Overview

The Tooth Relic of Lingguang Temple is a tooth venerated as a relic of the Buddha and enshrined at Lingguang Temple, one of the Eight Great Sites, or Badachu, in the forested Western Hills of Beijing. Buddhist tradition speaks of two surviving tooth relics of the Buddha: one is the celebrated Sacred Tooth of Kandy in Sri Lanka, and the other is the tooth that, by a long chain of transmission, is said to have reached China and come to rest in Beijing.

The Beijing relic has a concrete documentary anchor in the Zhaoxian Pagoda, a thirteen-storey brick tower built at Lingguang Temple in 1071 expressly to hold it, and again in the dramatic recovery of the relic from that pagoda's ruins after foreign troops destroyed the temple in 1900. Re-enshrined in a modern pagoda in the 1960s, it serves today as an object of veneration and as a focus of Buddhist cultural exchange, having been shown to visiting delegations from Buddhist countries.