DAZU (Day 9 - part 1)

After disembarking at Chongqing, we met Allen, our local guide, and boarded a tour bus heading northwest. It was a 2 1/2 hour drive to the Baodinghan rock carvings in Dazu.


Chongqing is home to 6 million people. The haze comes from water steam from the river. Chongqing is one of the three famous "furnace cities."


The band plays its farewells.


A long and interesting dock leads us to shore.


A glimpse back at the Princess Sheena with the Chongqing skyline in the background


At the bus stop, a man receives an ear massage from a friend.

Scenes from the drive

Chongqing:


These buildings are built in the traditional style of local "hanging houses" which are built on wooden stilts.

In the ancient time, the caves occupied by the Ba and Chu native people were dark and damp and often under attack by the wild beasts. Shennong Shi, the tribe leader, taught them to build this style of house (known as Diaojiaolou) on the banks of the river.


More lovely architecture in the city. All of these buildings were built after WWII, since fire bombing completely destroyed the city.


Gardens and fountains


Very modern ramps and interchanges

On the road:


Working at the toll booth

Toll booths litter the expressways. They are meant to help pay for the new roads. At the end of 2008, there were 37,500 miles of expressways in China, the second-largest amount in the world after the United States, which has nearly 62,000 miles.


One must be flexible on the roads, which apparently includes freely using the lanes of oncoming traffic.


Lanes seem to be more for decoration than function.


A touch of comfort

Passing through Dazu:


A traffic circle statue


The traditional way of life still finds its way into the bustling city.

And finally on to the rock carvings:


Rice fields

Rice is usually planted in April and harvested in August. Sometimes a farmer will have two crops per year, and in south where it gets hot, that number can get up to three crops. There is no room on the mountains for rice, so usually potatoes and corn are grown instead.


Many of the houses are no longer poor. The children work in the cities and send money to their parents to build larger houses.

For our lunch break, we stopped at the small village that had grown up next to the famous rock carving area.


The Laifuyuan Hotel (or Hotle as it is written on the sign)


Inside the lobby


These impressive carvings are made from the roots of a tree.


More amazing woodwork

The Dazu or Baodingshan (meaning Mt. Baoding) rock carvings are a series of religious sculptures and carvings dating back as far as the 7th century. They reflect the three belief systems found in China at the times they were created: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism.

Listed as a UNESCO World cultural Heritage Site, the 75 protected areas contain some 50,000 statues and over 100,000 Chinese characters. The highlights are found on Mt. Baoding and Mt. Beishan. The earliest carvings were begun in the year 650 during the early Tang Dynasty, but the main period of their creation began in the late 9th century. At the end of the 12th century (1174 - 1252), during the Song Dynasty, a Buddhist monk named Zhao Zi Feng began work on the elaborate sculptures and carvings on Mt. Baoding, dedicating over 70 years of his life to the project.

The carvings were first opened to Chinese travelers in 1961 and foreign visitors in 1980. The isolation helped keep the art unharmed during the massive anti-religious vandalism of the Cultural Revolution.


The main entrance


A nearby pagoda

Start of the carvings on Mt. Baoding:

While similar carvings have a 2,000 year history, the 10,000 here are only 800 years old. However, since they were all designed by one person, they have a cohesiveness that other sites that were carved over the centuries by different hands lack.


God of the mountain (left) and the ancestor of Taoism (right)

Taoism (or Daoism) refers to a variety of related philosophical and religious traditions and concepts that have influenced East Asia for over 2,000 years. The word Tao means "path" or "way." Prime Taoist concepts are compassion, moderation, and humility. It also focuses on nature, human-cosmos correspondence, health, longevity, wu wei (action through inaction, such as how water which is soft and weak can move mountains and carve stone), liberty, immortality and spontaneity. Reverence for ancestor spirits and immortals are also common.


Mother of Earth


Emperor of Heaven


The lower two large symbols mean Long Life and Happiness.


This tablet describes how the monk Zhao Zi Feng carved this place.


A closer look


Sakyamuni (or Shakyamuni) is the Chinese name for the Buddha. Buddhism first arrived in China around the year 100.

Buddha is a title not a name. It means Awakened or Enlightened One. Everyone has the potential to attain total enlightenment, and many actually have.

The Buddha was Prince Siddhartha Gautama, born around 560 BC in Nepal. He is the key figure in Buddhism, with accounts of his life and teachings being passed down by oral tradition for about 400 years until they were eventually written down. After being married at age 16 to Princess Yasodhara and having a son, he left his home at the age of 29 to devote himself entirely to spiritual practices. After a while, he realized he should not go to extremes, such as starvation, but rather that he should adopt a happy medium or middle path.

The image of the Buddha varies greatly across different countries and time, however, the fat and jovial image is actually of a different Buddha named Hotei. Odds are he is modeled after a hefty travelling Zen monk who lived in China around 850.


Sakyamuni with Zhao Zi Feng perched on his head


This statue was painted blue in 1958.


View of the path ahead... Enlightenment and Guardians