Analysis Of The Spatial Distribution And Temporal Change Of The Temples In Jiangxi Province

The Buddhism was introduced in Jiangxi province in the latest year of DonghanDynasty, from then on; there are many eminent monks and temples. The Buddhism isdeeply connected with the geographic environment during its development andbroadcast as a kind of religious culture. While the temple linked the social, priests andfollowers, is the site where the priests doing the Buddhist practice and the adherent tothe Buddhism. The sprung up of the temples is the visual representation of theprosperity of the Buddhism. In a qualified sence, the quantity, scale and distribution ofthe temple could reflect the broadcast of the Buddhism. The traditional Buddhismresearch is lack of the visible showing of the broadcast and moving, in view of this,this paper applies the GIS and spatial analysis to the human geography and trying toprovide a new idea in the Buddhism research.The first part: this paper chooses the Jiangxi province as the research area,digitalizes the600temples and the temporal-spatial attribution data, terrain, towns,rivers, the ancient administrative maps, the ancient roads and so on with the use of theGIS specialization and digitization tools, builds up the temple temporal-spatialgeodatabase. Based on the geodatabase, this paper makes research on the spatialdistribution and the temporal change of the temple with the use of the spatial statistics,buffering analysis, raster calculator and spatial interpolation. And then visualizes thehistorical trajectory of the temples.The second part: this paper trying to make analysis on the relationship betweenthe environment and temple by choosing the town, terrain and so on as the effectelements and achieving the following results:1. From the latest year of Donghan Dynasty to Yuanming Dynasty, due to theaffective of the propagating source of the Buddhism, the mean center of the temple ischanged from the southwest to the northeast and then changed to the south of Jiangxiprovince. But the center of the temple is located in the north of the Jiangxi province.The sphere of influence is larger as the time goes by.2. There is positive correlation relationship between the distribution of thetemple and roads and rivers. The more convenient, there are more temples.3. There is positive correlation relationship between the population and thetemple amount.4. For the terrain, there are more temples in the plain area where is more developand distribute more people. But in the mountain area there distributed large amounttemples also because of the special environment.