Yáo brought order to the people of the world and directed the government of all within the seas. But he went to see the Four Masters of the faraway Gūshè Mountain, and when he got home north of the Fen River, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there.
— Zhuāngzǐ, Chapter 1
The trail above Huacheng Si was empty.
It was August 1990. I was a graduate student in Chinese religious studies, traveling with my supervisor, Professor William Powell. The cable car system that now carries most visitors to the upper temples of Jiǔhuá Shān had not yet been built. The festival days were elsewhere on the mountain. The two of us had the path to ourselves — only the occasional monk, a brick porter we had passed on his shortcut earlier, and the silence of the granite under our feet.
The hike was strenuous and the day was warm. I took my shirt off. The fanny pack at my waist was pink and purple, the colors of a decade I had brought with me from California. I was in my early thirties, fit from years of competitive tennis, walking up a mountain in Anhui with my supervisor in something close to private conditions. I did not know I was witnessing a particular configuration of the mountain that would not last. I was just hiking.
We came around a corner.
She was standing at her garden, a small woman so small the cave behind her seemed almost to scale to her. The cave was set back from the trail among rocks. The garden was just outside it, a few square meters of cultivated ground with vegetables I did not recognize. She was perhaps in her seventies. She was alone. She had heard us coming, or the trail had told her, and she was waiting at the threshold.
She invited us in for tea.
The cave was barely large enough for the three of us. There was room for her bedding against one wall, a small altar, a few tea things, and the floor space she now offered to her two surprise visitors. We sat. She made tea. The interior was cool after the sun on the trail. The water came from somewhere — a spring, a barrel, I do not now remember. We drank tea with her. We exchanged the few words that her dialect and my graduate-student Mandarin allowed. We thanked her. We left.
That is the encounter. It lasted perhaps half an hour. The trail led us on. We continued our climb. By evening we were in the temple complex above and the day's specifics began to thin into the larger texture of the trip — the visit to Roushen Hall, the conversations with Professor Powell about the Dìzàng tradition, the slow accumulation of impressions that graduate fieldwork produces. The nun receded into memory. She did not entirely disappear.
I have a photograph from that day. The angle suggests that Professor Powell or someone took it. I am at left, shirtless, the pink and purple fanny pack at my waist, smiling slightly. The nun is beside me, in her dark robe, her face composed. The cave entrance is visible behind us. We are standing in the small garden. The photograph documents the encounter as it happened. It also documents the witness as he was — a young American academic in his early thirties, fit, on a strenuous private hike, met by a hospitality whose logic he did not yet fully understand.
This essay returns to that encounter, and to the mountain that produced it, after thirty-five years.
What I did not understand at the time, and what this essay will work to articulate, is that the encounter was not accidental. The trail led us to the cave because the cave had been positioned to be reached by the trail. The hermit was at her threshold because hermits at Jiǔhuá Shān have, for thirteen hundred years, occupied small dwellings positioned along the paths the pilgrims and travelers walk, offering the encounter as part of what the mountain delivers to those who climb it on foot. Her tea was a gift to two specific strangers; it was also one instance of a long-running operation. The hermit-and-cave succession at Jiǔhuá is one of the apparatuses through which the mountain works on the bodies that pass over it. We had stepped, that afternoon, into a configuration whose history we were not yet equipped to read.
We had also stepped into something the contemporary configuration of the mountain may no longer reliably deliver. The cable car system that has been built since our visit conveys most contemporary visitors directly from a parking station at the base to upper points near the major temples. The visitor who rides the cable car does not walk the trail above Huacheng Si. The visitor does not turn the corner and find the cave. The hermit, if she is still there, or if her successor occupies the cave, is no longer easily met. The corner has been routed past.
Whether this matters — and how — is the question this essay will work toward.
I want to be careful about the framing of our visit. Jiǔhuá Shān has been transformed many times across its history, and the configuration in which Professor Powell and I walked it was itself a recent one — the mountain had reopened to study and practice only a few years before, after the long closures of the Cultural Revolution. The empty trail we walked was empty in part because the apparatus of contemporary pilgrimage had not yet returned at scale. The mountain we walked was not the mountain of the Tang or the Ming. It was the mountain of the early post-Cultural Revolution period, briefly, before the contemporary tourism apparatus arrived. Each configuration delivers a different mountain to different bodies. Our configuration was not better than the present configuration. It was different. It produced different encounters. It is now itself part of the historical record of the mountain.
What I want to do in what follows is read Jiǔhuá as a layered apparatus that operates on the bodies that engage it, and to describe five distinct registers in which the contemporary mountain is engaged. These five registers — the conveyed visitor, the pilgrim, the porter, the pre-improvement walker, and the overland traveler — produce five different mountains, each with its own temporal signature, its own bodily commitment, its own relationship to the substrate of granite and forest and shrine. The five mountains coexist on the same site. They are not equivalent. What each one delivers to the body that engages it is the visible record of what the apparatus has done. The mountain reads itself through the bodies that pass over it, and the bodies — the kneeling pilgrim's bruised knees, the porter's stone calves, the conveyed visitor's selfie pose, the walker's surprise turning the corner — carry the record back into the world.
I take seriously, in what follows, the operational claims that the Daoist and Buddhist traditions at Jiǔhuá have made about themselves. These traditions hold that the mountain, engaged correctly, transmutes the practitioner — that the body that ascends in the prescribed manner returns from the mountain not the same body that arrived. Henri Maspero, writing on Daoist practice in the early twentieth century, took these operational claims seriously as descriptions of techniques that produced specific phenomenological and physiological effects in trained practitioners. The lineage that runs from Maspero through Rolf Stein, Isabelle Robinet, and Kristofer Schipper has continued to read Daoist and Buddhist bodily practice as operational rather than merely metaphorical. This essay extends that reading from the practitioner's body and the priest's altar to the mountain landscape itself. The sacred Chinese mountain, on this reading, is an operational apparatus, accumulated across centuries of devotional and laboring work, that performs specific transformations on the bodies of practitioners who engage it correctly. The transformations have technical signatures: bodily exhaustion, the dissolution of ordinary spatial coordinates, the yǎo rán state of depth-and-distance described in the Zhuāngzǐ passage that opens this essay, the long-term bodily inscriptions of repeated practice. The cable car, as we will see, does not deliver the visitor into this apparatus. It conveys the visitor past it.
The nun in the cave was operating, we will say, at the deep end of the apparatus. We met her because the apparatus is built to be met by those who walk. The contemporary visitor, riding the cable car to a point near the summit, does not meet her. Whether this is a loss, and what kind of loss it is, depends on what the apparatus is for. That question is the spine of what follows.
Jiǔhuá Shān (九華山, "Nine-Splendor Mountain") rises in southern Anhui Province, in the prefecture of Chizhou, north of the Yangtze and west of the Huangshan range. Its peaks cluster around 1,300 to 1,342 meters above sea level. Its name, attributed to the Tang poet Li Bai, replaced an earlier name, Jiǔzǐ Shān (九子山, "Nine-Sons Mountain"), after Li Bai compared the nine main peaks to lotus blossoms rising from the surrounding hills. The renaming was itself an early instance of the literary apparatus that would, over centuries, accumulate around the mountain — the substrate of poems, gazetteers, donor inscriptions, ritual texts, and travel writing that constitutes most of what later readers know about the place.
The mountain's Buddhist association is conventionally traced to the eighth century and to the figure of Kim Gyo-gak (Jīn Qiáojué 金喬覺, c. 696 – c. 794), a Korean prince who, according to tradition, traveled to China and settled at Jiǔhuá to practice and teach. Kim Gyo-gak is said to have lived on the mountain for seventy-five years and to have died at the age of ninety-nine; his body, the tradition holds, did not decay after death and was enshrined at what is now the Roushen Hall (肉身殿, "Hall of the Incorruptible Body"). The local Buddhist community came to identify Kim Gyo-gak as a manifestation of Dìzàng Púsà (地藏菩薩), the bodhisattva known in Sanskrit as Kshitigarbha, whose vow — until hell is empty, I will not become a Buddha — anchors the mountain's distinctive devotional intensity. Jiǔhuá became known as the earthly seat of Dìzàng, parallel to Wutai Shan (Mañjuśrī), Emei Shan (Samantabhadra), and Putuo Shan (Avalokiteśvara) as the four great Buddhist mountains of China.
The chronology, as it is usually told, places this fourfold scheme in continuity with the Tang. The historical record is more complicated. Jiǔhuá's elevation to the status of one of the four great Buddhist mountains is, on the evidence of the surviving sources, a Ming-dynasty construction, codified through the gazetteer apparatus of the late sixteenth century. The fourfold scheme appears decisively in print under the Wanli emperor (r. 1573–1620), in the preface a writer named Tu Long contributed to a 1589 gazetteer, and is consolidated through subsequent editions of mountain gazetteers (山志, shānzhì) produced at Jiǔhuá through the late Ming and Qing. What was, in earlier centuries, a regionally significant Buddhist mountain with a distinctive devotional tradition became, in the late imperial period, a nationally recognized sacred site and one of four corresponding places that organized the Chinese Buddhist sacred landscape into a totalizing cartography. The status was retroactively projected onto the Tang foundations. The tradition's own internal history, in this respect, is not the history that documentary scholarship reconstructs.
