"Brother Zhuang, Zhongchuan said that when he comes to China this time, he must worship Buddha whenever he sees it. He must worship these three Buddha statues. He asked us to go around first..."
After Yan Translator told Zhongchuan what Zhuang Rui said, Zhongchuan babbled again and kept his knees on the ground facing the seven or eight meter tall Buddha in front of him, looking very pious.
Zhuang Rui thought for a moment and said: "Peng Fei, you follow him, Brother Ren and I will go to the back first..."
This Buddhist temple should have been built in the Sui and Tang Dynasties. Its architectural style is very rare in the mainland. Zhuang Rui just wanted to take a look at it and was too lazy to talk to Zhongchuan. He immediately told Peng Fei to take care of Zhongchuan.
Peng Fei and Zhuang Rui have been getting along for several years, and they have a tacit understanding. He understood what Zhuang Rui meant, and nodded immediately and said: "Brother Zhuang, don't worry, I will watch over him, he will do anything fishy."
It can’t be played…”
"Okay, please be careful. We'll go to the back for a short walk and then come back. We'll do a good survey tomorrow..."
It's already past four o'clock today, and the sun has already set in the west, and the light is already a bit dark. It's not the people like Zhuang Rui who deal with corpses in ancient tombs all day long. If they are timid, they won't do it at all.
Dare to walk around in this deserted place.
However, nothing can be seen at night. Zhuang Rui just wants to have a general understanding of the architectural composition of this ancient temple so that he can start investigating tomorrow to see if he can find any valuable objects?
After explaining Peng Fei, Zhuang Rui, Dr. Ren and several graduate students from Peking University walked out directly from a dilapidated side door in the Main Hall.
Outside the side door of the Main Hall is a small courtyard. There is also a building at the end of the courtyard, but there is no door plaque on it. Instead, the three characters "Amitabha Pavilion" are directly engraved on it.
"This...this is actually a stone pavilion..."
When they got closer, Zhuang Rui and others discovered that the Amitabha Pavilion was actually carved from mountain rocks.
In the west, especially near Dunhuang, stone pavilions are not uncommon. The famous Mogao Grottoes are all carved out of the mountains. However, it is surprising to see stones other than yellow sand in the desert.
"Zhuang Rui, have you noticed that the terrain here is gradually going up? It should have been a mountain before. Let's go in and have a look..."
Most of the temples in the Sui and Tang Dynasties and even earlier periods were built on mountains, such as the White Horse Temple in Luoyang and the Songshan Shaolin Temple. It seems that this abandoned ancient temple does not fall out of this category.
After carefully looking around the stone pavilion, Dr. Ren sighed: "The ancients really didn't ask about the people or ghosts and gods. They spent so much money to build a temple just for peace of mind. How much money and material resources will be wasted?"
This Amitabha Pavilion is very delicately built. There is half a cliff on top of it, making it look like a flying pavilion flying in the sky, as if hanging.
Opening the rusty iron gate, you can clearly see that there is a statue of Amitabha carved on the middle wall of the pavilion, with bare feet and dirty face, a big smile, and a very lifelike shape.
In the middle of the stone pavilion, there was a patio. Zhuang Rui took a flashlight and looked at it. It was so dark that he could not see the lower part. He estimated that it must be at least ten meters deep.
The stones around the patio are very smooth, which must have been caused by the monks fetching water in the temple in the early years. However, the water in the well has dried up long ago, otherwise this place would not have become an empty temple.
Zhuang Rui looked back and found that the four characters "Qiongya dripping green" were carved on the lintel of the back door of the stone pavilion. He couldn't help but sigh: "Qiongya dripping green has a good artistic conception. I guess it must have been lined with green trees and ancient trees growing slantingly back then.
It’s just that no one could have imagined that it would be the decline it is today, right?”
"It's just like the change of dynasties. There are always ups and downs, but it's a pity that such a thousand-year-old temple is buried in the desert..."
Although we haven't been able to get a full view of it, we can see its scale just from these two temples. If it were placed in the Central Plains or Jiangnan area, its reputation would probably be higher than that of Songshan Shaolin.
Since it was getting late, Zhuang Rui and his party didn't waste any time and continued walking to the back door. Only when they walked along did they realize that the size of this thousand-year-old temple was far beyond their imagination.
After passing the Amitabha Pavilion, there are nearly eight or nine Buddhist temples such as Thousand Buddha Pavilion, Panlong Pavilion, Luohan Courtyard, Zhongtian Courtyard, Summoning Immortal Pavilion, Better Pavilion, Longquan Pavilion, etc., with corridors passing through and pavilions stacked on top of each other.
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Although everything that meets the eye has long been dilapidated, it can be imagined that when its incense was at its peak, people from various countries in the Western Regions and domestic people gathered here to worship Buddha.
When Zhuang Rui and his party walked to the last part of the ancient temple, Zhuang Rui looked at the six sparse ancient pagodas in the vast open space in front of them, and couldn't help blurting out: "This... is this stupa?"
