Xuanzhong Temple stands in the Stone Wall Mountains north-west of Jiaocheng County, in a fold of rock, and it is the ancestral temple of the Pure Land school of Chinese Buddhism. The Chinese name of the hills, Shibi, means stone wall, and describes them: the temple is tucked into a hollow with crags above and around it. Construction began in 472, the second year of the Yanxing era of the Northern Wei, and took four years. In 2013 it entered the seventh batch of national key cultural relic protection units. What a visitor sees now is largely a twentieth-century rebuilding.
From the journal
Xuanzhong Temple in the Stone Hills of Jiaocheng
The ancestral temple of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, begun in 472 in Jiaocheng's Stone Wall Mountains, where Tanluan taught and Daochuo held the abbacy for thirty years.
In the same city · Lüliang ↗A Pure Land temple in the stone hills
The approach through rock
The temple is built along the rise and fall of the slope and divided into a central, an eastern and a western route, facing south. On the central axis the halls follow one another: the Hall of Four Heavenly Kings, the Mahavira Hall, the Hall of Seven Buddhas and the Hall of a Thousand Buddhas. Only the first keeps its original Ming fabric, built in 1605 in the late Ming; the rest went up after the local government began rebuilding in 1954. Fire is the reason. A blaze in 1090 destroyed most of the buildings and the monk Daozhen had them rebuilt; another in 1186 took the temple again and the monk Yuanzhao rebuilt it. The Mahavira Hall is twenty-five metres long and twenty wide, with a Maitreya in the centre and sixteen arhats painted on the walls.
Why this place was chosen
The place was chosen for a doctrine, not a view. Tanluan, counted the founder of Pure Land Buddhism, settled here in his last years and taught the school, drawing numbers of practitioners; his works include the Wangsheng lun zhu. Daochuo arrived in the fifth year of the Daye era of the Sui, held the abbacy for more than thirty years and wrote the Anle ji. Shandao came in 641 and stayed for the rest of his life. Emperor Taizong visited in 635 and gave the temple the name Shibi Yongning Temple. Ennin carried the school to Japan, and the temple came to be counted a cradle of Pure Land in both countries. In 1920 the Japanese monk Tokiwa Daijo found it overgrown; in 1983 the State Council made it a national key Buddhist temple.