Sacred Buildings Explained · Temples and shrines of East Asia
The Pagoda and Temple Compound
How an East Asian Buddhist temple works, from the guardian gate and incense burner to the main hall, the bell and the tiered pagoda that grew from the Indian stupa.
Traditions: Buddhism
Part by part
Point at a number in the drawing or at a name in the list to see where each part is.
Gate with guardians
The compound is entered through a gate, called sanmon in Japan and shanmen in China. Huge muscular guardian figures, the Niō in Japan, stand in its side bays, one with mouth open and one with mouth closed, to keep evil from the sacred precinct.
Roofed corridor
In early Japanese and Korean temples a covered corridor, the kairō, encloses the inner precinct with its pagoda and main hall. It marks the boundary of the most sacred ground and frames the view of the buildings within.
Incense burner
Before the main hall stands a large bronze incense burner. Visitors light sticks of incense, place them in the ash and, in Japan, often waft the smoke over themselves, a gesture believed to purify and bring good health.
Pagoda
The pagoda is a tower of three, five, seven, nine or thirteen storeys, almost always an odd number. Relics were traditionally enshrined beneath or within it, and in Japanese wooden pagodas a great central pillar, the shinbashira, runs up through the core to the bronze spire with its nine rings.
Main hall
The main hall, kondō in early Japanese temples and Daxiong Baodian (“Precious Hall of the Great Hero”) in China, houses the principal images. Under its broad tiled roof worshippers bow, offer incense and chant, and monks perform the daily services.
Buddha image
On a raised altar stands the main image, often a seated Buddha flanked by bodhisattvas or disciples, gilded and lit by lamps. Which Buddha presides depends on the temple’s school and dedication, for example Shakyamuni, Amitabha or the healing Buddha Bhaishajyaguru.
Bell
The great bronze bell hangs in its own open tower and has no clapper; a monk strikes it from outside with a swinging wooden beam. Its deep tone marks the hours of the monastic day, and in Japan temple bells ring 108 times on New Year’s Eve, one stroke for each of the worldly desires in Buddhist teaching.
Lecture hall
Behind the main hall stands the lecture hall, kōdō in Japan, where monks gathered to hear the scriptures expounded and debated. In Chinese temples the equivalent Dharma hall serves for sermons and ceremonies, often with a scripture library beyond it.
In brief
- I.An East Asian Buddhist temple is a walled compound of separate buildings, entered through a gate guarded by fierce protector figures and centred on a main hall that houses the principal Buddha image.
- II.The pagoda, a tower of wood, brick or stone with an odd number of roofs, descends from the Indian stupa and was built to enshrine relics rather than to hold worshippers.
- III.Buddhism reached China around the first century CE, Korea in the fourth century and Japan in the sixth, and each country adapted the temple plan to its own building traditions.
- IV.Daily life in the compound revolves around chanting, offerings of incense and the sound of the great bell, with festivals for the Buddha’s birthday, the new year and the honouring of ancestors.
Visiting respectfully
- Bow briefly at the gate when entering and leaving the compound.
- Step over the raised thresholds of gates and halls rather than on them.
- Remove your shoes before entering halls with matted or wooden floors.
- Photography is often forbidden inside halls; look for signs or ask.
- Do not strike the bell unless the temple invites visitors to do so.
What the records show
- The Songyue Pagoda in Henan, built around 523 CE under the Northern Wei, is the oldest surviving brick pagoda in China.
- The main hall and five-storeyed pagoda of Hōryū-ji near Nara, rebuilt after a fire recorded in 670, are among the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world.
- The wooden pagoda of Fogong Temple at Yingxian in Shanxi, built in 1056, rises about 67 metres and is the oldest and tallest fully wooden pagoda in China.
- The Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an was first built in 652 to house scriptures brought back from India by the pilgrim monk Xuanzang.
Common misconceptions
- Pagodas are often thought of as temples where people pray inside. Most are reliquary towers meant to be seen and walked around, and the upper storeys of Japanese wooden pagodas are not usable rooms at all.
- The word “pagoda” is sometimes taken to be Chinese. It entered European languages through Portuguese in the sixteenth century and its origin is uncertain; suggested sources include Persian, Sanskrit and Sinhalese words. The Chinese term is ta.
- It is widely said that Japanese wooden pagodas never fall in earthquakes. Very few are recorded as toppled by earthquakes, and engineers study why, but many have been lost to fire, lightning and war.
Chapter I
From stupa to tower
Buddhism reached China along the trade routes from Central Asia, probably in the first century CE. Chinese tradition dates the first temple, the White Horse Temple at Luoyang, to the reign of Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty, though the story was told long after the event. Early temples adapted the Chinese palace and courtyard house: separate timber halls on stone platforms, with heavy tiled roofs on bracketed columns, arranged along a north–south axis inside a walled compound.
