Book 14 Chapter 1 – Martial Art Master from The Other Side

Bursts of long and drawn out, rising and falling, chanting voices that seemed to be coming from an unknown distant places, spread throughout the temple.

The three felt as if they were entering an uninhabited place, as they climbed the stairs of the tower where the huge bell, which weighed around a thousand catty, was hung, from where they looked down far and near to examine the situation.

The buildings inside Jing Nian Chanyuan were arranged neatly along the central axis, which ran directly from the Temple’s main gate, with the Copper Hall as the center of the monastery. The buildings were sized uniformly.

Other than the Copper Hall, all buildings had tri-colored glazed roof tiles. The color and luster looked new; perhaps some monks in the Temple were diligent enough to clean up, so that the tiles looked like this. Among the three colors, the peacock blue was the most dazzling. It could be imagined that the buildings would be resplendent under the bright sunshine.

From the bell tower where the three were located to the Copper Hall, there was only other building in between, but the distances were quite different; the former was far and the latter was near.

In front of the Copper Hall there was a vast open area, approximately a hundred zhang wide, covered in slabs of white stone, encircled by a fence made of carved white stone, forming a flat plaza.

In the middle of the white stone plaza was a shrine with a bronze statue of Manjushri Bodhisattva, riding on the back of a golden-mane lion. The statue’s height was approximately two zhang. Next to the shrine were the painted clay figures with gold ornaments of Pharmacist Buddha, Sakyamuni Buddha, and Amitabha, the three-world Buddhas. [Sorry, I am not familiar with Buddhism; these are simply what the dictionary gave me.] The figures looked imposing, but there was a bit of out-of-place feeling with the general situation of the monastery.

On all four sides of the white stone plaza, other than four gateways with white stone steps, there were 500 luohan [arhats] scattered around; all were made of cast bronze, each one’s expression and po