Structure Type: Buddhist Monastery 佛寺.
Location: Lingqiu County, Shanxi 山西靈丘縣. The monastery is located about 10 kilometers south of the county seat, through a narrow gap in the mountains that opens into a spectacular stone amphitheater. There is no village close by to the site.
Period: Late 19th-early 20th Century. The stele record of this monastery is extremely dense, stretching back into the early medieval period. The giant pagoda dates from the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) and several dhāraṇī pillars exist from this period; there are apparently Liao-period murals within the pagoda chamber, but this was not open to the public when I visited. The monastery was then repaired several times in the Kangxi reign (1661-1722). Finally, a long and complex series of renovations took place beginning around 1880 and continuing into the early years of the Republic (1910s), overseen by a monk named Long Cheng 龍誠. These steles are all kept in a dark room and are very difficult to read; I went over them carefully during my visit there but was unable to find one clear smoking gun for the murals. In any case, the extant murals were painted by at least two different artists or groups of artists; the Feast of Water and Land murals are in a quite different style from the murals which fill the other halls. A close reading of the stele texts may be able to get more information out of them than I did.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: I should note at the outset here that this site is complex and unique and I’m only able to give a glib impression of it. There are four main courtyards. From east to west, these are the Maitreya Hall 彌勒殿, the Mahāvīra Hall 大雄寶殿, a smaller courtyard with a dining hall 齋堂 and a living-hall for monks 戒堂, and the Hall of Returning to the True 歸真殿. Each of these courtyards or axes have multiple smaller side-halls 配殿, all of which were originally painted. Many of these halls are now damaged due to incense-smoke, and they also seem to be frequently set-aside as store-rooms or places to hang placard from donors. Thus the murals are not always visible.
The Maitreya Hall holds massive and beautiful murals, but unfortunately when I visited the sides of the room were being used to store tables and wooden boards, blocking most of the walls. The side-walls depict complex scenes from Buddhist stories, although the exact source I’m not sure. The rear wall has images of the Boddhisattvas and Heavenly Kings crowding around the central altar 佛龕. Behind the altar, there’s a narrow crawl-space with an image of a red sun rising from the waters. This image of fecund qi 氣 and water flowing out from behind the altar-wall is pervasive throughout late-imperial north-Chinese village temples; this hall represents an unusual use of this image in a large Buddhist prayer-hall.
The Mahāvīra Hall contains full-wall murals of the Dharma Assembly of Water and Land 水陸法會. Unfortunately, this hall is very dark and the murals have a reflective glaze over them making it impossible to use the camera-flash. These could no-doubt be photographed with a tripod and some electric lighting, but I didn’t have anything like this on me. Nevertheless I did my best to at least get a necessarily grainy image of each group of figures.
Outside the Mahāvīra Hall is the most interesting and intact of the side-halls. This is devoted to the Protector of the Monastery 伽藍神, in this case Lord Guan. The walls here have an amazing life of Śākyamuni sequence, set in a heavily western-influenced palace, with long perspectival colonnades stretching back. This mural is a very unique and important document of this early-modern Buddhist art.
Finally, the Hall of Returning to the True (give on some placards as the homophonous Hall of Precious Truth 貴真殿) has long images of the “thousand Buddhas”, in this case not actually amounting to more than a few dozen. Like the other halls, this one is dark, filled with pillars and hangings, and generally not easy to photograph in.
Other interesting bits of the monastery are of course the famous and beautiful Liao-Dynasty stupa, and some side-halls containing a huge number of steles and inscribed pillars. There’s also a separate cave-temple up on the clifftops overlooking the valley. This latter temple seems to have been totally rebuilt from the ’90s and does not now contain murals.
Other Notes: The monastery is run by the Lingqiu County Cultural Relics Bureau 靈丘縣文物局, who seem to spend most of their time throwing peanuts at a monkey, who has free reign of the place. I felt an empathetic link with this monkey but this was not reciprocated. I was almost disallowed from photographing the late-Qing and Republican period steles, because these “had no value” 沒有價值. This is a common refrain from Chinese scholars and officials about early-modern art and artifacts. If you push them on it you usually find out that that artistic “value” is expressed as a monetary amount. This accounts for the fact that, while the monastery is generally clean and well kept-up, the rooms with beautiful early-modern murals are considered places to stack large cabinets and paste paper donation-slips onto the walls.
Mahāvīra Hall [Feast of Water and Land] Full Gallery
All Other Halls Full Gallery
Steles, Pagoda, and Monastery Grounds Full Gallery
