Jingci Temple
Bell tower housing a ten-ton bronze bell cast with sixty-eight thousand sutra characters.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Jingci Temple in Hangzhou follows the casting of a replacement bell inside a Hangzhou oxygen plant in the mid-1980s, after the temple's original Ming-dynasty bell vanished amid the chaos of the late Qing wars. It traces how engineers spent two years pressing all sixty-eight thousand characters of the Lotus Sutra into the mold in reverse, with a single flawed pour able to ruin the sacred text. A Japanese Zen temple, Eihei-ji, ended up funding the replacement, and the job went to an industrial gas factory rather than a temple foundry.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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