六榕寺讲解词.docxVIP

SIX BANYAN TEMPLE 【Introduction】—【The Hall of Heavenly Kings】—【The Six Banyan Pagoda】—【The Sakyamuni Hall】—【The Sixth Patriarch Hall】 The Six Banyan Temple in Guangzhou is a 1400-year-old Buddhist monastery, dating from 537AD during China’s Southern and Northern Dynasties Period, when Buddhism in China was in its prime. Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty in South China was the most zealous devotee of Buddhism among all the emperors throughout the history of China. At that time, a Buddhist priest called Tanyu, who was a maternal uncle of Emperor Wu, was planning to bring the Buddhist relic they got in Cambodia to Guangzhou from Nanjing. To await the arrival of this Buddhist relic, the then governor of Guangzhou, Xiao Yu by name, specially had this temple built. The original structure of the temple was destroyed by fire in the middle of the 10th century during the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty. The existing temple was built in 989 and the pagoda was reconstructed in 1197. This temple has got different names. In 1100, when Su Dongpo, a celebrated writer and calligrapher of the Northern Song Dynasty, came to visit the temple and was asked to leave a piece of his calligraphy in the temple, he wrote down two Chinese characters “Liu Rong”, meaning “Six Banyan” in English, because he was deeply impressed by the six banyan trees then growing in the temple. Since then the temple has been commonly known as the Six Banyan Temple and the pagoda, the Six Banyan Pagoda. Now the facsimiles of these two characters can still be seen engraved on the stone tablet in a corridor and on the slab over the lintel of the front door. 【The Hall of Heavenly Kings】 The entrance hall of the temple is called The Hall of Heavenly Kings and is the shrine for Mile Buddha (Maitreya) and the Heavenly Kings (or the Devas as are called in Buddhist sutra). The statue in the middle, the man with a big belly, is Mile Buddha, who is commonly known as the Laughing Buddha because he is always grinn