Lingguang Temple

Lingguang Temple's history as a place of worship long predates 1900, but its present form owes everything to that year's destruction: during the Boxer Rebellion, foreign expeditionary forces bombarding Beijing's western approaches shelled the temple, which stood on high ground in the Western Hills, and its main buildings were reduced to ruins. When the wreckage was later cleared, workers found a stone box, apparently placed for safekeeping centuries earlier, containing a tooth relic that had survived the bombardment undamaged inside the collapsed pagoda that had held it.

The rediscovery prompted a specific building project rather than a general temple restoration: a new pagoda, built in the 1950s, was purpose-built to enshrine the recovered tooth, distinct from the general reconstruction of the temple's monastic buildings that continued around it over subsequent decades. The result is a site where the devotional focus, the relic pagoda, is materially newer than the tradition it commemorates, a pattern common to relics whose original housing did not survive intact. The Badachu complex of which Lingguang Temple forms part groups eight temples across the wooded hillsides west of the city, a traditional day-trip pilgrimage circuit for Beijing residents that long predates the modern city's expansion into the area, and Lingguang's pagoda remains the site's principal draw within that wider circuit precisely because of the relic it houses rather than for any architectural distinction of its own.

Chinese Buddhist tradition traces the tooth relic's journey over many centuries before it ever reached Beijing: from the Indian subcontinent, where it is said to have survived the Buddha's cremation, through Central Asia to the oasis kingdom of Khotan, and onward into China proper, reaching Nanjing in the fifth century before later moving to the Tang capital Chang'an and eventually to the Beijing region during the Five Dynasties period in the tenth century, well before the founding of the present temple complex. As with other tooth relics venerated across Asian Buddhism, more than one tradition claims to hold an authentic tooth of the Buddha, most notably the separate relic kept at Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and the atlas records each tradition's claim without adjudicating between them, since no method exists to test whether either, both or neither preserves an authentic remain from the fifth century BCE.

The temple's own presentation of the relic rests on this continuous chain of custody as transmitted through monastic record keeping rather than on physical examination, and its 1900 survival, hidden inside a collapsed structure until rediscovery, is treated by the temple as confirming rather than complicating that transmitted identity.