Hong Kong has a lot of beautiful sights to offer and is a very popular city for travellers from all around the world. Therefore it is no suprise that those spots are often very crowed. I asked a girl from Hong Kong if she could recommend a places which would be less busy and touristy since I was looking for some quite time just by myself to think and to find some rest from my last couple of days. She told me about the "Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery", a place where (according to her) I would find a walkway which is lined by over 500 human sized golden Buddha statues leading up to the monastrey area on top of a mountain, where thousands of either massive or tiny Buddhas would be awaiting me. At the beginning I didn't really trust her when she was describing this place to me. Why would a temple filled with 10.000 golden Buddhas not be a tourist hot spot? There was no way it would be as beautiful as her description. So I arrived (in the afternoon, just like she told me to) with quite little expactions and couldn't believe my eyes when I finally found the entrace. It was exactly how she told me it would be. Thousands of shiny, golden Buddhas in diffrent poses, every single one completly unique. And no other human being but me seemed to be there. As I made my way upstairs I found myself in a extremly peaceful and happy mind set. The statues had a very powerful atmosphere surrounding them and it was interesting to look at their different poses and facial expressions which reached from smiling and looking very content, to serious and nearly sad to bizzare and almost crazy. The whole area is located in a beautiful bamboo forest and I all I could hear was the wind stroking the tree's branches and exotic sounding birds. Not expecting anybody to join my walk I was quite suprised when all over sudden a monkey jumped out of the forest and landed on one of the Buddha's heads. After starring at me for a while the monkey continued its path, jumping from one statue to the other, using them as his way to get up the hill. But before I loose myself in these memories, I should let the pictures I took speak for themselfs.
(Keep on reading the text below the pictures if you are intersted in some facts about this magical place)
Some interesting facts about this monastery:
- It was founded by a Buddhist layman from Peking called Yuet Kai in 1949 and it took eight years to build all the buildings and another ten years to finally finish putting up all the statues
- There are actually 12.800 Buddhas in this temple. It is only called the "Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery" because the numer 10.000 is the highest one in the chinese language
- Many of the statues in the main hall (where most of the Buddhas are) were donations
- You can find the corp of the Yuet Kai in a glass case. His whole body is cast in gold and he looks like one of the other statues
- The monastery consists of five temples ,4 pavilions and one pagoda
- The path up the hill to the temples takes more than 430 steps
- Every single Buddha is different in its pose, style and facial Impression
