The museum complex, built using “Eastern design by Western construction” with similarities to Tang dynasty’s capital city Chang’an, demonstrates the beauty of Chinese architecture. Its ramparts symbolize a Dharma citadel that carefully guards and protects Buddhist and historical artifacts. Greeting visitors from all over the world, this modern Chinese castle, with its imperial hipped roofs and ancient city walls, is connecting the traditional and the contemporary, the East and the West, and Buddhism and Chinese culture. Looking from afar, the building blends into the mountain range on which it stands, and lines up with its Wood Sculpture Gallery and Chung Tai Chan Monastery, symbolizing a cohesive realization of the Grand Master Wei Chueh’s bodhisattva vision. The Museum started its construction in August 2012 and was inaugurated in August 2016. It sits in 9 hectares of land and has 66,000 square meters of floor space. It has an exhibition area of 16,000 square meters, divided into 18 galleries including two special exhibition rooms. The Wood Sculpture Gallery (remodeled from the former Chung Tai Museum) is located within the Chung Tai Chan Monastery complex, and is about 800 meters from the Chung Tai World Museum. It has 7,400 square meters of floor space, of which 3,700 square meters are used for the 8 galleries.

Chung Tai World Museum’s permanent collection and exhibition include two main features: Buddhist sculptures and steles, and a thousand-plus titles of stone rubbings gifted to our monastery by the Xi’an Beilin Museum in China. The Museum has 18 galleries, 16 are for permanent exhibition, and two are special exhibition rooms. All the exhibition spaces are designed to epitomize the Lotus Treasury World, the pure land of Rocana Buddha—the world as seen by buddhas and bodhisattvas. The exhibits are organized into three main types: written words, images, and scriptures. The selections include inscription rubbings, Buddhist statues and artifacts, and stone Confucian classics and Buddhist sutras. They convey three main themes: Carrying the Way with words, awakening the mind with images, and transmitting the Dharma through scriptures.