World Cultural Landscape Heritage: Mount Wutai (2)

Mount Wutai's history and the origin of its name

Establishment of Mount Wutai's Buddhism

It is said that Mount Wutai was a Taoism holy-place at first and in the "Taoist Scripture," Mount Wutai was called the Zifu Mountain, and the Zifu Temple was once built on it. The "Records of Qingliang Mountain" say that when the Bodhisattva Manjusri of Buddhism came to China for the first time, he lived in the Stone Basin Cave. The cave was actually in the Xuanzhen Taoist Temple. It indicates that Mount Wutai was originally a residence of Taoism.

When Buddhism was just spreading to China, it only had a small amount of followers. In 2 B.C., an emissary named Yi Cun sent by the King of the Da Yuezhi Kingdom (a kingdom established by a minority nationality which originally lived in the Yili River basins in the west of China's Xinjiang Province, and then moved to Central Asia) arrived in Chang'an (Xi'an at present), China's capital of that time. He orally passed on Buddhist scriptures to a scholar's student named Lu Jing. It was the earliest historical record regarding Buddhism spreading to China.