This matters for what follows. The mountain is a Tang foundation upon which Ming and Qing centuries built. The temple complex that survives today is overwhelmingly the product of late imperial construction, repeatedly damaged and repeatedly restored across the Qing and into the Republican period. Of the temples that stood at the mountain's peak, when the area held some 360 monastic establishments and four to five thousand monks and nuns, around ninety remain in active or restored condition today. Most of these were built or substantially rebuilt between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Huacheng Si (化城寺), the foundational temple at the center of Jiǔhuá Jiē, is described in the sources as Tang in origin but has been rebuilt many times; the structures visible today are largely Ming and Qing. Baisui Gong (百歲宮, "Hundred-Years Palace"), built into the cliff above Jiǔhuá Jiē in 1630, is one of the few precisely dated structures and is a useful anchor for the late-Ming building intensification.
The granite stairway and pathway system that connects the temples is similarly layered, though much harder to date precisely. Some sections are clearly older than the temples they serve, since the temples could not have been built without the paths that brought their materials and workers up. Other sections are connecting work, knitting older approach paths into the comprehensive pilgrimage circuit that exists today. The most recent layer is post-1980s, repairing damage from the Cultural Revolution period and accommodating the increase in pilgrim and tourist traffic that followed the mountain's reopening. The granite is local. The mountain provides its own building stock. Whoever needed steps could quarry the stone where they stood. The result is an accumulated pathway system in which different sections were cut by different generations for different purposes, all using the same material — the same granite that the practitioner's foot and forehead and palm meet wherever on the mountain the practice runs.
The cable car system was installed beginning in the late 1990s and expanded in the 2000s and 2010s. Three cable car lines now serve the mountain: a line to Tiantai Peak in the upper temple cluster, a line to Baisui Gong, and a line to Huatai. Together these lines deliver most contemporary visitors to within walking distance of the major upper temples without requiring an ascent on foot. The granite stairway remains in place. Some pilgrims still climb it. Most visitors do not.
The mountain that the visitor arrives at today, then, is a Tang foundation, a Ming-Qing temple system, a centuries-long accumulation of granite path infrastructure, a post-1980s reopened and partly restored religious site, and a contemporary cable-car-served tourism destination, all at once. The five layers are not arranged neatly in time. They are arranged spatially, on the mountain, where a contemporary visitor might walk a Qing pathway between a Ming temple rebuilt in the Qing and another Ming temple restored in the 1990s, while passing a granite step quarried in the Tang and a hermit cave occupied continuously since some unrecoverable date. The substrate holds traces of all of it. The cosmochronicle frame I have used elsewhere — substrate accumulating traces of human work, retellive across generations — applies to Jiǔhuá in a particularly dense form. The mountain is one of the deepest accumulations of devotional and laboring work in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, and it holds the traces of that work in granite, in surviving timber and tile, in inscription and image, and in the practices that continue at the site.
What the contemporary visitor walks, rides, or prostrates upon is this accumulated substrate. The five registers of movement that the rest of this essay will examine each engage the substrate differently. Each delivers a different mountain to the body that engages it. None of them encounters the Tang mountain or the Ming mountain or the Qing mountain or the Republican mountain on its own; all of them encounter the contemporary deposit, which contains all of those previous layers compressed into the present moment. The historical layering is the substrate. The bodies are how the layers come back into operation.
The contemporary visitor to Jiǔhuá Shān arrives by one of several routes. Most arrive by bus or private car at the parking lots below Jiǔhuá Jiē. From there, the choices begin. The visitor may walk up the granite stairway through the lower temples to the village area, or take a shuttle bus along the road, or proceed directly to one of the cable car stations. From the upper cable car termini, short walks lead to the major summit-cluster temples — Tiantai, Baisui Gong, the Roushen Hall, and others. The visitor may stay an hour, half a day, a full day, or several days. Most stay for less than half a day. A small number stay considerably longer and engage the mountain in registers the typical day-trip does not accommodate.
This essay distinguishes five registers in which the contemporary mountain is engaged. The five are not exhaustive — the mountain hosts other registers, including monastic life on the mountain, the labor of the tourism staff, and the practices of scholars and writers and artists who come to study or document it — but the five identified here are the registers that most clearly produce different mountains for the bodies that engage them.
Register one: the conveyed visitor. The body is moved up the mountain by machine — cable car, shuttle bus, road. The body's contact with the granite substrate is minimal or absent. The visit is brief, photographed, narrated to social media, and concluded with descent and onward travel to the next site. Time on the mountain rarely exceeds three hours.
Register two: the pilgrim. The body climbs on its own legs, in some cases on its knees. The most intense form of this register is yī bù yī bài (一步一拜, "one step, one bow") prostration ascent, in which the practitioner advances one stair-tread per cycle, with full prostration and prayer at each. The pilgrim's body is committed to the practice for hours or days, and the mountain operates on the body in ways the other registers do not.
Register three: the porter. The body labors on the mountain, supplying it. Loads are carried up the stairway, often by routes the pilgrim circuit does not take — shorter, steeper, more direct. The labor is daily, repeated across years and decades. Bodies built by this labor are recognizable to anyone who has seen them. The cable car has displaced this register substantially, but it has not abolished it.
Register four: the pre-improvement walker. The body walks the mountain without the comprehensive apparatus that the contemporary pilgrim or visitor uses. This register is partly historical — what walking the mountain looked like before the granite stairway was complete or before the cable car was built — and partly contemporary, in the experience of walkers who today choose the long ascent on foot rather than the cable car, or who walk side paths the comprehensive circuit does not include. Professor Powell and I walked the mountain in something close to this register in August 1990, when the cable car had not yet been built and the trail above Huacheng Si was empty.
Register five: the overland traveler. The body approaches the mountain from outside it, constrained only by surrounding geographic features — the river systems, the watershed crossings, the road and rail infrastructure that determines how the mountain is reached at all. This register precedes all the others. Every pilgrim and every porter and every monk first arrived at Jiǔhuá as an overland traveler. The mountain in this register is not yet the apparatus the other registers require; it is a destination, reached by whoever has reason and capacity to come.
The five registers are not arranged hierarchically. Each does specific work. Each delivers a specific mountain. The pilgrim's mountain is not better than the conveyed visitor's mountain, in any sense the analyst is qualified to judge; it is different, and what makes it different is the question this essay pursues.
The framework I will use to read the registers draws on three separable bodies of scholarship. From Henri Lefebvre's analysis of the production of space, I will use the distinction between conceived space (the planners' representations — the master plan of the cable car system, the UNESCO designation, the brochure cartography), perceived space (the everyday spatial practice of those who work and move on the mountain — the porters, the staff, the monastics in their daily routines), and lived space (the embodied symbolic experience of the practitioner who engages the substrate fully). The three layers operate simultaneously at Jiǔhuá and the registers I distinguish above interact with all three.
From Scott Lukas's analysis of themed and immersive spaces, I will use the concept of lived theming — the visitor's enactment of the theme through their own body and behavior — and the concept of immersion as the mode in which a themed environment envelops the practitioner. The contemporary tourism apparatus at Jiǔhuá is, among other things, a themed and immersive environment in Lukas's sense, and his frame helps describe what that apparatus does and how it differs from what the older devotional apparatus does.
From the Maspero-Stein-Robinet-Schipper lineage of Daoist studies, and from the parallel scholarship on Chinese Buddhist mountain practice represented by Naquin and Yü's Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, by Professor Robson's Power of Place on Nanyue, and by Dott's Identity Reflections on Tai Shan, I will draw the operational frame for what the older devotional apparatus is doing. This frame, as I have noted in Section I, takes seriously the operational claims that the Daoist and Buddhist traditions at Jiǔhuá have made about themselves. The mountain, engaged correctly, performs technical work on the practitioner. The signs of this work are bodily — bodily exhaustion, the dissolution of ordinary spatial coordinates, the yǎo rán state, the long-term inscriptions of repeated practice. The cable car, again, does not deliver the visitor into this apparatus; it conveys the visitor past it.
These three bodies of scholarship are not equivalent in what they offer. Lefebvre and Lukas give analytical vocabulary for sorting layers and reading the contemporary apparatus. The Daoist and Buddhist scholarship gives operational claims about what the older apparatus is for. This essay treats the analytical vocabulary as instrumental — useful for the reading but not load-bearing for the argument — and treats the operational claims as load-bearing. The mountain is not, in the end, a themed space whose meaning is exhausted by reading the apparatus. The mountain is an apparatus that, engaged correctly, does what its tradition says it does. The bodies that pass over it carry the record of the operation back into the world.
What follows engages the registers in turn, beginning with register two — the pilgrim — because the pilgrim's practice is the practice the mountain was built for, and the other registers are most clearly read in relation to it.
The granite stairway and pathway system at Jiǔhuá Shān is the substrate that all five movement registers engage. The cable car visitor passes over it without touching it. The pilgrim performs the prostration practice on it. The porter ascends it under load. The walker negotiates it on foot. The overland traveler arrives at its lower end. Whatever else can be said about the contemporary mountain, the stairway is the material fact that the registers of movement organize themselves around.
