Brief introduction of Tiefo Temple

Wangdian is a thousand-year-old town. In this small town, not only the humanities are gathered, but also Buddhism is very popular. According to Mei Lizhi, there are 56 temples, temples, churches and temples in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, which are distributed around towns. Among these Buddhists, Tiefo Temple is the most famous one.

Tiefo Temple, formerly known as Dongan, was built in the late Ming Dynasty (1627 ~ 1628). According to legend, there was a squire Li Shuyan in the town at that time, and his third daughter married Dong Jia in Nanxun. She has no children and no daughters, and brought an adopted daughter, but the adopted daughter doesn't want to get married when she grows up. Dong Gu had no choice but to buy an old house in Wangdian Town from the Li family and build it into buddhist nun, so that she could become a nun. Buddhist nun is very big, with front hall, back hall, tall buildings, abbot's room and so on. There is a Buddha statue in buddhist nun, which is about ten feet high. The Buddha's head is like a big incense burner. The Buddha's body is made of three layers of iron, and the iron used is half a finger thick. It was a wonder for a period of time, commonly known as Tiefo Temple.

In the third year of Shunzhi in Qing Dynasty (1646), the female Zen master went to the abbot Dong 'an alone and changed her name to Fushi Temple. Zen master Zhiyuan opened the altar here to preach the Dharma. At that time, believers gathered and the scene was quite hot. Zhu Yizun's grandmother, YiWen Zhao Shu Ren, devoutly worshipped Zhiyuan as her teacher. At that time, Zhujiajian Island was a scholarly family and an official family. The female Zen master of the pumice temple can invite the official wife to become a disciple, which shows that her missionary work is quite successful. Later, only the Garden died, which was inherited by the original Dong Shi woman and Gong Yichao, and was named "Yichuan" by the Garden. Yichuan died and was inherited by a slap. Carved in Jizhao Temple in Jingshan, Hangzhou, and circulated in Lengyan Temple in Jiaxing, the Buddhist masterpiece "Jiaxing Collection" contains quotations from female Zen masters, namely, Yuan Xinggang, Yi Ke and Yi Yichao Chen, the abbots of Fushi Temple, and Zhu Yizun, uncles of Guiyang House, also made a preface for them at that time. Zhu was a famous scholar-bureaucrat at that time, and also an important layman who participated in the engraving of Tibetan in Jiaxing in the later period. As soon as this move came out, Fushi Temple became even more famous.

After Chen Chao's death, the monastery was abandoned because there was no abbot. Later, local gentry recruited Zen master Jueke as abbot, and Jueke raised money from all directions to renovate Dong 'an. Jueke was old and became an imperial abbot. After the Republic of China, because there was no abbot for many years, the Tiefo Temple was abandoned again, and all the temples were destroyed, leaving only a big iron Buddha statue, so the villagers built huts to shelter from the wind and rain. 1956, the iron Buddha was listed as a second-class cultural relic of provincial art buildings. In the Great Leap Forward era of 1958, the iron Buddha was also used for steelmaking. Now, only from an old photo in "Wangdian Town Records" can we see the elegance of the Great Iron Buddha again.