Fo Guang Shan

Fo Guang Shan (lit. “Buddha Light Mountain”) is a Buddhist organization headquartered in Taiwan. It originated in a monastery founded in 1967 by the monk Hsing Yun (d. 1927) in southern Taiwan and has since grown into one of the largest and most visible Buddhist associations on the island and beyond. Inspired by the reformist teachings of the monk Taixu (1890–1947), Hsing Yun espouses humanistic Buddhism—that is, a Buddhism concerned with social issues rather than exclusively focused on monastic cultivation. He advocates social action as the creation of “pure lands” in the here and now, thus moving the focus of attention from the “pure land” as a feature of the afterlife to a utopian ideal in this world. His organization pursues this aim through the founding of temples and outreach centers across the world, as well as through the establishment of charitable and educational institutions. Fo Guang Shan is especially known for the latter, including primary and secondary schools, colleges and seminaries, and three full-scale universities: Fo Guang University and Nan Hua University in Taiwan and the University of the West in California.

Hsing Yun modernized monastic education by adopting curricular structures similar to secular colleges in Fo Guang Shan seminaries. He has been an early adopter of new communication technologies in Fo Guang Shan educational ventures and in his approach to dharma propagation. While Fo Guang Shan is best understood as a monastic order consisting of hundreds of nuns and monks, since 1991 it has been complemented by the Buddha Light International Association (BLIA), which counts both monastics and laypeople among its members. BLIA has become an important fund-raising and outreach organization with chapters on all five continents. The founding of international BLIA chapters and Fo Guang Shan temples and monasteries outside Taiwan is an important part of Hsing Yun's endeavor to spread the dharma and usher in the globalization of Buddhism. Kaosiung remains the global headquarters, but the order maintains almost 200 other temples and practice centers in Taiwan and across the globe, with the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, as one of the best known and earliest international foundings (1988). While the geographical spread of the Fo Guang Shan network demonstrates the successful internationalization of a Taiwanese Buddhist order, it is not in itself indicative of the emergence of a globalized Buddhism, as BLIA chapters the world over tend to draw most of their membership from among overseas Chinese communities and thus remain closely tied to a culturally specific Buddhist tradition.

It is Hsing Yun's ideal to progressively break down ethnic and sectarian borders within Buddhism. He is actively engaged in dialogues with leaders from other Buddhist traditions and has taken a lead in organizing multitraditional ordination rites, especially for nuns, thus aiding efforts to reestablish a female order in Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist traditions.