Hòe Nhai Pagoda - Hồng Phúc Ancestral Temple

Hòe Nhai Pagoda | Hồng Phúc Tự is located at 19 Hàng Than Street, Ba Đình Ward, Hanoi City, is one of the typical ancient pagodas of the Thăng Long – Hà Nội area. The pagoda's Sino-Vietnamese name is Hồng Phúc Tự, it is said to have been founded in the Lý dynasty. According to a stele dated 1703, the pagoda had existed for a long time and had fallen into disrepair, then was rebuilt and restored during the Lê Trung Hưng period.

At the end of the 17th century, Zen Master Thủy Nguyệt, the first patriarch of the Zen school Caodong in Vietnam, came to serve as abbot and contributed to building and developing the pagoda. Since then, Hòe Nhai has become one of the ancestral seats of the Caodong Zen school in the North, holding a notable position in the history of Vietnamese Buddhism.

The pagoda has traditional architecture with the following components: the Front Hall, Upper Sanctuary, Patriarch House, Mother Goddess House and auxiliary works, arranged in the style of ancient northern Vietnamese pagoda architecture. The pagoda currently preserves many Buddha statues, stone steles, horizontal plaques, parallel sentences, ritual objects and woodcarving works of value. The pagoda has 68 statues and 28 steles, including many precious artifacts for research in history, culture and fine arts.

In particular, the pagoda is famous for the statue “King Carrying the Buddha”, also called “Repentant King”. The statue depicts a king in a kneeling posture with a Buddha statue on his back, creating a unique sculpture associated with the concepts of repentance, striving for goodness, and the relationship between secular power and Buddhism. This is one of the typical artifacts that create the distinctive value of Hòe Nhai Pagoda.

Hòe Nhai Pagoda was ranked as a National Historical – Cultural Relic in 1989 and is currently an important Buddhist, cultural and spiritual activity site of the Ba Đình area.