The extraordi
nary Famen Si , 120km west of Xi’ao, home of the finger bone of the Buddha, and the nearby museum containing an unsurpassed collection of Tang-dynasty relics, are worth the long trip it takes to get here, The easiest way is to catch tour bus #2 (3hr; Y18) at the Xl’an train station, across the concourse on the east side in fi’ont of the Jiefang Hotel. It also stops at Qian Ling. Otherwise, take the hourly bus to Fu~eng, a small country town of white-tile buildings and cave houses, from Xi’an’s long-distance bus station (4hr. From Fufeng bus station take a minibus to the temple (20min).
In 147 AD, King Asoka of India, to atone, it is said, for his warlike life, distributed precious Buddhist relics (sarira) to Buddhist colonies throughout Asia. One of the earliest places of Buddhist worship in China, the Famen Si was built to house his gift of a finger, in the form of three separate bones. The temple enjoyed great fame in the Tang dynasty, when Emperor Tun Bayu began the practice of having the bones temporarily removed and taken to the court at Chang’an at the head of a procession, repeated every thirty years. The procession to bear the finger to Emperor Tai Zong in 873 was reputed to be more than 100kin long. After the emperor had paid his respect to the Buddha, the finger bones were closed back up in a vault underneath the temple stupa, together with a lavish collection of offerings, with each emperor attempting to outdo the last in pious generosity. After the fall of the Tang, the crypt was forgotten about and the story of the Buddha’s finger was dismissed as a legend until 1981, when the stnpa collapsed, revealing the crypt beneath, full of the most astonishing array of Tang precious objects, and at the back, concealed in box after box of gold, silver, crystal and jade, the legendary finger of the Buddha.
Today the temple is a popular place of pilgrimage. The sputa bas been rebuilt with a large vault underneath, around the original crypt, with a shrine holding the finger at its centre. A praying monk is always in attendance, sitting in Front of’the finger, next to the safe in which it is kept at night (if it’s not being exhibited elsewhere, as happens periodically). Indeed, the temple’s monks are taking no chances, and the only entrance to the vault is protected by a huge metal door of the kind usually seen in a bank. You can see into the original crypt, at 21m long the largest of its kind ever discovered in China, though there’s not much to see in there now.
The museum west of the temple houses the well-preserved Tang relics found in the crypt, and is certainly one of the best small museums in China. Exhibits are divided into sections according to their material, with copious explanations in English. On the lower floor, tile gold and silver is breathtaking for the quality of its workmanship; especially notable are a silver incense burner with an internal gyroscope to keep it upright, a silver tea basket, the earliest physician evidence of’ tea-drinking in China, and a gold figure of an elephant-bead- ed man. Some unusual items on display are twenty glass plates and bottles, some Persian, with Arabic designs, some from the Roman Empire, including a bottle made in the fifth century. Glassware, imported along the Silk Road, was more highly valued than gold at the tine. Also in the crypt were a thousand volumes of Buddhist sutras, pictures of which arc shown, and 27,000 coins, the most unusual of which, made of tortoisesheI1, are on display here. An annexe holds the remains of the silk sheets all the relics were wrapped up in, together with an exhibition on its method of manufacture.
At the centre of the naain room is a gilded silver coffin which held one of the finger bones, inside a copper model of a stupa, inside a marble pagoda. Prominent upstairs is a gold and silver monk’s staff which, ironically, would have been used for begging alms, but the main display here is of the caskets the other two finger bones were found in - finely made boxes of diminishing size, of’silver, sandalwood, gold and crystal, which sat inside each other, while the finger bones themselves were in tiny jade coffins.
Related information :
