by Bill Porter
Once we reached the overlook, we just stood there watching the scene change as clouds drifted in and out. It wasn’t simply one scene. It was as if the stage manager of a play was changing the scenery. We could have stood there all day, but our tour of the summit was just beginning. We retraced our steps to the main trail and continued skirting the north side of the mountain. As we did, we were surprised to pass several hotels. We weren’t planning to spend the night, but we went inside one and inquired. Even the smallest, simplest of rooms without a view cost over a hundred dollars a night. We could think of better places to spend our money and returned to the trail.
Huangshan pines
As we did, we had to stop every few minutes. Every few minutes revealed another spectacular view. Also, every few minutes, we needed to catch our breaths. It was the elevation: The cable car from Yunku Temple transported us from 900 meters, which was already fairly high, to 1,700 meters, which was much higher than we were used to. Where I was living in Hong Kong was ten meters above sea level, and where Finn and Steve lived near Seattle was less than 100 meters above the same ocean.
And so we huffed and puffed and oohed and aahed our way from the northeast to the northwest corner of the mountain. Finally, around noon, we arrived at a place called Paiyunlou, or Cloudbreak Pavilion. This was where people came to watch the sunset. There was also a hotel here, and we stopped long enough to have a simple lunch. It had to be simple, because everything was so expensive. All the food had to be brought up the mountain on someone’s back or in a cable car.
Afterwards, we followed the trail along the western side of the summit to the south side. As we did, we hiked past a side trail that led to Feilaishih, or Rock That Flew Here. It seems like every mountain in China has a Feilaishih, perched as if it would blow over in a strong wind. But Huangshan’s Rock That Flew Here was the biggest one we had seen. We watched people stand next to it and try to push it over. Lucky for them, it didn’t budge.
We left it where it was and continued on to the weather station, where the trail divided and where we had a choice. We could return to the hotels on the north side of the summit and the cable car that brought us up. Or we could continue along the west side of the summit to the cable car on the south side, and that was what we did. We were glad we did: the views were worth the effort. And the crowds thinned out. We often found ourselves alone, which rarely happens on the north side of the summit. Along the way, we passed by several small temples that had been converted into hostels, but we were determined to get down the mountain before dark and didn’t stop.
Along the way, there was also a side trail to Lienhuafeng, or Lotus Peak. It was Huangshan’s highest peak at nearly 1,900 meters. We thought about it, but we didn’t think about it long. Soon after that, we came to the mountain’s famous Welcoming Pine. We had seen pictures of it everywhere in China, especially in hotel lobbies, where it welcomes guests to spend the night. It’s the most famous pine tree in China, and seeing the real thing was worth all the ups and downs of the trail. We sat down on a stone bench and took in the view. We sat there so long we began to get cold and had to put on our jackets. It was getting late. Fortunately, we didn’t have far to go, and we reached the Yuping cable car with an hour to spare—it stopped operating at sunset.
One of the advantages of coming down the mountain via the Yuping, or Jade Screen, cable car is that it ends at a hot-spring hotel. We couldn’t resist. It wasn’t cheap, but for 30RMB a person we spent an hour soaking away our muscles’ memory of the trail. It didn’t take away all the soreness, but it was a great way to end the day. After our baths, we still had to take the shuttle bus back down the mountain to our crummy hotel, which seemed especially crummy after the day on Huangshan. But once we were asleep it didn’t matter. We weren’t done with mountains, and we planned to sleep on one the next night.
Our next destination was Chiuhuashan. We were going from China’s most scenic mountain to one of its most sacred. The two mountains weren’t that far apart as the crow flew. Unfortunately, we weren’t crows. We had to take the bus, and there was only one a day from Tangkou. It left every morning at 7:30, and we made sure we were on it. It began its daily journey by winding its way north through a long valley to Taiping Reservoir. After waiting for half an hour at the ferry, we crossed the reservoir, then drove through a countryside of rice fields and hillsides of tea before finally winding our way up Chiuhuashan. Six hours after we left, we were there.
