A Monk's Forty Years and the Mountain That Named a Nation's Buddha

The Leshan Giant Buddha, carved into the cliff face above the meeting point of the Min, Qingyi and Dadu rivers, began as the project of the monk Hai Tong, who started the carving in 713 hoping the statue's completed presence would calm the currents that made the river junction dangerous for boat traffic. Construction continued after his death, funded in a later stage by a regional military governor, and was not finished until 803, ninety years after the first work began, leaving the finished Buddha, at over seventy meters, the largest stone Buddha statue in the world.

Sichuan's other major claim on Chinese religious history sits closer to Chengdu, at Mount Qingcheng, an early center of the movement the second century teacher Zhang Daoling built into organized Daoism, a structure of ritual communities led by ordained priests carrying the title Celestial Master rather than the looser philosophical Daoism of earlier centuries. Qingcheng remains an active center of Daoist practice today, its temples continuing a religious lineage rooted in the same mountain since close to the movement's earliest years, a continuity of site that few other Chinese sacred mountains can claim across so long a span.