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More than 100 Tibetan lamas visit Taiwan

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More than 100 Tibetan lamas visit Taiwan

Karmapa Trinley Thaye Dorje

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – About 130 lamas from four branches of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India attended a peace prayer meeting in Taipei City Saturday.
An estimated more than 1,000 people were present at the event, which was designed to pray and meditate for the well-being of Taiwan.
Tibetan forms of Buddhism have made rapid progress on the island since the 1980s, with more than a thousand lamas from overseas, including China, visiting Taiwan each year for educational, religious and cultural work.
At the center of Saturday’s event was 32-year-old Trinley Thaye Dorje, the 17th Karmapa of the Karma Kagyu School, one of the four main branches of Buddhism in Tibet.
The India-based religious leader visited Taiwan four times before and already has a significant number of followers in the country, as well as in the United States and Europe.
Saturday’s prayer meeting formed part of a series of Tibetan cultural and artistic festival events supported by the government’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission. There were already more than 400 Tibetan Buddhist groups in Taiwan, counting a total of hundreds of thousands of members, according to government data.
The commission said the event symbolized the pluralist development of religion and culture in Taiwan.