A distinction worth making at the outset. The mountain itself is the deeper substrate. The granite and the soil and the watercourses and the forest cover were on the mountain before any human work began at Jiǔhuá, and they would remain if the human work were to be removed. What the stairway adds to this underlying substrate is a layer of prescription. The carved and set granite tells the body where to go, how to climb, where to place the foot. Before the stairway, the same stone and the same soil were there, but a body climbing the mountain was negotiating raw landform — finding its own footholds, choosing its own routes, encountering the gradient as the gradient happened to be. The stairway organizes the climb. It does not create the substrate; it shapes how bodies engage the substrate. When I refer in this essay to the stairway as substrate, I mean the human-worked layer specifically: the substrate of prescription that bodies engage when they ascend the contemporary mountain. The deeper substrate — the mountain itself — is what the stairway is built upon and into.
The stairway is not a single object with a single date of construction. It is a continuous accretion across centuries, with sections cut by different generations for different purposes, all using the same locally quarried granite. The mountain provides its own building stock. Wherever a body needed to climb a steep section, the stone could be quarried from the surrounding slopes and set in place. Wherever a temple needed to be reached, the path could be cut to it. Wherever an existing approach had degraded, donor-funded repair could replace the worn sections. The result is a pathway system in which different stretches were built at different times, by different sponsors, to serve different needs, and in which the layers are visible to a careful eye.
The stair dimensions themselves are worth naming. The granite treads at Jiǔhuá, like those at most Chinese sacred mountain pathways, are narrow by Western standards. A typical tread extends only ten to fifteen centimeters in depth, sometimes less. The risers are correspondingly proportioned. The dimensions reflect the body sizes of the historical user population — Chinese male feet of average size for the late imperial and early modern periods — and the practical economy of stone-quarrying-per-stair. A pilgrim with feet sized to the historical norm gets a stairway calibrated to their body. A visitor with significantly larger or smaller feet does not. I wear a size thirteen American shoe, and my feet overhung the treads at Jiǔhuá throughout the visit. Ascending was awkward. Descending was genuinely difficult, since the body's weight has to shift onto a foothold that does not accommodate the foot. The fit between the body and the stairway is part of what the apparatus does, and the apparatus was not built for my body. Professor Powell, smaller-footed and considerably more comfortable on the treads, could move at speed. On the day we were late returning to the village area for some appointment I no longer remember, the two of us ran down the granite stairway together — Professor Powell, then in his forties, moving with a grace that I, in my early thirties and trained for tennis, could not match on those narrow treads. He was, as the saying goes, a spry fellow.
This observation about fit has a sharper analytical implication for the yī bù yī bài practice discussed in Section V. The kneeling pilgrim places knee, hand, and forehead in repeated direct contact with stair-treads whose dimensions were chosen, however unreflectively, for bodies of a particular size and proportion. The knee coming down on a ten-to-fifteen-centimeter tread fits on it; a knee on a wider Western stair-tread would have a different geometry of contact. The forehead going forward onto the next tread up reaches a stone that is sized to be reachable by an average-bodied practitioner without strain. The apparatus is calibrated to the body, and the body is calibrated to the apparatus. This mutual fit, accumulated across centuries, is part of how the practice runs. A practitioner whose body falls outside the historical norm experiences the stairway differently — the apparatus does not greet them as it greets the average-bodied predecessor whose body it was, in effect, designed for.
The oldest sections of the stairway are necessarily the ones leading to the cliff temples and the high meditation caves. These sections cannot postdate the temples and caves they serve, because the temples and caves could not have been built or maintained without the paths that brought their materials and workers up. Where the stairway climbs a near-vertical face — the approaches to Tiantai, Baisui Gong, the various cliff hermitages — the path is the only possible means of access. The body cannot reach these places without help. Whatever generation first established a religious presence at such a site also, of necessity, established the path that reached it. These sections of the stairway are therefore as old as the religious occupation of their associated sites, which in some cases means Tang or earlier, though the original cuts have been repeatedly recut and replaced as stone weathered and stairs wore down.
The connective sections of the stairway — the longer stretches between major temples, the approaches from the village area to the summit cluster, the loops that link the temple complex into a continuous pilgrimage circuit — appear to belong predominantly to the late imperial period, when the mountain reached its peak of monastic establishment under the Ming and Qing. The Ming-Qing temple buildout, with its peak figure of some 360 monastic establishments and four to five thousand monks and nuns, required correspondingly extensive path infrastructure. The donor inscriptions surviving on stair-treads and at section beginnings, where they have been studied, indicate substantial late-imperial investment in path construction and repair. Specific dating of specific sections requires the gazetteer record and the on-site inscription survey, and a comprehensive treatment of the pathway's chronology has, to my knowledge, not yet been undertaken in either the Chinese or the English-language scholarship. This is a real research gap. The mountain's pathway system is one of the most extensive granite stairway networks in Chinese Buddhist geography, and it has been less studied than the comparable system at Tai Shan, which Brian Dott has treated in Identity Reflections.
The most recent layer of the stairway is post-1980. After the Cultural Revolution, when the mountain reopened to religious practice and to study, substantial repair work was undertaken on damaged sections of the path system. New connecting sections were built to accommodate the increase in pilgrim and tourist traffic that followed the reopening. The Republican-era and pre-Cultural-Revolution layers had themselves repaired and supplemented earlier sections; the post-1980 layer continued this work. A contemporary visitor walking the principal pilgrimage circuit moves over stone of multiple periods, sometimes within the span of a few hundred meters — a Tang or Ming approach to a cliff temple here, a Qing connecting section there, a 1990s repair filling in a stretch that had eroded.
The granite is local. This is part of what makes the stairway's accretion possible across such a long span. A wooden stairway, even if it could have been engineered to handle the gradients, would have rotted within decades and required complete replacement on a much shorter cycle. A stone imported from a distant quarry would have required expensive transport and would have been stylistically distinguishable from sections cut later from different sources. Local granite, quarried from the mountain itself, allows each generation of builders to add to or replace sections of an existing system using stone that is materially indistinguishable from what was there before. The seams between centuries are not seams of material but seams of weathering, dimension, cutting technique, and donor record. To a body walking on the stairway, the seams are invisible. The granite under the foot is the granite under the foot.
This material continuity across the layers has consequences for how the substrate functions in the practice that is performed on it. A pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài on a contemporary section of the stairway places forehead and palms on stone that may have been cut last decade or last century. On a different stretch of the same ascent, the stone may have been cut centuries earlier. The pilgrim does not know, in most cases, which sections are which. The body meets the granite the body meets. The practice, performed on the substrate, runs across the layered accumulation as if the layers were a single substrate. In a sense they are: the granite that was set in place by the Tang hermits and the granite that was set in place by the post-1980 repair crews are materially the same stone, locally quarried, weathering at the same rate, holding the contemporary body's contact in the same way. The cosmochronicle frame I have used elsewhere — substrate accumulating traces of human work across human time — applies to the Jiǔhuá stairway in a particularly literal form. The stone has been there, in increments, for as long as the religious presence on the mountain has been there. The contemporary body that meets the stone meets what has been there.
The pathway system also has a less visible layer that I want to name explicitly. The pilgrim circuit follows a route engineered for the pilgrim's experience, with switchbacks at scenic vistas, approaches to specific temples in the appropriate ritual order, gradients that an ordinary climbing body can manage. The porters' paths often run alongside or across the pilgrim circuit but follow a different logic. The porter's path goes straight up where straight up is possible, takes shorter routes that the pilgrim circuit avoids for ritual or experiential reasons, and engineers gradients steep enough that only a working porter would attempt them. The two systems sometimes coincide and sometimes diverge. The porter's path is, in its own way, also part of the stairway system, and its sections are also of varying ages, but it has been even less studied than the pilgrim circuit. The porter you might encounter on Jiǔhuá today, where porters still operate, may be ascending a section that has been used by his predecessors for centuries to supply the same temples by the most efficient route. I will return to the porter's path in Section VI.
The cable car system, installed beginning in the late 1990s and expanded in subsequent decades, runs above the stairway without engaging it. The cable car cabin is suspended on cables above the granite pathway, and most contemporary visitors use the cable car for the principal ascent, taking the stairway only for short connecting walks at the summit cluster. The cable car has not removed the stairway. The stairway remains in place, fully usable, and is used by those who choose to walk. The cable car has, however, reorganized the relationship between visitors and the stairway. For most contemporary visitors, the stairway is something seen from above through a cable car window rather than something walked. The granite that has been the substrate of the practice for thirteen centuries is, for the conveyed visitor, a feature of the landscape rather than the medium of the practice. I will return to this point in Section VIII, when I discuss the conveyed visitor's register directly.
For now, the substrate's nature can be summarized: the Jiǔhuá stairway is a continuously accumulated granite pathway system of indeterminate but layered age, built by generations of donors and laborers using locally quarried stone, serving multiple registers of movement, materially continuous across its layers in a way that allows the contemporary body to engage it as if engaging a single substrate. The five registers of movement examined in the sections that follow each engage this substrate differently. The pilgrim's contact with the granite is direct, sustained, and bodily. The porter's contact is loaded and habitual. The walker's contact is attentive and exploratory. The conveyed visitor's contact is minimal or absent. The overland traveler, before arriving at the mountain, has no contact with this substrate at all, but is on the route that leads to it.
The stairway is what the registers organize themselves around. The bodies that engage it carry the record of the engagement back into the world.
