I had spent a week in Beijing, and had soaked up the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, all the palaces and hutongs and markets and museums that I could really handle in that amount of time. Wanting to see more of the wider region, I began casting about for interesting religio-cultural relics to see in the surrounding areas. My searchlight fell upon the Yungang Grottoes, a series of caves containing tens of thousands of carvings of the Buddha and other reliefs depicting symbols and scenes from that wise tradition.
The Yungang Grottoes are about a dozen kilometers from the city of Datong, in Shanxi Province, so I took a train the following evening from Beijing to that former capital of coal mining. I stumbled out of the station in the early morning smog into the most cripplingly cold air that I had ever experienced. Even central Vermont at Christmas seemed Caribbean by comparison. My bag was very light walking towards the taxis as I had already put on all of the clothes I'd taken with me.
Trying to figure out the bus schedule made my skull ache, so I approached one of the taxi drivers gathered about the front of the train station, and soon we were off to the grottoes.
Carved by a series of Buddhist monks during the 5th century, the Yungang Grottoes contain over 50,000 statues, reliefs, and depictions of the Buddha. Most are very small, even bottle cap-sized, but there are also some massive, several meters-tall statues smiling serenely down on the throngs of tourists who come to see this important relic of China's Buddhist past.
Shuffling from one cave to the next, I was struck by the devotion that these artist-monks had shown in abundance and quality of craftsmanship within. The cold air in my nostrils brought out shades of the austerity and asceticism that must have been the rule of their daily lives.
The carvings sometimes look like near-natural occurrences, covering the face of the stone niches and enclaves as if caves themselves had been tectonically formed with the four noble truths in mind.
If it had been warmer, I would have stayed longer than an hour perusing the caves, but I was starting to have trouble moving parts of my face, and began to become anxious about the fact that I had yet to buy a ticket out of Datong, and that I may be stuck there for the night.
Regardless of these circumstances, I came away from the Yungang Grottoes with even more respect and admiration for Chinese history and culture than I'd already accumulated over the week.
My taxi man was waiting faithfully for me, and grinned and barked in Mandarin as he saw me approaching. Once back at the train station, I was blessed with luck to have been able to return to Beijing that evening, and through the night I swayed and rocked gracefully, millions of tiny Buddhas smiling down upon me.