The name Chiuhuashan means Nine Flower Mountain. Its old name was Chiutzushan, or Nine Son Mountain, after the sons of a family that first settled here. Then one day 1,250 years ago, the poet Li Pai visited the mountain. Li got drunk with some friends and wrote a poem in which he praised the mountain’s nine flower-like peaks, and the name Nine Flower Mountain stuck. Actually, Chiuhuashan has more than nine peaks, but in ancient China, the word for “nine” also meant “many.”
Despite giving the mountain its name, Li Pai is not someone people think about when they come here. At some point during our bus ride, I took out a picture of Ti-tsang Bodhisattva to show to Finn and Steve. One of our fellow passengers saw us looking at it, and suddenly everyone wanted to see it. So we passed it around. It turned out we were on a bus full of pilgrims. Ti-tsang is the bodhisattva who vowed to save all the beings in Hell, and Chiuhuashan was his home.
Among the dozens of bodhisattvas venerated by Chinese Buddhists, Kuan-yin is number-one. But Ti-tsang is a close second. After all, everyone is going to need his help sooner or later. Actually, the two form a perfect pair. Kuan-yin is usually portrayed as a woman who holds a vase of life-giving water, while Ti-tsang is portrayed as a monk who holds a staff he uses to pry open the gates of Hell. Kuan-yin helps those who are alive, while Ti-tsang helps those who aren’t.
Chiuhuashan is said to be his home because Ti-tsang first manifested himself here as a Korean monk who came to the mountain in the T’ang dynasty. His name wasn’t Ti-tsang. It was Chin Ch’iao-chueh. But he made the same vow Ti-tsang made to save all the beings in Hell, and while the Korean monk was still alive, people started calling him Ti-tsang. And in the centuries following the monk’s death, Chiuhuashan became venerated as his residence.
Chinese Buddhists venerate four such mountains as homes of their religion’s heroes, the ones they call bodhisattvas, which are beings who vow to forgo nirvana in order to save others. Buddhism recognizes hundreds of bodhisattvas, but four are revered above the rest, and their places of residence are the principal destinations of Buddhist pilgrims in China. The residence of Manjusri, or Wen-shu, the Bodhisattva of Great Wisdom, is on Wutaishan in North China; the residence of Samantabadra, or P’u-hsien, the Boddhisattva of Skillful Means, is on Omeishan in West China; the residence of Avalokitesvara, or Kuan-yin, the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion, is on Putuoshan off the east coast of China; and Chiuhuashan, the southern member of Buddhism’s four sacred mountains, is the residence of Ksitigarbha, or Ti-tsang, the Bodhisattva of Great Vows.
After six hours on a hard-seat bus, we were glad to be there. Steve and I had been to Chiuhuashan two years earlier and had stayed at one of the monasteries. We decided to see if we could stay there again. From the bus station, we walked past the long row of incense sellers and trinket shops and food stalls that catered to pilgrims. After a few minutes, we came to Chantanlin, Sandalwood Forest Temple. We walked inside, and a minute later we found the abbot. He recognized us, and he welcomed us back. His name was Hui-shen, and he showed us to a room next to a small garden at the back of the temple. After leaving us alone for a few minutes, he returned.
Hui-shen was short and wiry. I never got a chance to find out his age, but he was probably in his fifties. He wasn’t interested in small talk. He sat down next to my bed on the only chair in the room and spent the next two hours doing what he could to help us see through the world of red dust. Steve and I began by telling Hui-shen we had met several hermits during our previous trip and we planned to visit them again.
Hui-shen said
that hermits were no big deal and that most of them weren’t worth visiting. He said, “If you want to become a buddha, you first have to become a human being. Only by becoming a human being, can you become a buddha. Buddhas don’t exist outside this world. Enlightenment comes from realizing the true nature of suffering. How can you experience human suffering if you live in a cave or in a hut in the mountains? You have to live in the world of human beings. Why do you want to visit hermits?”
