Yunmen Temple 云门寺

About Yunmen Temple

The monastery was founded in 923, the first year of the Tongguang era of the Later Tang, when the Chan master Wenyan, a seventh-generation successor of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, obtained the assent of the king of Southern Han and established a community on Yunmen Mountain. Wenyan led it for twenty-six years, and the school that took the mountain's name became known for an abrupt, compressed style of teaching meant to cut through a student's reasoning rather than argue with it. The lineage and the monastery faded after the Southern Song, and by the late 1930s and 1940s the buildings were badly decayed. Yunmen Temple is among the first group of nationally important Buddhist temples designated open by the State Council.

What stands on the site today is the result of two twentieth-century rebuildings. In 1943 the monk Xuyun settled at Yunmen and spent nine years restoring it. From 1982 the Chan master Foyuan resumed the work, opening a monastic training class in 1989 and the Yunmen Buddhist Academy in 1992, before passing the abbacy to Mingxiang in 2003. The monastery marked the 1,100th anniversary of its founding on 5 November 2023. Visitors should note that the temple is not the same thing as the Yunmenshan tourism area on the hillside beside it: the provincial culture and tourism department renamed the graded 4A area from the Yunmen Temple Buddhist Culture Ecological Reserve to the Shaoguan Yunmenshan Ecological and Cultural Tourism Area and cut it from 6.95 to 3.21 square kilometres, with Yunmen Temple defining its western boundary. The resort's glass skywalk, cable car and amusement facilities belong to that commercial area, not to the monastery.

What to look for

• The monastery precinct itself, the root house of the Yunmen Chan lineage founded in 923
• The buildings raised during Xuyun's rebuilding from 1943 and the later restoration begun by Foyuan in 1982
• The Yunmen Buddhist Academy, the monastic teaching institution founded here in 1992
• The wooded setting of Yunmen Mountain in Ruyuan, a county known as a centre of the Guoshan Yao
• The boundary between the monastery and the separately run Yunmenshan tourism area on the slopes to its east

Location & getting there

Getting to Yunmen Temple

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 云门寺 with 韶关市 and 乳源瑶族自治县.