The temple run project in Taichung

VISIT TAIWAN

THE TEMPLE RUN PROJECT IN TAICHUNG

It’s such a pleasure to visit Taiwan. I am lucky to have the chance to experience Taiwanese culture and meet a lot of good people. Taiwan is a wonderful country with lots of variety in nature, lifestyle and food. The latter seems to be one of the most important things in the Taiwanese culture apart from religion, which was sometimes a real challenge to me with respect to the amount of food they eat. But anyway, the food was always good and I am very impressed with how many different kinds of food they eat, how exotic rice can look, and how amazingly full of taste their fruits are.

My GCDP (Global Comunity Developement Program) from AIESEC Tunghai University took me to Yuan Bao Temple in Taichung, Taiwan, where I participated in “The Temple Run” project. Temples are one of the most historical and cultural centres in Taiwan. The project is based in Yuan Bao Temple, and consisted of me and another five interns. They’re coming from different parts of the world; Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Canada, and they all add a lot to the diversity of the team. In this project we are making a video about the temple or about all the special temple activities, telling the story of this holy place to let more and more people realize this culture and respect it.

Regarding Yuan Bao Temple history, Baosheng Emperor is the master god in Yuan Bao temple. Baosheng Emperor came from China. Yuan Bao temple is an extremely historic temple in Taiwan. There is a variety of traditional activities here. For example, every year they light fireworks to celebrate the God of birth. “Pilgrimage Procession” will be held two times a year. There are many believers in this sacred place.

Today the temple has some ceremonies about thanking God. The ceremony, which is held at Yuan Bao Temple is one of the most interesting religious ceremonies I’ve ever seen. I was very impressed by what I saw. At the the ceremony people put their palms together and bowed (some knelt) in front of the table to show respect and ask for blessings.

Since there was a lot of people that came to the ceremony, they cooked a lot of delicious vegetarian dishes and everyone ate it for free. I found this interesting because all of the foods they made were vegetarian foods. They do that because it such a compassionate choice for animals and also a plant-based vegetarian diet is healthier and can prevent disease.

I’m so glad I joined The Temple Run project in Yuan Bao Temple, because through this project I have the opportunity to learn about Taiwanese culture and have some cross cultural understanding, which was one of the points I had already talked about under the cultural experience portion. Just to build on that, this GCDP experience has widened my perspectives about the world and that we are just one small person in a big world full of diverse people and cultures. We shouldn’t be imposing our culture and perspectives on another societies but rather, learn to be tolerant about those differences and celebrate the diversity.