The Buddhist humanitarian organization Tzu Chi Foundation has deepened its humanitarian commitment in Nepal, the Buddha’s homeland, with two significant milestones: breaking ground on a planned residential community in Kapilvastu and progressing with the construction of a new Dharma hall at its Lumbini campus. The activities in the region where the Buddha-to-be Prince Siddhartha is believed to have been born and raised, underscored the Taiwan-based foundation’s long-term commitment to one of the world’s poorest countries.
The Kapilvastu Great Love Village, ceremonially launched in December 2025, is a self-contained community on 4.1 hectares of land, comprising 200 permanent homes, a kindergarten, a market, a community center, and vocational training facilities. The integrated design reflects Tzu Chi’s philosophy of addressing poverty by through education, economic opportunity, and social infrastructure. Vocational programs will be offered onsite to enable residents to move toward economic self-reliance and break cycles of generational poverty.
Tzu Chi volunteers have been present in Lumbini Province’s Kapilvastu District since November 2023, conducting home visits, distributing daily necessities, and running mobile medical clinics. This sustained grassroots engagement has gradually built the trust that made the larger project possible.
Kapilvastu Municipality Mayor Sudeep Paudel, who signed a memorandum of understanding with Tzu Chi, remarked on the dedication of Tzu Chi’s volunteers. “It is thanks to the volunteers’ continuous dedication over the past three years that this vision has not only endured, but grown stronger,” Paudel said. He added that observing steady construction progress at the nearby Lumbini Tzu Chi Campus had given him confidence in the foundation’s long-term intentions. (Tzu Chi)
Kapilvastu Municipality official Ramjeet Prasad Kurmi affirmed the shift in community sentiment. “Everything Tzu Chi has done makes villagers feel at ease,” Kurmi said. “They are willing to work hand-in-hand with the volunteers to support future initiatives.” (Tzu Chi)
Tzu Chi Vice President Pi-Yu Lin, representing founder Master Cheng Yen at the groundbreaking ceremony, pointed to the hardships faced by residents of one of Buddhism’s most historically significant sites. Despite Kapilvastu’s spiritual importance, she noted, many families lacked adequate housing, access to medical care, and educational opportunities.
“We hope that through the construction of the Great Love Village, we can provide sturdy, safe, and hygienic homes, and help improve the difficult living conditions that the Buddha’s descendants continue to face more than 2,500 years later,” Lin said. (Tzu Chi)
The ceremony drew 194 monastics, more than 100 Tzu Chi volunteers from Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, and hundreds of local residents. The program included chanting and a sign language performance of a Tzu Chi song by vocational training students and volunteers.
In tandem with the Great Love Village project, construction of Jing Si Hall, a new Dharma hall and accompanying facilities at Tzu Chi’s Lumbini campus has continued apace. Once complete, the structure will form part of a growing campus that includes a planned hospital, intended to serve as a comprehensive center to support Tzu Chi’s four missions: charity, medicine, education, and humanistic culture. The campus will also house Lumbini Tzu Chi School, which will open with kindergarten and Grade 1 classes and is intended to serve as a model institution for the foundation’s mission in Nepal.
The CEO of Tzu Chi Singapore, Low Swee Seh, noted that Master Cheng Yen has long held the aspiration to establish a center for Dharma propagation in the land of the Buddha’s birth.
One of Tzu Chi’s Nepalese volunteers, Rishikesh Mourya, who emphasized the significance of the campus for Nepali practitioners. “In the past, I had to travel overseas to visit a Jing Si Hall,” Mourya said. “Soon, we will have one in our own country. This campus will become a home for volunteers and a place where we can truly serve society.”
The Kapilvastu and Lumbini developments are the most visible of several concurrent Tzu Chi initiatives in Nepal. In late 2024, the foundation completed and handed over 100 earthquake-resistant homes to Dalit families in Sunsari District, Koshi Province. The Dalit community has historically occupied the lowest tier of Nepal’s caste hierarchy. Many families in the project had lived for generations in bamboo and thatch huts on land to which they held no legal title, vulnerable to eviction and seasonal floods during the monsoon season.
The new homes were built with treated bamboo frames to resist seismic activity and pest infestations, with cement-plastered walls to improve insulation and structural integrity. Each property includes an 18-meter well, sanitation facilities, and an electricity supply. The 100 homes are spread across four local governments in Sunsari District. Each household received a registered land title alongside their keys—for many families, their first legal document of any kind.
The timing of the handover carried additional weight. Two weeks before the ceremony, heavy flooding had struck the region, destroying the homes of three families among the project’s beneficiaries. Vice President Lin expressed relief that the completion of the Great Love Homes had proven timely, offering the displaced families an place to rebuild their lives.
For 17-year-old Om Kumar Harijan, whose family had lived in a thatched house for three generations without legal land rights, the new home has been life-changing. His father works abroad, leaving Harijan to care for his grandmother, mother, and younger siblings.
“The new house is stronger than our old home,” Harijan said. “From the new home, it takes only five minutes to cycle to school. If we keep up the payments, in four years we will get the land ownership.” The families receive their homes in an installment arrangement under which participating families will gain full title to their properties after four years.
Tzu Chi’s compassionate outreach in Nepal has grown steadily since the country’s devastating 2015 earthquakes, extending across mobile medical outreach, relief distribution, and school support in multiple provinces. The Kapilvastu Great Love Village and the Lumbini campus represent the foundation’s most ambitious construction commitments in Nepal to date, and, in the foundation’s own framing, an effort to honor the Buddha’s legacy of compassion in the very land where it originated.
As a global icon of socially engaged Buddhism, Master Cheng Yen has expressed a deeply held belief that all people are capable of manifesting the same great compassion as the Buddha. She has noted that true compassion is not simply feeling sympathy for the suffering of others, but is found in reaching out to relieve suffering with concrete action.
Master Cheng Yen is popularly known in Taiwan as one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Buddhism, the others being: Master Sheng Yen, founder of Dharma Drum Mountain; Master Hsing Yun, founder of Fo Guang Shan; and Master Wei Chueh, founder of Chung Tai Shan. These four global Buddhist orders, correspondingly known as the “Four Great Mountains,” have grown to become among the most influential Chinese Buddhist organizations in the world.
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Tzu Chi Foundation
New beginnings in Nepal: Kapilvastu Great Love Village and Lumbini Jing Si Hall (Tzu Chi Foundation)
New Great Love Village homes transform lives in Sunsari (Tzu Chi Foundation)
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