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Home » Sunday » Now and Then

Kaiyuan Temple stands as an icon of Buddhism’s golden era

By Tan Weiyun | 00:00 UTC+8 July 5, 2020 | Print Edition

IT’S hard to measure exactly how many Buddhist temples there are in China, but one thing is for sure, there are many more temples named “Kaiyuan” than any others scattered around the country.

One of the temples is located in Quanzhou, a coastal city in Fujian Province, and it stands as the nation’s most famous.

The Kaiyuan Temple is a magnificent, grandiose architectural delight highlighting the blooming days of the Kaiyuan Reign in the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), which was the golden era of Buddhism.

Built in AD 686, the temple was sponsored by Huang Shougong, a rich landlord, who dreamed one night that his mulberry trees would blossom with lotus flowers. Taking it as a “Buddha’s oracle,” Huang decided to construct a shrine for worship. After several rounds of renovation, reconstruction and expansion over the past 15 centuries, the temple has been a spiritual home for locals.

On every 26th day of a lunar calendar month, pious Buddhists gather in the main hall, burn incenses and kneel down in prayer. They then line up and follow monks to walk around the temple again and again, while chanting the sutra. This tradition has been preserved for around 1,000 years.

The architecture sits on an axis running from south to north in a symmetric shape with halls, courtyards, pavilions and towers.

The Purple Cloud Hall, the main body of the complex, is supported by 86 giant stone pillars, and its 76 brackets are beautifully carved with 24 statues of flying apsaras.

It is rare to see a Buddhist temple combine Buddhist birds, Christian angels and ancient Chinese goddesses.

Five golden Buddhas sit in the middle of the main hall with kind yet solemn faces. They are preaching, giving, guiding and meditating.

A total of 72 stone lions, each sporting a man’s face, crouch in front of the hall. In the back corridor there are two stone posts relocated from an ancient Indian temple during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Past the main hall is Ganlu (Amrita) Ordination Platform with five levels, worshipping the Vairocana Buddha on the top.

It’s said in the Tang Dynasty that there was Amrita falling down from the sky, and a monk, named Xing Zhao, dug a well in the place to hold the sweet dew. In 1019, a platform was built above the well to make it an official Buddhist shrine.

The Vairocana Buddha, in a wooden sculpture, sits on a lotus seat with 1,000 petals. Each leaf of the lotus is carved with a 6-centimeter-high Buddha. Eight vajra Buddhas, topless and barefoot, glare down to scare away evil.

Two five-floor towers stand on the temple’s east and west, like two guardians on each side. The eastern Zhenguo Tower is a brick-laid octagonal structure, 48 meters high.

The walls of the tower are made of carved granite, stacked in a crisscross manner, with accurate calculations and meticulous construction. It was once printed on a stamp as one of “China’s four famous towers,” issued in 1997, earning the title “the King of Stone Towers.”

The western Renshou Tower, about 4 meters shorter than the eastern one, is in the same architectural style. The pair still stand tall despite several typhoons and an 8-magnitude earthquake.

The scripture library — Cangjing Ge — has more than 3,700 volumes of sutras.

The king, Wang Shenzhi (AD 862-925) of the Min territory (ancient Fujian), was a devout Buddhist, who launched several tower expansion projects. He even ordered workers to grind 500 kilograms of gold and silver into powder and added it to ink. The king invited the temple’s Master Yiying to write two volumes of “Tripitaka Sutra” with the precious ink. Some of the broken pages are still kept on the second floor of the library today.

Other cherished collections include “Lotus Sutra” written by a Ruzhao Monk in Yuan Dynasty, which he wrote with his own blood, and the “Palm-leaf Scriptures” in Tamil language — both priceless Buddhist classics in China.

The library collects historical relics from the Tang Dynasty to the Republic of China, including 32 Buddha statues in various sizes made of jade, copper, porcelain and wood, as well as art by famous calligraphers such as Zhang Ruitu (1570-1644) and Monk Hongyi (1880-1942).

The library’s first floor features 12 square-shaped iron clocks from the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279).

One of them, engraved with 46 business trademarks of Taiwan’s Lugang area in 1837, offers important evidence of the trading history between Quanzhou and Taiwan.

Now and Then


 

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