Dazu

If you follow stories about China in some of my favorite news venues, including NPR and the NYT, you've just read about another tragic self-immolation and off-the-scale air pollution. These stories are indeed news and no doubt need to be told. But! What amazing stories rarely find their way into the daily news!?

I'm reminded a little of the first time I read about the US in (what was to me) a foreign newspaper, the Auckland Star. Where was this land of drug junkies, urban riots, revolution and general mayhem? The newspaper was full of stories about the troubled US. Was it describing the same land where I had, just months before, stood at the foot of the hill each morning, waiting for my yellow school bus?

For sure, everything in China is big--including its problems and its amazing history. I don't fault the NYT or NPR for covering some of the problems--that's what news media do. But I want to take you back to the Dazu Rock Carvings, a place I first visited under clear skies in July and thought I would be re-visiting this weekend with my brother and his wife. As it turns out, we'll be scaling the local mountains in Beibei instead, but I still want to share a little more about Dazu, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

When my friend Martha and I decided to go last July, we managed to buy our tickets and board a bus from Tongliang to Dazu with no problem--and spoke a tiny bit of Chinese with two different passengers who were curious about our travel plans and eager to use a little of their English. Once we got to the bus station in Dazu, it wasn't completely self-evident where we got the next bus to the historic caves. We could have just "Qing-wen,-dazu-zai-nar?"-ed our way, but one of the two fellows on the bus volunteered to accompany us the many blocks to the next bus stop, angling for nothing in return and taking more than an hour out of his day. This was far from the first time a stranger had walked me some distance, simply to wave good bye.

Martha and I might as well have stepped into a time machine--back to the Tang Dynasty. It was in the seventh century when the earliest carvings were made in these rock walls, but it was in the twelfth century, by then the Song Dynasty, when Zhao Zhifeng devoted his adult life to the the rock carvings and sculpture. Other monks and nuns toiled over the carvings for years, spreading via rock carvings a medium and a message along the Silk Road from India into northwestern China. Today you'll find tens of thousands of statues and scores of sculptures just at Dazu, with mostly Buddhist themes. The most interesting, we believed, were those on Mount Baoding. Just one of the reclining Buddha's fingers would dwarf you.

You can glimpse the Bao Ding Mountain Circle of Life in the distance.

Somebody's English is about on par with my Chinese.

Check the Buddhist gesture on the street lights.
A lotus flower dangles from each Buddha hand.

A lotus flower.

My Peace Corps buddy Martha

The Bao Ding Mountain Demons with the Rulers of Hell.

Instead of static, repetitive clusters of three to five statutes, these carvings depict a lively mix of the sacred and secular, of Buddhism and local versions of Confucian and Daoist beliefs, in a sequence of "thirty-one monumental tableaux carved around a horse-shoe shaped gully." http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/china/dazu/