The most intense form of pilgrimage practice at Jiǔhuá Shān, and the practice the mountain's pathway and temple system most directly serves, is the prostration ascent known as yī bù yī bài (一步一拜) — "one step, one bow." The practitioner takes a single step forward and up, performs a full prostration with prayer or mantra, rises, takes the next step, and prostrates again. Each stair-tread is its own ritual unit. The body advances on the mountain at the rate of one step per cycle, with each cycle lasting roughly ten to fifteen seconds depending on the practitioner's pace, devotional intensity, and physical condition. The ascent of a major route at this rate, performed without break, requires hours; performed across the full mountain, days.
A less intensive variant, sān bù yī bài (三步一拜, "three steps, one bow"), allows three steps between prostrations and is more commonly performed at festival mass-ascents in which large numbers of pilgrims advance in coordinated rows. The choice between yī bù and sān bù depends on the festival, the route, the pilgrim's commitment, and the time available. The bodily and devotional logic is the same in both; what differs is the rate of ascent and the total number of prostrations performed.
I witnessed a mass prostration ascent at Jiǔhuá during a festival visit with Professor Powell in August 1990. The visit fell during or near the Dìzàng festival period. The specific festival day and the official conference framing remain to be confirmed against the temple's records and Professor Powell's recollection. What I remember clearly is the visual fact of the ascent: hundreds of pilgrims, possibly more, in yellow robes, advancing in rows shoulder to shoulder up the approach toward Jiǔhuá Jiē, and continuing on their knees up the granite stairway toward the upper temples and the Roushen Hall.
The pilgrims had arrived at the mountain by every available means. Some had come long distances on foot, sometimes performing the prostration practice on the road approaching the mountain. Some had come by bus, in groups organized through regional Buddhist associations or temples. Some had come by train and then by hired car or local taxi. Some, the most resourced, had been driven directly to the lower parking lots in private cars. Where each pilgrim's prostration ascent began depended on where that particular body had arrived at the mountain. For some, the practice began on the road, miles from the temple district. For others, at the bus drop-off. For others, at the parking lot. For others, at the foot of the granite stairway proper. The practice did not require a uniform starting point. Each pilgrim began the prostration cycle from the point at which their own journey to the mountain ended, and this is consistent with the doctrinal logic of the practice: the bodhisattva Dìzàng has vowed to work on behalf of suffering beings until hell is empty, and that work is not understood as restricted to specifically sacred ground. The pilgrim joins the bodhisattva's labor by undertaking the practice, and the practice can be undertaken from any point at which the practitioner is physically present.
Professor Powell and I had also arrived at the mountain by some local conveyance — a taxi from a town in the surrounding prefecture, the specific route now thinned in memory. We were not pilgrims. We were two scholars on a research visit, and our arrival did not initiate any practice. We walked into the mountain's contemporary apparatus as observers, with the witness's distinct relationship to what we saw.
The visual effect of the mass ascent was a continuous undulation of bodies up the approach. When a row of pilgrims rose from prostration and stepped, the rows behind also rose and stepped. When the front row prostrated, those behind prostrated as well, with a brief lag as the wave of the cycle traveled through the assembled mass. The yellow robes moved up the mountain in this pulsing rhythm, accompanied by the chanted prayer or mantra of the practitioners, the scuff of robes and knees on stone, the breath of bodies in coordinated effort. The acoustic and visual fact of several hundred bodies practicing in unison along a granite approach is difficult to convey in description. Anyone who has witnessed such a thing knows it; anyone who has not has no available analogue.
The math of the practice is staggering. The granite stairway from the parking lot below Jiǔhuá Jiē to the village area, and from the village to the summit cluster, comprises several thousand individual stair-treads — the precise count varies by route and by source, but is in the range of three to five thousand for the principal pilgrimage circuit. A pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài across a major segment of this circuit performs in the range of one to several thousand prostrations. The ascent typically takes the better part of a day, and pilgrims sometimes rest at way-stations or temples along the route, eating little and sleeping briefly before resuming. The full ascent and circuit, performed at the most intensive rate, can take multiple days. Knees on stone, repeatedly, for hours; hands and forehead in repeated direct contact with the granite; the rhythm of step-bow-rise-step-bow-rise entering its own register beneath conscious thought.
The doctrinal framing matters. Jiǔhuá Shān is the earthly seat of Dìzàng Púsà (Kshitigarbha), the bodhisattva whose vow — until hell is empty, I will not become a Buddha — anchors the mountain's distinctive devotional intensity. The yī bù yī bài practice at Jiǔhuá is not generically Buddhist devotion; it is participation in Dìzàng's labor. Each prostration is a small instance of the bodhisattva's vow, taking on suffering on behalf of the beings of the hell realms that Dìzàng has vowed to empty. The pilgrim does not perform the practice for personal merit alone, though personal merit accrues. The practice is performed because Dìzàng performs it — the bodhisattva's labor is the labor the pilgrim joins, and the practice's intensity reflects the seriousness of what the bodhisattva has undertaken. Empty hell. The phrase is enormous and the practice corresponds to it.
What this practice does to the body is specific and recognizable. The exhaustion is total. The knees bruise and, on extended ascents, sometimes bleed; the hands and forehead develop their own marks. The breath enters a particular rhythm coordinated with the prostration cycle, and the chanted prayer or mantra runs continuously at the level of automatic vocalization. The body that has been performing this practice for several hours is in a different physiological state than the body that began. Heart rate, lactate, glucose, electrolytes, the cumulative wear on joints and skin — the practitioner's homeostasis is being challenged in specific ways and is responding in specific ways. The practice is, among other things, an extended physiological event.
It is also a phenomenological event. As the practice continues, ordinary spatial coordinates begin to dissolve. The practitioner's awareness narrows to the immediate cycle: this step, this prostration, this prayer, this rise, this next step. The surrounding mountain — the trees, the temples passed, the other practitioners in their rows — recedes into a peripheral field that is sensed but not attended to. Time loses its ordinary segmentation. The destination, in the form of the next temple or the summit hall, is known but does not occupy the foreground of attention. What occupies the foreground is the cycle itself.
This is the state the Zhuāngzǐ passage cited at the head of this essay describes from the outside. Yáo brought order to the people of the world... but he went to see the Four Masters of the faraway Gūshè Mountain, and when he got home north of the Fen River, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there. The Chinese phrase translated dazed is yǎo rán (窅然), which carries a sense of depth, distance, and the gaze of someone whose attention is no longer fastened to the ordinary categories of the world. Yǎo rán is the technical signature of a state the apparatus is calibrated to produce. It is not a metaphor for what social construction produces. It is a description of a specific phenomenology that bodies enter when ordinary spatial and identity coordinates dissolve under the pressure of sustained committed practice. The pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài on the granite stairway of Jiǔhuá enters a version of this state across the hours of the practice. The Zhuāngzǐ names it. The Huáng Tíng Jīng and the inner-alchemical literature describe its cultivation. Practitioners across centuries have reported the experience in terms that are remarkably consistent. The state is not new and it is not idiosyncratic. It is what the apparatus does.
There are other names for related states in other registers. Rock climbers know a phenomenon called sewing machine leg, in which the climber's leg muscles begin to tremble involuntarily under sustained load on a difficult section, and the tremor — once it begins — is difficult or impossible to stop without rest. Sewing machine leg is partly a fatigue phenomenon and partly a nervous-system phenomenon: the autonomic system has taken over from the executive function, and conscious effort to suppress the tremor often makes it worse. Climbers describe the experience as the loss of mental control over the body during sustained committed effort. The experience is recognizable to anyone who has had it, and the techniques for managing it — controlled breathing, mental repositioning, finding a moment of stable rest — are part of climbing's bodily literacy.
The relationship between sewing machine leg and the yǎo rán state is not metaphorical. Both are nervous-system events that occur when the body is committed to sustained practice under conditions in which executive control begins to give way to other registers of operation. The climber's tremor and the pilgrim's spatial dissolution are members of the same phenomenological family. The practitioner of yī bù yī bài on Jiǔhuá's stairway, several hours into the ascent, is in a state that a rock climber would recognize from the inside, even if the surface vocabulary differs and the religious framing is absent in one case and central in the other. The body's nervous system does what it does. The traditions that have built apparatuses for inducing and managing such states — Daoist alchemical practice, Buddhist devotional practice, the ascetic traditions across cultures, and the technical disciplines of sustained effort like climbing — have converged on similar bodily techniques because the underlying physiology is shared.
Henri Maspero, writing on the yǎngshēng (養生) tradition of Daoist bodily practice in the early twentieth century, took seriously the operational claims that the tradition made about what its techniques produced. The breathing exercises, the dietary practices, the meditative procedures, the ritualized movements such as the Pace of Yu (Yǔ bù, 禹步) — these were not, for Maspero, primitive precursors of modern science to be patronized or debunked. They were technical procedures that produced specific phenomenological and physiological effects in trained practitioners, and Maspero's task was to describe them as carefully as the sources allowed. The lineage that runs from Maspero through Rolf Stein, Isabelle Robinet, and Kristofer Schipper has continued this approach. Schipper, who trained as a Daoist priest in Taiwan in addition to his scholarly work, wrote The Taoist Body from the position of someone who had performed the practices and who took their operational logic seriously as a description of what they did.
