《洛阳伽蓝记》和永宁寺The Luoyang Monasteries and the Yongning Temple

The Yongning Temple is the first entry in the book, and the longest. In the first year of the Xiping era (516), Empress Dowager Ling, née Hu, built a nine-storey wooden pagoda outside the gate of the palace city. The Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang says it "rose ninety zhang high" and could be seen from a hundred li away; the Commentary on the Water Classic, however, records forty-nine zhang. For the next eighteen years, every turning point of the late Northern Wei passed before this pagoda. The final fire burned for three months; it went into the ground, and smoke was still rising a year later. In the same year the pagoda burned, the capital was moved to Ye and Luoyang was abandoned. Thirteen years later, Yang Xuanzhi passed through Luoyang again on official duty and wrote this book amid the ruins. - Yang Xuanzhi and Li Daoyuan both saw the pagoda with their own eyes, yet the heights they report differ by almost a factor of two. Whom should we believe? - "Donating one's home as a monastery" is usually understood as an act of merit. If we tabulate when and why the monasteries of Northern Wei Luoyang were founded, can we still understand it that way? - When history is written by those who know the ending, every detail easily becomes an omen. How did the people of Luoyang see things at the time? - Unfired clay statues survived because of the great fire; a city that has vanished was written into a book because of its destruction. Where else can we see this relationship between destruction and preservation?