The Big Buddha

We took the bus to Leshan to see its world-famous "giant buddha", which is the tallest in the world, or so we were told. I found this hard to believe because I distinctly remember visiting another "world's largest buddha" last year, in Japan. Obviously I remembered wrong… the Japanese buddha had to be only the world's largest bronze buddha, or the world’s largest cross-legged buddha, or maybe even only the world's largest cross-legged bronze buddha in Japan… As it turns out, neither of those two buddhas can decently claim the title of world’s largest. That doesn’t mean they’re small, you see, it’s just that many, many peoples have been building buddhas for a long, long time, and evidently they enjoy building them really, really big.

I do mean really big. Leshan's buddha stands, or rather sits, 75-meter tall, carved in the red cliffs of mount Emei, overlooking the river Minjiang. It was built in 713 when a priest became wary of the river's notoriously dangerous rapids and set out carving a huge Buddha in the hope that it would appease the waters. Remarkably, this somewhat roundabout approach proved demonstrably effective: building the massive figure involved carving out enormous quantities of rocks and dirt, which were then thrown in the river bed, making its flow quieter and less treacherous.

Beyond this cute story there is very little to say about Leshan's Buddha except that it is indeed really big. A long hike thru a temple-sprinkled mountainous park is required before you get on a platform which overlooks the Buddha's head, where you will be joined by about two million Chinese tourists. Together you then amble down a series of switch backs along the buddha’s height. This takes a good long while, and then you find yourself staring at toes much bigger than your own person, and gazing upwards at a sitting figure that would be called a skyscraper if only it was habitable. You take a moment to reflect that this is indeed very impressive, then make your way back to the bus, thinking happily that for the rest of your life you’ll be able to say you’ve seen the world’s biggest buddha – although only to people who won’t bother to check…

For once the excitement did not end at the bus’ door, and the return trip to Chengdu proved a lot more interesting than we expected. That’s because we were granted an exclusive viewing of "Up Close", an extremely fine example of quality Hong Kong cinema. It tells the gripping tale of two (very hot) twenty-something chinese martial artists girls who start out as mortal enemies but in the end team up to fight a (predictably) japanese evil lord. For the first, and hopefully last time, I watched an entire movie in the original Chinese (possibly Cantonese with Mandarin subtitles, but who knows?) and I don’t think I missed much of the plot. I enjoyed it immensely.