Xuanzang Shrine at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan: Pilgrimage and Memory

On the southern shore of Sun Moon Lake, a white-walled hillside temple holds what devotees believe is a fragment of the skull of history’s most travelled monk. Xuanzang Shrine in Taiwan is easy to overlook on an itinerary crowded with tea plantations and lantern festivals, but its story — a seventh-century pilgrimage to India, a relic seized in wartime Nanjing, a decades-long journey home — is one of the more improbable threads in the island’s religious history. Odyssey’s Taiwan Lantern Festival small group tour visits the shrine on its ninth day, alongside Sun Moon Lake’s tea terraces and the lion-guarded courtyard of Wenwu Temple.

A Monk’s Sixteen-Year Walk to India

Xuanzang was a Tang dynasty monk, born around 602 CE, who left the imperial capital Chang’an in 629 without official permission to cross the Gobi Desert and the Tian Shan into Central Asia. From there he pushed on over the Hindu Kush into India, eventually settling for years of study at the great monastic university of Nalanda under the scholar Śīlabhadra. He spent close to a decade and a half travelling the subcontinent, debating doctrine and collecting Buddhist texts, before returning to Chang’an in 645 with hundreds of scriptures, images and relics. The Tang court, impressed rather than punitive, gave him imperial support for the two decades he spent translating Sanskrit sutras into Chinese — a body of work that shaped East Asian Buddhist doctrine for centuries afterwards. Nine hundred years later his journey was reimagined as the fantastical novel Journey to the West, and it’s that later, embellished version — a monk, a monkey, a pig, a river spirit — that most visitors already half-know before they reach the shrine. Odyssey’s guide to the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum looks at how a very different, contemporary Taiwanese institution tries to make Buddhist scholarship legible to a general audience; Xuanzang Shrine does the same work through relic veneration rather than exhibition design.

How did a monk’s relic end up on the shore of a Taiwanese lake?

In 1942, Japanese troops occupying Nanjing uncovered a stone box in the grounds of a demolished temple, inscribed with Xuanzang’s name and believed lost since the original shrine was destroyed in an 1856 uprising. Accounts differ on exactly what happened next — Sun Moon Lake’s own tourism materials say the whole relic went to Japan, while some academic historians argue it was divided three ways, between Nanjing, Beijing and Japan. What’s agreed is that a portion was enshrined at Ci’en Temple in Saitama, and that Japanese monks flew a piece back to Taipei in November 1955 in a ceremony met by a hundred-car procession. It was placed at Xuanguang Temple, the smaller temple by the lake’s edge, in 1956; when Xuanzang Temple itself was completed on the hillside above in 1965, the relic moved to its present home.

What’s the difference between Xuanzang Temple and Xuanguang Temple?

Xuanguang Temple sits right at the water’s edge, a short walk up from its own boat pier, and is the older of the two — the relic’s first home in Taiwan and, more prosaically, a spot regulars visit for its tea eggs. Xuanzang Temple stands higher up the same hillside, built in 1965 specifically to house the relic once it outgrew its temporary lodging. It’s constructed in Tang dynasty style across two terraced levels, with a white exterior, a relief carving of Xuanzang’s procession through the western regions, and steles recording the temple’s history and the friendship between Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. Inside, alongside the relic, sits a golden statue of Sakyamuni Buddha. The two sites are often described together because they share one story, but they’re a few hundred metres and a change of elevation apart.

How much walking does a visit to Xuanzang Shrine in Taiwan involve?

Less than the site’s hillside setting suggests. A sealed road now reaches the temple precinct directly, and the walking inside the grounds is a short run of steps between the two terraces — nothing like the 366-step “Stairway to Heaven” that pilgrims once climbed from the old lakeside pier to reach nearby Wenwu Temple, a route road access has made optional rather than necessary. Travellers who find standing and short flights of stairs manageable should have no trouble with this stop.

Tea, Temples and the Lake Itself

The shrine is one stop in a fuller day at Sun Moon Lake. Odyssey’s Day 9 itinerary also takes in the Assam Tea Factory, where black tea introduced to the district during the Japanese colonial era is still grown and processed — Odyssey’s guide to Sun Moon Lake’s tea history covers that side of the day in full. Later, the group visits Wenwu Temple, a Confucian and martial temple whose rear terrace gives one of the most photographed views on the lake, before a private motorboat ride across the water and a stop at Ita Thao, the lakeside market and village of the Thao people, Taiwan’s smallest recognised indigenous group. Together, the day moves between three very different registers of belief and belonging — Buddhist relic veneration, Confucian ritual, and Thao ancestral geography — all within a few kilometres of shoreline.

Is the relic definitely Xuanzang’s?

Belief, rather than forensic certainty, is what the shrine runs on. The 1942 discovery in Nanjing rested on an inscription rather than independent verification, and the relic’s wartime journey through occupied China and Japan left a paper trail that historians still argue over — how much of it survived, whether it was split, and what happened to the other pieces. For the temple and its visitors this ambiguity sits comfortably alongside devotion; Buddhist relic veneration has never depended on the kind of proof a laboratory would ask for. It’s worth knowing this history going in, both because it’s genuinely interesting and because it explains why local guides sometimes tell slightly different versions of the same story.

A Wider Pattern of Sacred Landscape

Xuanzang Shrine is one instance of a pattern that recurs right around Taiwan’s coast and highlands: sites where landscape and religious memory have folded into each other over generations. Further up the east coast, the limestone sea caves at Baxian carry their own layer of sacred association, named for eight deities said to have sheltered there. Neither site asks a visitor to take a position on the underlying claims — what’s worth noticing, in both cases, is how a physical place becomes a repository for a story a community has decided matters enough to keep telling.

Do the shrine and the Buddha Museum tell the same story?

Not quite. Xuanzang Shrine is a devotional site built around a contested relic and a centuries-old pilgrimage story; its focus is veneration, and its architecture is traditional Tang-style temple building. Kaohsiung’s Buddha Museum, visited earlier in the tour, is a modern museum built around Humanistic Buddhism, a twentieth-century movement more concerned with contemporary practice and public education than relic history. Visiting both across the same trip gives a useful contrast — one site asking for reverence toward the past, the other explaining Buddhism’s present-day life in Taiwan.

Xuanzang Shrine rewards the kind of unhurried, curious travel this tour is built around — a quiet hillside stop with a genuinely improbable backstory, sitting between a tea factory and a night market on the same afternoon. It’s one thread among many in the wider journey our Taiwan Lantern Festival guide traces across the island, from Taipei’s lantern-lit mountains to the temples and coastline further south.