Visiting Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden from Toronto (2024 Guide)

Every once in a while, some new town or attraction in southern Ontario blows up on Instagram or Tiktok and it appears everyone is visiting. The one I seem to be seeing everywhere this summer is the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden and Temple, so of course we had to go and see what everyone was posting about. We had a pretty hard time locating information ahead of our visit in late June, so I’ve put together this guide with the information I would have liked to have ahead of time for visiting the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden from Toronto.

What is the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden?

The Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden is a project put together by the Buddhist Association of Canada. It’s been decades in the making and although the grounds of the project are still under construction, it’s now open to the public to visit. The compound is being built as a bridge between East and West and to allow for pilgrimage for practicing Buddhists (and visitors). The big attraction is the completed temple that you can enter and the trails to the other points of interest. You can easily spend half a day here walking the trails to all the sights.

Directions

You’ll find the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden at 708 Ski Hill Rd, Cavan-Monaghan, ON L0A 1A0. It’s located about 1.5 hours east of Toronto and 30 minutes west of Peterborough (to give you an idea of whereabout in Ontario you’ll find it). The 1.5 hours from Toronto will heavily vary depending on where you’re coming from.

The compound is huge, but you enter from one main entrance and then you can drive left or right depending on what you want to explore. We found mobile connection within the temple very spotty, so sending each other live location was not working because Google Maps would direct to some roads outside of the temple. Much easier to just decide where to meet up and go from there.

There is a shuttle bus between the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden and Cham Sham Temple (located in Thornhill, north of Toronto). More details on this can be found on their direct page.

Does it cost anything to visit the Wutai Shan Buddhist Gardens ?

The temple itself and the individual statues are currently free to visit since the compound is still under construction. I would assume eventually there will be some kind of admission fee, but there’s been no announcement to indicate that so far, so it’s worth visiting while you can.

There is an art gallery within the big temple that charges $10 per person for admission. If you want to buy anything from the temple or restaurants this would have a cost as well.

As of August 1, 2024 there will be a parking fee implemented. This will be $20 for a 15-passenger or under vehicle. For a school bus or other medium-sized bus the charge is $45. For a coach bus the charge is $80. These are flat rates for the day and valid until 6 pm. They do note vehicles that overstay their visit may be towed.

Opening Hours

The Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden is open to the public in the summer months between April 16th and November 5th. You can visit between Thursdays and Mondays, between 9 am and 6 pm. It is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

In the winter months, between November 16th and April 15th, it is closed to the public.

Do you need to make an appointment to visit the Wutai Shan Buddhist Gardens ?

This was the question we had that thoroughly confused us. When you go to the Buddhist Garden’s official website, it says open to the public in the summer by “appointment only”, and then it redirects you to Buddhist Association website (as you can see below):

But once you go to the Buddhist Association of Canada’s website you actually see the below which indicates to no reservations are required:

We did call ahead to confirm and were told that no reservations were required and showed up with no issue.

What is there to do?

As mentioned, it’s a pretty big compound. You can certainly just drive around it and view it from the outside and if doing so you will get a pretty decent view of the statues, but you will miss the temple and some other highlights. On the main website of the gardens, they list the 5 platforms of Manjusri Bodhisattva, the 8 sights and 16 points of interest for visitors to enjoy so you’ll definitely have more than enough to do for a few hours.

We particularly enjoyed the three-story temple which houses among the other halls the main Buddha hall and spent close to an hour just exploring the temple. The giant staircase that you’ll have seen in plenty of pictures is the one that leads up to that temple. The main Buddha hall on the third floor of the temple has many large Buddha statues and plenty of opportunities to pray and pay your respects if you choose to do so. The bottom floors house The Buddhist College of Canada, which is a joint program with the University of Toronto, in addition to the art gallery, tea shop, restaurant and other halls.

The raised area around the temple structure itself has several statues and great view points so it’s worth spending some time around there as well.

We also visited the south platform. The platforms are the 5 big gold statues you can see around the grounds. The one we visited was about a 10 minute uphill walk from the parking lot but it was surrounded by beautiful pillars that made for an excellent photo opportunity. The walk was paved so you could take a stroller or wheelchair.

We also stopped by the giant Buddha right by the entrance. It was easily the most crowded part of the visit but do make sure to walk around the whole statue. The bottom is detailed with carvings of many different monks. According to the website, these are the 500 monks who participated in the first Buddhist council after the passing of Buddha Shakyamuni. The statue is the tallest Buddha statue in North America.

Food, washrooms, accessibility

There are bathrooms inside the temple but guests are asked not to use them. There are porta-potties by the giant stairs that can be used by visitors at this time. I’m not sure if this is due to construction of the bathrooms, but that’s the current situation when we visited in June at least, and it’s reflected in the rules in the above picture (under the bookings heading).

There is a vegetarian restaurant on the ground floor of the temple where the dishes are approximately $20 each. There was also a tea shop type of place in the lobby on the main floor where there were snacks you could purchase. Granted there are no rules about bringing food into your car so you could pack some snacks and eat between stops.

There is an elevator in the temple that you can use to navigate between the floors, it’s located on the back of the temple so you have to go across the halls and around to the back to access it. There’s a stair case on the back as well to move between the floors, so you don’t have to use the giant entrance one if you don’t want to.

We only visited a few of the statues but the ones we did visit had paved paths between them so they were able to be accessible with wheelchairs and strollers. The exception was the giant Buddha statue which only had the big stairs up it but you can view the statue from the bottom of it. I don’t know how it’ll shape up once all the construction is done and if there are plans to make it as accessible as possible or not, but for now it’s fairly accessible!

There you have it! That answered the questions I had going into our visit for sure.

Are you interested in visiting the Wutai Shan Buddhist Gardens? Pin this post for your own upcoming visit and let me know in the comments if you have any additional questions I may be able to answer!