The relic stupa is used to house the relics of great eminent monks after they have passed away. As the crystallization of personal discipline, concentration, and wisdom, the relics have a very important position in Buddhism and are also a testimony that the practitioners have achieved results.
For example, after Sakyamuni Buddha passed into nirvana 2,500 years ago, when his disciples cremated his body, they obtained a skull, two shoulder blades, four teeth, a middle finger bone relic and 84,000 beads from the ashes.
The true body relics, these relics of the Buddha, have always been regarded by believers as sacred objects and Buddhist treasures, and they compete to worship them.
Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China, and Hong Yi, Yin Guang, Taixu, Zhang Jia and other great masters in modern times, all left a considerable number of relics after their death, which were enshrined and worshiped by later generations of Buddhists.
In ancient times, generally speaking, stupas could not be built unless they were extremely important temples. Most of them were built by imperial edict. The presence of stupas here must have been a Buddhist center during the heyday of Buddhism thousands of years ago.
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After Dr. Ren walked around several hexagonal cone-shaped stupas over 4 meters high, he showed a look of disappointment on his face and said, "It's true that they are stupas, but I'm afraid they are the relics of eminent monks and virtuous men of all ages."
, have all been moved away..."
The relics of eminent monks have always been extremely important Buddhist treasures, not to mention that the names and life stories of the seated eminent monks are written in Sanskrit on these relic stupas. If there are relics in the stupas, then this discovery will be enough to make a breakthrough in world Buddhism.
It caused a sensation inside.
After Zhuang Rui heard Dr. Ren's words, he slightly released the spiritual energy in his eyes. As expected, the tower was empty, and there were no relic-like objects. It must have been that the monks of the temple took away the relics of these eminent monks when they moved.
Zhuang Rui looked at the sky. The sun was almost setting below the horizon, and night had completely fallen, so he said, "Let's go back. This place is considered abandoned, but it can be developed into a tourist attraction. I just don't know."
Is the local government willing to invest..."
This place is too far away from the place where humans live. It takes three days to walk in the desert alone. In addition, there are quicksands blocking the road. If you want to develop it, I am afraid it will cost an astronomical amount of money. So
Zhuang Rui only said this.
After returning to the gate of the ancient temple, Mengzi, Erdan and others had already lit a fire on the ground, using dead branches of Populus euphratica. The brothers followed Zhuang Rui for a while and realized that they could not dismantle the temple buildings to make fire for cooking.
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"Zhuang Rui, there are not even a few ordinary tables and chairs left here. There is not much value left in the excavation. Let's go back tomorrow..." Zhuang Rui and others couldn't help with cooking, so they just sat around the campfire to discuss it.
The next step of the journey has come.
Zhuang Rui took out a pack of cigarettes and distributed them to everyone, then nodded and said: "Okay, after leaving here, we will enter the prairie. Now the tombs from the Xixia and Mongolia periods are relatively intact. I hope we can
Find one..."
The main purpose of Zhuang Rui's trip was to host a field archaeological excavation as a reference for his future doctoral thesis. However, the ancient tombs discovered along the way were either stolen or dug up, or were like the Mausoleum of Qin Shihuang.
Unable to discover it, Zhuang Rui is now a little anxious.
I originally expected to find some objects in this thousand-year-old temple, but when Zhuang Rui passed through every palace and pavilion just now, he used his spiritual energy to carefully survey it, but he found that not a single valuable thing was left behind.
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Thinking of this, Zhuang Rui suddenly remembered something and shouted to Mengzi who was busy around the campfire: "Brother Mengzi, I want to ask you something..."
"Brother Zhuang, what's going on?" Mengzi turned around without knowing why.
"Brother Mengzi, didn't you say before that there are only three or five monks in this temple? This is impossible. Such a big temple can accommodate at least two to three hundred monks, right?"
Mengzi told Zhuang Rui before that this place was just a small temple, but everything he saw before him obviously had nothing to do with the word "small".
After Mengzi heard Zhuang Rui's words, he scratched his head in confusion. After thinking for a long time, he said: "This... I don't know, but the old man in the town used to say that there are really only three or five monks here.
, they even passed by the town when they moved away..."
"Zhuang Rui, don't worry about it. It is estimated that many monks left the temple a long time ago, and there are only a few left behind. It may be too long ago, and even the people in the town don't know..."
Dr. Ren gave a very reasonable explanation. Zhuang Rui thought about it and nodded in agreement, but he always felt that something was wrong.
"Brother Mengzi, let's make some broth tonight. I can't drink the soup at this time, and my mouth is almost foaming..." Just as Zhuang Rui was thinking in his mind, Peng Fei's voice suddenly came to his ears.
"Huh? By the way, what were they doing just now?"
After hearing what Peng Fei said, Zhuang Rui realized that these people had actually come out of the temple. He couldn't help but be stunned. They had been wandering around for at least an hour and had not seen Peng Fei.
