A Temple Without an Axis

Fengxue Temple sits eight kilometres northeast of Ruzhou, inside a national forest park and two kilometres from the Guaipo slope, and it is laid out unlike a northern monastery. The provincial government's heritage page notes that the buildings follow the shape of the hillside instead of a central axis, an arrangement the page calls rare in the north. The same page counts more than 140 surviving buildings from the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and quotes specialists who call the place a museum of ancient architecture. The effect on a visitor is disorientation of a useful kind: halls appear at different levels, approached from the side, so the sequence of a courtyard temple does not tell you what comes next.

Three buildings are singled out. The Tang seven-ancestor pagoda, the Song hanging-bell pavilion and the Jin middle Buddha hall are named by the province as the temple's three national treasures, and each is a different kind of structure: a brick pagoda, a timber pavilion built to hold a bell, and a hall whose timber frame is the reason for its fame. The temple's pagoda forest is described as one of the three great pagoda forests in the country, a cemetery of brick and stone tombs for generations of monks. The Pingdingshan tourism bureau adds that the temple and its pagoda forest have been protected at national level since 1988 and at provincial level since 1963, which makes the site's modern protection older than most of its visitors.

The sources disagree about when the temple began, and the disagreement is instructive. The provincial heritage page says it was built in the Northern Wei, first called Xiangji, renamed Qianfeng in the Sui, and a centre of the Tiantai school, with more than 1,500 years behind it. The Pingdingshan tourism bureau's page says it was founded in the first year of Chuping under the Eastern Han, which would make it more than 1,800 years old, and gives the names Xiangji, Qianfeng and Baiyun monastery in sequence. Both accounts agree that it is a Tiantai and Linji double ancestral temple, that it was listed provincially in 1963 and nationally in 1988, and that the buildings on the hill are what matter. The date is disputed; the fabric is not.