Wenshu Yuan Monastery

This guide to Wenshu Yuan Monastery in Chengdu centers on Cidu, an ascetic monk who lived alone in a hut on the grounds after arriving in 1681, known to almost no one until his death. It follows what witnesses claimed to see at his funeral pyre and how that claim reshaped the temple's name and purpose ever since. Inside one of its halls sits an object of faith just as strange: a fragment monks say belongs to the skull of Xuanzang, the seventh-century monk whose journey to India inspired Journey to the West.