Surging News reporter Ge Mingning
Liu Mingli sometimes went up the mountain alone and looked up at the big Buddha in the village.
He thought that the lighting should be better, and the face of the Buddha hidden in the grotto was a little dark. He is the village party secretary of the location of the big Buddha, in Helin Village, Longtai Town, Anyue County, Ziyang, Sichuan. He often went to worship this Buddha when he was a child. As a native of his village, he was always worried that the villagers of his fellow village would destroy the artifact out of the same love.
It is said that the Great Buddha built in the Southern Song Dynasty is about six meters tall, with a delicate posture, the left hand is slightly drooping, making a gesture of giving alms to others, the thumb and index finger of the right hand are sandwiched together, and the eyes are indifferent in the slender eyelids.
In the 80s of the last century, when the management of cultural relics was not standardized, the villagers "dressed" the Buddha in a golden robe, and the exposed skin was also painted gold, and the heavy color covered the details of the stone carvings that should have been more complex. After forty years, the golden pigment on the Buddha's body begins to fall off, and parts of it can be peeled off, like peeling a walnut. Some old people have already chatted with Liu Mingli and want to re-apply makeup to the Buddha, but Liu Mingli can only dissuade him bitterly.
In November, a stone sculpture carved in the Northern Wei Dynasty in Nanjiang County, Sichuan Province, was "painted" by local villagers, causing widespread attention. In addition, a case of Buddha head theft in Anyue County in 2017 also gave Liu Mingli a lot of psychological pressure. Therefore, except for the traditional days of the first and fifteenth days of the new month, he instructed the temple keepers to lock the temple door tightly.
In Anyue County, where there are many ancient stone carvings, the local countryside is mired in aging and traditional Xi, and has not tasted the sweetness of income from tourism, which makes grassroots cadres who are interested in protecting ancient Buddha statues feel troubled and difficult.
The Big Buddha that was locked up The pictures in this article are all pictures of The Paper reporter Ge Mingning
The temple in the village, the Buddha for everyone
Around the above-mentioned big Buddha, you can see a small temple in an average of one or two kilometers.
The local people of Anyue have the Xi of raising funds to build temples, and the temple belongs to everyone, and this Xi custom has been at least since the former Qing Dynasty.
An old man recalled to the surging news reporter that there was a stone tablet in the village in the past, which was engraved with the name of the person and the "silver few hundred taels" donated separately, which was bragging, "I saw it when I was a child, and there were only 'a few taels of silver'." Later, the stone tablet recording the merits disappeared.
A bag of rice, vermicelli, tofu...... Recent donations, including in-kind and tens or hundreds of yuan in cash, were recorded on the blackboard in front of a temple gate one by one. The temple used the money to repair the road leading to the temple and install street lights.
There are no antiquities in some small temples, but as a temporary activity point for Buddhism, the person in charge also has to participate in the training organized by the Ziyang Buddhist Association every year, and one of the training contents is "not to embezzle money".
Li Ming (not his real name), the person in charge of a small temple who has lived here all his life, said that in the past, the temples were personally managed by the head of the rural production team. In order to build a temple, he and his friends went around to see other big temples and invited craftsmen to come back.
However, what new statues are added can only be decided by the people who donate money to build them. Therefore, these temples do not seem to have any overall planning, there are Guanyin of the South China Sea, there are also Guanyin, and there are gods who manage fish and pigs on the ground, crowded and crowded.
The renovation of the temple requires continuous investment. Li Ming recalled that in 2013 and 2023, Anyue had two floods in ten years, both of which washed the temple to a mess. They just hired a dozen workers this year to repair it for two days.
In normal times, people worship these gods, and the temple has to be overhauled once every two or three years, and the statues of the gods are painted and "worn with gold". For the wishes expressed to the gods and Buddhas, the villagers often have to make vows. The most common is to drape idols of different sizes with red cloth, and the price of a foot has risen from a few cents a few decades ago to more than one piece now. There is a special kitchen at the entrance of some temples, on the first and fifteenth day of the lunar month, people in the vicinity burn incense together, and then get together, eat a vegetarian meal, and get together.
