Longquan (monastery)

The construction of the Beijing Longquan Monastery began in 957 AD. e., the first year of the reign of Emperor Inli of the Liao Dynasty. On April 11, 2005, the monastery again resumed its activity as a functioning religious organization.

Longquan Monastery is located at the foot of the Fenghuanglin Ridge (Phoenix), located in the north-west of Beijing, the capital of China. In the mountains, the ruins of monasteries and caves are still preserved, which were used by the monks for meditation. There are places such as the Datszyuesa Monastery, the Shanfans Monastery, the Huangpu Yuan Convent, the Miaofenan Convent, the Chaoyang Cave and others. On the walls of some of these caves Buddhist images carved in antiquity are clearly visible. The single-span stone bridge Jinlong ("Golden Dragon") was built by the first rector Jisheng. Among the bridges of this kind preserved in Beijing, this one is closest to the original, original appearance. Trees, bridges, stones - all of them for their long century have been witnesses to the history of the monastery.

There are more than one hundred Buddhist monks in the Longquan Monastery. Sangha members are carefully selected and must meet the criteria of faith, education, understanding of organization principles, team spirit and determination to engage in Buddhist practice. The sangha of the monastery not only inherits the best traditional monastery system, but also absorbs the features of modern academic Buddhist education, while emphasizing both internal self-improvement and the external dissemination of the Doctrine. As a result, a new highly skilled sangha of the monastery was formed.

In the sangha, a summer retreat is held every year; every half-month, according to Vinaya, pass vows and repentance. Regarding management, following the traditional Vinaya system and the modern experience of managing monasteries, two types of organization were formed in the Longquan Monastery: ethics of Buddhist discipline and administrative ethics. All types of religious activity are organized in accordance with the ethics of Buddhist discipline, which is based on monastic vows, seniority here is determined by the level and time of vows taken. The activity processes rely on administrative ethics, which is based on the principles of the job hierarchy.

In November 2013, the sangha of Longquan Monastery began to organize the Great Basket of Sutras (Tripitaki). Based on the earliest and most complete version of the “Golden Tripitaka of Zhao City” (Zhao cheng jin zan), collected different versions of Tripitaki are collected, as well as Buddhist works found in the XX century. In the process of reconciliation, interpretation and streamlining, traditional methods and modern technologies such as artificial intelligence are used. In December 2015, a series of “Comments and Explanations on the Winai Nanshan Codex” was published, which opened the door to modern people in the treasury of Buddhist canons.

In the Longquan Monastery, several departments were created, such as a library, Tripitaka office, translation center, animation center, charity department, and culture department. Mass editions of the monastery include the multilingual Monk's Miniblog - 365 Days of Longquan Monastery, The Understanding of Life (in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, French, Thai and Vietnamese), The Reasons for Our Darkness - Inside Us, How to Create good by words "," How to do good by listening. " Comic books and cartoons have won prizes at various international competitions.

The monastery runs the website “Voice of Longquan” in seven languages, official accounts in the Weixin program. The Longquan Library uses an information database for literature, as well as a modern management system for accounting for issued books, in 2017 it was first open to the general reader. Tripitaki’s streamlining work uses research in the field of artificial intelligence technologies, for example, the machine learning technique allows traditional OCR to recognize hieroglyphs and conduct semantic analysis, which is a big advance. Robot monk Xianer, created with the help of IT and a large amount of data, has a touch perception function and can answer people's questions. With the help of Buddhist knowledge, he transmits positive energy on the Internet, which attracts people's attention.

• Chengxi, 成 蹊,. A decade's development of Beijing Longquan monastery = Beijing Longquan si kai fang shi zhou nian ji nian ce = 北京 龙泉 寺 开放 十 周年 纪念册. - Di 1 ban. - Beijing. - 458 p. - ISBN 9787518802975 . - ISBN 751880297X .

• Longquan Monastery Website