On December 20 (the first day of the eleventh lunar month), Lingyin Temple’s seven-day Winter Chan Retreat concluded successfully.
The retreat began on December 14, when the Lingyin Sangha entered the Chan Meditation Hall – an esteemed space for cultivating mindfulness and insights – engaged in deep koan study and committed to refining body and mind. On the 20th, everyone gathered in the Prajña Hall to perform the completion ceremony, after which they lined up to visit the Abbot’s residence and the Patriarch Hall to extinguish the “life-and-death leave”.
With a history spanning over 1,600 years, Lingyin Temple is devoted to preserving and promoting the Chan culture and sustaining the Dharma lineage. The Chan hall observes ancient rites: in winter, the Chan retreat begins with solemn discipline and strict order. The aim is to translate the temple’s spiritual ethos into practice, to inculcate the temple’s purposes in the heart, and to safeguard the temple’s traditional Chan atmosphere for continuing generations of monastic disciples.
