Attached like fire escape stairs to the sides of a red brick tenement, the way up the cliff-face Maiji Mountain Grottoes rose up, threatening, impossibly high for someone like me who is deathly afraid of heights. From Wikipedia, “Acrophobia (from the Greek: ἄκρον, ákron , meaning ‘peak, summit, edge’ and φόβος, phóbos, ‘fear’) is an extreme or irrational fear of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up.” For me, unfortunately, anything above the height of a one-story roof was high up.
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Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
Dunhuang, whose name means to flourish and prosper, was established as a military garrison city in 111 BC at an oasis where the two Silk Road routes traversing the Taklamakan Desert to the west, merged. It anchored the Hexi Corridor, running southeast to Lanzhou and protected the merchants, monks, imperial envoys and camel traders carrying China’s precious silk and spices eastward. Located in Gansu Province—China’s most ethnically diverse—like all of Gansu, it retains the crossroads flavor, the intermingled lineage broadcast in faces, as well as the friendliness of a longstanding oasis town. Yet, all of the friendliness—the constant smiles, hellos and helpful gestures—were about to be outdone by a considerate act so unusual and from such an unexpected source that nothing like it had ever happened to me before anywhere in the world. Our captain eased us into the dock in Big Harbor on the lake at Liujiaxia Gorge, while ferry workers were securing red trucks loaded with pipe under gray uncertain skies. I snapped a quick pic and climbed into the front seat of the car that would bring us back to town. The woman who rode out with me climbed in the back and I was just happy to be away from all my boat mates, away from the arguing, but most of all I was grateful to be rid of the young, nervy, arrogant couple. Cut off from the rest of the world when engineers dammed the Yellow River and flooded Liujiaxia Gorge, the ‘Ten Thousand Buddha Cave Grotto’ can only be reached by boat and even then only during certain times of the year. In winter, there is ice and low water. In the spring, the Tibetan Plateau snowmelt raises the water level and allows boats to access the site during the summer and fall. No roads go there. The boat that brings you in also brings you back out. So, without any other options, I waited in the boat besieged by vendors, who eventually lost interest due to the steady rain. While waiting, I thought about the process of waiting and how it was a test of ‘Being Bingling Grotto.’ Why does it perturb us so much? For instance, while watching television, we are waiting but distracted from the fact that we are doing so. In that case, it doesn’t bother us. Waiting while staring at pictures that move is okay. But waiting for others to do something—even though the world is always moving, is not okay. Why? I looked around and realized fear was in there somewhere—fear that I would be left behind, fear that others wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do, fear that I would be uncomfortable, fear that reality wouldn’t live up to the vision I had already preprogrammed into my mind. The rain, rejoicing as it reconnected with the waters of the lake whispered, “Expectations are almost as troublesome as fear.” An hour passed as I pondered waiting. I was wet, but relatively comfortable, engaged in trying to decipher the riddle of waiting, only wishing that I hadn’t given away my potato chips. Time passed in an earthly way in this soggy but ethereal place. The oldest engraving in cave 169 in the Bingling (Tibetan for 10,000 Buddhas) Grotto site dates back to 420 A.D. Ten years after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths and a few years before Attila the Hun began his wild sweep westward, Tibetan monks began carving statues and shrines in Jishi Hills. The trip to the Bingling Temple Buddha Caves in Gansu Province began at the West Bus Station in Lanzhou where the woman who sold me a ticket waved me toward a ticket taker with laugh lines so deep they looked as if they were etched in with an eyebrow pencil. |
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