Chan Buddhism in Wilderness and the Buddhist Tourism

The culture of landscape constitutes one of the vital characteristics of Chinese culture, in which, Chan Buddhism is a typical kind of Buddhist culture expressed by the natural objects. Chinese Buddhism, represented by Chan School, is interpreted by the beautiful natural scenery, therefore it is closely related to the tourism from the ancient time. However, this link is to defend Buddhist tourism, which is inevitably criticized, since the secularization of sacred Buddhism, though Buddhist tourism is beneficial for life, society, economy, and Buddhism itself. But this sort of criticism is a misunderstanding of Chinese Buddhism since that Chinese Buddhism absorbs Zhuang Zi’s thought that “the ultimate truth (道) is in shit (屎尿)”, so that it purports to the sacred dimension which is overlapped by the secular aspect. For example, the short poems composed by masters in Chan School “The Buddhist dharma is in this world, so that the enlightenment could not be realized outside of the human world”, “where there is bamboo and flower, there is dharma and prajna”, are the best way to express this kind of divine concept, moreover, Buddhist tourism is an effective practice to allocate this divine connotation.