The Temple of Two Monasteries

The temple is easier to understand as two buildings than one. It now consists of a West Monastery from 1669 and an East Monastery from 1940, enclosed within a single compound of 10,600 square metres, and the pairing explains its size and its layered character. The old monastery was started in the early Qing and renovated in the eighth year of Kangxi, and the district's account names the founder more precisely: the building was begun in 1658 and 1659 with money donated by Cao Bin, then commander of the Tianjin garrison. A military officer paying for a Chan temple in a garrison town on a canal is a very specific kind of patronage.

What the temple holds is described in dimensions. A Qing dynasty Sakyamuni statue stands seven metres high and weighs six tonnes, with 9,999 small Buddhas carved on its lotus throne, a figure that is one short of ten thousand for reasons the sources do not explain. Inside the Great Compassion hall stands a 3.6-metre mud statue of the thousand-hand Guanyin. The relic palace holds hundreds of Buddha statues in bronze, iron, stone and wood from dynasties since the Wei and Jin period, which makes it a survey collection as much as a shrine. In 1983 the State Council approved the temple as a nationally open Buddhist temple.

The monastery once held a skull relic of Xuanzang, the seventh-century pilgrim whose journey to India became a foundation story of Chinese Buddhism; he died in 664. The relic went to India in 1956 and is now in the Patna museum, a transfer that belongs to the diplomatic history of the 1950s rather than to the temple's own. Its departure is worth recording because it marks what a religious site can lose without losing its function: the temple remains open, active and visited, and one of its most famous objects is now a day's travel away in another country. The building survived; the relic did not stay.