It is a time-honored tradition for Chinese people to go to temples and pay homage to Buddhas for blessings during the Lunar New Year holidays besides performing customary duties like family gatherings and calls on relatives and friends. Mostly, people pray for a good year ahead and troubles mitigated or removed. Modern technologies and global urbanization, however, make it an increasingly rare and cherished experience for families with members living apart and away to reunite for a few days during the holiday season.

The New Year family reunion, however, became even more cumbersome for many if not all during the last two years due to COVID-19. Lockdowns and quarantines whether in-place or institutional, and separations and solitude combine to complicate a lingering pandemic that both distresses and frustrates. Religion comes to the rescue in such dark hours and Buddha Dharma lends itself well to guiding as our GPS for life. Learning the teachings of Buddha has a soothing effect to help us stay calm and poised when things go wrong and rewarding us with a winning self-confidence for the future.

The Ling Jiou Mountain (LJM) monasteries situated in the northern tip of Taiwan and billed as one of the Top-100 Most Scenic Religious Sites is at the same time a superb choice for a visit during the New Year holidays. LJM is a highly esteemed establishment with a rare Triyana tradition of Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana, with separate monasteries including the Sheng Shan Temple located in downtown Fulong and the Wu Sheng Monastery atop the Laolan Mount. A spring outing with the family to the LJM monasteries not only makes a relaxing and refreshing excursion but also affords an opportunity to pay tribute to Buddhas and sign up to Dharma functions that help eradicate negative karma created in the year past while cleansing clutters of the mind to ensure a blessed year ahead.

The LJM Dharma functions during the Lunar New Year holidays focused on chanting the Lotus Sutra that symbolizes the purity of the lotus despite its sub-ideal environment. Devout participants would be exposed to a spiritually cleansing process to divorce themselves from worries that troubled their mind, body, and life the year before to return to the purity of their Buddha nature. There were also desks set up on the ground floor of the Shan Fa Hall for people young and old to write posts in calligraphy for the Lunar New Year and bring them home as tokens. When key-in has since long threatened to replace hand-writing altogether in our digital era, writing calligraphy demands concentration and makes the task a memorable experience besides the ‘hand-crafted’ gifts to ourselves.

The three large golden Buddhas at the spectacular Hall of Golden Buddhas represent respectively Peace, Success, and Perfection. For the Lunar New Year festival, the statues were adorned with fresh flowers and colorful tassels, which were linked to bamboo tubes wrapped in Fu characters to suggest good luck. In the past, visitors could hold the bamboo tube in their hands to feel physically connected to the Buddha in what is termed the ‘Holding Buddha’s Hand’ ritual. The pandemic made no allowance in that instance, but visitors still said their prayers in the most sincere manner possible, believing that the power of their mindfulness would secure blessings from the Buddhas in the absence of the ritual. On the other side of the Golden Buddhas is the shrine of the 108 Lokesvaras of Nepal, which was exquisitely replicated by the late maestro sculptor CC Lin. It took Master Lin more than a decade to finish this unique ensemble of bronze artwork in red copper painted in enamel colors. The towering set of bronze artwork easily conveys a sense of bliss empowered by the numerous manifestations of Avalokitesvara. The stone bearing the imprint of Buddha’s feet in the spot to the left of the Golden Buddhas is another place of worship where followers would kneel down to pray, although in recent years the pandemic discouraged people to do that for epidemic prevention.

Outside the Hall of Golden Buddhas, LJM residential masters happily engaged themselves with visitors by helping them tie a knot for a wrist bracelet called the ‘Five Buddha Beads’. The bracelet is a blessed red thread braided from both ends to leave space in the middle for the 5 beads representing the four directions and the center to suggest that Buddha’s blessings be with you wherever you go. The blessings are locked in for keeps when the knot is tied by an LJM master. The ‘Five Buddhas Beads’ is a common insignia for LJM followers the world over. When you see it worn on the wrist of another person, you feel close to home and LJM wherever you find yourself.

There are shuttle buses for the upper LJM Wusheng Monastery and the ride along the scenic driveway up the mountain is refreshing while the vast open space of the monastery does more than calm the spirit with a sense of homecoming. Oil lamps in the Hall of Great Fortune give off a warm light and aromatic scent to accompany the five-day Dharma functions of ‘Usher in the Blessing’, ‘Remove Obstacles’, ‘Neutralize Calamities’, ‘Restore Health’, and ‘Attract Fortune’ for the new year. Tibetan lamas chant scriptures in energetic tones to augment the overall atmosphere and further solidify people’s convictions. Visitors can also opt to practice meditation in the Chan(Zen) space of the Yuan Tong Hall, or work on a hand-copy in calligraphy the Heart Sutra to reflect on the profundity of Buddha’s wisdom in the process.

The Holy Founding Hall marks a significant site of LJM as a starting point for the Wusheng Monastery. It features statues of Buddhas of all three mainstream traditions of Buddhism as well as sacred relics. Natural mountain water seeping through rocks is gathered for ritualistic processing for conversion into the ‘Water of Compassion’ and ‘Water of Longevity’ to help purify people’s actions, words, and thoughts. People come here to pay homage to Buddhas and Bodhisattvas while receiving blessings from Buddha relics to experience physical and spiritual purification in a magnetic field of holiness.

Dharma Master Hsin Tao was quoted in his teaching as saying that ‘positive karma and good deeds help ward off sufferings inflicted by the pandemic, and things change for the better when one’s attachment, anger, and ignorance are weeded out. To harbor no attachment is to offer alms, to know no anger equals compassion, and to bear no ignorance means access to wisdom.’ And further, ‘Fortune is the reward of offerings and services for the others, whereas longevity comes from helping the others retain salvation.’ It is, therefore, an accredited notion that paying a visit to LJM during the New Year holidays would cleanse your awareness, remove past habits rooted in attachment, anger, and ignorance within, and fend off assaults by the toxic ‘Five Poisons’ from without, so as to maintain health physically as well as spiritually. It was also widely accepted that the praying process would become ever more powerful when performed out of altruism instead of ego-centrism.

Everyone has his/her own idea of an enjoyable lunar Chinese New Year holiday. An excursion is not just about soaking in scenic landscape outdoors but retrofitting the in-coming year by removing clutter and attachments to regain the Buddha nature of wisdom for finding the ultimate shelter of life. A visit to LJM drew out an echo from inside with a connection to Buddhas to warrant a journey into a more promising future.