Religious center
China Daily | Updated: 2014-07-22 07:34
Established in AD 68 under the patronage of Emperor Liu Zhuang in the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD25-220), which had Luoyang as its capital, White Horse Temple is the first Buddhist temple in China and the starting point of the spread of Buddhism in the country.
One night in AD 64, the emperor had a dream about a man whose body was "brilliant as the sun". The dream inspired the emperor to send two officials westward to search for Buddhist scriptures.
The officials persuaded two Indian Buddhist monks they encountered in what is today's Afghanistan to go to China to help spread Buddhism.
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