Leshan Giant Buddha and Oriental Park - China

Leshan Giant Buddha and Oriental Park - China

Leshan a bustling city buried deep within the heart of mainland China if you've come this far like we have chances are you're here to see the Leshan giant buddha sitting along the banks of the Menon dadoo rivers this  foot masterpiece is simply stunning it is 10 stories tall making it the single largest Buddhist statue in the world and if it were standing it would be as tall as a Statue of Liberty but this massive marvel is far from the only one in the area oriental buddha park as we discovered spans hundreds of feet underground and holds over 3,000 individual statues carvings and depictions of the buddha it was an incredible discovery but to tell you the whole story we have to go back to the beginning starting with a taxi ride and a ticket booth we're trying to get ahead of all the tourist groups right now the reasoning behind that is that the line to go down and see the Buddha is insanely long at times throughout the day which means you can be standing the line for up to two to three hours we don't really want to do that so if we can avoid it all is the better okay fingers crossed volition Buddha here meets at the confluence three major rivers here in leshan the Buddhist month that started building it died but its followers completed it and he originally built it to try to bless the waters here shipping vessels and stuff that used to come down these areas would have a hard time navigating the waters and crashed and all sorts of stuff like that anyways because of all the deposit from the rocks out into the water from building it and actually did change the course of the river making it easier for the ships to navigate the confluence here so it actually worked getting into it now it's a nice wet day it's supposed to rain the whole city's covered in a mist out this way it was all clear yesterday which is really cool to see this is all it's like three major rivers right here and a little island all meeting up and it's muggy as hell but still nice thankfully. 

It only took about 30 minutes of standing alone to get to the bottom I know that sounds like a long time and it is but once we made it down we were blown away by what we were seeing carve straight into the cliffside giant doesn't even begin to describe this thing and we noticed some details up close that we're pretty cool there's a built-in drainage system around the head and chest allowing rain to flow around and keeping the inner areas dry it's been renovated several times over its 1200 year lifetime and even used to have a giant wooden housing around it until the Mongols tore it down in the 13th 40s and so having seen what we came here to see we were all done that's it we were ready to head home or so we thought okay so we knew there was a lunch of stuff going on here at the leshan Buddha site but we kind of stumbled on some stuff that we weren't expecting apparently there's this whole other section that we're about to see that we didn't even know about about this giant lying down Buddha and all these other statues in the cave and according to the signage there's something like thousands some odd depictions of the Buddha along this path including the bigger ones cut a little a little treat with our meal today so we're heading on in or down and we don't really know exactly what to expect other than the pictures we saw at the entrance here we paid 80 yuan on top of our tickets earlier but just from the pictures if it's anything like that it looks like it's going to be totally worth it around this corner hot it was totally worth it we couldn't believe what we were seeing right in front of us were more towering statues that welcomed us into the caves off to the side, once we got in, we found several detailed carvings each depicting some aspect of a Buddha's life and they were full scenes of mountains and clouds covering the entire walls sometimes but the most amazing of these was the thousand hands Quan Yin, she's the 

Bodhisattva of compassion and each hand is posed slightly differently or holding various objects reaching out to those in need around the world one of my personal favorites is the murals were simply stunning but I have to admit those weren't the only walls that interested us and look how it goes like it's shifting it's like they came in and went you know what I mean yeah they did it in layers almost and every spacing it's exactly the same and these are the same kind of cuts that you see all over the world and caves and stone working. it's hard to believe that this was done by hand for it to be this regular and the spacing and the lines but then on top, they got spacing like somebody went down it with a like saw or something, it's all the exact same spacing and its pretty wild the size and scale. The statues are amazing some of these are just enormous and there are so many of them all over the park. 

We can't even imagine the amount of time that it took to create these and we'll check that map to figure out what to see next as all these amazing carvings and incredibly well-preserved. In the hollowed-out cave of statues that are 3040 feet high carved has incredible detail, straight out of the rock and it keeps going. A lot of this we are going to have to tell you about the post maybe half the size of the other Buddha but the detail and a cave on a hole about the shining light on it and by this point we've seen some impressive things but nothing could have prepared us for this next chamber colossal walls lined on both sides with hundreds if not thousands of individual land intricate figures stretching on and on. 

The wheel of samsara is a representation of the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation but even it was still only one of many different incredible depictions in this room this cave system is massive - what I mean is we just keep coming upon like amazing structure after amazing structure and these things are just enormous what it's hard to describe how like massive this all of these things are but it's kind of dizzying standing up post and this is all inside of a cave system.  With every square inch of this place that's really been amazing but oriental buddha park still had one last surprise left in store the incredible sleeping Buddha stretching out across 500 feet of cliffside and tucked in nicely by the trees surrounding it this gargantuan statue is also carved straight out of the mountain the head alone is over 50 feet tall and has individually spiral curls, just like the giant Buddha to us this statue perfectly captured the peaceful nature of leshan this park everything we had seen that day one thing I'm about a lot of these places you got to keep in mind is if you're walking down or walking up you're gonna have to come back the same way and there's a lot of stairs in China so while most of the places are pretty easy to do in a day or something even for somebody with is not in like peak physical condition if you're doing if you have this tight of a schedule as we do I mean you're walking like we've been averaging I think between you know for like the first week we were doing like 15 miles a day and most of all of that was uphill climbing so just be prepared for that if you have a packed schedule honestly if you're vacationing my recommendation would be to stay in one place for four or five days.