Day 7 Long Shan Temple

On our last day here, we visited Long Shan Temple. A little bit of the history of this place. In 1738, settlers from Fujian, China constructed a temple in Wanhua, Taipei on the site where a man left an amulet of Guanyin (Goddess of Mercy) hanging from a tree. Legend has it that the amulet gave off a bright light, even in the darkness and so, a temple was built. That temple is the Longshan temple.

In East Asian Buddism, Guanyin is depicted as a female diety. Her origins however are from the Buddha of Compassion, known in Sanskrit as Avolokitesvara, who takes the male form. The Tibetan name for the Buddha of Compassion is Chenrezig, and Tibetan Buddhists look to the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of Chenrezig. While I won’t go into any more detail about Guanyin, I will mention an interesting aside. In Japanese, Guanyin is pronounced Kannon and this is where the name for the Canon company first came from, although the spelling was changed a few years after the company was formed. So to those who shoot with Canon equipment, you’re shooting with a Buddha.

Over the course of a couple of centuries, Taipei’s Longshan temple has been destroyed either in full or in part on numerous earthquakes and fires and in the spring of 1945 was even bombed by the US who claimed the Japanese were using the temple as an arms storage facility. As a result, the temple has been rebuilt and restored numerous times.