Bailin Temple (Beijing)

The temple, the largest of its kind in Dadu, was occupied by the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, which enjoyed great power under the Mongol emperors.

The fortunes of the temple, though, were short-lived: in 1355, the Sakya were overthrown in Tibet by local warlords, and the Yuan Dynasty suffered the same fate 13 years later, in 1368, when Dadu was taken by a rebel army and pillaged.

In 1447, the Zhengtong Emperor ordered a renovation of the monastery, and in the following years, a small square developed in front of the temple's main gate.

The prestige of this new neighbour resulted in the gift of a monumental bell in 1707 and in a complete renovation of the monastery in 1713 on the occasion of the 60th birthday of the Kangxi Emperor.

The rise of such a monastery resulted in a partial oblivion for Bailin Temple, which, by the end of the dynasty, had become dependent on its western counterpart.

In 1758, the Qianlong Emperor ordered a lavish renovation of the buildings, part of his great project to shape Beijing into a monument to his power.

[1] Like the Yonghegong Lamasery, Bailin Temple was not touched during the pillages of 1860 by Anglo-French forces and of 1900 by the Eight-Nation Alliance because of the superstitious fear that Tibetan Buddhism inspired to the invaders.

[2] However, as the Qing Dynasty came to an end in 1911 and the capital was moved to Nanjing, Tibetan Buddhism came to be seen as a feudal and non-Han religion, and the temples entered into decadence.

According to a memoir by Master Tanxu, Abbot Taiyuan was from northeast China; prior to his conversion, his secular name was Zhang Jiechen.

In the autumn of the same year, a public mill (a stone slab used by the community in ancient times to grind cereals) in front of the temple was destroyed, as the road was leveled for easier traffic.

A horizontally inscribed plaque in the handwriting of the Kangxi Emperor, which reads "The Everlasting Cypress Grove" (Wangubailin) hangs on the façade of the Mahavira Hall, while statues of the Buddhas of the Three Worlds are found inside.

Their surfaces were cast with bas-reliefs of coiling dragons and a mantra to be intoned after a person's death in the hope of gaining passage to the Pure Land.