My father's cottage lay on the hillside, and there was a mountain behind the village, called Longtou Mountain.
Longtou Mountain consists of three mountains, from high to low, one next to the other, and the ridge is almost straight. Mountains are like dragon heads, and ridges are like dragon bodies. From a distance, Longtou Mountain really resembles a wandering dragon, with its dragon head rising high, dragging a long dragon body and hiding among the mountains of western Hunan Province. In the Xiangxi Global Geopark, this is a rare wonder.
An ancient temple on Longtou Mountain in Western Hunan Province. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
According to geologists, 380 million years ago, Longtou Mountain was hidden in the ocean, and the stone formation was about 500 million years ago. In other words, Longtou Mountain was formed in the Cambrian Period (542 million years ago - 485 million years ago). The basis for saying that 380 million years ago was still in the sea, is the Lingguan Mountain opposite Longtou Mountain, and there are still fossils of insect tubes, and the output layer is in the Devonian Period. This insect tube fossil was also formed in the Devonian Period (405 million years ago - 350 million years ago) 380 million years ago.
The altitude of Longtou Mountain is only 800 or 900 meters, the altitude of Lingguan Mountain is above 1,000 meters, and the fossil insect tube is also above 1,000 meters.
The more hundreds of millions of years have passed, the vicissitudes of the sea have become mulberry fields. To put it bluntly: the sea has withered, the stone is not rotten!
Today, Longtou Mountain is in the territory of Yongshun County, and Lingguan Mountain belongs to the scope of Baojing County, the two counties are bounded by rivers, and the streams on both sides crisscross and flow into the unitary water.
Locals introduce Longtou Mountain, mainly related to a large rock at the top of the shortest mountain of the Three Mountains. This large stone is hidden in the oak and cypress trees, and when you look at it, it is really like a raised dragon head, with a dragon nose, a dragon's mouth, a dragon's eye and a dragon's horn, etc., which are vivid. I remembered that the stone seemed to be often covered with red cloth. The disadvantage is that the right side of the dragon's mouth is missing, and the upper and lower jaws appear incongruous and symmetrical.
The myths and legends about Longtou Mountain are very interesting. Legend has it that this Dragon Head Mountain is very spiritual, during the day it lies on the mountain to rest, but at night it transforms, stirs up the wind, eats and drinks.
However, it was wrong that the dragon's mouth should not be facing the direction of Baojing, and the dragon's body was hidden in the mountains of Yongshun. "Eat Baojing, Gong Yongshun." The secret of Longtou Mountain, after being broken by Mr. Feng Shui, made the Baojing people unable to sleep at night. One month, on a dark and windy night, several dark shadows secretly climbed The Dragon Head Mountain and beat off the dragon's mouth with a hammer.
Legend has it that the people who lived under the Dragon Head Mountain, in the past three more in the middle of the night, could hear the dragon's groan, and suddenly there was no time, climbing up the mountain to see, the dragon's lower mouth fell to the side. Dog blood was also found on the faucet. The dog's bloody head, this is not a good thing, so I also asked Mr. Feng Shui to calculate, and soon knew what was going on.
Now that the dragon's mouth has been knocked out, let's try harder to catch it. Therefore, some unwilling Yongshun people asked the Taoist priest to do it and made up the dragon's mouth with a stone. It is said that no matter how hard people try, the dragon head never shows up again. Even the color of the dragon head has changed from gray-white to earthy brown, some people say that this is the infiltration of dog blood, and some people say that the dragon is dripping blood. There is also a saying that in order to make the dragon head too stiff, the locals built a temple next to it and invited the high monks to chant the sutra day and night.
Longtou Mountain has strange rocks such as dragon heads. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
This brown dragon head, this broken dragon's mouth, and the stone wall built with stone for the construction of the ancient temple, the stone steps and ancient roads to go up the mountain are all well preserved today.
Legends are legends after all. But after the locals said this, it was passed around, and slowly, it seemed to become a real thing. However, There is still a story about Longtou Mountain.
There is an ancient temple on the top of Longtou Mountain, and it is impossible to verify when it was built. Judging from the remaining stone walls, although small in scale, it is very grand.
After the renovation of the ancient temple of Longtou Mountain in Western Hunan Province. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
The last monk of the ancient temple, who is said to be called Wang Monk, did not leave until the early 1940s. When I was a child, I heard my uncle tell me that the monk Wang did not go out of the house, did not live in the temple, had a home, had a wife and children, lived by the well under the mountain, ploughed the fields and plowed the land to do farm work, and was proficient in everything. Someone came to burn incense and worship the Buddha, as long as they stood at the door of the temple and shouted loudly, the monk Wang put on his clothes and rushed to the temple to recite the words.
