The Leshan Giant Buddha

A monk walked from village to village, holding a bowl in both hands.

He was not asking for rice. He was asking for money. Some households dropped a few small coins into his bowl. Some gave more. Some only stood at the door, looked at him for a while, and shook their heads. He thanked them all the same, then went back to the road and on to the next village. This did not go on for a few months. It went on for many long years.

And here is the strange part. Whatever he was saving for, coin by coin, almost certainly none of the people who gave would live to see it finished. Not even the monk himself.

The reason lay at a meeting of rivers.

In the Leshan area, there is a place where three rivers rush toward a single point. Leshan lies in Sichuan, a province of China. The Min River flows down, the Dadu and the Qingyi pour in, and all three meet right below a cliff of red rock. They do not merge gently. They crash into one another, roll over, spin in whirlpools, throw the water up and drag it down. Boats passing that stretch had to take their chances. Some made it through. Some did not.

The monk's name was Haitong. He lived right beside that stretch of river, and he had seen it happen often enough to dream up a plan that nobody could believe at first hearing.

He wanted to carve a statue into the very cliff that looked down on the meeting of the rivers. It would show Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. It would not be a statue on a pedestal inside a temple. He wanted to cut straight into the mountain, taking the stone away until the shape of a seated Buddha appeared inside it. He wanted the statue to be 71 meters tall.

That is the height of a building of more than 20 stories. Only this building would not be built up. It would be carved out of a mountain that was already there. And the man behind it was asking for money, coin by coin, with a bowl.

People in later generations told a story about him. No matter who demanded it, he refused to let anyone touch the money set aside for the statue. That story passed by word of mouth through many generations, so it is best heard as just that. The work itself began in 713, when the first chisel blows struck the cliff.

The workers hung from the side of the mountain and carved from the top down. The rock broke away in slabs, slid down the slope, and splashed into the river. First came the top of the head. Then the forehead, then the eyes, then the nose, then the mouth. Then the shoulders.

Haitong died when the work had reached that point.

So he lived to see a great face emerge from the cliff, and below that face there was still only mountain. No hands yet. No feet. Nothing at all.

His disciples carried on. A high official of the region gave money to help, and the work went on for a long stretch. It had been carved down to the knees when it came to a halt and the workers drifted away. The statue sat there unfinished, and rain and sun passed over it as they would over any ordinary cliff. Only about 70 years after the work began did a regional governor named Wei Gao call the workers back to finish the job. In 803, the statue was complete. From the first chisel blow to the last took nearly a century. That is long enough for a child to be born, grow up, grow old and die, with the work still not done.

What emerged after all that time is a seated Buddha, hands resting on the knees, feet set down right at the water's edge. The head is 14.7 meters tall and 10 meters wide. The ears are 7 meters long. A single finger is 8.3 meters long, almost the length of two cars parked end to end. The top of the foot is 8.5 meters wide, so wide that about a hundred people could sit on it together.

But the best detail of the statue is one that cannot be seen from the river below.

The hair is made of spiral curls, more than a thousand of them. Each curl is pieced together from separate stones rather than shaped as one solid mass. Each is fitted so tightly to the head that it seems to grow out of the rock. Hidden among those curls are channels. More channels lie in the collar of the robe, across the chest, and behind the two ears. A hollow there opens into a passage inside. Sichuan rain falling on the head follows those channels, flows around the back, and pours down the mountain, instead of pooling and slowly eating into the stone.

That drainage system was made more than 1,200 years ago. It is still working.

As for the river, the story ended in a way even Haitong had not planned.

Over that near century, mountains of stone cut from the cliff had to go somewhere. They went into the river. Day after day, slabs large and small kept tumbling down and piling up on the riverbed, right at the whirlpools. The river grew shallower, the shape of its bed changed, and the current had to change with it. The fierce churning of the old days eased. Boats really did pass that stretch more easily.

He had meant to calm the water with a statue. In the end, the water calmed because of the rubble the statue left behind.

Long ago, people also raised a 13-story wooden building over the statue, to shelter it from rain and sun. That roof is gone now. The statue sits in the open air, through rain and sun for generation after generation. It is still whole, thanks to the channels hidden in its hair. In 1996, the statue was added to the World Heritage List.

In Vietnam, too, people know the feeling of standing beneath a giant statue. One stands on the Sơn Trà Peninsula in Da Nang, at Linh Ứng Bãi Bụt Pagoda. It shows Quan Thế Âm, the bodhisattva of compassion. It is 67 meters tall, only a few meters shorter than the statue at the meeting of the rivers. The two are nearly the same height, but they were made in completely opposite ways. One was built up, layer upon layer of material stacked from the bottom to the top. The other was taken away, slab after slab of rock peeled from a mountain until what remained was the statue itself.

Today boats still pass every day where the three rivers meet at Leshan. They glide past two stone feet as big as a whole courtyard, over water made gentle by the very stones that fell from above. And no one on those boats ever met the man with the bowl, who walked from village to village, asking coin by coin for a work that one lifetime was not long enough to finish.