Kinship of Rivers Project: Big Buddha, Pt. 2

This means "Buddha" in Chinese.

There were some windy old stairs up to the top of the Buddha cut into the cliff, the kind where if you slipped in fell you'd plummet all 71 meters to your death, and those were the stairs I wanted to go up, but as luck would have it they were closed, so we had to go up the boring back way. Here's the stairs I wanted to go up

On the way to the other stairs, we found this big guy in a cave. He was sure happy about something

The stairs we took up had 333 steps, which is a very lucky number. Also lucky, we found out, was the year we were visiting the Buddha, the year of his 1300th birthday. The guide said something along those lines, and Ping translated. I asked, "Today?" and the non-english speaking guide repeated back, "Today!" So, it's official: we visited the largest Buddha in China on the day of his 1300th birthday. The guide said that it meant that all our prayers came true as a result.

Right by the cave Buddha there was an old worn-down wall. Turns out if you touch the wall you get good luck, money and knowledge. We touched the wall. Seems like around you have a hard time touching something that doesn't give you good luck.

Anyway, I'm pretty tipsy. We're in Chengdu right now and we just got back from the bar. Those folks in Chengdu sure know how to party. Doesn't mater if you don't speak a word of Chinese. More on that later, just keep Chengdu on your list of party cities when you go China. Anyone from Chengdu reading this? You're the best! Keep it real, Chengdu.

So, back to Leshan. There are 333 steps to the top of the Buddha. I was counting every single one, just to make sure we made it to 333, until we got to a detour where we could look at the Medicine Buddha. If you pray to the Medicine Buddha you will be granted peace and good health, and you guessed it, good luck. Well, it turns out if you take the detour to the Medicine Buddha, you wind up climbing a total of four steps from the landing to the place where the paths meet again. If you don't it's three. I wrote that down in my notebook, and while I was writing it down, I lost count of the total steps we've been climbing altogether, so we'll just have to take the monk's word for it on the 333. Here's the medicine man Buddha, looking serene.

Here's a funny looking statue on top of the bathroom. They were the most ornate bathrooms I've seen in my life, but they smelled like nobody cleaned them in 1300 years.

Anyway, we finally got to the top of the 333 steps, (a very auspicious number or steps,) we got to a sweet temple. Inside the temple were all sorts of Buddhas, which we weren't allowed to photograph, because they were inside of temples. They had three big gold ones in front, and rows of goofy ones on the side. On the side, one statue was cleaning out his ears. One statue was ripping off his face to reveal another face. One statue had eyebrows down to his nipples. When we were in the temple, the guide showed us to a glass case full of trinkets. The trinkets were wildly overpriced, and the guide explained to us that we shouldn't try and bargain them down for the trinkets because this was the monks livelyhood, selling trinkets. What's more, the trinkets were blessed by the monks to give you great fortune. If you bought more than one or at most two, that would be too lucky and you'd get back luck. Obviously, this was a pretty good sell, and we wanted to buy some trinkets. Too bad! The guy who manned the booths went home an hour ago.

So we hung some sweet river flags by the temple. We bought three sticks of yellow incense, which granted us peace and health, and three sticks of purple incense for knowledge and money. Ariel called dibs on the latter.

Here's some flags!

We wandered around a bit. I took a picture of Buddha's ear, which I posted in the last blog post, and we also saw the cave where Haitong lived.

On the way down, we ran talked some monks about buying some blessed trinkets at the temple. The monks have to make a living, just like the rest of us it turns out. I bought a bracelet with a Pixiu on it. A Pixiu is a sort of dragon that constantly eats, but never has to take a shit, making it the symbol of wealth.