In the past few months, Fan Jinyu, who lives in Longtai Town, has been actively eating for the Big Buddha. She is 69 years old this year, just stopped from her extremely difficult life, to catch her breath - before returning to Anyue's hometown to "retire", she went to Lhasa to work for 20 years, first in the construction site ash and then in a vegetable greenhouse, the place was too cold in winter, she was so cold that her hands were full of cold, and later, she returned to Anyue to take her grandson. Now, the grandson doesn't have to watch all day. At the end of November, Anyue's specialty lemons ushered in a bumper harvest, and she went to odd jobs to remove the paper bags for shading the mountains of lemons.
If you want to say where the magic of the Buddha is, in the eyes of the people in the temple, Fan Jinyu's five grandchildren have all grown up clean and healthy - the Buddha is effective.
Fan Jinyu is not from Helin Village. According to her recollection, more than 30 years ago, a close relative introduced her to worship the Buddha here. At that time, she had not yet gone to Lhasa to work, and her family opened a small rice grinding workshop, which was very hard and difficult to do. She walked for two hours on a dirt road and prayed to the Big Buddha. Now, every year on the eve of the Chinese New Year, she still climbs up the ladder and scrubs the Buddha's golden face with a clean towel.
She is "bold and determined", and she is not afraid to climb to a height of six meters, nor is she afraid to get close to the Buddha's big face. She believes that "it protects us".
In recent years, it has been revealed that a cultural relic has been prayed for by believers who have "made up" according to Xi without authorization. When asked if she wanted to give the Buddha makeup, she said that she couldn't invite that kind of master now, just invite a craftsman, and the Buddha's face would be flowered, leaving a scar, and Secretary Liu would not let it.
When Liu Mingli heard this, he reiterated to her that makeup is harmful to the Buddha, harms the value of the Buddha's cultural relics, and will also harm the local economic outlet.
The Regulations on the Protection of Anyue Stone Carvings in Ziyang City, which came into effect in February 2019, stipulate that "anyone who repairs, adds, engravings or reshapes Anyue stone carvings without authorization" can be fined up to 500,000 yuan. After Liu Mingli moved out of the regulations, he continued, if he did not obey: "I will not allow you to come to worship in the future." ”
Who will take care of the Buddha
One of Fan Jinyu's sons and two daughters stayed in Lhasa to do business.
It's almost the New Year. When they returned home, Fan Jinyu asked them to worship the Buddha, praying that they would make money in the coming year, and the whole family would be prosperous, and there would be no "mother-in-law" and no noise.
In Liu Mingli's eyes, the Big Buddha is an important landscape in Longtai Town, and there are always people who go to the temple gate to dance the dam dance, but now, there are fewer young people who worship the Buddha, and only a few people who fall in love still come to pray.
The countryside in this area is visibly hollowing out, and the stalls that should be noisy are silent. Many people's doors are pasted, "Wealth is like the rising sun, and wealth is like a spring tide coming at will", but the door is empty, and people have left.
Liu Mingli is very ambivalent about the rise and fall of popularity in the temple. There used to be some "fairy maidens" in the temple to burn paper for people to pray for blessings, and burned the charms into water for people to drink, he thought it was a deception, and all of them were driven away; the people nearby used to "hang red" for the big Buddha, and the beams were all red cloths dedicated to it, layer upon layer. Liu Mingli commanded people to take it down. He thought that if a piece of cloth was set on fire, the entire temple would be burned in an instant, and the local tradition also included burning paper in front of the statue of the deity, believing that the closer the prostrate one was, the more devout it appeared, and that years of incense had blackened the feet of the Buddha, and it was forbidden to burn paper close to it.
On November 29, Liu Mingli saw a plastic shell wrapped in Buddha incense in front of the Big Buddha, and he was anxious again: "Someone inside burns incense, I must scold him." Liu Dengkui, the temple keeper, argued that someone opened the plastic packaging of the incense, first took it to worship in front of the Buddha, and then took it out of the room to light it.
Liu Dengkui and his hut guarding the temple
Liu Dengkui, 59, is one of the youngest people who lives in the village. He said that the local government gave the Buddha a monthly fund of 500 yuan, and he and four other people took turns to be on duty. He slept in the old hut next to the Big Buddha on the night shift. When he was a child, he would come here to hunt pigweed, and the children would play and drill around in the hollowed-out piece behind the Buddha.
Liu Mingli is a "post-70s", his grandfather believes in Buddhism, and he also brought him to worship Buddha when he was young. He felt that the Buddha was "very powerful" and could not look at it directly. The Big Buddha lost his nose and several fingers during the Cultural Revolution. After the end of the "Cultural Revolution", the village pooled money to build a temple and paint gold on the Buddha according to tradition, and the participating craftsmen also collected very little money out of affection. Liu Mingli remembered that before he graduated from primary school, he helped the temple keep accounts.
