were enshrined the main devotional images of the worship
complex. Worshipers could enter Buddha halls, in contrast
to pagodas, which sometimes could be entered but in other
instances had imagery carved on the exterior and were cir-
cumambulated during worship. The earliest extant wooden
Chinese Buddha halls are from the eighth and ninth centu-
ries. From excavated remains and written descriptions we
know that Buddha halls of the sixth and seventh centuries
were rectangular in plan and of one story.
The site of Yongning Monastery in the Northern Wei
(493–534) capital at Luoyang in Henan province is one of
the most extensively excavated and described temple com-
pounds of the early period of Buddhist architecture in China.
Its rectangular wooden pagoda soared 161 meters in nine
stories. Each side of each story was supported by ten pillars
and had three doors and six windows. The doors were ver-
milion lacquer, held in place with golden nails. Golden bells
hung from each corner of each level. The Great Buddha hall
directly to its north was fashioned after the main hall of audi-
ence of Luoyang palace. It contained a three-meter-tall gol-
den Buddha. Also following imperial architecture, Yongning
Monastery was enclosed by a 212-by-301-meter mud-earth
wall, 3.3 meters thick, with a gate on each side. Its main gate,
seven bays across the front, was 66 meters high and rose three
stories. The others were two stories high. Records inform us
that Yongning Monastery had a thousand bays of rooms,
among which were monks’ quarters, towers, pavilions, and
the main Buddha hall and pagoda behind one another at the
center. Yongningsi (temple compound) was just one of
1,367 Buddhist structures or temple compounds in the
Northern Wei capital during its forty-year history. The main
southern capital in Jiankang (present-day Nanjing) had 480
monasteries during the third through sixth centuries. Al-
though not all received the kind of imperial patronage lav-
ished on Yongning Monastery, whether converted from resi-
dences, built anew, or expanded from earlier structures, every
temple compound had a pagoda and Buddha hall, and usual-
ly at least an entry gate and one enclosing corridor joined to
the gate or surrounding the two main structures. All were
Chinese versions of the viha ̄ra, the second Buddhist structur-
al type imported from India. Like their Indian predecessors,
most contained residential architecture for monks, and, even
more so than in India, the Chinese Buddhist temple com-
pound was a group of courtyard-enclosed spaces. Unlike
many Indian viha ̄ra, pagodas projected above the low walls
of temple compounds, and were sometimes the only feature
that made it possible to distinguish a Chinese temple com-
pound from a palace complex.
The last architectural form inherited from Indian Bud-
dhist temple compounds was the caitya. In China, the caitya
took the form of a rock-carved worship cave. The Chinese
had occasionally carved tombs into natural rock prior to the
entry of Buddhism. In at least one instance—the panorama
of rock-carved imagery from the Han dynasty at Lianyun-
gang in Jiansu province—Buddhist deities are believed to
have been carved into the face of rock. The concept of wor-
ship in a cave-temple, however, was inherited from India by
way of Central Asia. Cave-temples with relief sculptures and
paintings decorating their interiors, along with freestanding
temples in oases along the Silk Routes, were seen by Chinese
merchants before the fall of the Han dynasty. By the end of
the fourth century, cave-temples in the vicinity of Dunhuang
in Gansu province showed a unique blending of Chinese and
South Asian structure and iconography. Structural and deco-
rative features of cave-temples in Xinjiang and Gansu contin-
ued to bear signs of the native communities of monks and
merchants from every part of Asia as late as the tenth century.
Most famous among cave-temple monasteries are, from west
to east, Kizil, Kumtura, and Bezeklik in Xinjiang; the Mogao
and other cave-temple groups in the Dunhuang region, and
Maijishan in Gansu province; and Yun’gang, Tianlongshan,
Xiangtangshan, Longmen, and Gongxian in the north cen-
tral Chinese provinces of Shanxi, Hebei, and Henan. Addi-
tional cave-temples studied in the twentieth century Gansu,
the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, southeastern China,
and Liaoning in the Northeast is giving way to the redating
and refinement of chronologies for all of China’s cave-
temples.
The transmission of Buddhism and the rock-carved
temple compound never followed a clear or direct path from
South to East Asia during the five centuries (fifth to tenth)
during which the architectural form flourished in Central
Asia and China. Features of Chinese architecture, notably
the ceramic tile roof and pillar-supported structure raised on
a high platform with bracket sets, appeared in the murals and
in reliefs at each of the sites named above by the fifth or sixth
century. Often these indicators that Buddhism had entered
the Chinese sphere existed alongside worshipers whose non-
Chinese ethnicity was emphasized in the paintings or sculp-
ture. Even after the facial features of figures that decorated
the walls of Chinese caitya halls had become Sinified, ele-
ments of South Asian architecture persisted. One of the most
common decorative features in Chinese cave-temples is the
pointed, horseshoe-shaped arch called a caitya arch.
Temple compounds after 800 CE. The impermanence
of wooden architecture has meant that rock-carved cave-
temples, paintings of temple compounds on the walls of
cave-temples, and excavated remains provide the most reli-
able evidence of comprehensive Buddhist worship space be-
fore the tenth century. Eight individual Buddha halls have
been identified from the period 782 to 966, most with origi-
nal images and some with wall paintings. Six are in Shanxi
province, one is in Hebei, and one in Fujian. All but one are
of the humble variety, with three or five bays across the front,
indicating that their temple compounds either were not re-
cipients of imperial patronage or were constructed in times
of political and budgetary turmoil.
In China, the most important temple compounds, in-
cluding rock-carved worship caves, were commissioned by
the emperor or empress, often in or near national capitals,9046 TEMPLE: BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN EAST ASIA