Huayan Temple and the Architecture of the Liao Dynasty

The hall stands in the old city of Datong, northwest of Shanhua Temple, and it is the largest surviving Buddha hall in China. That single fact is the reason to look at it closely: the second largest is at Fengguo Temple in Yi County, Liaoning, and the third here in the same city, so two of the three great timber halls of the Chinese north stand a few streets apart. The temple is a first-batch national key cultural relics protection unit and one of the national key Buddhist temples of the Han region. The ranking is one of size, and this hall sits at the top of it.

A hall of this span is carried by its frame, not by its walls, and the frame is what to watch for. Under the eaves, bracket sets sit on the column heads and step outward in layers, holding the overhang clear of the wall line; above them the purlins run the length of the building and the rafters cross them up to the ridge. The weight comes down through the columns. What the eye can check without a drawing is proportion: the height of the roof against the height of the columns, the depth of the eaves, and the way each corner of the roof is carried out beyond the last column on the line.

A monastery that owns a canon needs a place to keep it, and that is the work of a library hall: a building set apart from the Buddha halls, closed against damp and light, holding the printed volumes of the Huayan Sutra and the rest of the canon in cabinets. The temple takes its name from that sutra, and it is one of the national key Buddhist temples of the Han region, a designation that marks a working monastery rather than a museum. That is the logic of the building: the halls of worship face the visitor, while the hall that keeps the canon is turned towards the book.