The Great Lama Temple

The Great Lama Temple by Esther Singleton

"The Great Lama Temple" presents a first-person account of a visit to the Yung-ho-kung, a major Lama Buddhist monastery situated within the northeastern corner of the Tartar city wall in Peking, narrated by C. F. Gordon-Cumming and compiled by Esther Singleton. The narrator accompanies Dr. Dudgeon, a physician whose medical services to the presiding head Lama — a Mongol Tartar who bears the title "Living Buddha" — have secured him rare access to the monastery. The institution houses approximately 1,300 monks of all ages, including boys as young as six. These monks are characterized as Mongol Tartars of degraded moral character: dirty, rapacious, and hostile to outsiders. Foreigners have repeatedly failed to gain entry, bribery included. Entry is achieved only through Dr. Dudgeon's personal standing and, at the gate, by the forceful application of a shoulder against an obstructing doorkeeper, who is ultimately subdued by threats of denunciation to the head Lama. Passage through the temple's successive locked doors requires constant small payments — kum-sha — to each priest in charge, producing an atmosphere of veiled menace as each door is sealed behind the visitors. Despite this, the interior reveals extraordinary richness: yellow glazed roof tiles, stone-carved animal figures at the entrance, wooden carvings of birds, beasts, serpents, and monstrous human heads, silk hangings, gold embroidery, painted lanterns, ornamental baldachinos, and thousands of small porcelain images of Buddha lining the walls. Prominent among the temple's idols is Kwang-ti, a historical warrior of the early Christian era deified some eight centuries later as the God of War, with state temples erected in every city of the empire. His shrine bears arms, armour, bows, and arrows. Although his martial associations sit oddly within a Buddhist context, Kwang-ti also functions as Protector of the Peace, invoked across all manner of civil and national crises. The text recounts two legends: that his intercession restored dried salt wells in Shansi after an imperial petition was ceremonially burnt and conveyed to the spirit world; and that he appeared visibly in the clouds above Nankin in 1855 during the Taiping Rebellion to assist imperial forces, earning posthumous promotion by the Emperor Hien-feng to a rank equal to that of Confucius — a status revered by Taoists and Buddhists alike. The altar furnishings throughout are of the finest Peking enamel — vases, candlesticks, and incense burners — beneath a ceiling panelled in green and gold, with scroll paintings at every turn. The main hall, called the Foo-Koo or Hall of Buddha, contains the temple's most imposing object: a cyclopean image of Matreya, the Buddha of Futurity, seventy feet tall and carved reputedly from a single block of wood, painted to resemble bronze. A gallery at shoulder height encircles the image and leads into two flanking circular buildings, each housing an enormous rotating cylinder of equivalent height, its surface studded with niches each containing the figure of a Buddhist saint. Worshippers attach paper prayer-strips to these cylinders and turn them as an act of collective homage to the entire assembly of saints. The narrator draws a parallel to the practice in some Lama monasteries of housing sacred scriptures and commentaries in revolving cylindrical bookcases, turned in their entirety as a substitute for reading — a mechanical piety in which comprehension plays no part. The visitors arrive too late for the principal morning service, which begins at four o'clock, but a detailed description is given. More than a hundred mats are spread across the temple floor, each supporting ten subordinate Lamas kneeling in yellow robes and crested yellow felt helmets, barefoot within the temple though otherwise wearing red felt boots. The Great Lama occupies a gilded throne before the altar, vested in violet robes and a yellow mitre, bearing a crozier. The temple is in near darkness except for the tapers blazing on the altar. At the sound of a copper gong, the monks chant litanies in monotone, one priest reading from a silken scroll while the others murmur in response, some reciting words while others sustain a continuous deep bass. Incense clouds the interior. A second gong signals a transition to sacred chants, which give way to a cacophony of gongs, bells, conch-shells, and tambourines, followed by a silence of particular intensity given the preceding din.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1903 · Genre: Travel Literature, Memoir/Personal Narrative, Ethnography · 1,719 words

First lines

C. F. GORDON-CUMMING

This morning soon after 5 A. M. Dr. Dudgeon took me to see the / Yung-ho-kung, a very fine old Lama temple, just within the wall, at the / north-east corner of the Tartar city. It contains about 1,300 monks of / all ages, down to small boys six years old, under the headship of a / Lama, who assumes the title of "The Living Buddha."

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Buddhism · architecture · temple · China · Beijing · travel · history · cultural heritage · religion · Asian culture · Buddhist temples · spirituality

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