Hung Quang Temple under the Vietnam Pure-Land Buddhist Association was established in 1952 and has nearly 70 years of providing medical charities for local people.
The Hung Quang Temple – the office of the provincial Pure-land Buddhist association is located in Nguyen Hue street of Ben Tre city’s An Hoi ward and currently managed by Herbalist Châu Thị Thu (Buddhist name: Diệu Không).
The traditional clinic based at Hung Quang Temple has currently 15 herbalists, doctors and nurses taking part in free medical treatments using traditional methods.
Every day, the clinic conducts free medical examination for over 100 patients in localities. Besides providing free herbal medicine, treatments for bones and joint cases, the clinic also offers acupuncture, physical therapy exercises.
With the increasing number of patients, each year the clinic has freely distributed over 20 tons of herbal medicines. Therefore, in order to have enough medicine dispensed, the temple has established a specialized board including members from provinces of An Giang, Tra Vinh, Dong Thap, Vinh Long, Vung Tau, etc for collecting herbal medicines. In addition, the temple has built a medicine storehouse with a total area of 1,200 m2 for keeping tons of pre-processed and dried medicines.
In addition, Herbalist Diệu Không and Buddhists of the temple have proactively participated in other social charities including supports sent to the elders, patients in mental hospitals and orphans and donation of rice to the poor, etc. In order to help local people overcome difficulties caused by COVID-19 pandemic and saltwater intrusion in early 2020, Herbalist Diệu Không has successfully encouraged sponsors to install the first free rice-ATM in the province with the amount of 500 kg of rice per day in two months, as well as present over 116,500 m3 of fresh water, 150 barrels of noodles, 300kg of sugar, and 300 bottles of cooking oil to the poor in the locality, with the total contribution of nearly one billion VND.
Recently, Herbalist Diệu Không and Herbalist Võ Hoàng Yên have successfully raised fund for sending 4,620 relief packages valued at over two billion VND to people seriously affected by heavy floods in the Central region.
PH