We told him we liked hermits. We liked their simple lives, and we liked the way they smiled. We also liked listening to Hui-shen. He was determined to teach us something, and he kept poking his finger into our sides to make sure we understood. Just in case we didn’t, he wrote everything down. I still have the backs of a dozen envelopes and scraps of paper he left in our room covered with his summaries of the Dharma.
Finally, another monk came in and called him away. A group of pilgrims wanted to pay for a funeral service. Just in case their departed loved ones went down instead of up, pilgrims come to Chiuhuashan to ask Ti-tsang for special consideration. In fact, funeral services are the main source of income for nearly all the temples on the mountain, and most of the monks and nuns on Chiuhuashan spend part of every day chanting scriptures to help relieve the suffering of the departed as well as the suffering of those they left behind.
Even though Hui-shen didn’t think hermits deserved our attention, much less our time, Steve and I met a nun living in a hut the first time we visited Chiuhuashan, and we wanted to visit her again. We called her the Tiger Lady. She didn’t tell us her real name. The trail to her hut began just up from the bus station next to Chihyuan Temple. The first part was easy enough, although it was straight up. When we reached the ridge that encircled the pilgrimage center below, we turned left onto a dirt trail that came and went. After a few false starts, we finally found the trail that led down the other side of the mountain. A small sign confirmed that this was, indeed, the trail to Tiger Cave that Steve and I had followed two years earlier. We followed it again, and a few minutes later we were there. Next to the cave was a mud-brick hut with whitewashed walls. It was the Tiger Lady’s home. We saw her working in her garden and yelled “Omitofo.” She stood up and looked puzzled.
Tiger Cave and Tiger Lady’s hut
She was a Buddhist nun, and for the past ten years she had been living next to the cave. The first time we visited her, she showed us tiger tracks in her garden. She said she only saw the tiger a few times, but she heard it almost every night. When we asked her if she remembered us, she just shrugged. She said a couple foreigners visited her a few years back, but it wasn’t us. We asked her how the young monk was doing. When we’d visited her before, she told us a young monk was living in a nearly inaccessible niche farther down the cliff. He was completely devoted to his meditation practice, and she told us he didn’t have anything to eat. So we gave her 100RMB and asked her to buy him some food. She said the young monk left a few months ago. We asked her if she remembered us giving her money to help take care of him. She said she remembered a couple foreigners giving her some money, but it wasn’t us.
She led us inside Tiger Cave, and we paid our respects at the shrine for the monk who lived here 1,500 years ago and for the tiger that kept him company. Then she led us up onto the rocks above the cave. She jumped onto a ledge like a cat and motioned for us to follow. We struggled up. While we all crouched on the ledge next to a huge boulder, she said this was the best spot to view the rest of the mountain. It was. Across the neighboring gorge, two waterfalls hung in space. The rest was all clouds and forest and rocky spires. In the distance, we could see the trail that pilgrims took to the main peak. The peak looked far away, and the trail to the top must have consisted of several thousand steps. Hiking to the Tiger Lady’s hut was enough for us.
Master Hui-shen at Chantanlin Temple
When we went back down to her hut, she turned away to show us something, and we slipped some money under a plate. She wanted to show us a picture of Ti-tsang. She said it was very special and had been blessed by a Tibetan lama who visited her. We said, “Omitofo.” She also poured us some tea and gave us some candy. We drank the tea but left the candy. Finally, we told her we had to go. We said good-bye and retraced our steps back to the pilgrimage center.
It was time for us to pay our respects to Ti-tsang. We walked past the temple where we were staying to a set of steps that led up the mountain. A couple hundred steps later, we reached Joushen Paodien, or Material Body Hall. It was where the Korean monk’s body was kept. It was inside a pagoda in the middle of a shrine hall. The monk in charge told us that the body was still in perfect condition. When we asked him how he knew, he said the monks take it out the last day of the seventh month every year and give it a sponge bath—in private. We then lit some incense and joined dozens of other pilgrims circumambulating the pagoda.
