The legend that gives Gufo Temple its identity is the story of a monk named Puji. By the time he arrived at the remote river bank at Jingangku, the temple had fallen into ruin. Little incense burned there. Only one clay figure of Buddha remained, so eroded by wind, rain, and snow that its features were barely recognizable. The locals called it the Old Buddha, using a Chinese proverb: a clay idol fording a river can hardly save itself. Puji knelt before the battered figure and made an offer: "Old Buddha, you made me Buddha, and I will refurbish you." A voice answered from the ruins: "Puji, you come to refurbish me, and I make you Buddha." Shaken, the monk looked around and saw no one. He tested the silence: "True Buddha is here. No need to go afar!" The voice answered again: "Yes, yes!" Puji spent the next two years begging alms across the countryside, eventually gathering more than 70,000 lian of silver to rebuild the temple.

Gufo Temple occupies a strategic position in the Mount Wutai sacred landscape. It is the first temple that pilgrims encounter when approaching from the southern route, which follows the Qingshui River through Jingangku into the mountain complex. This placement gave the temple an outsized role in pilgrims' experience -- it was their first taste of the sacred geography they were about to enter, a threshold between the secular world and the Buddhist mountain above. The remote location along the river bank also explains the temple's history of neglect: far from the central temple cluster at Taihuai Town, it received less foot traffic and less patronage than the more famous monasteries deeper in the mountains.

In the early nineteenth century, men from Jiajiang County in Sichuan Province installed a statue of Cai Lun -- the inventor of paper -- inside Gufo Temple. The choice seems odd for a Buddhist temple, but it reflects the fluid boundaries between religious and folk worship in Chinese sacred sites. Cai Lun, a eunuch official of the Eastern Han dynasty who is credited with developing the papermaking process around 105 AD, was venerated by paper workers as a patron deity. Workers from Sichuan's paper-producing regions carried their reverence for him wherever they traveled. The statue's presence in Gufo Temple is a small reminder that China's sacred mountains have always served purposes broader than any single faith tradition, absorbing local beliefs and practical devotions alongside the formal Buddhist liturgy.