Lingyin Temple and the Buddhas of Feilaifeng

One of the most famous spots along the West Lake, in Hangzhou, is the LingYin Temple and the adjacent FeiLaiFeng grottoes.  In this little travelogue, we'll start with the grottoes....since that is where our little EAS tour group started.

Just outside the temple there is a knob of limestone that rises several hundred feet over its surroundings. Neither height nor location makes it remarkable.  The West Lake is surrounded by hills, many of them much larger.  But this particular hill has hundreds of Buddhist images carved into its exposed limestone.  That is what makes it famous; and it is famous throughout all of China as one of the treasures of Hangzhou.

The rocky knob is called FeiLaiFeng.  The three Chinese characters in its name represent "to fly", "to come", and "rocky peak".  The travel websites translate this into English in different ways.  Some call it "the peak flow from afar" and some the "peak peak that flew hither" and some "the mountain come flying".  It seems that everything about China is ambiguous.

FeiLaiFeng is carved with over 300 images related to Buddhism.  Some are small.  Some big.  Some are crude.  Others approach the complexity of a Renaissance masterpiece.  The peak is riddled with caves and wormhole passages.  Inside, in near total darkness, there are also carvings.

The stone carvings on FeiLaiFeng date back to 1100 years ago.  Though the rock was there before the founding of temple, the carving of the rock came several hundred years after.  The style, I am told, is true to the origins of Buddhism in India and Tibet.  In fact, the local legends all say that entire rocky knob was originally located in India but flew itself to Hangzhou.  (Which explains why it is called "the mountain come flying".)  The artwork certainly looks to me like it could be Indian.  The tour guide assured us, though, that it is classically Chinese.

A friend from India told me that it is easy to distinguish between Indian and Chinese religious art.  In India, he said, the Buddhas all have Indian faces.  In China, they all have Chinese faces.  Below the neck, they are pretty much indistinguishable.  But the face will always give it away.

Just past the Buddhas of FeiLaiFeng is the LingYin Temple.  This temple is easily the largest temple complex that we've seen in China.  The main buildings are positioned on a line the runs up the side of a hill.  Each has an entry in a front and an exit in the back leading to a courtyard and then the entry of the next.  As you move from building to building you climb further up the hill.  It's similar, in that way, to some of the temples we saw in Kyoto, Japan.

These buildings have names such as Hall of the Heavenly King, Hall from the Fantastic Hero, Hall of the Buddha of Medicine, and Grand Hall of the Great Sage.  Each houses a major shrine in the form of a great statue at its center.  On the side walls are tens, if not hundreds, of smaller statues and shrines. 

The ritual for the observant usually starts outside, in the front of the temple, with the burning of paper offerings, candles, and incense sticks (known as joss sticks).  The paper offerings usually go straight into a cauldron.  The candles and joss sticks are usually held in front of the body in raised, clasped hands as the initial prayers are made.  Then they are placed into a rack of some type or into the cauldron where they continue to smoulder for long after.
The next step is to enter through the front door of the hall and to kowtow in front of the main shrine.  (English is full or words "borrowed" from other languages.  Kowtow is one of the very few words that English has borrowed from Chinese.)  They kneel upon mats and perform three of these prostrations.  Then they continue to pray or they move on surrounding walls to make appeals to the Bodhisattvas and lesser beings.  My understanding is that when Buddhists pray, they are normally asking for assistance with something.   Each of these deities, I am told, has an area of specialization.  Prayers and offerings are directed at specific shrines based on this.

Health, Wealth, and Long Life.  These are the top three themes for which people are praying.  Wealth for the young and/or poor.  Health for the sick.  Long life for the old.   One can pray for these things to be granted to oneself, or pray for them to be granted to a relative or friend.  Folks pray for other things, too;  love, marriage, children, revenge, etc...  I'd guess that each has a special patron.

The photo above shows the monks of the temple monastery.  Like monks of any religion, these folks spend a lot of time in prayer and study of their own choosing.   In this case, they have been engaged by a patron to offer additional prayers to help the patron's cause.  The ritual was much more elaborate and coordinated than normal prayers.  But beyond that, I couldn't tell what was actually going on.  

Our tour guide assured us that there was some kind of fee for the monks' assistance.  Though they live a life of poverty and denial, they still have to put food in their bellies and keep the temple in good repair.  All organized religions face the same challenges, I suppose.

In the photo of our group above, at center, is an elderly pilgrim come from Tibet.  Some folks in our group struck up a conversation with her and her family.  She stood out from the crowd because of her costume, which is in the Tibetan tradition.  Tibet was, and still is, one of the centers of Buddhist culture.  The Lingyin temple is of a type of Buddhism which seems to have a Tibetan pedigree.  The power of Lingyin temple to draw pilgrims from afar is an example of its fame and reputation.