MUGI – My Unique Gift Idea

Found on the sixth and seventh floors of the Pacific Department Store in Yungho City, Taiwan, about nine miles from Taipei City, is a unique shopping experience.

The Museum of World Religions, which opened in 2001, is the brainchild of Master Hsin Tao, a Buddhist monk who spent more than a decade renouncing the world. When he emerged, Tao was motivated to relieve the suffering in the world by building a spiritual supermarket, where people can shop for a religion they want to follow.

In a room equipped with a large video screen, religious leaders, from the Grand Mufti of Bosnia to a Vipassana Buddhist, describe their spiritual epiphanies.

Down the hall in an area devoted to funerals and the afterlife, one can sit quietly and watch intimate footage of pudu—a Chinese ceremony to release souls from purgatory—or be a fly on the wall at funerals in India or Israel.

Also there are large models of Chartres Cathedral, the Jewish Altneuschul in Prague, the Shinto temple Ise Jingu, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Visitors can walk around them and press a button to illuminate the interior spaces so they might “feel” the sacred architecture and what it’s like to worship there.