The Big Wild Goose Pagoda is located in the Da Ci'en Temple in Jinchangfang, Chang'an City, Tang Dynasty (now south of Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province). It is also known as the "Ci'en Temple Pagoda". In the third year of Yonghui of the Tang Dynasty (652), Xuanzang presided over the construction of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda in order to preserve the Buddhist scriptures and statues brought back to Chang'an from Tianzhu via the Silk Road. It initially had five floors, and was later added to nine floors, with countless more floors and heights. After several changes, it was finally fixed to the seven-story tower that we saw, with a total height of 64.517 meters and a side length of the bottom floor of 25.5 meters.
In the spring of the third year of Yonghui (652), Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty, Xuanzang petitioned for the construction of the Wild Goose Pagoda, which was completed in October. At first, the tower had five floors, with a brick surface and an earth core. From 701 to 704 AD, during Wu Zetian's Chang'an reign, it was renovated into a seven-story pavilion-style brick tower, which has been preserved to this day.
The pagoda was built to preserve the Sanskrit scriptures of Bedoro leaves retrieved from India, and more than 10,000 relics were buried there. It is said that the origin of the name of the tower is as follows: the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built by Xuanzang in imitation of the Indian Wild Goose Pagoda, so the original name of the Indian Pagoda was inherited. The word "大" added before the name of the pagoda means Mahayana Buddhism.
Related information
"Yanta inscription" began in the Tang Dynasty. At that time, after each imperial examination, in addition to wearing flowers and riding horses around Chang'an, new scholars also had to climb the wild goose pagoda and leave poems and inscriptions, which symbolized that they would rise to the top step by step and rise to the top. This was a high honor at the time.
After Bai Juyi, the great poet of the Tang Dynasty, passed the Jinshi examination, he climbed to the Wild Goose Pagoda and wrote the poem "Under the Ci'en Pagoda, where the inscription is, the youngest among the seventeen people" expressed his joy at his youthful success. By the Ming Dynasty, Chang'an was no longer the capital.
However, local literati admired the legend of inscriptions on the wild goose pagoda in the Tang Dynasty. After each provincial examination (equivalent to the provincial examination), the candidates who passed the examination had to climb the pagoda together and write poems and leave their names. Until now, some of the lintels and stone frames of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda still have some poems written by previous generations.
Reference for the above content: Baidu Encyclopedia-Big Wild Goose Pagoda