Mount Emei

Emei is the tallest of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism at three thousand and ninety-nine metres, and the seat of Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva of practice, the one associated with putting the teaching into action rather than with wisdom or compassion. A gilded, multi-faced Samantabhadra on an elephant stands at the Golden Summit.

The claim to be first

Emei is claimed as the site of the first Buddhist temple built in China, in the first century CE.

The claim is traditional and is not settled archaeologically. It should be read as what the mountain holds about itself. The dating of Buddhism's arrival in China is genuinely uncertain, the earliest firm evidence is textual rather than architectural, and several sites make comparable claims.

That said, the mountain's Buddhist history is long by any measure, and some seventy-six Ming and Qing monasteries survive along its routes.

The climb

The pilgrim path runs about fifty kilometres and traditionally took several days, with monasteries offering lodging along the way.

Cable cars and a bus road now carry most visitors most of the way, which has changed the character of the ascent considerably, a mountain whose religious point was substantially the effort of climbing it can now be topped in an afternoon.

The macaques on the lower slopes are notoriously aggressive and are a genuine hazard.

Light on the summit

The Golden Summit is known for two optical phenomena that drew pilgrims long before they were explained: Buddha's Light, a glory, a coloured ring around the observer's own shadow cast on cloud below, and the Sacred Lamps, lights seen at night on the slopes.

The glory is understood physically now. It remains the case that a pilgrim who climbed for days and saw their own shadow ringed in light on the clouds beneath the summit had an experience the mountain's literature had prepared them for.

UNESCO inscribed Emei in 1996, together with the Leshan Giant Buddha at its foot, a seventy-one-metre Maitreya carved into a cliff over the eighth century to calm the river confluence below it, and the largest stone Buddha in the world.

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.