When he was in high school in the town, the head teacher asked him to write a social investigation report, he wanted to write "Protecting the Anyue Stone Carvings", for this matter, he returned to the village, carefully observed the Buddha, only to find that the Buddha was smiling, not "mighty".
Liu Mingli later went south to Guangdong with the tide of migrant workers, and according to his Xi, he also came to kowtow during the New Year and pray for peace and prosperity.
He said that in 2017, because he loved his hometown, he returned to his hometown to start a business and became a village cadre. Like other fellow villagers who went to the coastal areas to see the world when they were young, Liu Mingli imagined many ideas for developing the countryside, such as planting red seed trees in some places and pear trees in some places, rebuilding roads for jogging and cycling, and building a field on top of the Big Buddha to play "live CS" and simulate field battles......
He believes that the center of all attractions should be the Big Buddha, and a plaster replica of the Big Buddha should be made so that tourists can take pictures with it freely.
But now, he doesn't dare to look for money and publicity, and if someone wants to come to the door to observe, he doesn't necessarily pay attention to it, for fear of being robbed.
In 2017, at the cliff statue of Muyu Mountain, which also belongs to Anyue County, someone cut off the Buddha's head and prepared to steal it, and the 58-year-old wife of the clerk was injured when she stopped it. Afterwards, the thief was caught, and the Buddha's head was found in the ditch.
A few years ago, Huang Zhaofu, an eighty-year-old man, guarded the temple alone. Liu Mingli was very uneasy, always thinking that if someone came to steal the Buddha's head, just push the old man to the ground - even Liu Dengkui couldn't bear it, and the two of them would be subdued - the key is that Huang Zhaofu doesn't like to answer the phone. At night, Liu Mingli looked at his mobile phone, thinking about the Big Buddha and the eighty-year-old man.
Liu Dengkui also recalled that Huang Zhaofu was worried that he was getting old: "I'm afraid that one day I will die on the slope and no one will bury it." ”
Huang Zhaofu has now moved to Chongqing to live with his son and no longer guards the temple. Recalled, Fan Jinyu said that Huang Zhaofu once wanted to mold a "longevity bodhisattva", but later the money was not enough and was not molded.
Sustenance, damage
No pilgrim knows why the Big Buddha and the "little monk" next to him have been looking at each other for a long time.
Fan Jinyu has always believed that the little monk on the right hand side "is standing guard for the Buddha", and some people think that they are "learning scriptures from the west". Huang Zhaofu understood a little and told Liu Mingli that the one on the right of the Buddha is one of the ten disciples, Ka Ye, and the one on the left who has been annihilated is Ananda.
One view is that the big Buddha in Helin Village, together with the nearby Fengmen Temple Big Buddha, and one of the caves in the Yuanjue Cave on the edge of Anyue County, all show the Buddhist allusion "smiling with flowers" - the Buddha is holding flowers, and many viewers are at a loss, only Ka Ye is smiling, so the Buddha passed on the Zen mind method that transcends language to him. It's just that all known Buddha statues, this flower is not in the Buddha's hand. Some Buddha's hands have been destroyed in history, and the gestures are different after repair. The aforementioned view is also difficult to prove.
A senior volunteer for the protection of Anyue stone carvings told The Paper that it is difficult to repair Sichuan stone carvings after folk makeup, because the local sand and stone are soft, and when trying to peel off the paint and cement repair, the cultural relics will peel off and be damaged together, and it is difficult to say whether the painting and plasticization, especially some cultural relics that have not been graded or have not been found by the official at all, constitute "damaged cultural relics" in the "crime of obstructing the management of cultural relics" in the Criminal Law.
The number of Anyue stone carvings is very large, the location is scattered, and the gods are hidden in the mountains.
As a provincial-level cultural protection unit, the Big Buddha Temple and Sanxian Cave in Gaosheng Township are about 20 kilometers away from the Big Buddha in Helin Village. The Big Buddha Temple was built in the Northern Song Dynasty, three Buddha statues sit cross-legged, with a compassionate and solemn expression, and the main body of the Three Immortal Caves is the Taoist gods carved in the Ming Dynasty, which is more lively and agile.
