Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery was founded in 1921 in Bishan, Singapore, and rebuilt on a larger scale from the 1980s onward. It is regarded today as Singapore's largest Mahayana Buddhist temple complex, a scale reached through that later rebuilding rather than present from its founding, and the complex has become one of the fixed points of Singapore's Buddhist institutional life in the process.

The monastery is registered as a charity with Singapore's Commissioner of Charities and draws its income chiefly from crematorium and columbarium services, prayer services and donations, a funding base distinct from the direct member giving many congregational bodies rely on. As a registered charity it files annual financial statements under Singapore's charity regulations, held on the Commissioner's Charity Portal.

More than a century after its 1921 founding, the monastery continues to operate at the scale its 1980s rebuilding created, still Singapore's largest Mahayana Buddhist temple complex and still funded chiefly through the same crematorium, columbarium, prayer service and donation income its charity filings describe year after year.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery's most recently available filing, for the 2022 calendar year, reported annual income of 45,503,013 Singapore dollars against expenditure of 41,809,527 Singapore dollars, leaving total funds and reserves of 297,037,933 Singapore dollars at year end. The two preceding years were smaller, income of 34,872,096 Singapore dollars in 2021 and 36,982,115 Singapore dollars in 2020, drawn, as in 2022, chiefly from crematorium and columbarium services, prayer services and donations.

The figures reach this record at one remove. Singapore's Charity Portal, where the monastery's own filings are held, renders as a client-side application shell with no server-rendered data, so the numbers here come from a charity data aggregator that states it draws from the same Portal filings rather than from the regulator's page read directly.

Read across three years, the monastery's reported income has grown steadily, from just under 35 million Singapore dollars in 2020 to over 45 million in 2022, while its year-end reserves, nearly six times its most recent annual income, describe an institution operating well within its means rather than one drawing down capital to cover its activities.