Fo Guang Shan

North and east of Kaohsiung is a huge Buddhist complex. It includes multiple temples as well as a monastery. For tourists there is a hotel, multiple vegetarian restaurants, gift shops, a calligraphy museum, art museum, and museums of Buddhist beliefs and history.  There is even a tooth relic that supposedly belonged to the original Buddha. The whole area is a beautifully landscaped garden. Margaret and I used one of the days when the kids were in school to go check it out. We had a great lunch at one of the vegetarian restaurants. If all vegetarian food was that good and that easy to find I might actually go vegetarian.  Then we walked around the grounds and explored the museums. There was a set of murals running along one wall of the compound illustrating various buddhist ideas. One showed a cow being lead away to a slaughter house with huge human style tears pouring out of its eyes. It was enough to make Margaret reconsider her love of hamburgers.