History and Provenance

The traditional account gives the relic a long westward-to-eastward journey: from the Indian world across Central Asia to Khotan, then to Nanjing in the 5th century, on to Chang'an under the Sui dynasty, and finally to the area of present-day Beijing during the Five Dynasties. Under the Liao dynasty, in 1071, the octagonal thirteen-storey Zhaoxian Pagoda was raised at Lingguang Temple to enshrine the tooth, and its deposit was recorded in an inscription.

In 1900 the temple lay in the path of the Eight-Nation Alliance during the Boxer Uprising, and the Zhaoxian Pagoda was destroyed by shelling and fire. As monks cleared the ruins of the pagoda base, they found a stone reliquary holding the tooth and an inscription confirming its enshrinement in 1071. The relic was safeguarded through the upheavals of the twentieth century, and in the early 1960s the temple built a new Buddha Tooth Relic Pagoda to receive it; the tooth was re-enshrined there in 1964. Since then it has been venerated at Lingguang Temple and periodically presented to Buddhist delegations from abroad.