This was the principal stop on the Chiuhuashan pilgrim trail. The trail continued on another five or six kilometers and eventually up a long, steep flight of stone steps to the top of the next ridge. On a clear day, we were told, Huangshan is visible to the east and the Yangtze to the west. And if you get tired along the way, sedan chair porters are glad to help you out. But we had seen enough. We walked back down to our monastic lodging and met Master Hui-shen again. When we told him we would be leaving the next morning, he wrote down one last thing for us to keep in mind: “A deluded mind is like ice. An enlightened mind is like water. It flows through the valley of life, unattached.” All we could think of to say was, “Omitofo.”
12. Li Pai
We were truly sad to leave Chantanlin and Master Hui-shen. He tried his best to see that we left the mountain a little wiser than when we arrived. But it was time to leave. As we walked down the gauntlet of shops catering to pilgrims and tourists, we were puzzled when we noticed that they all sold statues of Kuan-yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Ti-tsang was nowhere in sight. Chiuhuashan was Ti-tsang’s home. Why no statues? And what was Kuan-yin doing here? Her home was on an island in the East China Sea. We thought about it and concluded that Chinese Buddhists prefer to have a statue of the Goddess of Mercy at home. Who wants to be reminded of Hell?
Place where Li Pai embraced the moon
And so we said good-bye to Ti-tsang, at least for the time being, and left on the seven o’clock bus to Nanking—not that we were going that far. Four hours later, we got off in Hsuancheng. The reason we got off there was paper. We had already visited the factories in Shehsien that produced the most famous inksticks and inkstones in China. Paper was the third of the four treasures of the scholar’s studio. And the paper known as hsuan-chih was the most famous of all. Since hsuan-chih was named after Hsuancheng, we figured this was the place to see it made. We figured wrong. When we asked at the bus station, we found out that all the hsuan-chih factories were near Chinghsien, fifty kilometers to the southwest. We were also told that they didn’t welcome visitors. Their paper-making process was a secret. For the first time on our trip, we had to admit defeat.
From the bus station, it was a short walk to the train station, where we bought tickets on the next local heading north. While we were waiting on the platform, we met a man from Chinghsien. When he asked what we were doing there, we told him we were hoping to find out more about how hsuan-chih was made. He said he used to work at one of the factories, and he proceeded to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about his hometown’s most famous product. The reason, he said, paper produced in Chinghsien was so famous, was the area’s water. He said every factory was located near a mountain stream. To the water, they added elm and mulberry bark and rice straw. The hillsides around Chinghsien, he said, were covered with straw and bark most of the year. It had to be bleached for months before it could be used. Also, every kind of paper required special ingredients, many of which were secret. One ingredient he mentioned that caught us by surprise was kiwi juice.
Paper from these ingredients, he said, was first produced in Chinghsien during the Han
dynasty nearly 2,000 years ago. By the end of the T’ang, 1,000 years ago, it was the favorite paper of China’s leading calligraphers and artists. Since then, numerous grades and varieties had been developed. And nowadays, no calligrapher or artist would settle for anything less than hsuan-chih, which was produced, we were sad to say, in Chinghsien, not in Hsuancheng, where we stood waiting for our train.
The northbound finally came, and two hours later, we were the only passengers who got off in Tangtu. It was a funny name. It meant Stuck in the Mud. But it was a sunny day, and there was no rain in sight. After asking directions, we walked across a bridge to a place where buses passed by and and caught one headed for Huangchih, which was about thirty kilometers to the southeast. Thirty minutes later, halfway there, we got off at the grave of Li Pai.
When Chinese rank their poets, they always put Tu Fu and Li Pai at the top. We had already visited Tu Fu’s weed-covered grave in the countryside north of Changsha. Li Pai’s grave had fared better, probably because of its proximity to Nanking—which had been the capital of a number of southern dynasties. The grave was in a park-like setting near the foot of Chingshan and surrounded by a long white wall. When he died in 762, Li Pai was buried several kilometers to the west on Lungshan. But 150 years later, his remains were moved to Chingshan in accordance with his wishes. I’m not sure why it took so long.
