This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Temples gathers four Buddhist temples each built or rebuilt around a single object at the center of their own veneration, one of them not even a Buddhist text.
Lingguang Temple, in the Western Hills outside Beijing, was rebuilt in the twentieth century after the original complex was destroyed by foreign shelling during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion; the tooth venerated as a relic of the Buddha survived in the ruins and was afterward enshrined in a pagoda built specifically to house it. Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, Sri Lanka, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, served as the Kandyan kingdom's royal chapel before becoming the country's most important Buddhist pilgrimage site, and survived a 1998 truck bomb that damaged its buildings but left its own tooth relic unharmed, shown only rarely and briefly inside a sequence of nested caskets.
Haw Pha Bang in Luang Prabang, Laos, was built specifically to house the Phra Bang, the standing Buddha image that gives the former royal capital its name; construction begun in 1963 was interrupted for decades by civil war and the 1975 revolution, during which the image itself was removed to Vientiane before its return and the temple's completion in the twenty first century.
Osu Kannon Temple in Nagoya is the outlier of the four, a Shingon Buddhist temple whose library holds the oldest surviving manuscript of the Kojiki, a foundational Shinto text, one of the few cases in this atlas where the earliest witness to one tradition's own text has been kept for centuries by a different tradition's temple.