The scholarship on Chinese Buddhist mountain pilgrimage, particularly in the work of Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü's edited volume Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, of Brian Dott's Identity Reflections on Tai Shan, and of Professor James Robson's Power of Place on Nanyue, has made parallel moves for Buddhist devotional practice. The pilgrimage is not, on this scholarship, simply a social or political phenomenon to be analyzed for its symbolic functions, though it is also that. It is a practice that practitioners undertake with specific operational expectations: that the body that ascends in the prescribed manner returns from the mountain not the same body that arrived. Yü's work on Putuo Shan and on Avalokiteśvara's Chinese transformation, in particular, takes seriously the practitioner's framing of pilgrimage as encounter with the bodhisattva and as transformative of the practitioner's relationship to the bodhisattva's compassion.
This essay extends these readings from the practitioner's body and the bodhisattva's seat to the mountain landscape itself. The granite stairway at Jiǔhuá is the material substrate through which the operation runs. The same stone the Tang and Song hermits cut, the same stone the Ming pilgrims wore down, the same stone the Qing donors funded and inscribed, the same stone the contemporary pilgrim now meets with knees and forehead and palms, is the medium that carries the practice across centuries. The practitioner's body is in direct material contact with a substrate that has held the prostrations of a thousand years of bodies before theirs. The granite is, in the cosmochronicle frame I have used elsewhere, retellive: it has accumulated the traces of the practice, and the contemporary practitioner enters a long-running operation rather than initiating a new one. The body bows to the same stone the body's predecessors bowed to.
This material continuity is part of what the practice does. A wooden stairway would not do this. A concrete walkway would not do this. The granite, local to the mountain and quarried where it stands, holds the practice across time in a way that no replacement material could. The practitioner who places their forehead on a stair-tread at Jiǔhuá in 2024 places it on stone that has been receiving foreheads for centuries. This is not mystical claim; it is a description of material fact. The granite is what has been there. The body that meets it meets what has been there.
I will return to this point in Section X, in the analytical turn of the essay, because it has implications for what the cable car does that I will need the empirical work of the intervening sections to develop fully. For now, the observation suffices: the yī bù yī bài practice operates through direct bodily contact with a centuries-old substrate, and the practice's continuity across generations is partly carried by the substrate's continuity across generations. The pilgrim's body becomes, for the duration of the practice, the latest body in a long line of bodies that have used this particular granite to perform this particular operation. The practice is the operation. The granite is the medium. The body is the latest deposit.
The pilgrim returns from the mountain not the same body that arrived. The bruised knees and the hand abrasions heal. The yǎo rán state recedes as the practitioner re-enters the ordinary world of buses and meals and family obligations. What remains is more difficult to specify, and the tradition's accounts of what remains are extensive and varied. Some practitioners describe lasting changes in their relationship to the bodhisattva, to the practice, to suffering, to themselves. Some describe more modest residues. Some describe the experience of having been changed without being able to specify how. The witness who has not performed the practice cannot speak from the inside about what remains; what the witness can do is observe that the practitioners themselves report remainders, and that the apparatus has been built and maintained across thirteen centuries by practitioners who continue to find that the practice does what the tradition says it does.
Professor Powell and I, on our 1990 visit, did not perform the prostration practice. We watched it. We were a graduate student and his supervisor, on a research visit, walking the mountain in our own bodies but not in the pilgrim register at its full intensity. What we witnessed was the practice running, and what we carried away was the visual and acoustic fact of it: hundreds of bodies in yellow robes advancing up the granite in coordinated waves, the breath and the prayer and the scuff of robes and knees on stone, the long ascent from parking lot to summit hall conducted at the rate of one step per devotional cycle. The witness's evidence is partial. The practitioner's evidence is the body. The mountain's evidence is the granite. All three are present at Jiǔhuá. The essay holds them together.
We passed him on the way down. We were running, more or less — descending fast on the more direct route from the upper temple cluster, hurrying because Professor Powell wanted to make it back to the village area for some commitment whose details I no longer remember. The porter was trudging up the same path, moving upward under load. Trudging is the right word: his pace was the only pace the load permitted, steady and inexorable, neither hurried nor slow. Two stacks of bricks were balanced on the ends of a bamboo pole that he carried across his shoulders. He passed Professor Powell and me with a brief nod and continued upward.
I turned around. I am not sure why. Some combination of the brevity of the encounter, the visual fact of the man and his load, and an instinct trained by years around athletic bodies that there was something here worth a second look. From the angle above him on the stairway, with him below me and rising step by step, I could see the back of his legs at full working extension. He was, I would estimate, somewhere in his sixties or seventies. He was small. His calves were extraordinary. They were doing their work as I watched — contracting and relaxing in alternation, driving each step against the load, the muscle visible in motion as it executed the function it had been built across decades to execute.
I want to spend a moment on the calves, because they are the part of him I remember most precisely and they are the visible record of what register three of movement at Jiǔhuá produces in the bodies that perform it.
I had been a competitive tennis player throughout my twenties and into my early thirties. I had played at a level high enough that I had spent significant time around other tennis players whose bodies were the product of years of high-level training. I knew what athletic conditioning produced. I knew what calves built by sustained explosive sport activity looked like. The calves of the porter we passed on the shortcut at Jiǔhuá were not athletic-conditioning calves. They were something else. They were dense beyond what training alone produces, with the kind of definition that comes from decades of one specific motion repeated under load, on a body that had adapted to that motion to the point where the muscle had become the body's most prominent feature. Tennis builds particular legs. The calves I saw on the porter were the legs that a different kind of work builds.
The work in question is the daily ascent of the granite stairway under load. The porter carries supplies from the lower portions of the mountain, including the parking lot and village area, up to the higher temple complexes. The loads vary by what is being supplied — building materials, food staples, fuel, ritual implements, sometimes refuse on the descent — but the typical configuration is the bamboo pole across the shoulders with two roughly balanced stacks at its ends, totaling somewhere between sixty and a hundred kilograms depending on the load and the porter's strength. The porter ascends with this load to whatever destination the day's supply work requires, often a major temple at the summit cluster, then descends empty or with a return load. A working day for an experienced porter in this register may include several round trips on the stairway.
The biomechanics of stair-ascent under load place the largest sustained demand on the gastrocnemius and soleus — the calf muscles. Each step lifts the body and the load against gravity by the height of a stair-riser, typically fifteen to twenty centimeters at Jiǔhuá. The plantarflexion required to drive each step under load is repeated thousands of times per ascent, day after day. A porter who has performed this work for decades has, in effect, performed a calf-strengthening regimen of impossibly long duration and high consistency that no athletic training program could replicate. The result is the body I saw on the shortcut. The man's calves were the cumulative deposit of forty or fifty years of one specific motion. They were what the work, repeated across his working life, had made of his body.
It is also worth saying that the porter we saw was old. I did not assess his age precisely, but he was clearly past the typical age at which professional athletes can sustain elite-level performance, and he was carrying loads I would not have wanted to carry on those stairs at any age. The work is brutal. The selection across a working population is brutal. The porters whose bodies break — knees, lower back, the long-term wear of the vertebral compression that comes from years of shoulder-borne loads — leave the work, sometimes early in their careers. The porters who survive into old age while still working are the ones whose bodies adapted in ways that allowed them to continue. The man we passed was a survivor of that selection. The calves were the visible sign that his body had been one of the ones that could keep doing the work.
The bamboo pole he carried — the biǎndan (扁擔) — is a tool worth describing. It is a flexible bamboo pole, typically two to three meters long, with the load divided between two ends and the carrier in the middle. The bamboo's flexibility is functional, not incidental. As the porter walks, the pole flexes rhythmically with each step. At the bottom of the pole's flex, the load momentarily presses down on the carrier's shoulders; at the top of the flex, the load momentarily lifts. A porter who walks the pole correctly synchronizes his gait with the pole's natural frequency of oscillation, so that he steps when the load is at its lightest and the muscular effort of each step is reduced. The carrier's body, the load, and the pole's elasticity are tuned to one another. This is a practical optimization developed over thousands of years of use. A porter using a biǎndan properly can carry loads that would be substantially more difficult to carry on a rigid yoke or in unsynchronized hands.
The porter's path at Jiǔhuá, where it can be seen, follows a different logic from the pilgrim path. The pilgrim circuit has been engineered for the pilgrim's experience: switchbacks at vistas, approaches to specific temples in the appropriate ritual order, gradients that allow ordinary climbing bodies to manage. The porter's path is engineered for load efficiency. It goes straight up where straight up is possible. It takes the shortest route between the supply origin and the destination. It accepts gradients that the ordinary visitor would find unmanageable, because the porter, with his trained body and his pole, can manage them more efficiently than he can manage a longer route at a gentler grade. The two paths sometimes coincide. They more often diverge, with the porter's path running shorter and steeper alongside the pilgrim's longer circuit, or branching off entirely to reach a temple by the most direct line. The porter we passed was ascending the shortcut, his load destined for one of the upper temples. The shortcut existed because the porters needed it, and the porters' use of it across centuries kept it open and serviceable. Professor Powell and I were descending it because we needed the fast route down. We and the porter were on the same path doing different work: he was supplying the apparatus, we were trying to make our schedule. The path accommodated both of us, briefly, in passing.
