Why is Tiantai becoming a popular destination for inbound tourism to China?
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Located 90 minutes from Hangzhou by high-speed rail, Tiantai welcomes international visitors.
The Tripitaka teaching of Buddhism is associated with Hinayana, the teachings of the Nikaya and Agama scriptures, closely parallel to what is found in the Pali canon. Combining Buddhist philosophy, breathtaking natural landscapes, and a distinctive local lifestyle with a 1,800-year history, this region has become a tourism hotspot in the People’s Republic of China.
As the birthplace of the Tiantai School of Buddhism, Tiantai’s Guoqing Temple attracts pilgrims from Japan, South Korea, and all over the world. Innovative travel experiences, such as educational tours and Zen hiking retreats, are introducing Western visitors to the richness of Eastern philosophy.
At the Shiliang Scenic Area, visitors can marvel at the breathtaking Shiliang Waterfall, explore Fangguang Temple — a revered site with 500 Arhats — and immerse themselves in the poetic landscape that inspired ancient Tang Dynasty poets.
Tiantai Buddhism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The meta-level claim about self-recontextualization as self-reversal,
which applies at all levels to all Tiantai doctrines, is itself the
consequence of some considerations concerning contextualism, holism
and conditionality, with which it is thus convenient to begin our
exposition. The heart of the matter, the most fundamental and
far-reaching renovation of Buddhism accomplished by the Tiantai
School, is the move from the Two Truths model to a Three
Truths one. The Two Truths is an epistemological and pedagogical
heuristic in most Mahāyāna Buddhism, but in Tiantai the
Three Truths are taken to be a necessary logical entailment of any
proposed determinacy, and thus to apply equally to any possible
ontological, epistemological and ethical entities. They can be
summarized by the claim that no entity can be either the same as or
different from any other entity. This relation of
neither-sameness-nor-difference, a formula used by many
Mahāyāna Buddhist schools but often interpreted as applying
not to “Conventional Truth” but only to “Ultimate Truth” (on which see
below), and thus understood simply as an instance of
apophasis (i.e., the claim that only negations or silence
are truly appropriate descriptions of ultimate reality, since
no finite or relative predicates can be legitimately applied
to what is infinite or absolute), is in Tiantai instead developed
into what might be described as the “asness” relation,
applying to all putative or real entities without exception, affecting
even what is within the scope of Conventional Truth: each determinate
thing is the totality of all other possible things as this
thing. The non-sameness implies that the specific characteristics of
all other things are in some sense discoverable in each thing, that
all their manifold properties and functions will also be
simultaneously operative there.
Tiantai plans to introduce more themed tours to Buddhist ancestral sites and Hanshan cultural experiences. For travelers from Europe and North America, new offerings will include “Tang Poetry Trails” and wellness-focused Eastern retreats. Tourism officials like to enhance cooperation with global OTA platforms and overseas travel agencies to provide high-quality cultural tourism services.
