Sichuan province is not only home to booming Chengdu city, spicy hot pot and a leisurely lifestyle, but also to spectacular mountains filled with traditional culture, breathtaking views and Buddhist traditions.

I recently took a four-day trip, staying in temples and walking with monks and nuns, to experience the Buddhist culture, taste the famous water tofu and play with the mischievous monkeys who are kept in line by guys cracking their bamboo sticks.

Temples provide simple accommodation for tourists and pilgrims. Check out 

www.emsfj.com/Index.html (only in Chinese) for more information. Mount Emei is one of China’s four great Buddhist mountains (some say it’s the greatest), and it is rapidly being developed for Buddhism and for tourism.

I hoped to witness “Buddha’s Halo” at the summit, a spectacular multicolored vision that occurs in the mist when light, temperature and moisture are just right. The majestic meteorological phenomenon is said to be a blessing from the Buddha.

American singer/songwriter James Taylor too was looking for something when he visited the magical mountain in the mid-1990s and wrote a song about the experience that begins:

“We were walking in paradise, never did notice. Blind in the Buddha land, looking for solace.”

So, I was bound for paradise: Shanghai roundtrip RMB 2,200.

Day One

Leshan and Giant Buddha

My 11am flight to Chengdu took three hours. My seat companion Mr Song, a businessman, told me that it is a great place to live and he was considering selling his father’s house in Shanghai to move there. He kept telling me to eat Sichuan tofu.

I arrived before 3pm and jumped into a car with a couple of Beijing businessmen, heading east to Leshan City – my first stop – to visit the Leshan Giant Buddha. The driver, Mr Zhou, shuttles between Chengdu and Leshan every day in his own car. The 120km trip costs RMB 100 per person.

On the way, driver Zhou talked reverently about the Giant Buddha and said Leshan is blessed. He has two children – he violated the one-child policy and paid the fine – and said he can make two or three shuttles in a day if necessary. But one trip is usually enough. He wants to spend more time playing basketball with his eldest son who will play on his high school team this year.

“Your skin will turn whiter if you stay in Leshan for one month,” he told me in his Sichuan-accented Mandarin. “The water is different here and the place is blessed.”

We chatted about the traditional mask-changing Sichuan opera, about teahouses near the river, the art of black wood carving, and Leshan barbeques with the famous tofu. He dropped the businessmen off at a hotel in Leshan and drove me across the river and up a little mountain to Ling Yun temple (reach cloud), just next to the Giant Buddha’s face.

The Leshan Giant Buddha is the biggest carved-stone Buddha in the world. It is a seated Maitreya. Maitreya usually appears as a bodhisattva incarnated as a very fat monk with a broad smile on his face and his breast and paunch exposed, but this Buddha is in good shape and wears a serene expression. It took 90 years to carve and was completed in the year 803 in the Tang Dynasty. It is on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.

Facing the confluence of three rivers, the Buddha is 71 meters (about 233 feet) high, and has three-meter-long (about 11 feet) fingers. The eight-meter-long (about 27 feet) instep is big enough for a hundred people to sit on and the 28-meter-wide (about 92 feet) shoulders are large enough to be a basketball court. No matter where I climbed, I could not get the entire Buddha in my viewfinder on his side of the river.

People say that when the river waters reach the feet of the Buddha, then the whole village will be flooded. The Buddha was carved in hopes that it would control the river spirit that caused disastrous flooding over the centuries.

Back at the temple, I enjoyed a vegetarian meal with spicy fried pepper – the whole trip was vegetarian. Then my monk guide Yuan Rong (Fountain Glory) sent me to a hotel because the temple’s own hostel for pilgrims is under construction.

The next morning, I had a bowl of very clean and delicious vegetable noodles and the homemade soybean milk. Then I returned to Ling Yun temple to meet head monk Zhao Guan (Shine View). He has been a monk for 25 years, since he was 13 years old. He was wrapped in a blanket because Sichuan is wet and cold in autumn. He told me how devoted people in Leshan formed a human ring around the Giant Buddha and protected it from the rampages of anti-religion zealots during the Cultural Revolution.