What the porter is supplying matters for understanding what register three does and why it has been part of the mountain's apparatus throughout its history. Before the cable car system was installed, everything on the mountain that was not grown there or quarried there came up on porters' poles. The grain the monastics ate, the oil for lamps, the salt, the cloth for robes, the building materials for repairs, the ritual implements imported from elsewhere, the tea offered in cups to passing pilgrims and visitors — all of it came up on shoulders. The temples at the summit cluster, with their bronze statues and their roof tiles and their carved beams, were built and maintained over centuries by the cumulative labor of porters carrying everything that was needed. The mountain's monastic and pilgrimage life was supplied by porters' calves. The calves we saw on the man passing us on the shortcut were doing what calves of his ilk have done at Jiǔhuá for thirteen centuries.
The cable car has displaced this register substantially but not entirely. The cable car can carry goods as well as visitors, and a great deal of the bulk supply that was previously moved by porter is now moved by cable car, then by short-distance carrying or carting at the upper terminus. Some porters still work the mountain, however, particularly on routes the cable car does not directly serve, for temples and hermitages off the main circuit, and for specialized loads. The porter we saw was working in this remaining configuration. His calves were the body of a man who had been doing this labor before the cable car displaced most of it, and who continued to do it on the routes where it remained necessary.
I want to be careful about how to read the porter's labor in relation to the practice the pilgrim performs. The porter is not, in any standard sense, performing devotional practice. He is doing his job. He carries bricks because someone is paying him to carry bricks. The labor is not, on its surface, religious labor. The Chan Buddhist tradition has, however, long held that ordinary labor — chopping wood, carrying water — can be a form of practice when performed with sustained attention over long durations on the same site. The porter who has spent forty years carrying loads up the same granite stairway has been on the mountain longer, and more steadily, and with more bodily commitment, than nearly any pilgrim. The mountain has entered him through his calves and his shoulders and the wear on his joints in a way that no short-term practice could match. Whether he himself frames his work as practice is a question that depends on the individual and that I am not in a position to answer for the man we passed. What I can say is that his body, after decades on the stairway, was the visible record of a long-running engagement with the substrate that the apparatus has been built around. His body knew the mountain in a way that even most monastic practitioners do not.
This is also, in its way, an engagement with what the cable car bypasses. The cable car moves goods up the mountain efficiently and abolishes the porter's labor wherever it reaches. What is removed when the porter's labor is abolished is not merely a job. It is the long-running bodily engagement of a particular kind of worker with the mountain — the engagement that has, across thirteen centuries, supplied the apparatus that all the other registers depend on. The porter was the body that made the rest of the operation possible. The porter who is still working at Jiǔhuá today is doing labor that has been industrialized away in most of the equivalent registers at most of the equivalent sacred mountains. The man we passed was, in this sense, also a survivor — not just of his individual cohort's selection, but of the economic transformation that has eliminated his kind of labor from most of the contexts in which it once operated.
We did not speak to him. He passed with his nod and his pole and his bricks, and we continued our descent, and he continued his ascent. He could not have stopped to talk if he had wanted to. The whole apparatus of carrier-pole-load was in synchronized motion: the bamboo flexing at its natural frequency, the gait timed to the flex, the breath coordinated with the cycle, the calves contracting and relaxing in their established rhythm. To stop is to break the synchronization, to take the full static load on stationary shoulders, to lose the elastic assist of the biǎndan, to interrupt the metabolic equilibrium the working body has established. The economy of the brief nod was the economy of the working body itself. He could spare a head movement. He could not spare a step. The encounter lasted a few seconds, and the few seconds were the maximum the situation permitted. What he was doing he had done thousands of times before that day, and would do again, on a path he knew with the intimacy of a body that had walked it for most of his life.
Register four is the body that walks the mountain on foot, before the contemporary cable car system, in the configuration of trail and temple that walking-on-foot allowed. Professor Powell and I walked Jiǔhuá in this configuration in August 1990. The cable car had not been built. The festival days drew their crowds to the major temples and the village area, but the upper trails outside the immediate temple complexes were quiet. The two of us moved through the mountain on our own legs, at our own pace, attentive to what the trail offered.
What the trail offered, on the days we walked it, was substantial.
The granite trails wind across cliff faces and through forest cover and up open ridges and into the cloud and mist that gather on Anhui mountains in the warm months. On one of our walking days the mists were heavy and the conditions were of the kind the Chinese landscape painting tradition has been concerned with for a thousand years. Mist rose from the valleys and wound up the granite faces in long sinuous columns, dispersing and reforming with the air currents along the cliffs. Professor Powell and I walked, and as we walked we discussed the long iconographic tradition of dragon imagery in Chinese painting and poetry — the shānshuǐ (山水) tradition, the Six Dynasties and Tang poetic vocabulary in which mist-on-mountain is rendered as dragon, the way qì (氣) circulating in the landscape was understood as continuous with the qì circulating in the practitioner's body. The conversation was the kind of conversation that graduate students have with their supervisors on long walks — half scholarly exchange, half the slow elaboration of ideas that walking with attention produces.
What the day was actually showing us, while we discussed the tradition, was the tradition's referent. There were dragons on the cliffs that day. The mist was doing what mist does at Jiǔhuá in the right conditions, and what it does is recognizable as the imagery the tradition codified centuries earlier. The poetry and painting did not invent the dragons. The poetry and painting were the tradition's careful description of what bodies present at Chinese sacred mountains had seen, and what we were seeing on that walk was the same phenomenon the tradition had been pointing at. The mist columns winding up the granite were dragons in the only sense the tradition had ever meant the word: the visible movement of qì in the landscape, recognizable as living motion, present to the body that was attentive enough to see it. The dragons were there because the conditions were there and our eyes had been trained to recognize them.
This is part of what walking the mountain on foot makes available. The cable car visitor passes above the cliffs at speed, in an enclosed cabin, on a fixed cable, with the views framed by the cabin window. The walker's eye, moving with the body's pace through the substrate of the trail, has the time and the attention to see the qì of the mountain in operation. The painter and the poet whose vocabulary you are using to describe what you see have put themselves in this position before you — they walked, they looked, they wrote what they saw. Walking with attention places the body in the lineage of the painters and the poets. The cable car places the body in a different lineage.
At a particular point along the trail, on a different day of our walks, Professor Powell stopped. The spot was unremarkable to my eye — a place beside the path where a view opened across a valley toward the next ridge — but Professor Powell knew it. He had been there before, on an earlier visit, and he was returning to it. He stood at the spot for some moments and offered a prayer for his deceased mother. I stood with him. I did not pray. I was a graduate student in his early thirties, not yet practiced in the offering of such prayers, not yet certain that I had the standing to offer them, uncomfortable with the act in a way I would not be uncomfortable with it now. Professor Powell did not require me to pray. He let me be present with him while he did, which was, I now understand, its own form of teaching. He was showing me something that scholarship does not have a category for. He was showing me what it is to mark a spot on a sacred mountain across the unfolding of a life. The spot was hers, in his marking of it. Returning to the spot was returning to her. The prayer was the act of remembrance the spot existed to receive.
I would have prayed today. Thirty-five years on, with my own losses and my own accumulated relationship to the mountain and to what it offered us that day, I would stand at the same spot or one like it and pray for my own dead, and I would do so without the hesitation that the younger body had. The thirty-five years between the visit and the writing of this essay are part of what the mountain has been doing to me across that span. The walker's experience does not end when the walk ends. The body continues to receive what the walk gave it for as long as the body lives. Professor Powell understood this. He was kind enough to let me be present at his spot before I knew what the moment was for. The moment is for now.
The corner and the nun, with which this essay opened in Section I, was another instance of what walking the mountain on foot made available. The trail led us to her cave because the trail had been engineered, or had emerged through use, to lead bodies past her threshold. She was at her threshold because hermits at Jiǔhuá Shān have, for thirteen centuries, occupied small dwellings positioned along the paths that visitors walk. The encounter was not accidental. It was apparatus working. The trail bringing pilgrims and travelers to the hermit, the hermit offering tea, the visitor receiving the offering and continuing on — this is one of the things that walking-on-foot at Jiǔhuá produces, and the cable car does not produce it because the cable car does not deliver the visitor to the trail at all. The corner that brought us to her is one of the corners that the cable car's route passes above without engaging.
I have wondered, in the thirty-five years since, whether the same nun is in that cave, or whether her successor is, or whether the cave fell vacant when she died. The hermit-and-cave succession at Chinese sacred mountains is a real institutional phenomenon. The cave is a seat that outlasts its occupant. When one hermit dies, another may move in, sent by the supervising monastery or arriving on her own initiative. The cave is part of the apparatus, more durable than any single occupant. My guess is that someone is in the cave now, or has been recently. The cable car has not abolished the trail. The trail still leads to the corner. Whoever is in the cave is offering tea to whoever still chooses to walk.
Professor Powell and I were placed, during our visit, with a generosity that scholarly visitors to Chinese Buddhist sites do not always receive. We were given residential accommodations inside the main temple complex — a small apartment for me, a separate one for Professor Powell, in the wing where the abbot and the senior monastics also lived. We met the abbot and the temple's senior figures shortly after our arrival. On one occasion, escorted into the abbot's office to wait for a meeting, I made the mistake of seating myself on the couch — a comfortable couch in what looked to me like the natural waiting-area position. Professor Powell, who had been at many Chinese temples and knew the protocols, indicated quietly that I should move. The seat I had taken was not a guest's seat. It was, I realized as I rose, the abbot's. Chinese temple offices have hierarchies of seating that operate independent of any sign or instruction. The host's seat is the host's seat by spatial position — the one facing the door, the one against the back wall, the one most central to the room's organization. A guest sits where the host indicates. I had not known. Professor Powell knew, and the small correction was gentle and complete. I sat where I was supposed to sit. The protocol was satisfied. The visit continued.
