This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Fo Guang Shan is an international Chinese Mahayana Buddhist monastic order founded in 1967 by the Taiwanese Buddhist monk Hsing Yun, also known as Master Xingyun, headquartered at Fo Guang Shan Monastery in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Hsing Yun organized the order around his own teaching of Humanistic Buddhism, an approach that emphasizes applying Buddhist practice to ordinary, everyday life and social engagement rather than treating monastic withdrawal as the tradition's only serious path, a reframing that shaped every institution the order went on to build.
That founding vision translated quickly into physical growth: temples, cultural centers and educational branches spread from the single Kaohsiung monastery into dozens of countries within Hsing Yun's own lifetime, an expansion that made Fo Guang Shan one of Taiwan's largest Buddhist organizations well before the twentieth century closed, built on the specific premise that Buddhist teaching belonged in ordinary civic and cultural life rather than only behind monastery walls.
Fo Guang Shan Monastery itself, the order's headquarters at Kaohsiung, grew from a single founding site into a large monastic and cultural complex, the physical anchor for an order whose reach eventually extended well beyond Taiwan itself into a genuinely international network of temples and educational branches, each one tracing its own institutional lineage back to the same 1967 founding and the same Humanistic Buddhism teaching Hsing Yun had set out to spread from that first Kaohsiung site.