Mount Jiuhua's monasteries: a network in the landscape

Mount Jiuhua's Buddhist character is distributed across its slopes rather than contained in a single landmark. The Academy of Chinese Studies describes monasteries along Jiuhua Avenue, in Minyuan Park and among the mountains. Its account names Jetavana Monastery, Hundred-Year Palace, East Crag Monastery and Sweet Balm Monastery as the “Four Monastic Establishments of Jiuhua.” The names are an invitation to read the mountain as a connected religious landscape: roads, settlements, peaks and institutions belong to the same story.

The page was last updated on 22 October 2020. At that time it recorded 82 extant monasteries and about 400 resident monks and nuns. The same account contrasts this with earlier periods, including thousands of monastics in the Qing era and more than 150 monasteries, huts and hermitages in the 1930s. Read in sequence, the counts show how the mountain’s religious institutions changed over time.

The Academy reports a collection of roughly 1,300 cultural objects and gives examples more concrete than the number: Sanskrit sutras written on palm leaves, Ming and Qing editions of the Tripitaka, handwritten Ming sutras, a Yuan-era blue porcelain bowl, and bronze objects from the Ming period. These works turn a visit to a monastery into contact with several kinds of history—scripture, craft, patronage and imperial gifts. The account also mentions jade seals presented by a Qing emperor, making the collection a record of religious practice and political attention.

The Academy of Chinese Studies describes steep peaks, caves once used as secluded cloisters and monasteries set within the mountain environment. The religious landscape is therefore inseparable from its terrain: paths connect institutions, and the mountain’s folds offer places for retreat. The figures for monasteries and resident monastics above belong to the page’s 2020 snapshot; the account’s enduring detail is the relationship it traces between religious life and the physical setting.