In the Sanxian Cave, the surging news reporter found the basis for the local continuous repair and sculpture of new statues. The inscription is the stone tablet engraved in the first year of the Ming Dynasty's Apocalypse, and the original intention of building the cave is, "three holes on the left and right, a few partial buildings, in order to become three religions", which means that it hopes to carry the three beliefs of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and then, it is also the name of the donor.
The Three Immortal Caves were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and repainted in the eighties.
Ordinary people prefer the Three Immortal Caves. On the first and fifteenth days of the new year, there are three or four tables in the Big Buddha Temple, and more than a dozen tables can be placed in the Three Immortal Caves. According to the analysis of the above-mentioned volunteers, although the Sanxian Cave is hidden in the deep mountains, it is located in the population gathering place of a village, and some elderly people are Xi to playing cards here, which is lively and lively.
They need to place their spiritual sustenance in the "village temple". Under the gods, thirty or forty years ago, the villagers added Erlang God and Wenchang Emperor, the latter may also be Confucius, it is impossible to say - the old people who are "fighting the landlord" laughed and said that the Sichuan people love Erlang God and think that he is the son of Li Bing of Jiangyan, the capital of Xiudu.
Locals are required to place spiritual sustenance in the "village temple", including a stone lion with rice in its mouth as part of the ritual.
Locals are required to place spiritual sustenance in the "village temple", including a stone lion with rice in its mouth as part of the ritual.
Locals recalled that the cultural protection leaders who came to inspect said, "If you don't wear makeup, it must be a national security (national protection unit)." ”
The volunteer told reporters that according to his observations, some village cadres lack the will to protect cultural relics. In recent years, some precious cultural relics have been found from time to time, and the process cannot be completed for a while, and the status of "national security" and "provincial security" cannot be obtained, and the cadres in charge of tourism in the county can not give a word of "valuable". To protect these cultural relics, there is no template or positive example, and the village cadres have little confidence to ask the locals to abandon long-standing Xi customs, such as prohibiting them from applying makeup to gods and Buddhas and "wearing gold".
In 2018, the "Investigation Briefing on the Cliff Statues of Gaosheng Buddha Temple, Shehuang Temple and Leishen Cave in Anyue, Sichuan" published by "Cultural Relics" shows that within less than a kilometer of Gaosheng Buddha, there are three Buddha statues carved in the Southern Song Dynasty. The volunteer sent a comparison image showing that he had been painted up and had become part of a temple.
A temple keeper of the Gaosheng Buddha told The Paper that around 2013, the cultural relics it guarded were required to be "locked up" and not allowed to burn incense and visit. One of the hopes of the temple keepers is that the cultural relics will be upgraded from "provincial security" to "national security", thinking that in this way they can be "opened" and "collect tickets".
During the interview, Liu Mingli, who was entangled in whether to develop it, also half-jokingly told the reporter that if the cultural relics continue to be a "county protection" (county-level cultural relics protection unit), if they want to develop, "they must rely on their strength", which means that the Buddha has to rely on magic to attract locals to visit and compete with other temples.
In fact, these "small temples" in the mountains involving cultural relics, even if the temple doors are closed, are always linked to the interests of the mountain. In Fengmen Temple, local villagers told The Paper that people from some developed areas donated large sums of money to the temple, spent money to build roads, sent new Buddha statues, and local villagers carried the Buddha statues to the mountain. These donors have erected conspicuous monuments of merit.
On the first and fifteenth day of the new year, the local old people first burn incense in the temple to worship these newly repaired, stereotyped gods and Buddhas, and then, take a cliff path to the foot of the "Flower Buddha" with a history of nearly 1,000 years.
This statue also caused an uproar on the Internet a few years ago because of its makeup. On the day of the reporter's visit, the clouds were pressing, the drizzle was falling, the Buddha stared at the waiter under his right hand with a smile, the right hand was mended, not a flower gesture, and there was no flower, and the aunt who guarded the temple sighed and said: "Now the paint is not good, the original color is good, foggy, (again) the sun is shining, and it becomes white." ”
The local cultural relics protection unit has banned villagers from burning incense at the foot of the Buddha. Therefore, a large pile of paper money that has not been completely burned is piled up a few meters in front of the "Flower Buddha", and they seem to be cold and shivering in the wind and rain, but they linger.
(The Paper reporter Yuan Lu also contributed to this article)
Senior editor of this issue: Zhou Yuhua