The Indian stupa, the domed mound over relics, had no counterpart in China. Most historians think the pagoda arose when the idea of the stupa met the Chinese tradition of multi-storeyed timber towers, known from Han dynasty tomb models. The result was a tower whose small crowning spire preserved the shape of the Indian dome and umbrellas. Early pagodas stood at the centre of the compound as its main focus of worship; the Songyue Pagoda of around 523 CE, a twelve-sided brick tower, is the oldest to survive.
Buddhism and its architecture passed from China to Korea in the fourth century and from Korea to Japan in the sixth. Korean builders became masters of the stone pagoda, as at Mireuksa and at Bulguksa near Gyeongju, whose two contrasting eighth-century pagodas still stand. In Japan the earliest temples were built with the help of craftsmen from the Korean kingdom of Baekje. At Asuka-dera, founded in the late sixth century, the pagoda stood in the centre surrounded by three halls.
Over the following centuries the balance shifted. As devotion to images grew, the main hall became the centre of the compound, and the pagoda moved to the side or was paired, as in the twin pagodas of Yakushi-ji in Nara. At Hōryū-ji, rebuilt in the late seventh century, the pagoda and main hall stand side by side within the corridor, a plan of equal partners.
Building a pagoda was a major act of piety for emperors and aristocrats. Relics, or crystals and texts standing in for them, were placed in nested containers of gold, silver and bronze and set in a chamber beneath or within the tower. In China such deposits were sometimes sealed in underground crypts; the crypt of Famen Temple near Xi’an, opened in 1987, held treasures of the Tang dynasty and a relic venerated as a finger bone of the Buddha.
Chapter II
A day in the compound
A temple is first of all a home for monks or nuns and a place where lay people come to worship. The monastic day begins before dawn with the sounding of a board, drum or bell, followed by morning chanting in the main hall. Monks recite scriptures, make offerings of incense, light, flowers, water and food to the images, and repeat the services in the evening. In meditation schools such as Chan, known in Japan as Zen, a dedicated meditation hall stands at the heart of monastic life. Meals, study and work in the kitchens and gardens follow the same fixed timetable, announced by the bell, the drum and wooden clappers.
Lay visitors come to pray, to make offerings and to ask for blessings for health, success in examinations or the welfare of family members. They light incense at the burner, bow before the main image, and may leave donations, written prayers or votive tablets. Many temples, especially in Japan, also look after the dead: they hold funerals and memorial services and keep cemeteries, so that families return through the year.
The temple year is punctuated by festivals. The Buddha’s birthday is celebrated in spring with lanterns and with the bathing of a small image of the infant Buddha in sweet tea or scented water. In summer, the Ghost Festival in China and Obon in Japan honour the spirits of ancestors. At the new year crowds visit temples to pray for good fortune, and in Japan the great bells ring out the old year at midnight.
Chapter III
China, Korea and Japan
Chinese temple compounds usually open with a gate followed by a Hall of the Heavenly Kings, where four armoured guardians and a smiling Maitreya greet the visitor. A bell tower and a drum tower flank the main courtyard, and beyond the Precious Hall of the Great Hero lie a Dharma hall and a scripture library. Many Chinese pagodas are of brick or stone and stand apart from the main axis; the Yingxian pagoda of 1056 is a rare survivor in wood.
Korean temples, often set in mountain valleys, combine the main hall with shrines to the mountain spirit and other local protectors, and their granite pagodas are a national art form. Japanese temples kept the timber pagoda alive. Five-storeyed pagodas such as those of Hōryū-ji, Daigo-ji and Tō-ji, the last about 55 metres high, are among the most recognisable buildings in Japan, and the Great Buddha Hall of Tōdai-ji in Nara, rebuilt in 1709, is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world.
Later Japanese schools developed their own layouts. Zen temples, introduced from China from the late twelfth century, follow an ordered plan of gate, Buddha hall, Dharma hall and monastic buildings, often without a pagoda at all, while Pure Land temples centre on a great hall for Amida Buddha. In Vietnam the word “pagoda” is used for the whole temple, and in English it is often extended to the gilded stupas of Myanmar, such as the Shwedagon, which are closer to the Indian form.
Questions people ask
Why do pagodas have an odd number of storeys?
Odd numbers were considered auspicious in Chinese thought, and odd-numbered towers became the norm across East Asia. There are rare exceptions, especially among early or regional examples.
Can you go inside a pagoda?
In Japan most pagodas are closed, and their upper storeys are structural rather than usable. In China many brick pagodas have internal stairs, and some, such as the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, can be climbed.
What is the difference between a pagoda and a stupa?
Both are Buddhist reliquary monuments. The stupa is the Indian form, a dome on a base, while the pagoda is its East Asian development as a multi-storeyed tower, usually topped by a small stupa-like spire.
Sources and further reading
- Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019)
- Liang Ssu-ch’eng, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, ed. Wilma Fairbank (MIT Press, 1984)
- Kazuo Nishi and Kazuo Hozumi, What Is Japanese Architecture? (Kodansha International, 1985)
- Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of Japan (Penguin, 1955)