Monastic Seats Across Traditions: Nine Communities from Ethiopia to Japan to Germany

Tradition attributes this rock-cut church to Abba Yemata, one of the Nine Saints credited with expanding Ethiopian monasticism in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is cut into a sandstone pillar in the Gheralta area of Tigray and is reached by an exposed climb that locals treat as part of the pilgrimage. It is still an active parish with a resident priest.

Founded in 502 CE as Baolin Temple, Nanhua is the temple most closely tied to Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, who taught here for about thirty-seven years until 713. His preserved body is displayed in the Sixth Patriarch Hall, which makes the lineage and its founding teacher present in one place.

At the meeting of three rivers in Leshan, Sichuan, Lingyun Temple stands on the hill above the Giant Buddha, and the temple is older than the statue. Carving began in 713 under the monk Haitong, to calm the violent currents where the rivers meet. The hill is inscribed with Mount Emei as one UNESCO property.

Kukai, later titled Kobo Daishi, received this mountain by imperial grant in 816 and began building here around 819 as the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism. More than a hundred temple complexes now surround the founding precinct and the Okunoin mausoleum, where adherents hold that Kukai remains in perpetual meditation. The mountain was closed to women until 1872.

Yunmen Wenyan founded this monastery in Guangdong around 918 and taught here for roughly thirty years. It is the founding seat of the Yunmen school, one of the Five Houses of classical Chan, whose encounter dialogues fed into the Blue Cliff Record. It declined for centuries until Xuyun began rebuilding it in the 1940s.

Traditionally founded in the tenth century as a hermitage by John of Rila, Bulgaria's most important national saint, it grew into the largest centre of Bulgarian Orthodox monasticism. Under Ottoman rule it helped preserve Bulgarian language and religious identity. A fire in 1833 destroyed most buildings, but the Hrelyo Tower of 1335 survived.

Sergius of Radonezh founded this monastery near Moscow around 1337 to 1340, and it was raised to a lavra, the highest grade of Orthodox monastery, in 1744. Andrei Rublev's Trinity icon hung in its cathedral for about five centuries and returned permanently at Pentecost in 2024. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1993.

Nyammey Sherab Gyaltsen founded the original Menri in Tsang in 1405 as the head monastery of the Bon tradition. It was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and re-established in exile at Dolanji in India from 1967, keeping the same abbatial lineage and course of study. Its survival is treated as central to Bon continuing as an organised monastic system.

Here the setting is Benedictine and Western. Johannes Trithemius became abbot in 1483 at twenty-one, built one of Germany's largest private libraries and wrote the Steganographia before a dispute over his strict reforms drove him out in 1506. French troops destroyed the abbey in 1689, and a small museum on Trithemius now occupies the surviving buildings.