Lingyin Temple and Feilai Feng

The story

You are walking up a shady valley beside a clear, fast stream. On your left rises a low hill of grey, holed and fluted rock, overhung with trees, and in its face, in niches and caves, sit stone figures: a fat laughing monk surrounded by smaller ones, robed Buddhas, crowned goddesses. On your right, through a yellow wall, are the curving roofs of a monastery and the smell of incense.

Tradition says the monastery was founded in 326, in the Eastern Jin (317–420), by an Indian monk named Huili. In the same years, in the Roman Empire, Constantine was building his new capital on the Bosporus.

Part of West Lake, Hangzhou. Also there: Bai Causeway, Solitary Hill, Yue Fei's Temple, Su Causeway, Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, Leifeng Pagoda.

What is here

One free booking covers the carvings, Lingyin Temple, and the two temples higher up the hill.

If you have one minute

In the valley

Huili is said to have looked at the hill and declared that it was a small peak of Vulture Peak in India, and asked when it had flown here. The hill has been called Feilai Feng, "the peak that flew here", ever since. He built his temple facing it.

The carvings in the hill were made between the tenth century and the fourteenth, from the Five Dynasties (907–960) to the Yuan (1271–1368). It is one of the largest groups of Yuan Buddhist sculpture in southern China, including figures in the Tibetan style brought by the Mongol court.

The temple across the stream has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. The great halls you see were rebuilt in the Qing (1644–1912) and the twentieth century.

Things people often get wrong

"It is free, so you can just turn up." Since February 2026 there has been no queue on the spot. You must book online at least a day ahead.

"The laughing Buddha is the Buddha." He is Maitreya, the Buddha to come, shown as a Chinese monk with a cloth bag who lived in the tenth century.

"The temple is called Lingyin." The Kangxi Emperor renamed it Yunlin Chan Temple in 1689, and his board still hangs over the gate. Nobody uses the name.

People who stood here

• Bai Juyi (Tang (618–907) poet, governor of Hangzhou 822–824)In 823 he wrote an essay on the Cold Spring Pavilion at the foot of the peak, saying that of all the views round Hangzhou, the temple was the best and the pavilion the best at the temple. He sat by the same stream that runs beside you.
• The Kangxi Emperor (Qing emperor, 1661–1722)On his tour of the south in 1689 he gave the temple a new name, Cloud Forest; the story goes that he had seen it lying in cloud among the trees from the hill behind. His board with four characters still hangs over the Hall of the Heavenly Kings.

Go deeper: five stops, from the stream to the great hall

The route runs first along the carvings, then into the temple. With the carvings, the temple and the climb to the upper temples, allow half a day.

1. The stream and the pavilion

Inside the gate the path follows the Cold Spring stream. The small pavilion over the water stands on the site Bai Juyi wrote about in 823, though the building is modern.

2. The carvings

The best-known figure is the laughing Maitreya of the Southern Song (1127–1279), cut into the cliff with his great belly and open bag, eighteen arhats round him. He is the largest of the carvings.

Further on, in the caves, are rows of smaller Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the tenth century, and on the cliff faces the Yuan figures, crowned and jewelled in the Tibetan manner.

At the foot of the hill stands a slim stone pagoda said to cover the remains of Huili himself. It was rebuilt in the Ming (1368–1644).

3. The Hall of the Heavenly Kings

Cross the stream into the temple. The first hall has the Kangxi Emperor's board outside. Inside sit the laughing Maitreya again, the four Heavenly Kings, and behind him, facing the main hall, the guardian Weituo, carved from camphor wood in the Southern Song.

4. The great hall

In front of the great hall stand two stone pagodas set up in 960 by the king of Wuyue (907–978), Qian Chu, the man who later built Leifeng Pagoda. They are among the oldest things in the temple.

Inside, the seated Buddha stands 24.8 metres high with its throne and halo, carved from twenty-four blocks of camphor wood and gilded. It was made in the 1950s to replace a figure that collapsed.

5. The halls above

Behind the great hall more halls climb the slope, including one for Ji Gong, the mad monk of the stories, who is said to have been ordained here. Paths go on up the hill to two smaller temples, Yongfu and Taoguang, which are included in the same booking.