this is the lama temple, so my knowledge of Buddhism is shaky (based on books i read years ago and discussions with people who might be shaky as well) but i will try to stay true to what i know. There are no pictures inside the temples as that is not allowed. The lama temple is for the panchen lama (hereafter pl) who was one of the two students of Buddha. The dalai lama was the other. Both are reincarnated and the current incarnation of the pl is the 11th. He was found in 1996 and returned to the lama temple in Beijing so apparently it is still used for Buddhist ceremonies and the Chinese government is still cool with all this. The pl was the personal priest to the Chinese emperor. This was the entrance to the temple and you could see in both the landscaping and the condition of the temple itself that it is more monied than the earth temple which is a couple of a blocks away.

Note: As i am looking up links it appears that a lot of what i have been told is one version. Take some time to look up the other version which i will do as well (altough probably not while here).


a lion outside the first temple which contained the future Buddha. One thing that i learned that i did not know before is that there are many incarnations of the Buddha (that wording might be wrong). So most temples had three buddhas in them. The second had the past, present and future Buddha. The third had the buddhas for longevity, medicine and fortune. The last temple had a gigantic Buddha. The largest single tree carving according to the Guinness book of world records. The last Buddha is magnificent. Worth visiting the temple just for that, something like 70 feet tall. You can barely see the head in the temple and it is all from one large sandalwood tree.


this is hua lighting some incense for the first Buddha. The way the temple is set up is that you leave a certain amount of incense at each temple or gate to get through. Usually it was three sticks of incense. In addition you can light sticks outside of the temples in these fires and pray. You cannot bring the lit incense into the temples though anymore. In addition people leave money all over for good luck. a couple of interesting points, you should not step on the door frame when stepping into the temples as it is disrespectful (not sure why). Also there is something called qiangjing (not the right pinyan but ...) basically you take a small object into the temple and for a fee they bless the object. This was very popular with the lines for this being very long.


this is the street leading to the temple. All of the stores on the street are selling incense for use inside the temple. It costs you about 2 quai (.25$) for 15 small sticks. You can get pretty extravagant though. The better the incense the better the prayer i guess, just like all religious sites. The more you pay the better, deities hear you. Of course we bought incense at the expensive place because we did not look around enough so we paid 5 quai. One of the vendors convinced us to buy more also because the original amount we bought would not let us give sticks to all the buddhas.

the pic below is at the beginning of the temple. You could pay to ring the bell three times. It was fun watching the kids doing this. They seemed to enjoy making such a large noise.