Wang Wei has a poem "Over the Xiangji Temple":
I don't know the Xiangji Temple, a few miles into the cloud peak.
Ancient trees are uninhabited, and where is the bell in the deep mountains.
The sound of the spring swallows the dangerous stone, and the sun is cold and green pine.
The twilight empty pool is bent, and Anzen makes a poisonous dragon.
The silence of the poem painting mountain, the seclusion of the temple. Thinking about the poisonous dragon through the air, Yu restrains evil thoughts in order to comprehend the profundity of Zen and appreciate the fun of nature. In the poem, the Xiangji Temple is secluded and silent, so that the people who have the heart to practice yearn for it, it is rumored that Tang Gaozong and Wu Zetian have rubbed this Buddha to worship here, and respectively gave more than 1,000 relics and 100 treasure flowers.
Xiangji Temple, is the Pure Land ancestral garden, built in the second year of Yonglong of Tang Gaozong (681 AD), the origin of the temple name now has two theories. One believes that in the Tang Dynasty, there was a fragrant weir next to the temple and was named after Chang'an, and the other theory is that the name of the temple originated from the "Vima Sutra" ** Tianzhu has a country of incense, and the Buddha's name is incense. In fact, if you look through the historical records, you can see that the origin of the name of Xiangji Temple is due to the good guidance of the Venerable Master.
Master Shandao is the founder of the Pure Land Sect, passed away in the second year of Yonglong, and his ** Huaiyun built the Xiangji Temple to support the Master of Good Guidance in order to commemorate the merits of Master Shandao. Because of the master's merits and perfection like the fragrance of the incense country "flowing around the immeasurable world", enlightening, influencing and guiding sentient beings to transcend the sea of suffering, so the master of good guidance is compared to the "Xiangji Buddha", and the Buddhist temple is named: Xiangji Temple.
In the last years of the Sui Dynasty, the soldiers were continuous, and the flames of the uprising became more and more intense, and in the ninth year of the great cause of Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty (613 AD), Du Fuwei and Fu Gongci led a large uprising, which posed a huge threat to the Sui Dynasty. It was in this year that Master Shandao was born in Linzi City (now Zibo, Shandong), which was destroyed by the war and once reduced to an abandoned city. The common surname is Zhu, and the name is ominous.
It can be said that the young master of good guidance grew up in the turmoil of the late Sui and early Tang dynasties, and the cruelty of war and the disasters brought about by it have long been deeply imprinted in his young heart, so that he has a profound understanding of the danger of the land and the impermanence of life since he was a child.
When he was ten years old, Master Shandao came to Mizhou (now Zhucheng, Shandong) with his relatives who had escaped the scourge of war, and he became a monk with the famous master for a hundred years. Master Mingsheng was the master of the Three Treatises of the Tang Dynasty, and when he saw that the good guide was intelligent and extraordinary, he cherished it very much, and named him "Good Guide", and taught and studied Mahayana classics such as the Vimala Sutra and the Lotus Sutra.
When he was nineteen years old, Venerable Shandao happened to see the magnificent scene of the Pure Land of Bliss depicted in the "Western Disguised Map", and he couldn't help but yearn for it. Since then, he has traveled around famous mountains and rivers, looking for teachers and Taoists, and pursuing the method of bliss in the past life. Soon, he met the monk Miaokai and studied the Sutra of Amitayus and obtained the method of visualizing Amitabha Buddha and the Pure Land of Bliss to achieve bliss in rebirth.
So, at the age of 23, Venerable Shandao retreated to Wuzhen Monastery on Mount Junnan and finally attained the profound and profound Buddha Samadhi. In his twenties, he was able to attain the Buddha's samadhi without guidance, which is an unprecedented achievement of the ancients and since, and it is no wonder that the founder of the Vinaya sect, Daoxuan Lawyer, will write the seventeen-year-old master of Shandao into the "Continuation of the Biography of the High Monk".
However, Venerable Shandao was not complacent, and when he heard that Venerable Dao Hui of the Pure Land was preaching the profound meaning of the Sutra of Amitayus in Xuanzhong Temple in Bingzhou, he happily went to worship Venerable Dao Xuan as his teacher, becoming his most outstanding **.
At the age of thirty-three, Venerable Dao passed away, and Master Shandao went to Chang'an to begin a career of propagating the Dharma for more than 30 years.
There are five books and nine volumes of the posthumous works of the master of good guidance, namely "The Four Posts of the Sutra", "The Concept of the Method", "Praise of the Dharma", "Praise of the Past Life" and "Praise of the Boat". Among them, the "Four Posts of the Sutra" is the fundamental canon for the founding of the Pure Land. Therefore, although Master Shandao is called the second ancestor of the Pure Land Sect, he is actually the founder.
It is said that Master Shandao felt that the content of Buddhist scriptures is vast, and the myriad of practice methods often makes people in the world often do not know how to start. Moreover, the special practice of the Pure Land method has led to widespread misunderstanding since ancient times. Therefore, after returning to Chang'an, Master Shandao wrote the ancient and modern "Four Posts of the Sutra" in Wuzhen Temple
The Japanese Zen master Fa Ran also saw the "Four Posts of the Sutra" in the Tang Dynasty and never forgot it, and after returning to Japan, he founded the Japanese Pure Land Sect, and regarded the good guide master as the ancestor of the Japanese Pure Land Sect.