Day Two

Fu Hu Temple and Nuns’ Life

Mount Emei is one of China’s Four Buddhist Shrines. The mountain is known for its abrupt cliffs, soaring peaks, roaring waterfalls, gurgling springs, towering ancient trees and fragrant flowers. It has been described as “a beautiful spot under heaven” by men of letters since ancient times. The highest peak is 3,099 meters above sea level; the rugged road to the summit is 75 kilometers long.

In the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), monks and priests built temples in the mountain area. Construction took place over a period of l,800 years. Mount Emei is referred to as the “capital of fairyland and the kingdom of monks”. Now only 28 temples remain with 500 monks. This is what I had come to see.

I took a one-hour bus ride (RMB 11) to the mountain area and was greeted by my next monk guide Yuan Chao (Fountain Cross). He is in his mid-30s and in charge of the human resource department of the Emei Buddhism Association. He decided to place me for the first day at Fu Hu temple (Tame Tiger) for nuns. It is the biggest temple on the mountain, with 13 halls.

I was introduced to Yan Miao (Excellent Performer), a serene and elegant nun from Sichuan and director of the Buddhism school for nuns in Fu Hu temple. After tea and a chat, she arranged for her student Yan Ji (Lucky Performer) to be my companion and guide.

After lunch at the temple, we walked to Luo Feng An (Display Apex Temple), a place for monks’ funerals and cremation. “I can’t come up here alone,” said Yan Ji, who is afraid of ghosts in spite of having decided to serve the Buddha. We walked through dense pine woods blocking the sunlight.

A beloved monk teacher had died a few days previously and his students were reading sutras in front of his casket: it is a 49-day, 24-hour ritual. Monks caskets are wooden boxes, about 1.3-meters square. The monk’s body is placed inside, in a seated position. Later, it will be taken to the crematory. Yan Ji told me that if the monk is especially holy, some saríra or Buddhist relics will remain among the ashes. These will be collected and treasured, like bones of the saints.

Students will collect money to build a stone pagoda at the gravesite, in honor of their teacher – the taller the pagoda, the more famous and saintly he was.

The mountain is criss-crossed with paths, so we took new path back to Fu Hu Temple. Yan Ji showed me her dormitory room in a square wooden building in a garden. The nuns’ tooth brushes and basins are carefully arranged outside. She showed me hundreds of fresh walnuts, a present for me, a girl from the big city who had never eaten fresh walnuts before. We drank tea, took in the view and cracked walnuts.

I noticed an amazing thing: the roof was clean in the drizzle. Despite the wind, no leaves fell on the roof. Yan Ji said this was because of special construction that factored in the wind currents to make sure the leaves drop elsewhere – and possibly because of the power of the horsetail whisk of the Pu Xian Buddha, the Buddha of Mount Emei.

After the walnut break, Yan Ji showed me a six-meter-high bronze tower within the temple; it contains the 20,000-character Huayan Sutra and is decorated with 4,700 engraved Buddhist figures.

Then I went to Luo Han Tang (Those Who Attain Enlightenment Hall) where Yan Ji told me to choose one of 500 arhat (Sanskirt for those who attain enlightenment) statues and start walking along the line of statuary, counting one statue for each year of my life. I started from a solemn statue and ended at one with a kindly, smiling expression. Yan told me this coming year will be lucky for me.

At 5:30pm a delicious vegetarian meal with vegetables much tastier than those I can get in Shanghai. Afterward, nuns played traditional Chinese instruments, the sound of flutes mingling with the sound of zithers. Some sang, some read. Student nuns are in their teens and twenties, the age limit for enrollment is 30.

It was dark and drizzly outside. At 7pm there was a class for singing sutras accompanied by temple instruments such as bells and wooden drums. The nuns’ clear voices were the only sound in the quiet night. I couldn’t help but practice my favorite taichi to the singing – the peaceful feeling and rhythmic breathing fit perfectly.

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