Mount Tai Shan, Five Peaks, one of the Nine Sacred Mountains of China July 27, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Asia, Flight Schedule, Hotels, Motel, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Gear, Trip , trackbackMount Tai Shan (WU T’AI SHAN) is oneof the Nine Sacred Mountains of China. It is situated some hundred miles southwest of Beijing. It has five main peaks which rise over a central plateau, itself about 8,000 feet (2,440m) above the North China Plain: the name Wu T’ai means Five Peaks or Terraces.
It is one of the relatively few World Heritage sites that is both a place of natural significance and a cultural site, for scattered across the plateau, perched on ridges and high up the five peaks themselves, are some 300 temples. Wu T’ai is, or was, sacred not only to the Chinese but also to the Tibetans and Mongolians. The temples originated from all three traditions of Buddhism and also Taoism, coloured with hints of earlier nature religions and their deities. The culmination of the journey for many of the pilgrims was to offer homage as they walked 1,080 times around the chorten on the mountain supposedly containing a relic of the Buddha. (It may just be an interesting coincidence, but 1,080 is one of the key numbers of various ancient, arcane traditions of numerological knowledge.)
Wu Tai was considered the main Earthly locus of Manjusri Bodhisattva, symbolizing Divine Wisdom. (This is reminiscent of that other World Heritage site, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, similarly dedicated to Divine Wisdom.) The region became a battlefield between the invading Japanese and the Chinese, and a little later between the Communists and the former regime in China, and the temples were pillaged. We are fortunate, therefore, that the English Buddhist John Blofeld has left us a wonderful record of his visit to the sacred mountain in the late 1930s, shortly before the winds of change blew so fiercely.
Blofeld was dazzled by his first view of the plateau as he and his travelling companions crossed over the mountain pass above it. It was, he recalled, ‘a sight which might have inspired the original conception of Shangri-La’. In addition to the shrines and brightly coloured monasteries scattered on the slopes and clinging to vertiginous rocks, a veritable carpet of flowers bedecked the whole scene, growing in `extraordinary profusion’. Despite its altitude, the plateau was well sheltered, and was lush with vegetation. ‘Never . . . had I seen a sight so lovely,’ Blofeld admitted.
As he settled in on the mountain, he found the spiritual aspect of his nature to be ‘daily refreshed by the winds which blew across the plateau carrying the perfume of incense and wood-fires to the nostrils, and singing of the great Central Asian plains beyond, where the world was either very old or very fresh and young’.
Numerous fascinating experiences were in store for Blofeld during his stay on Wu T’ai. Apart from those that related to his personal spiritual quest, he was shown some strange natural phenomena. In a cave behind the small Mani Bhadra Monastery, for example, he was shown a depression in the ground holding a shallow pool of crystal-clear water. This water was sacred to Samandabhadra Bodhisattva (P’u Hsien, the personification of Divine Action) and countless pilgrims took away bottles of it, as it has supposed healing properties. Though the pool was fed by neither spring nor any inlet, Blofeld himself watched ’several scores’ of pilgrims take their fill at the pool without the water level decreasing.
But, as the Englishman observed, ‘Eastern places of pilgrimage abound in such small mysteries’. Eventually, he was allowed to witness something else, which was ‘much harder to explain’ — the Bodhisattva Lights.
Blofeld and a small group of companions toured the five peaks of Wu T’ai, visiting the temples on them as a form of pilgrimage. They left the South Peak till last: it was there, they were told, that the Bodhisattva of Divine Wisdom, the very spirit the mountain was dedicated to, actually manifested in the form of the lights. The small party, accompanied by guides, reached the highest temple on the South Peak by late afternoon. They observed with interest a small tower built on the highest pinnacle of the peak, about 100 feet (30m) above the temple. One of the monks pointed out to the visitors that the windows in the tower overlooked a veritable abyss, as it was positioned at a higher level than any of the surrounding mountains. The Lights always appeared between midnight and two o’clock in the morning, so the pilgrims went to bed in the temple in a state of great anticipation.
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