Things are busy, if you have money to collect money, you can send things without money. Monk Wang always carried such a basket on his back, back and forth, on call, very serious, very religious.
The uncle said that the monk Wang's nickname was "Six-Fingered Child", and he had a small finger on the side of the thumb of his right hand, which was very special. My uncle, who was born in 1928, said that when he was a child, he had seen The Monk Wang, who seemed to be a Baojing man, did not know his specific age, but remembered that he looked thin and thin.
The uncle said that he had listened to the elders and that the monk Wang began to come to Longtou Mountain, often not hiding his six fingers, and later stopped being seen. My uncle had seen the monk several times, but he didn't look at what his fingers looked like, because he either held them to his chest or put them in his sleeve. Later, my uncle heard that one night, for some reason, in the incense burner in front of Longtou Mountain, the monk Wang burned the sixth finger.
No one knew why the monk had burned that extra finger. In any case, this kind of gritted teeth pain is unbearable for ordinary people. Not long after, the monk who had burned off his fingers left, and his wife and children followed suit. I don't know where the family went.
When the monk wang left, the Temple of Longtou Mountain was deserted. In the 1960s and 1970s, some local people also went to the temple to transport stones to remove bricks and tiles, and soon the temple collapsed. In the 1980s, we used to herd cattle under Longtou Mountain, climb a lot, and at the top of the mountain, I still remember that there was a vice-uplink:
The distance is empty, the ear root into the path, to this mind.
The words were brush letters, black, written on the left side of the lime glutinous rice, the right side had fallen off, and there was nothing. Is this what the king monk left behind?
The Temple Hill Gate is made of stone and is still well preserved. There is also a pair of couplets at the mountain gate, and the right couplet is clearly written: the Golden Realm in the Middle Of the Tushi Realm. The left handwriting is blurry and cannot be seen clearly.
Until the video of Longtou Mountain was posted a few days ago, a netizen named Chen Ying in Guangxi told me that the left link should be: the Palace of the Fan King in the Lotus Flower.
I looked closely at the photo, and the first word was really "bi", and the last word was also "palace".
Jade Palace. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
I did not ask her too much, Baidu checked, it turned out that this is an ancient verse, the author is the sixth emperor of the Jin Dynasty, Yan Jing (1168-1208). Yan Jing, also known as Jin Zhangzong, only lived forty years and reigned for twenty years. The "Rule of Mingchang" he created was the most prosperous period of the Jin Dynasty.
Could it be that the temple on Longtou Mountain was built at this time? At that time, Longtou Mountain belonged to the Southern Song Dynasty, and the relationship between the Song and Jin dynasties was also good at that time. Well, leaving aside the founding time of the temple, after saying that Yan Jing's verses can appear on Longtou Mountain, it can be seen that the knowledge of the temple cultivators is extraordinary.
For a period of time, locals talked about Longtou Mountain, always saying that it was remote, backward, inconvenient transportation, etc., in fact, looking at the thick history books, this place is not so closed.
During the Xiangxi Tusi period, Longtou Mountain was surrounded by nanwei prefectures, one of the three Tuzhi prefectures under the jurisdiction of Yongshun Tusi. The Yongshun Fu Zhi has clouds: "Nanwei Prefecture, Song is Zhongxi Prefecture, and later Nanwei Prefecture." ”
In 1017, Qin Yunzan, who was engraved in the inscription of "Xizhou Copper Pillar", is the earliest Nanwei Zhizhou in history.
Nanwei is on the shore of the Unitary River, surrounded by water on three sides, building a city by the mountains, and the dragon and the tiger are standing. Among the military forces of Theoji in western Hunan Province, the water army is the most important. Turning over the thick history of the Ming Dynasty, whether it is the water battle between Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youyi poyang Lake, or the bloody battle of Xiangxi Tusi in the southeast of the War of Resistance against the Wu Dynasty, there are records of the great achievements of the Nanwei Water Army.
In 1366, when Zhu Yuanzhang's great cause was initially decided, and he had just begun to build an imperial palace in Nanjing, Peng Jinsheng of Nanwei Zhizhou, as a sign of loyalty, offered Nanmu to the imperial court. This pioneering feat shocked the government and the public.
Yes, no matter how the situation changes outside, Xiangxi Toast's loyalty to the country remains unchanged, and it has always made the right choice at a critical moment in history.
