The Baoxie Temple by the junction of Keelung River and Tamsui River in New Taipei is founded by Master Taian in 1970. The Samantabhadra Buddhist Institute behind the temple is an educational facility mainly for monastics. Taian was famous for offering 8 months of repentance and sutra-chanting rituals annually on average for decades. Now that the monastics and frequent devotees are all getting older, the major annual festival is the month-long 80-scrolled Huayan Sutra recitation festival.
The deities in the main hall are the Huayan Three Bodhisattvas, Guanyin, Manjushri, and Samntabhadra, an ensemble not commonly seen. Nonetheless, since the Song Dynasty, the Huayan Three Bodhisattvas have been built in China sporadically. The Baozangyan Temple in Taipei also has a group of images in question. Even though Taiwanese belief in Guanyin came from the southern Fujian coastline, no source of Huayan Three Bodhisattvas images could be found in temples in Fujian to date. This paper is a rudimentary attempt to reconstruct how Master Tai’an designed and embodied the sacred space in Baoxie Temple.
Other than the Huayan Three Bodhisattvas in the main hall, there are other Huayan related imageries in the temple. Unlike the popular narrative representations of the Nine Assemblies delivered in seven different locations and Sudhāna’s pilgrimage elsewhere in the world, Taian presented the Huayan essence with seemingly decorative abstract lotus floral patterns on the floor. In addition to the Huayan images, Maitreya, Standing thousand-Buddhas, and Prince Siddhārtha encountered the “four sights”, ie, the human sufferings are shown in another hall. All these images are the mainstream representations found in one of the earliest Buddhist images made in China, Dunhuang Caves.
On my third visit to the temple, during the month-long Huayan-reciting festival, an octogenarian participant confirmed that Master Taian referred to those huge colorful lotus flowers as “the lotus flowers of the Nine Assemblies delivered in seven different locations in the Huayan Sutra”. Other than the legacy of efficacious rituals, the founding master of the Baoxie Temple carefully chosen and skillfully designed images to embody Buddhist thoughts and ideas to devotees and visitors alike.
