Little Sands Campus
Located in peaceful Little Sands, the GEBIS Little Sands Campus is an important site to conduct monastic practice and public gatherings. The campus was established in 2010, and has since been developed to include a prayer hall, dormitories, an educational building, an administrative building, landscaping, and so on.
In the prayer hall, there are several beautifully crafted statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas, along with the entire Buddhist scriptural collection.
The GEBIS Little Sands Campus has been the site for many Buddhist events and gatherings, including open houses, retreats, and seminars. In the future, various events and classes will continue to be offered at the Little Sands Campus, with something available for everyone.
Heatherdale Campus
The GEBIS Heatherdale Campus is situated amid the unique and lovely communities and natural environments of this island province. In Master Zhen-Ru’s vision, this campus will eventually become the educational hub for our entire monastic community, a center for Buddhist higher education, housing ordained practitioners from all over the world.
Since the Little Sands Campus was established, it has grown to steadily house about 200 monks studying there year long, along with an additional 200 who stay as visiting monks over the summer.
In an effort to continue to provide ideal learning and practicing environments for the increasing number of teaching staff and student monks in the community, plans to construct GEBIS Heatherdale Campus were initiated in 2015.
The first major building to be built was a dormitory complex which combined Chinese and Western architectural styles. It was approved for construction in July 2015 and was completed in September 2017. Currently, it houses 128 happy resident monks.
A Fusion of Architectural Styles
The first dormitory consists of a north and south wing, connected in the middle by an elegantly designed central entrance. In addition to enough living spaces for 128 monastic members, it also has classrooms, dining halls, and temporary gathering spaces for the entire sangha community. Master Zhen-Ru’s vision for the monastery was for it to embody PEI’s local architectural techniques and craftsmanship, together with a classical Eastern external design.
Vision for the Next 10 Years
With the first dormitory complex complete, in 2018 the second complex construction began with its projected completion in 2020.
Plans are being made to further develop the GEBIS Montague Campus over the next 15 years. It is expected to have a great hall (able to seat 3000 people), six dormitory complexes (to provide housing for 1600 people), a central educational building (for classes, scriptural debate), a scriptural translation building (for scriptural debate translation work, and scriptural and book collections), and a multipurpose auditorium.