James Baquet

    jamesbaquet@gmail.com

    ASIDE from a new hall and the general mountain freshness of Gaoming (“High Bright”) Temple, two features really stood out.

    The first was an especially delightful collection of 500 arhats. While some such groupings are static, staid, and frankly a little boring, this one was hilarious, showing the arhats interacting in humorous ways. Musicians playing their hearts out; a pair of kick-boxers; a raucous tea party; ear-tugging, joke-telling, prank-pulling, tickling. They were arranged in two halls, one upstairs from the other; I could have spent hours there.

    The other attraction was harder to find. We had heard of a statue of Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, newly carved in natural stone. But we couldn’t find it. Finally we met a monk who led us out of the tower courtyard and down a kilometer-long mountain path, through several side trips to view rocks and caves of various descriptions, until we reached a “shiny” carving in a spectacular setting overlooking mountains and valleys. The venerable monk’s incredible kindness was well appreciated.

    Traveling back down the mountain, we stopped at Zhizhe Tayuan, site of a pagoda with the remains of Zhiyi, founder of Tiantai Buddhism. (He had died in front of the Great Buddha in Xinchang.) We climbed up a small hill to the compound, and found the pagoda in a small hall inside a courtyard.