Source: People's Daily - Shanxi Channel
Gaoping Dinglin Temple is located in the southern foothills of Seven Buddha Mountain, 5 kilometers southeast of Gaoping City. Here the mountains and rivers are beautiful, the forest is dense and cloudy, dinglin temple is lying in the mountain pass surrounded by mountains on three sides, a valley in the south, the valley is full of springs, and a mountain road leads to the former lively Taihang Baixing, which is really a pure land far away from the dust. On May 26, 2001, it was selected as a national key cultural relics protection unit, and it is the largest ancient monastery in Gaoping's 22 "national security units".
Dinglin Temple was originally named "Yongde Temple", but because there was a Dinglin Spring in the temple, it was renamed "Dinglin Temple". The date of its founding is unknown, but at least in the Tang Dynasty, the temple was repaired during the Later Tang Changxing Period (930-935), the Song Yongxi Period (984-987), the Eighth Year of the Jin Emperor's Reign (1148), the Second Year of Dading (1162), the Fourth Year of Taihe (1204), the Fourth Year of Yuan Yanyou (1317), and the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The whole is a four-entry courtyard, and the main buildings are the Mountain Gate, the Lei Yin Hall, the Three Buddhas Hall, and the Seven Buddhas Hall. On both sides of the main building, there are also bell and drum towers, corridors, partial courtyards and pavilions, etc., and the existing mountain gate, Lei Yin Hall, east and west halls are Yuan Dynasty buildings, and the rest are Ming and Qing relics, which is an ancient building complex integrating the diverse styles of the Jin, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Dinglin Temple sits north to south, built according to the mountain, the hall loft pavilion, high and low, and ancient trees, green mountains and green water, very quiet and quiet. Moving between more than 8,000 square meters, the buildings spanning the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties are arranged in it, which is dazzling and beautiful.
Tourists who come to visit are always attracted by the towering mountain gate of Dinglin Temple. The façade of Dinglin Temple Mountain is three rooms wide, and it is a composite two-story high-rise building with heavy eaves and nine ridges, with a brick floor and a wooden structure on the second floor. The bottom floor of the pavilion is the main entrance of the temple, and the second floor is made of four heavenly kings, so the mountain gate is also known as the Hall of the Heavenly King. There is a baoxia in front of the gate of the Heavenly King Hall, forming a structure of "three layers of light and two dark layers", with three layers of dripping eaves with high and low eaves, high eaves and unique shapes. The Hall of the Heavenly King is side by side with the three-storey bell tower and drum tower on the east and west sides, forming a five-story eaves up and down, which looks imposing, which can be called the best in the Shanxi pavilion style architecture. Looking up, the roof looks like a roc bird flapping its wings, which is amazing.
Entering the temple through the Dongye Gate, there is a square pedestal in the middle of the courtyard, and above the pedestal is the Lei Yin Hall of Dinglin Temple. In front of the platform of the temple, there are two stone carved octagonal prayer blocks, both 4.30 meters high, one is the Maitreya birth pagoda, built in the second year of the Taiping Revival of the Northern Song Dynasty (977), and the other is built in the second year of Yongxi (985), the scriptures are engraved on the scriptures, and the lotus, raspberry and jewel roof are the artistic treasures of the Song Dynasty stone carved scriptures. The lei yin hall has a square plan, exquisite bucket arches, open doors between the front and back, barrel plate bois roof, and glass ridge decoration is a masterpiece of gold dynasty glass products, golden splendor, is the essence of the existing ancient architecture of Dinglin Temple. In July 2007, when the lei yin hall was overhauled, cultural relics workers found that its wooden structure was mainly a yuan dynasty relic, partially using older architectural components, and the internal beams also retained many Song and Jin relics.
It is worth mentioning that Yuan Dynasty architecture plays a role in the history of Chinese architecture, and is a transitional period between Song and Liaojin architecture and Ming and Qing dynasty architecture. The wooden construction technology of the Yuan Dynasty, on the one hand, follows the traditional rule of structural methods, on the other hand, further develops the "large-amount" structure of column reduction and column shifting, and the style is mainly based on rough atmosphere, giving posterity the impression that most of the architectural styles of the Yuan Dynasty are simple and rough. However, as a Yuan Dynasty building, the Lei Yin Hall of Dinglin Temple is small and exquisite. The Lei Yin Hall has a single eaves and nine ridges, with three rooms in width and depth, and the beam structure is six rafter houses, and three columns are used for the milk rafters after the four rafters. The pillar foundation stone is flat with the ground, there is no convexity, the column is stony, the flat square is smeared with four corners, and the side corners of the column are obvious, but the rise is almost invisible. The column head is made of obestrations, pubaifang, and five paving as bucket arches, and there is no tween paving due to the small frame between the buildings. The front and back and sides of the Lei Yin Hall bucket arch are different, the front arch is a single copy of the single lower ang, the lower ang is the real ang of the piano face, and the head of the play is ang; the mountain face bucket arch is a double lower ang without jumping, the lower ang is the fake ang of the piano face, and the head of the play is the grasshopper head.
The terrain behind the Lei Yin Hall gradually increased, and the Three Buddhas Hall no longer exists, only the base site remains. Shanfa Hall and Luohan Hall are listed separately, for the stone cultivation cave on the cliff wall, there is a spring water flowing out of each of them, the monks engraved stones "stop trickling" and "ask for jin" for the name, now only the western spring water trickles sound, clear and luscious, all year round, known as "Dinglin Spring". Climbing up the steep stone steps between the two halls of "Shanfa" and "Arhat", it is a chic courtyard called "the best", the north is the Hall of the Seven Buddhas, the east and west are pavilions, and the two pavilions on both sides of the courtyard are towering, and the view is as far as possible.
Dinglin Temple is a Buddhist temple suitable for meditation, which not only has a pavilion-style mountain gate, an exquisite lei yin hall, exquisite stone scriptures, and a variety of strange flowers and trees. In front of the Seven Buddhas Hall, there are two small-leaf plane trees with strong flowers, and there are two melon trees in the courtyard of the Zen Hall on the east side of the temple, which are full of fragrance when the melons are ripe. There are also two thousand-year-old woody peonies, which are graceful and rich in bloom. The monks' vegetarian custom made it more dependent on eating vegetables, melons and fruits, and the Buddhist teachings since the Tang and Song dynasties explicitly advocated garden cultivation. In addition to the monks' meditation on the Buddha, they are keen to plant flowers and trees, which not only improves their lives, but also beautifies the environment. The rise of garden planting stimulated the enthusiasm of monks to introduce and experiment with new varieties, the Great Monk of the Jin Dynasty moved back to woody peonies from Luoyang, the southern monks of the Qing Dynasty brought small-leaved plane trees and papaya trees thousands of miles away, and more than 2,000 whitebark pines on the hillside behind the temple were planted by monks and laymen during the Qianlong period to improve the environment, and now they have become lush forests. This thousand-year-old woody peony, which is uncommon north of the Yellow River, the papaya tree and small-leaf plane tree born south of the Yangtze River are not only witnesses to the famous north and south of Dinglin Temple, but also become a portrayal of agricultural Zen culture since the Tang Dynasty. (Text/Sang Liyuan, Photo/Courtesy of the Propaganda Department of Gaoping Municipal Party Committee)