Erxian Nunnery, Chengdu成都二仙庵
- Type
- Temples and Abbeys (Gongguan)
- Location
- China · Sichuan · Chengdu · East of the Qingyang Palace, today adjoining the Culture Park
- Coordinates
- 30.666, 104.045 Map ↗
- School
- Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, Longmen (Dragon Gate) Lineage of Quanzhen
- First built
- 1695, the 34th year of the Kangxi era, Qing · Built by the Sichuan judicial commissioner Zhao Liangbi for Chen Qingjue, patriarch of the Bidong Branch of the Quanzhen Longmen Lineage; the ancestral court of the Bidong Branch; the site where the Daozang jiyao was printed
- Heritage status
- Chengdu Municipal Cultural Heritage Site
Overview
The Erxian Nunnery stands east of the Qingyang Palace. It was built in the thirty-fourth year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing (1695) by the Sichuan judicial commissioner Zhao Liangbi for the Quanzhen Longmen priest Chen Qingjue, whom the Kangxi Emperor granted the title 'Perfected of the Green Grotto' (Bidong Zhenren); the Bidong Branch of the Longmen Lineage founded by Chen Qingjue took the Erxian Nunnery as its ancestral court from that time and became the mainstream of Quanzhen Daoism in Southwest China. The nunnery's name derives from the legend of the manifestation of the 'two immortals' Lü Dongbin and Han Xiangzi. In the thirty-second year of the Guangxu era of the Qing (1906), the abbot Yan Yonghe and others reprinted and expanded the Daozang jiyao here, carving more than 10,000 woodblocks, now housed at the Qingyang Palace, an important achievement in the compilation of Daoist texts in the Qing. The Erxian Nunnery was once a public monastery and an ordination site; after the 1950s it was absorbed into a public park, with partial restoration in the 2000s.
Highlights
- Ancestral court of the Bidong Branch
- Printing of the Daozang jiyao
- Chen Qingjue