inscription that recorded what they wrote that night was too faint to read, and I was losing feeling in my feet again. I rowed back to the shore and walked out to the road and flagged down a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the north edge of town to the bridge of barges that carried cars and buses and trucks across the Yellow River.
The bridge of barges was a jury-rigged affair that rocked back and forth every time a vehicle crossed. Pedestrians had to hold onto a chain that separated them from the traffic and that also kept them from falling into the river. I walked out and tried to take a photo, but I couldn’t let go of the chain long enough. In winter, the river shrank to the point where a person could throw a rock across. In fact, this was the narrowest section of the river on the entire floodplain. Even in summer, when the water level was at its highest, it was only 200 meters across in Chinan, which was the distance between the huge stone dikes on either side. According to a man who worked near the bridge, the bottom of the river was actually five meters higher than the city due to the constant deposit of silt – and that was just the bottom of the river, not the top of the river. He said every July an army of volunteers had to pile sandbags along the dikes and work around the clock to keep China’s city of springs from becoming a city of mud.
STONE BUDDHAS
The snow was still there the next morning. It illumined the otherwise dark slopes of Chienfoshan, or Thousand Buddha Mountain, which formed the southern boundary of Chinan. Buddhists started carving buddhas into its cliffs as early as the sixth century, and there were as many as a thousand of them at one time. But most of the buddhas have moved on to other buddhalands, and their numbers have dwindled to sixty or so, the survivors of art collectors, wars and purges. I took a taxi to the trail that led up the hill and started walking. As I walked past one buddha after another, I wondered who paid for all this carving. And why in Chinan? The carving was not especially fine, but the snow gave the buddhas a serenity that art alone had failed to convey.
I walked as far as I could, until my shoes began to disappear in the snow and my feet began to feel numb again. Halfway to the top, I turned and headed back. I hadn’t expected to see anyone else on the mountain. But on my way down, I met an old couple who said they walked up the mountain every day, rain or snow. When I told them I had hiked up the mountain to see the buddhas, they said there were much better buddhas in the mountains south of Chinan near the village of Liupu.
Carvings at Thousand Buddha Mountain
After I returned to my hotel and restored feeling to my feet, I checked out and hired a car to take me there. It wasn’t far, maybe thirty or forty kilometers south of the city. On the way there, the sun came out, and the snow disappeared from the road, as if it had never fallen. An hour after leaving Chinan, just past the village of Liupu, we turned into a side valley. The road ended near a lone stupa standing at the edge of a grove of ancient cedars. Stupas were built to contain the remains of Buddhist monks. In fact, the form originated in India from burial mounds. But it had evolved into shapes that reminded me of small rocket ships. Some were so big, they even had staircases inside leading to windows and balconies.
The stupa at Liupu was different. It was not a rocket ship. Or if it was, it was a fat, square one. Most stupas were made of brick, but this one was made of stone. It was built in 611 and was fifteen meters high, and it was almost as wide. On each side was an arched entrance, and inside each entrance was a statue of one of the buddhas of the four directions: Amitabha, who welcomes the faithful to his Pure Land, faced west; Akshobhya faced north; Ratnasambhava faced east; and Shakyamuni, the buddha of the current dispensation, faced south.
This stupa once marked the entrance to a major Buddhist center that had since vanished. But the stupa wasn’t the only relic from the past. A path led across the valley past another cliff face into which a dozen buddhas had been carved. There was an explanation below one of them that said it had been carved in 658 by the order of Li Fu, the thirteenth son of Emperor T’ai-tsung of the T’ang dynasty. The carving depicted Maitreya, the buddha who was prophesied to come after Shakyamuni. There was also an inscription carved inside the niche: “May all people live to old age, may their families and countries be at peace, and may all beings everywhere attain buddhahood.”
A stupa at Liupu
Past the cliff, the trail continued down a slope to a small grove of several more stupas. The biggest was eleven meters high and was also square. On the outside were carvings of dragons and tigers and the guardians of the four quarters. The setting, with mountains rising on three sides, would have been perfect for a monastery. But nothing except its cemetery remained.
My driver said there was an even bigger Buddhist cemetery west of Liupu across another range of mountains. However, there was no direct road. He said we would have to return to Chinan before we could head south again, which is what we did. Two hours later, we turned off the main highway that led south to T’ai-an onto a side road that led east into the mountains. A few minutes later, we arrived at Lingyen Temple. The temple was on a northern spur of Taishan, China’s most sacred mountain. There was a saying that a pilgrimage to Taishan wasn’t a pilgrimage if it didn’t include a visit to Lingyen Temple. Although this had been true in the past, when Lingyen Temple was still a center of Buddhist practice, there wasn’t a monk in sight, much less a pilgrim. In fact, my driver and I were the only visitors. Apparently, no one liked to go out when it was so cold.
The temple, though, was still intact, and the caretaker took us on a tour, which began with two gnarled cedars. They were planted, he said, 2,000 years earlier in the Han dynasty before someone built a Buddhist temple there. Just past the cedar on the right were three springs. I had read somewhere that Lingyen Temple was the origin of the tea ceremony that eventually found its way to Japan and that these three springs were the source of the water. But the caretaker didn’t know anything about the tea ceremony or the story. He led us instead into the Hall of a Thousand Buddhas.
The walls were lined with a thousand small statues of Shakyamuni, and in the center of the hall were three huge buddhas. The one in the middle was the only buddha made of rattan that I had ever seen. And it was 900 years old. The other two were made of bronze – 5,000 kilos of bronze, according to the caretaker. And along the base of the walls was a collection of one-meter-high statues made of clay. Other temples had statues of the sixteen or eighteen or even the 500 arhats, arhats being paragons of Indian Buddhism who had little, if any, connection with real people. But this group was restricted to historical figures and was equally divided between Indian and Chinese monks. There were forty of them, with Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who brought Zen to China, sitting in the place of honor.
Walking back outside, the caretaker led us to a huge stupa on the other side of the shrine hall. It was over fifty meters high, and there was even a staircase inside that went to the top. But the caretaker said it was too dangerous, and he led us instead to what he claimed was the second biggest Buddhist cemetery in China, second only to that of Shaolin. It included more than 150 rocket ships, all made of stone. It was such a surprising day. I saw so many stone buddhas and stone stupas but not a single living monk or nun. Omitofo.
TAISHAN
From Lingyen’s forest of stupas, we returned to the main highway and continued south to T’ai-an. T’ai-an was the name of the town that had grown up around the temple where emperors came to pay their respects to Taishan. Mountains played an important role in Chinese culture. They were like acupuncture points on the body of the earth and home to powerful forces. And Taishan was their soul. It was where the recently departed spirits of the dead came for assignment to the afterlife. It was the earthly conduit to the netherworld, and the mountain was the single biggest center of pilgrimage in China. Emperors, too, came there to make peace, not only with the hereafter, but also with the forces of the present, whose assistance they needed in this life. I arrived too late in the day to follow them up the trail to the summit and contented