The temple began as Baoyan Temple during the Northern Qi dynasty, which ruled northern China from 550 to 577. It was renamed Heshui Temple during a subsequent period, destroyed during the anti-Buddhist persecutions under Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou dynasty, then rebuilt during the Sui dynasty and given its current name: Xiuding Monastery, the "Temple of Cultivated Meditation." This cycle of destruction and renewal is common among Chinese Buddhist sites, where political upheavals periodically swept away religious institutions only to see them rebuilt by the next regime. Each iteration left its mark on the architecture and the stone.

The temple's most remarkable features are its grottoes and carved statuary. Fourteen Buddhist niches and 37 shrines hold more than 500 statues of the Buddha, the vast majority carved between 1504 and 1565 during the Ming dynasty. The artisans who created them worked on cliff faces where a misplaced step meant death, shaping sandstone and limestone into serene figures that seem indifferent to the abyss beneath them. The scale of the project, spanning more than sixty years, suggests sustained patronage and a community of skilled carvers working generation to generation.

The entire complex defies conventional construction. Buildings cling to the cliff face as if gravity were negotiable, their foundations anchored in crevices and ledges that offer barely enough surface for a foothold. The surviving main buildings include the Hall of Water and Land, the Hall of the Grand Buddha, the Hall of Lord Guan, the Pavilion of Juxian, and the Pavilion of Ksitigarbha, the bodhisattva associated with the earth and the underworld. Each structure adapts to the rock it occupies, following the contours of the cliff rather than imposing a symmetrical plan. The effect is less architecture than geology with windows.

In June 2006, Jindeng Temple was listed among the sixth group of Major National Historical and Cultural Sites by the State Council of China, placing it under the country's highest level of cultural protection. The designation recognized not just the temple's age and artistry but its rarity: cliff-face temple complexes of this scale are uncommon even in a country rich with Buddhist heritage sites. Located 65 kilometers northeast of Pingshun County in Changzhi's Xingcheng Town, the temple draws visitors willing to navigate narrow mountain roads for the experience of standing where the builders stood, looking out from the cliff face across the valleys of southeastern Shanxi.