Tourists continue search for enlightenment

Spiritually motivated travel is perhaps the oldest form of tourism. In Greater China, Taiwan remains the most vibrant religious culture centre, where centuries-old folk temples, especially in Tainan and Lugang, add colour and beauty to urban landscapes.

Taiwan's tourist industry is booming - international arrivals more than doubled to 7.31 million from 2006 until last year - and religious sites have reported growing numbers of visitors from Hong Kong, the mainland and Singapore.

The monastic and educational complex at Dharma Drum Mountain (DDM), 23km northeast of central Taipei, received about 12,000 non-Taiwanese visitors last year, says Bhikkhuni Guo-jiann Shih, director of DDM's department of international relations and development. DDM is also the global headquarters of a Buddhist foundation with affiliates in North America, Britain and Hong Kong. According to Bhikkhuni Guo-jiann Shih, non-Taiwanese visitors are especially interested in tours of the complex, retreats and how the Chan form of Buddhism is practised.

At the end of 2011, another of Taiwan's major Buddhist organisations opened to the public what is perhaps the island's most striking religious monument. Fo Guang Shan's Buddha Memorial Centre houses a tooth, which the faithful believe was retrieved from the ashes after Buddha was cremated in 543BC. The centre, which cost an estimated US$300 million to build, welcomed 8 million visitors last year. At the original monastery next to the centre, monks, nuns and volunteers gave guided tours to more than 240,000 people last year, including more than 150,000 from the mainland.

Tourists from different backgrounds tend to ask different questions. A volunteer says: "Westerners have asked me about nuns' and monks' celibacy. Ethnic Chinese would never do that, perhaps because they already know the answer."

What some claim to be the biggest regular religious event in the world outside India begins and ends each spring in Dajia, a town in Taichung - Taiwan's third-largest city and now linked to Hong Kong by twice-daily flights. To mark the birthday of Mazu, the sea goddess known to Cantonese speakers as Tin Hau, an immense procession sets out on foot from Jenn Lann Temple and marches southwards. Over eight days, a palanquin bearing the shrine's revered Mazu icon is carried 300km through towns and villages, stopping en route to accept offerings at shrines.