Five Halls, Two Stone Horses, and the First Translation Line

The approach is deliberately plain. The temple occupies a rectangular enclosure of about four hectares, oriented with its axis running north to south, and outside the gate on the south side a pair of Song stone horses stand facing each other, about the size of real horses and described as gentle and tame in expression. The gate itself was rebuilt in the Ming and presents three arches in a row, understood in Buddhist terms as the gate of liberation. Under the gate, some of the arch stones still carry the names of the craftsmen who cut them, and the accounts of the site identify these inscriptions as Eastern Han work. Inside, five main halls run in a line on the central axis with the side halls mirrored to left and right; the Tianwang Hall alone has a wooden niche with more than fifty gilded dragons around it.

The founding story is the reason for the name. The accounts describe Emperor Ming of Han dreaming in 64 CE of a tall golden figure, dispatching envoys west in 65, and the envoys returning in 67 with scriptures and an image of the Buddha carried on white horses, the animals that gave the monastery its name. In the following year, 68 CE, the emperor ordered a monastery built three li north of the Yongmen gate on the imperial road west of the city. The two monks who made the journey, Kasyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna, translated the Forty-Two Chapter Sutra here, which is identified as the earliest surviving Chinese translation of a Buddhist text. The narrative continues: in the 150-odd years after 68 CE, 192 works totalling 395 scrolls were translated in the monastery, which is why it is called China's first translation house.

Two later additions sit beside the old axis and say something about the temple's standing. The Thai court was begun after a lay donor from Bangkok visited in 1992 and presented a gilt bronze Buddha 7.2 metres tall and eight tonnes in weight; the main hall was finished in 1995, rebuilt and extended from 2010, and the whole complex was completed in 2014 with a consecration ceremony that year. The Myanmar court was laid out in 2012 and finished in June 2014, covering 7,020 square metres with a golden pagoda 32.92 metres high modelled on the Shwezigon in Bagan. Between them they hold a Buddhist relic stone casket brought to Luoyang in 2014, after more than a century in Bangkok. The old five-hall axis remains the spine; the two courts attach to its western side.