Scaling the Heights of Buddhist History

The drizzling clouds sprinkling our mini-van began to thin, and we thought our gear-grinding haul up this Shanxi Province dirt-track to Dong Tai Temple was about to end. Instead, a little man posted mid-track appeared from beneath his umbrella to tell us the path ahead had collapsed and that we had to make a detour.

A further snail's-pace hour of our being overtaken by goats went by until the mists succumbed to a roaring blue sky, and we were welcomed to the double-eaves of Dong Tai by a crowd of fortune tellers, monks, peddlers and largely polite seekers of hand-outs. Our Beijing group instantly felt a great top-of-the-world exhilaration, seeing and feeling the spiritual splendour of Wutai Shan and its four other peaks set like architectural jewels in fringes of cloud.

Wutai Shan, equally well known as Five-terrace Mountain, is one of China's four Buddhist mountains. Strung across its ridges and valleys is a stunning collection of temples, monasteries, chertens and palaces developed over 2,000 years. The area became religiously significant around AD60, when an Indian monk had a vision of the Manjusari Buddha, the Bodhisattva that Wutai Shan is devoted to. The first monastery was founded under Emperor Ming Di in AD69. Huge development was undertaken by the Wei people from northern China between 386 and 535, after which Buddhism became the state religion. Pilgrims came from kingdoms as far distant as Indonesia, Cambodia and India. Two-hundred further sites blossomed during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Currently the mountain has 50 or so temples and monasteries, a less impressive number than in earlier times but still enough to spoil visitors for choice. Wutai Shan's rugged inaccessibility may have partly saved it from history's periodic ravages, but the difficulty in getting there continues to thin today's number of visitors. Meanwhile, renovations and restorations temporarily slightly reduce the choice of must-sees for visitors, so don'st spend hours heading for this or that temple or monastery until you are sure you are not, in fact, heading for little more than a building site.

Fifteen sites are in Tai Huai, basically a dusty strip of hotels, restaurants, bauble shops and taxis that troughs the 3,000-metre crests of these holiest of hills. The five peaks orbit this one-road town, now the joint resting-up place for travellers and main springboard, by foot, horse, car (or ski-lift to Dailuo Peak), for the sites.

Over two days, our party saw so many - but nowhere near enough. This was no surprise, for original pilgrims supposedly took two years, on foot, to visit every site. Of note is Nanshan Si, a working monastery combining three temples, 3km south of Tai Huai. A track flanked by gift stalls eventually climbs to an impressive, 100-step staircase. Nanshan is an hutong-like maze of alleys and buildings, rising and dipping as it cuts up a hillside pocked with nooks, crannies, stairs, doorways and courtyards dating back to the 13th century.

Declining offers of horses, we strolled back to town and the Tai Yuan Si Dagoba, whose centerpiece is a 50-metre-high dagoba with Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist influence. Beyond lies the massive 400-room Xiantong Si, dating back to Eastern Han but mainly built during Ming and Qing. Its Hall of Bronze is worth a day's viewing all on its own; the same could almost be said about a hall containing small, black, bizarre stone figurines representing great Lamas of the past. At the Luohou temple, the Buddha is inside a lotus flower, with the flower petals breathing in and out.

The trinket-sellers and restaurateurs of Tai Huai work hard in trying to relieve visitors of money, which is fair enough. But it grated when our taxi driver, having agreed a price, was given a 20-minute tongue-lashing by a bunch of locals for having apparently charged us too little. The incident soured what had been a pleasant visit overall.

But such irritations pale into insignificance against the wonders of Wutai Shan and the area's general environment. Happily there is no sign of the slag heaps that dot other areas of coal-producing Shanxi. The hills are green and clean, the air so pure it tastes like fresh water from a mountain stream. And breezes trigger a perfect aural backdrop of chimes from the 250 bells of Taiyuan Si Dagoba, the town's symbol. It is idyllic beyond measure.