Lingguang Temple (Badachu)

Buddhist tradition holds that the cremation of the Buddha left, among other relics, two teeth; one is said to have gone to Sri Lanka, where it is enshrined at Kandy, and the other to have travelled north and east into Central Asia and China. The tooth at Lingguang is identified with this second relic, brought, by the temple's account, from the region of Udyana through Khotan into China in the fifth century and eventually to the hills west of Beijing.

Whatever the details of that long transmission, the tooth became one of the most venerated relics in Chinese Buddhism, its authority resting less on forensic proof than on an unbroken chain of enshrinement, imperial patronage and pilgrimage. The distinction it shares with Kandy, that of being one of only two recognised tooth relics, gives it a special place in the modern Buddhist world and helps explain why the Chinese state has treated it as a diplomatic asset, lending it for veneration to Buddhist-majority countries across Asia.

The relic's home has been rebuilt more than once. Under the Liao, in 1071, a noblewoman connected to the dynasty's chief minister endowed the Zhaoxian Pagoda at what was then Longquan Temple to enshrine the tooth, and an inscription recorded the act. That brick pagoda stood for more than eight centuries until 1900, when it was wrecked by artillery during the foreign suppression of the Boxer Uprising. Monks sifting the ruins the following year recovered a stone casket, and inside it the relic together with an inscription confirming its identity.

The relic was quietly kept until the People's Republic, with the backing of the central government and the newly organised Buddhist Association of China, undertook to house it properly. Between 1957 and 1964 a new octagonal pagoda, the Buddha Tooth Relic Pagoda, rose about a hundred metres from the ruined Liao tower; some fifty metres tall and thirteen storeys high, it enshrines the relic in a hall on its second level and was formally completed on 26 June 1964.

Lingguang stands among the eight temples of Badachu, a much-visited belt of monasteries and springs in the hills west of Beijing that has drawn pilgrims and day-trippers for centuries. The tooth relic gives the temple a reach far beyond the capital: since the 1950s it has repeatedly been carried abroad on official tours, to Myanmar in 1955 and again in 1994 and 2011, to Sri Lanka, and to Thailand, each loan an act of religious diplomacy in which a relic of the Buddha stands in for goodwill between states. At home it remains a focus of ordinary devotion, its pagoda circled by pilgrims and framed by the wooded slopes of the Western Hills. In June 2024 the temple and the Buddhist Association of China marked the sixtieth anniversary of the modern stupa, an occasion that underlined both the relic's continuing veneration and its role in the public religious life of contemporary China.

The Buddha's cremated remains are traditionally described as divided among multiple claimants and redistributed by Ashoka into thousands of stupas, an origin story that makes any surviving tooth relic's chain of custody from ancient India to China impossible to verify independently, since the canonical accounts are religious narrative rather than documented custody; the Lingguang tooth's own transmission narrative places it moving from Udyana in the northwest into China before its arrival near the Liao capital. The tooth relic at Lingguang is one of only two teeth generally recognised across the Buddhist world as authentic survivals, the other kept at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and the two occupy different roles, the Kandy relic tied for centuries to Sinhalese royal legitimacy, the Lingguang relic emerging as an instrument of state Buddhist diplomacy only after its 1900 rediscovery.