{"id":1439,"date":"2001-12-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-12-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/12\/06\/2001-12-06-taiwan-buddhist-open-world-s-first-museum-of-world-religions\/"},"modified":"2001-12-06T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-12-06T12:00:00","slug":"2001-12-06-taiwan-buddhist-open-world-s-first-museum-of-world-religions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/12\/06\/2001-12-06-taiwan-buddhist-open-world-s-first-museum-of-world-religions\/","title":{"rendered":"Taiwan Buddhist Open World&#8217;s First Museum of World Religions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Central News Agency<\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>TAIPEI, TAIWAN, November 9, 2001: Taiwan&#8217;s president, Chen Shui-bian, and 12 local and foreign dignitaries, including Swami Dayananda Saraswati, opened the Museum of World Religions&#8221; in suburban Taipei today. Chen said, &#8220;The inauguration of the museum is a pride and glory of the 23 million people of Taiwan, as it is the first of its kind in the world. The museum symbolizes respect, tolerance and benevolence.&#8221; The museum was developed by Master Hsin-tao Shih, abbot of Ling Jiou Mountain Wu Sheng Monastery, in Fulon, Taiwan. It cost US$58 million and took ten years to complete. There are on display numerous religious scriptures, artifacts, instruments, object d&#8217;art, more than 7,000 books on various religions, as well as 2,000-plus video and audio recordings on religious subjects. The Ling Jiou Mountain Wu Sheng Monastery, one of the five most prominent monasteries in Taiwan, was established on a mountain facing the Pacific Ocean in the northeastern township of Fulon by Hsin-tao Shih more than two decades ago. Hsin-tao Shih was born in Burma to Chinese parents in 1948. He came to Taiwan as a youth and practiced Buddhism, striving for virtue by isolating himself for years before taking formal monastic vows. Hsin-tao Shih decided to build the world religion museum some ten years ago in an attempt to break lay people&#8217;s superstitions, to help raise cultural standards and to help cultivate the inner virtues of human beings, a spokesman of the museum said.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Central News Agency TAIPEI, TAIWAN, November 9, 2001: Taiwan&#8217;s president, Chen Shui-bian, and 12 local and foreign dignitaries, including,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}