What the residential placement made available was access to the temple's ordinary daily round. I am a pre-dawn person by temperament, and at Jiǔhuá this temperament was met by the apparatus directly. Each morning, well before sunrise, the wooden fish (mùyú 木魚) and the great hanging instruments at the main hall were struck to begin the monastic day. The sound of the wooden fish in pre-dawn dark, on a Chinese sacred mountain, with the granite and the temples and the surrounding forest arranged around the sound, is one of the substantive acoustic experiences a body can have at a Buddhist site. I was awake. I went to the main hall. I joined the monks at the back of the assembled gathering for the morning recitation and meditation. I had a small audio recorder with me and recorded the chanting. Centuries of daily practice had run through that hall, on those tiles, in that pre-dawn dark, and what I was hearing on that morning was the contemporary instance of an operation that had been running at Jiǔhuá since the Tang. The recording I made is one of the small material artifacts of the visit that I still have.
I was sensitive about taking photographs in the most sacred of the spaces we entered. When pilgrims were performing the prostration circumambulation around the altar at the Roushen Hall, where Kim Gyo-gak's incorruptible body is interred, I left the camera behind and brought a notebook instead. I sat or stood at the back of the hall and tried to copy down, by hand, the inscriptions on the banners hanging in the space. The banners carried devotional and dedicatory texts of the kind that hang in active temples throughout China — formulations of the Dìzàng vow, traditional offering phrases, the names of donors and their dedications. I was working in conditions that did not favor careful transcription: the practice was running around me, the lighting was uneven, my classical Chinese was a graduate student's rather than a scholar's, and the calligraphic styles on the banners ranged from straightforward to demanding. I made a mess of the characters. I gave the mess to Professor Powell. I do not know how much of it he could read; the offering of it to him was as much a gesture of I tried as a useful textual record. The mess is somewhere in my files, presumably, along with the dawn-hall recording. Both are honest artifacts of what one young scholar could and could not capture during the visit.
After the morning recitation, the monks went to breakfast. I went with them. The breakfast was xī fàn (稀飯) — rice porridge, the standard monastic breakfast — served with the standard array of accompaniments laid out in small dishes for the diners to add as they preferred: pickled vegetables, fermented bean curd, salted greens, peanuts in chili oil, dried small fish, perhaps a few other items. I take my xī fàn plain, with peanuts only. This is how I have always preferred it, and it is how I still prefer it. I added peanuts and ate. The Jiǔhuá monks watched with some interest. From their position, I had refused all the available toppings that would have made the porridge a normal monastic breakfast. From my position, I was eating my breakfast the way I like to eat it. The monks read my preference as ascetic restraint — the foreign visitor abstaining from all the small pleasures the table offered. They commented on it, kindly and with humor. I was performing austerity, in their reading, without having intended to. The cross-cultural register-confusion was funny on both sides. I did not correct their reading, in part because I did not at the time have the language to explain that I just like my porridge plain, and in part because I was not certain that the explanation would have changed the reading. The monks read what they read. The body produces the lived theming whether the body intends it or not.
These are some of the things that walking the mountain on foot, and being placed inside the temple's daily life, made available to two scholars in 1990 post-Cultural-Revolution conditions. The trail offered the dragons and the corner and the nun and the spot beside the path. The temple offered the dawn hall and the breakfast and the small comedy of the porridge. The walking and the placement were the conditions for what the apparatus could deliver. The contemporary cable-car visitor, arriving at the upper terminus and walking briefly to the major summit temples before being conveyed back down, does not have these conditions. The apparatus is still there. The conditions for receiving what it offers are different.
I want to be careful about the temptation to make this a story of access lost. The contemporary mountain delivers what it delivers to the bodies that engage it as they engage it. The cable car visitor's mountain is real, just different from ours. The pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài in the festival mass ascent is having an experience the cable car cannot deliver, but that experience is available now to anyone who chooses to perform the practice — the apparatus is intact for those who come prepared to use it. The walker who today chooses to climb the granite stairway on foot rather than ride the cable car is having an experience close to ours, with the difference that the trails are now busier than they were and the silence we sometimes had is harder to find.
What we had that is genuinely no longer available was the combination of conditions: the post-Cultural-Revolution reopening with its unfamiliar emptiness, the absence of the cable car's reorganizing presence, our supervisor's standing with the temple, the international conference's coincidence with our visit, the residential placement, the abbot's hospitality, the trails that were not yet visited at scale by the contemporary tourism flow. That particular combination held for a brief window and then changed. We were lucky to have walked the mountain in it. The walking was lucky. The luck was part of the walking.
The walker's mountain, at Jiǔhuá, is the mountain that the granite stairway and the trails and the cliff paths and the cave thresholds and the marked spots beside the trail were built for. It is the mountain that has been there since the Tang, doing its work on the bodies that walk it on their own legs and look at what walking with attention shows them. The dragons on the cliff that day were one instance. Professor Powell at his spot was another. The nun in her cave was another. The dawn hall and the breakfast were others. Each instance was apparatus working. The walker's body was the medium through which the apparatus could deliver what it had to deliver. We were the bodies through which, that week in August 1990, some of what Jiǔhuá does to walkers passed.
The cable car system at Jiǔhuá Shān was installed in stages over the post-1980 decades, with the principal lines coming into service from the 1990s onward. Three cable car routes now serve the mountain: a line from Phoenix Pine (Fènghuáng Sōng) station to the Tiantai cluster of upper temples, a line from Jiǔhuá Jiē up to Baisui Gong, and a line to Huatai. Together these lines deliver most contemporary visitors to within a short walk of the major upper temples without requiring an ascent on foot. The granite stairway remains in place and is fully usable. Some visitors still climb it. Most do not. The cable car system was not present at the time of my visit with Professor Powell in August 1990. The precise installation dates for each line are documented in the records of the Jiǔhuá Shān Scenic Area Administration and in Chinese-language sources I will cite specifically when this essay is finalized.
The contemporary visitor's typical itinerary at Jiǔhuá looks something like this. The visitor arrives by bus or private car at one of the parking facilities below Jiǔhuá Jiē. They proceed to the entry point of the scenic area, where they purchase tickets — the entry ticket to the scenic area itself, which is a separate fee, and then the cable car tickets for whichever lines they intend to ride. They take the cable car to the upper terminus. From the terminus they walk to one of the major temples, typically the Roushen Hall or one of the Tiantai cluster of summit temples. They spend some time at the temple, photograph themselves and their party against the temple backdrop, perhaps light a stick of incense, perhaps make a small donation. They then return to the cable car, descend, and either ride a second cable car to a different upper site or proceed back to the parking lot. The total time on the mountain is typically between two and four hours. Some visitors stay for a meal in the Jiǔhuá Jiē village area before departing. Most depart promptly to continue the day's itinerary, which often includes adjacent sites — the Huangshan range a short distance away is the most common pairing — and concludes at a hotel in a nearby town for the night.
The phenomenology of this register can be summarized in five verbs. The visitor is conveyed up. The visitor produces a selfie. The visitor blogs the visit, in some form, to social media or to a personal feed. The visitor is conveyed down. The visitor proceeds on to the next site. Conveyed up, selfie, blog, descend, on to the next site. Each verb names a specific phase of the apparatus's operation on the visitor, and each verb names a relationship between the visitor and the mountain that distinguishes register one from the other registers examined in this essay.
Conveyed up. The verb is in the passive voice, and the passive voice is the analytical claim. The body does not climb the mountain. The body is moved up the mountain by machine — cable car cabin, fixed cable, motor at the upper terminus winding the cable across its loop. The visitor's body is, for the duration of the cable car ride, in the same grammatical position as a piece of cargo. The cable car conveys the visitor. This is not a value judgment. It is a description of the relationship between the body and the apparatus. The cable car was designed to convey, and conveying is what it does. The visitor's role during conveyance is to remain in the cabin, photograph the views from the cabin window, and arrive at the upper terminus.
Selfie. The visitor's relationship to the destination, once arrived, is largely mediated by the photograph the visitor produces of themselves at the destination. The smartphone camera, held at arm's length or on a small tripod, is positioned so that the visitor and their party are in the foreground and the temple, the cliff, the bronze Dìzàng statue, or the vista is in the background. The photograph is composed for the visitor's social documentation rather than for the apparent purpose of recording the temple. The temple becomes the backdrop for a self-portrait. This reverses the gaze pattern of the practitioner who addresses the temple, whose body is oriented toward the bodhisattva or the altar or the stone, with the practitioner's own physical position being secondary to the act of address. The selfie photographer is the figure addressed. The temple is set decoration. The pilgrim addresses the bodhisattva. The visitor addresses the camera. This formulation, like the one earlier about the prostration practice, oversimplifies in order to clarify, but the simplification points at a real difference. The orientations of the bodies are different.
