The Hanging Temple, also Hengshan Hanging Temple, Hanging Monastery or Xuankong Temple () is a temple built into a cliff ( above the ground) near Mount Heng in Hunyuan County,

Datong Datong is a prefecture-level city in northern Shanxi Province in the People's Republic of China. It is located in the Datong Basin at an elevation of and borders Inner Mongolia to the north and west and Hebei to the east. As of the 2020 cens ...

City,

Shanxi Shanxi (; ; formerly romanised as Shansi) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the North China region. The capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan, while its next most populated prefecture-lev ...

Province, China. The closest city is Datong, to the northwest. Along with the Yungang Grottoes, the Hanging Temple is one of the main tourist attractions and historical sites in the Datong area. Built more than 1,500 years ago, this temple is notable not only for its location on a sheer precipice but also because it is the only existing temple with the combination of three Chinese traditional philosophies or three religions (三教): Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The structure is kept in place with oak crossbeams fitted into holes chiseled into the cliffs. The main supportive structure is hidden inside the bedrock. The monastery is located in the small canyon basin, and the body of the building hangs from the middle of the cliff under the prominent summit, protecting the temple from rain erosion and sunlight bake.

History

According to legend, construction of the temple was started at the end of the

Northern Wei Wei (), known in historiography as the Northern Wei (), Tuoba Wei (), Yuan Wei () and Later Wei (), was founded by the Tuoba (Tabgach) clan of the Xianbei. The first of the Northern and Southern dynasties#Northern dynasties, Northern dynasties ...

dynasty by only one man, a monk named Liaoran () in 491 AD. Over the next 1,400 years, many repairs and extensions have led to its present-day scale.

Architecture

The entire 40 halls and pavilions are all built on cliffs which are over from the ground. The distance from north to south is longer than from east to west and it becomes higher and higher from the gate in the south to north along the mountain. With brief layout, it includes the Qielan Hall (Hall of Sangharama), Sanguan Hall (Hall of Three Officials, ), Chunyang Hall (), Hall of Sakyamuni, Hall of Three Religions () and

Guanyin Hall The Hall of Guanyin or Guanyin Hall ( or ) is the most important annex halls in Chinese Buddhist temples and mainly for enshrining Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara). Guanyin, also called "Guanshiyin" (), "Guanshizizai" (), "Guanzizai" (), etc., is the at ...

Hall of Three Religions

The Hall of Three Religions mainly enshrines Buddhist

deities A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The ''Oxford Dictionary of English'' defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greate ...

as well as both Taoism and Confucianism. The statues of Sakyamuni (middle),

Lao-Tze Laozi (), also known by numerous other names, was a semilegendary ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Laozi ( zh, ) is a Chinese honorific, generally translated as "the Old Master". Traditional accounts say he was born as in the state o ...

(left) and Confucius (right) are enshrined in the hall. This reflects the prevailing idea of Three Teaching Harmonious as One () in the Ming and

Qing The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...

dynasties (1368–1911).

Gallery

References

External links

Hanging Temple
Class II Protected Sites in China, fro

Retrieved d.d. January 1, 2010.
History of the Hanging Monastery

Geo Architecture and Landscape in China's geographic and Historic Context
(2016). Book by Fang Wang. Page 102-112. Buddhist temples in Datong Datong 6th-century establishments in China 6th-century Buddhist temples Visionary environments Major National Historical and Cultural Sites in Shanxi Three teachings {{Buddhist temples in China