Did young people visiting family and friends during the Lunar New Year holiday also visit temples to worship?
Academic Chung Wen-jung (鍾文榮) says that traditional temple followers are generally older and as their age increases, the number of followers declines.
As a result, smaller temples have begun closing as they receive fewer donations.
The problem is not only a matter of the age of the followers. When the Dehe (德和宮) land god temple in Zhongcheng Park (忠誠公園) in Taipei’s Tianmu (天母) area was to be rebuilt in 1997, residents protested vehemently, and said the temple destroyed the view and was a source of environmental pollution.
Residents in the area’s Mingshan Borough (名山里) even organized the Zhongcheng Park Self-help Committee and collected hundreds of signatures from people who did not want the temple to return to the park.
In the end, the city government was left with no choice but to halt the move and find a new location.
The temple was originally in what is now a park, but the park was built later, around the temple. The crux of the problem was probably the temple’s exterior. Had the temple been designed more like the Nongchan Temple (農禪寺) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), residents would perhaps have been happier.
Nongchan Temple has a modern design and it includes the Water Moon Monastery (水月道場), a view that Master Sheng Yen (聖嚴法師) “saw” when meditating, saying it looked like “flowers suspended in mid-air and a moon in water.”
Architect Kris Yao (姚仁喜) designed the temple based on this vision and the final design is reminiscent of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, only smaller and more romantic.
Because the temple faces a large lotus pond, it looks graceful day and night, overcast or sunny.
No incense is burned at Nongchan Temple, but surprisingly, even without it, the temple attracts many visitors. It has been included on a list of 10 temples merging Western and Eastern elements, making it a place where the young want to check in, and it has even been praised internationally for its beauty.
It is not only about big temples. In 2015, the Fude (福德祠) land god shrine association in Taichung’s Dahe Borough (大河里) invited architecture, urban planning, landscaping and interior design students from Taiwan and abroad to submit designs for the shrine.
Although the prize money only ranged from NT$20,000 to NT$60,000, they received 307 designs, a much stronger response than expected. The winner was a Japanese student.
The chosen design was strongly criticized by a certain legislator, who said it was a waste of public funds to select a Japanese-style shrine design for a traditional Chinese-style “national palace.”
However, all the funds were collected locally and that legislator had no idea what they were talking about. The statement caused a public backlash, as followers were not opposed to the design and were only concerned whether it would attract more young people to the temple.
The Dahe Borough Fude Shrine originally consisted of just three rocks piled on top of each other, and it was called “Three stones.” It did not resemble the temple there today, and it was only later that it was labelled “traditional Chinese culture” and was called a “national palace.”
It is said that elements of nature are most likely to attract people, and both the three rocks at the land god shrine and the lotus flowers at Nongchan Temple are aesthetic factors that bring nature and humanity together.
Cultural symbols are sometimes in flux. For example, many are unaware that the design of some mosques originated with Christian architecture in the Eastern Roman Empire. When the empire fell into decline, the Muslim world took over and turned the Greek Orthodox patriarchal cathedral in what is today’s Istanbul into the Hagia Sophia mosque of the Ottoman Empire.
The turning of a Christian “national palace” into a mosque set an example that calls for deep reflection.
Lu Ching-fu is a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University’s department of applied arts.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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