ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
The architecture of Chung Tai Chan Monastery combines Buddhadharma with art, culture, and technology. Merging tradition with contemporary design, the monastery meets the needs of a modern sangha while remaining deeply connected with Buddhist history. Its main building fuses elements of a traditional monastery and a Buddhist pagoda, providing a refuge for cultivators while silently embodying the Dharma.
Chung Tai Chan Monastery was awarded the Taiwan Architecture Award in 2002 and the International Award for Lighting Design in 2003—a new page in 21st century Buddhist architecture.
Hallmark Features
Chung Tai is located in the Puli Basins, surrounded by Taiwan’s central mountain range. Seen from afar, the monastery resembles a meditator sitting on a lotus pedestal, looking over the world with compassion and serenity.
With expressing the Dharma through form as its guiding design principle, Chung Tai Chan Monastery embodies the teaching and spirit of Buddhism. Its halls and corridors represent the ultimate teaching of the Mahayana tradition, where gradual cultivation and sudden enlightenment are non-dual on the path to buddhahood.
The building’s central axis comprises three main buddha halls, each located on successive floors aligning with the Golden Dome that crowns the monastery. This arrangement symbolizes sudden enlightenment, the most direct path to ultimate truth: “awaken the mind and see one’s true nature; seeing the true nature, one becomes a buddha.” The three halls feature statues of the buddha’s Transformation Body, Bliss Body, and Dharma Body, known as the three-fold body that one manifests upon complete enlightenment.
On either side of the building’s center, pilgrimage stairways leading up to the bodhisattva halls represent the path of gradual cultivation. Out of selfless compassion, bodhisattvas vow to enlighten themselves as well as all sentient beings. They walk the Bodhisattva Way step by step, until perfect buddhahood is attained.