by Wanling Su

Constructed in 489 A.D., Qixia Temple (栖霞寺) is located on Qixia Mountain (栖霞山), outside of the city of Nanjing (南京). This famous temple is known as the origin of the Three Treatises School in Southwest China. The temple underwent many name changes during different dynasties, and was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion; reconstruction begain in 1919 and was finished in 1979. The main hall of the temple has a statue of the Dharma body of the Buddha. Behind the Buddha is a statue of Guanyin, and its background is an illustration of Sudana's life. There are also two shrines on the left and right sides of the hall. One is a small Guanyin shrine from the Palace Museum in Beijing. There is a legend that the face of this Guanyin was originally modelled after the Empress Wu Zetian (武则天). That is incorrect, however, because the head was actually added after Empress Wu's time. The other shrine is the Amitabha Buddha. Across from the main hall is the Sutra library, which is important for the Buddhist seminary.

The temple has several famous sites, including the Thousand Buddha Rock, a cliff with grottos containing 515 statues of the Buddha. The “1000th” statue is said to be modelled after the sculptor himself, as it is of a mason holding a chisel and hammer. According to the legend, when the deadline came for the statues to be inspected, the masons counted repeatedly but could yield only 999 statues. There was no time for the last statue to be constructed. In order to prevent his fellow masons from being punished and executed, one mason jumped into the cave and became the last statue. The Thousand Buddha Rock began to be established in 540 A.D., when a vision of heavenly light appeared above the three Buddha statues in the Three Sacred Hall. The aristocracy of Liang and Qi flocked to construct statues at the site, and gradually the Thousand Buddha Rock was formed.

Another famous site is the Sarira Stupa, constructed in 601 A.D. The story of its construction was recorded in the Ming Dynasty—Emperor Wen of Sui (楊堅) was supposed to have met an immortal nun who gave him hundreds of sarira, crystal-like beads purportedly found among the cremated ashes of Buddhist masters. After ascending to the throne, the Emperor felt such respect for the nun that he ordered the 83 states of China to each find a scenic temple and construct a stupa for the sarira. Qixia Temple was the first to be granted sarira. The stupa is octagonal and 18.74 meters high, and the eight sides of the altar are decorated with scenes from the life of Sakyamuni.

Qixia Temple is also home to both a large Buddhist seminary and the Jianzhen Memorial Hall. The Hall contains a figure of Jianzhen (鑒真), commemorating the Tang-dynasty monk who brought Vinaya and Chinese medicine to Japan despite arduous setbacks. Jianzhen tried to sail to Japan for five times in over a decade before he finally succeeded, but by then he was blind. The statue of Jianzhen, as well as various memorabilia about his journey, were a gift from the world of Japanese Buddhism and an indication of historically friendly relations between Chinese and Japanese Buddhism.

At the time that our group visited Qixia Temple, there was a month-long exhibition of a skull remnant from Sakyamuni Buddha. The relic is the parietal bone, or the top part of the skull, and supposedly the only known remnant of Sakyamuni's skull remaining in the world. It was saved in a pagoda-shaped shrine by the Indian Emperor Ashoka, who had collected and enshrined Sakyamuni's remains. Ashoka sent the resulting shrines to countries all over the world. This particular remnant came to China over 1000 years ago, but was only recently discovered. The shrine had been buried in a chamber built in 1011, underneath the ruins of the Song-dynasty Changgan Temple in Nanjing.