Emei's summit produces an optical effect that looks supernatural enough that pilgrims have described it in religious terms for centuries, and it has a mundane physical explanation.
The bodhisattva of practice
Mount Emei is venerated as the bodhimanda, or spiritual seat, of Samantabhadra, known in Chinese as Puxian, the bodhisattva associated with practice and meditation. A giant gilded statue of Samantabhadra with four faces and ten trunks, completed in 2005 atop the Golden Summit, depicts the bodhisattva riding six-tusked elephants in each direction, standing among the largest Buddhist statues built in modern China.
Buddha's light, explained
Visitors to the Golden Summit have long reported the Buddha's light, a coloured halo of light surrounding the shadow of one's own head, cast onto cloud or mist below the peak under the right sun angle. The effect is a form of the same optical phenomenon known elsewhere as a glory or Brocken spectre, produced by sunlight diffracting around water droplets, and it was read for centuries as a sign of enlightenment or blessing before its optical cause was understood.
Monkeys with a reputation
Emei's resident troops of Tibetan macaques are well known locally and among visitors for aggressively approaching pilgrims for food, a modern nuisance the mountain's older devotional literature has nothing to say about, since the behaviour reflects recent tourism pressure rather than any traditional element of the pilgrimage.