The story of our Tanzhe Si tour in Beijing (page 3)

      The Monk saw off  us until the  corner of the hill, and stoped there for a while, said: " Look at there, so many pagoda tombs there."    we watched out guided by his  direction, there is a red wall with over 3 meters high to encircled the pagoda forest. why so many pagodas and why they are different in size and styles ? we asked to ourself . the Monk explain simplified:" the Tanzhe temple  having a history of a dozen or more dynasties, it  has seem numerous monks do Buddhist practice here and finish their lives in this world, thus leaving many pagoda tombs in different styles close by the temple."     "Probably the best known is the one for Master Miaoyan, daughter of Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty, called Princess of Miaoyan." he continued : "In order to redeem his father from killing so many people in battles, she converted herself to Buddhism, and spent the rest of her life here. Her pagoda tomb is also a solid brick five－floor construction in dense－eave style, with one smaller pagoda on each side for company." we also read the signs beside of one pagoda and it said:"    Shi fang pu tong Pagoda （meaning harmoniously unified in all directions） is the one for monks collectively buried. This is a solid brick construction shaped like an upside－down alms bowl. One of the brick, it is said, is movable from which ashes of a dead monk at a lower－rank could be added to join the others. As it had ashes of so many monks, it is called housand people pagoda.  Due to different eras those pagoda tombs exhibit different styles. And their construction shows different ranks when their occupants were alive." finally, Mike said in a deep feeling:" these  construction not only provided an informational resource, both in written language and real objects, but also a kind of excited to the study of Buddhist pagoda evolution and the history of the Tanzhe Temple.

    When near the end of tour, the Monk invited us to his bed room, where provide the space for two monks seperated with a table,  there is a so important Buddha on the center of the table and front of it offer some fruits to the god, they also use the electric light and telephone even though he has his own cell phone and left to me due to he wanna to got his photos what I took at the tour,  It was a great amazing tour...