In 1680, at Chenlongguan in present-day Yuanling County, it was Peng Linggao of Nanwei Zhizhou who led his troops to encircle and suppress the main force of Wu Sangui's rebels from Jiandao and conquer Chenlongguan in one fell swoop. The "Great Victory of ChenlongGuan" made the Kangxi Emperor Long Yan Great Yue, and awarded a seal of Yongshun Xuanweisi for his merits. This seal is still well preserved in the World Cultural Heritage Museum of Laosicheng Ruins, which is a national first-class cultural relic.
Time passes. When looking up at the brilliant starry sky on the land of western Hunan Province, people may be deeply shocked by the echoes brought by history.
Today, the area around Nanwei Prefecture has been changed to Nanwei Village, a village under the jurisdiction of The Zejia Town of Longtou Mountain, and most of the villagers are surnamed Peng, claiming to be descendants of Toast. Some people also say that it may be that during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, after achieving the great victory of Chenlongguan, Peng Linggao of Nanwei Tuzhi Prefecture began to major in the Longtou Mountain Temple. The reason given is that both the Jin Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty were founded by the Jurchens. Peng Linggao had a close relationship with the Qing Dynasty, and because of this, he gradually learned and spread the Jurchen culture. The Jin Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty were in the same period, and due to historical reasons, in the Ming Dynasty, it is unlikely that his poems appeared on Longtou Mountain.
Searching for the truth in the vast history is a hard work, but the remaining couplet in front of the Longtou Mountain Temple gives people unlimited reverie.
In recent years, the collapsed LongtouShan Ancient Temple has been newly built. The mountain gate did not move, the foundation remained unchanged, and even the remnants of the wall did not move, repairing the old as old.
The main practitioner was a young entrepreneur who went out under Longtou Mountain, a big filial piety who did not want to be named, and my classmates in junior high school. It is said that my classmate's mother fell ill a few years ago, and went to Jishou and Changsha to seek medical treatment, but they all thought it was a terminal illness and could not be cured. In the days of companionship, the old mother told her son that she was only seventy-seven years old, and in such a good society, she did not even live to be eighty years old, and she couldn't figure it out.
She began to reminisce about life, hoping to find reason and comfort in the "reincarnation" she recognized. The old lady was a devout Buddhist, and looking back on the past, she said that when she was young, she went to the Temple of Longtou Mountain to carry bricks and tiles, did she offend the bodhisattva because of this? So, she told her son that she hoped to fulfill her wish to repair the temple on Longtou Mountain. The son agreed with all his mouth, said he would do it, and with some good men and women, it was completed in less than two years.
After everything was completed, my classmate did not even leave a name, nor did the inscription, but only told her mother that her wish was fulfilled. It is also miraculous to say that the doctor thought that the old lady could only live for half a year at most, but she insisted on it for more than three years and lived past the age of eighty before she died.
There are gods three feet above the head. Some people say that this is the result of the old man's accumulation of virtue and good deeds, some people say that the bodhisattva of Longtou Mountain blessed her, and some people say that this is superstition...
In short, the temple of Longtou Mountain was restored, a great project that ordinary people had done to fulfill some of his wishes. The old man is gone, but it seems that he has always lived in the memory of the locals.
From the direction of Baojing, Longtou Mountain is like an eagle spreading its wings. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
Not long ago, we went to Longtou Mountain, and along the way, my father also told me about this old man, saying that she was a kind person, a person who usually spoke softly...
I called my old classmate, and he was reluctant to talk too much about it, but just said: In life, you always have to do some good deeds that your parents want to do.
"Be good to yourself and be good to others." Everyone is good, and they are on the other side. As we chatted, I couldn't help but think of this poem. This poem is carved on the stone wall of Buermen, which is a national forest park, just next to the city of Yongshun County, on the banks of the Mengdong River. Longdusan mountain is about 30 kilometers away from Buermen, not far away. However, from Longtou Mountain to Baojing County, it seems to be closer, only more than 20 kilometers by car.
Father's cottage, forever concerned. Photo/ I came from Xiangxi
Looking at Longtou Mountain from the direction of Baojing, the three mountains are staggered, like a beautiful pen holder. The car turned another corner, and the three mountains were hidden in a straight line in the mountains, revealing only the highest mountain, like an eagle spreading its wings.
"Horizontally, it is a peak on the side of the ridge, and the height of the distance is different." But no matter where you look at it, my father's cottage is under the Dragon Head Mountain, which is my eternal concern and lifelong love.
Text/I came from Xiangxi