Censers

(1MB)  (1MB)

When you go to a temple there are always lots of big censers sitting around where you can offer incense to the deities. To offer incense to a certain deity, you just use the censer nearest that deity’s statue.

There are seven censers at Lungshan Temple. It is customary to offer three sticks of incense at each censer, for a total of 21 incense sticks. As the incense sticks burn down, the ashes pile up high inside the big censer, and people sometimes take a scoop of the ashes and put them in a little bag to carry around or hang around the neck as an amulet. You can also buy an amulet from the temple, in which case you have to take the amulet and expose it to the incense smoke from the censer to have it blessed.
Censers usually are three-legged. One of these legs (the one indicated by the arrow in the photo) corresponds to the tripod’s vertical angle, and this is the leg that points toward the god to which the censer is dedicated. The one in this photo is dedicated to the boddhisatva Guanyin, patron deity of Lungshan Temple.

There are two censers in the main hall, one dedicated to Guanyin and one to the Jade Emperor. The worshipper first faces the main hall and offers three sticks of incense to Guanyin, then faces the temple’s front gate and offers three sticks of incense to the Jade Emperor, the highest-ranking deity in the Chinese pantheon.

An interesting detail on the censers of Lungshan Temple is the “barbarians holding up the censer hood.” The barbarians (han fan) in question are Westerners. What do you suppose our forebears were thinking when they designed the censers this way? It’s an interesting question to speculate about.