Blog. The selfie is not a private memento. The selfie is content, produced for a small or large audience on the visitor's social media platforms, family chat groups, photo-sharing services, or personal websites. The visit is not complete when the body returns from the mountain. The visit is complete when the photograph and a brief caption have been posted to whichever platform the visitor uses, and the post has begun to receive responses — likes, comments, reactions — from the visitor's network. The visit's social meaning is realized in the post, not in the body's experience on the mountain. This is not a recent or aberrant phenomenon; it is the dominant register of contemporary tourism documentation, and it operates at every visited site of significance globally. The visitor's mountain is processed into image and image into post and post into social capital. The processing is the visit's purpose for many of the bodies that perform it.
Descend. The same cable car that conveyed the visitor up now conveys them down. The descent is identical in mechanical form to the ascent, but reversed in direction. The visitor has spent perhaps an hour or two at the upper terminus and the temples accessible from it. The descent takes a few minutes. The body has not engaged the mountain through climbing on the way up; the body does not engage the mountain through descending on the way down. The cable car cabin holds the visitor stationary while the cable moves. There is no wandering, no lostness, no yǎo rán state of dissolved spatial coordinates. The visitor returns to the parking lot in much the same condition in which they arrived.
On to the next site. The mountain is one item on a tour itinerary. The visitor's day, week, or vacation includes other sites — Huangshan most commonly, perhaps Hongcun or Xidi village in the same Anhui itinerary, perhaps a Yangtze cruise stop, perhaps Shanghai for the urban portion of the trip. Jiǔhuá Shān is, in the visitor's experience, one of these. It is interchangeable with the others in the sense that all of them are sites the itinerary includes and all of them are checked off the list as the trip progresses. The mountain is collected. The collection is the goal. The visitor returns home with photographs and posts from each site, and the cumulative collection is the trip the visitor took.
These five phases describe the conveyed visitor's register at Jiǔhuá. The temporal scale is short — a few hours at the site, with most of those hours spent in conveyance, photography, and the brief approaches to the major temples. The bodily commitment is minimal — the body is conveyed for most of the ascent and descent, and walks only short connecting distances at the upper terminus. The substrate contact is minimal or absent — the body does not touch the granite stairway, except perhaps incidentally for short walks at the temple cluster, and the deeper substrate of the mountain itself is engaged only through the cable car cabin's window. The phenomenological state induced by the visit is brief, externally photographed, and quickly returned to the ordinary register as the body returns to the parking lot and the next destination.
This is, in Lukas's vocabulary, a themed-and-immersive-space experience of the kind his work documents extensively. The contemporary cable-car-served Chinese sacred mountain is a themed space in the sense that its significant features — the temples, the bodhisattva, the views, the historical-religious context — are presented to the visitor through a designed pathway that organizes the visitor's movement, attention, and consumption. The pathway includes the entry ticket and signage, the cable car routing, the path layout at the upper terminus, the photo opportunity points marked or implicitly designated, the souvenir vendors, the food stalls, the descent and exit routing. The visitor's experience is shaped at every step by design choices. The experience is also immersive, in Lukas's sense, because the design envelops the visitor in the theme — the visitor is, for the duration of the visit, at the Buddhist sacred mountain, with the visual, acoustic, and informational environment continuously addressing the theme. The themed-space frame does describe what register one is.
What the themed-space frame does not describe, and what the operational register that this essay has been developing is for, is the question of what the apparatus does to the visitor — what transformation, if any, it performs on the body that engages it. The themed-space apparatus produces an experience that the visitor can document and share. It does not produce the yǎo rán state, the bodily exhaustion of sustained committed practice, the long-term inscription of repeated practice, or the bodily contact with the centuries-deep substrate that the practicing-on-foot registers produce. The themed-space apparatus, in this sense, is a different kind of apparatus than the older devotional apparatus that the granite stairway was built to serve. The older apparatus is for transmuting the practitioner. The themed-space apparatus is for managing the visitor.
The two apparatuses coexist at Jiǔhuá. They are not in competition for the same bodies — most cable car visitors do not perform yī bù yī bài, and most pilgrims who perform yī bù yī bài do not also ride the cable car — but they share the same site, draw on overlapping infrastructure, and present themselves as continuous with one another in the visitor's perception. The cable car visitor at Jiǔhuá is, in their own experience, visiting a Chinese Buddhist sacred mountain, which is what the themed-space apparatus presents. The themed-space apparatus is not lying about what it presents. The mountain is a Chinese Buddhist sacred mountain. The cable car visitor's visit, however brief and however mediated by photography and social media, is a real visit to a real sacred mountain. The visitor has been there.
What the visitor has not done is engaged the apparatus that the mountain was built to host. The granite stairway, the prostration circuit, the hermit's cave threshold, the dawn hall's morning recitation — these are all still present at the mountain, but they are bypassed, not abolished, by the cable-car-and-selfie apparatus. The visitor who chose to walk the granite stairway, to perform yī bù yī bài if the visitor were a practitioner, to attend the dawn hall as Professor Powell and I did, to walk the trail above Huacheng Si in the configuration that allows the corner-and-the-nun encounter — that visitor is engaging a different apparatus, and the different apparatus does different work. The cable car has not taken away the option. The cable car has, however, made the older apparatus the option-not-taken for most contemporary visitors. The mountain operates on whichever apparatus the body engages. Most contemporary bodies engage the cable car apparatus.
I want to note one further feature of register one that the analytical work in Section X will develop. The cable car visitor's body never touches the granite stairway, except perhaps incidentally on the short connecting walks at the upper terminus. The granite that has held the prostration practice across thirteen centuries is, for the cable car visitor, a feature of the landscape rather than a medium of the body's engagement with the mountain. The material continuity that the kneeling pilgrim's body engages — the same stone the Tang and Song hermits cut, the same stone the Ming pilgrims wore down — is bypassed entirely by the conveyed body. The cable car visitor's body has been at the mountain. The cable car visitor's body has not been on the granite. This material discontinuity is, I will argue in Section X, part of what distinguishes the registers from one another at a deeper level than the obvious differences in time and effort. The granite is what has been there. Whatever bodies meet it now meet what has been there. The bodies that do not meet it meet a different mountain.
The five registers I have examined to this point all engage the mountain at the scale of bodies on or near the substrate of the granite stairway. Register five is different. The overland traveler has not yet arrived at the mountain. Their body is in motion across the surrounding geography, on a route that may or may not lead to Jiǔhuá and that, before any of the other registers can begin, has to deliver them to the mountain's edge.
This register is the substrate of all the others. Every pilgrim, every porter, every monk, every conveyed visitor first arrived at Jiǔhuá as an overland traveler. The history of the mountain is partly the history of who could reach it, by what routes, with what infrastructure, in what political and economic conditions. The mountain has not always been equally reachable. The conditions for reaching it have changed across centuries, and what each generation of practitioners and visitors found at Jiǔhuá depended in part on what their generation's overland infrastructure permitted them to bring.
The geography itself has not changed across the period that concerns this essay. Jiǔhuá Shān sits in southern Anhui Province, north of the Yangtze River and west of the Huangshan range. The mountain is in the prefecture of Chizhou, which occupies the south bank of the Yangtze in this region. The principal water route to Jiǔhuá's vicinity has always been the Yangtze, which carried boat traffic from upstream and downstream through the prefectural port towns. The principal land route from the Yangtze to the mountain follows the small watercourses that drain north from the Jiǔhuá massif into the river. From the Yangtze port, a traveler proceeded south by foot, cart, or sedan chair through agricultural country and into the foothills, with the mountain gradually approaching as the road climbed. The final ascent to Jiǔhuá Jiē, the village area at the mountain's heart, was historically a foot-and-sedan-chair operation, since the gradients were steep and the road infrastructure in the immediate approaches was always more limited than the river-port approach permitted.
The Tang and earlier period of Buddhist establishment at Jiǔhuá took place when the Yangtze was already a major artery of Chinese commercial and religious traffic. Kim Gyo-gak, the Korean monk whose presence at Jiǔhuá in the eighth century anchors the mountain's Dìzàng identification, would have arrived on the Yangtze, from the eastern coastal ports where Korean and Japanese travelers commonly entered Tang China, then proceeded south into the foothills and up to the mountain. The route was substantial — a major multi-week journey from the Korean peninsula by sea, then up the Yangtze, then overland into Anhui. The fact that he made it at all is part of the mountain's founding narrative. The fact that he stayed for seventy-five years is part of the mountain's institutional memory.
The Ming and Qing buildout of the mountain's temple complex, with its peak figure of several hundred monastic establishments, depended on overland infrastructure that had developed substantially by the late imperial period. The Yangtze ports of Chizhou and the upstream and downstream prefectural seats moved goods, pilgrims, monks, and ritual implements to the mountain's vicinity. The roads from the Yangtze inland to the mountain were maintained, in part, by the same lineage and donor networks that funded temple construction. A pilgrim from Beijing or from a southern coastal city in the Ming or Qing might have spent several weeks traveling to Jiǔhuá, with the journey itself sometimes performed in devotional registers. The overland approach was not a separate event from the pilgrimage. The approach was part of the pilgrimage. The pilgrim who arrived at the foot of the granite stairway had already performed substantial travel, and the body that began the ascent had been on the road long enough to have entered, in some measure, the disposition the practice required.
The Republican period and the early Communist period brought rail and motorized road infrastructure to the broader region but did not, until later, transform the immediate approach to the mountain. The Cultural Revolution closed Jiǔhuá to religious practice, and the overland infrastructure during that period served only the limited civilian and administrative traffic that the closure permitted. When the mountain reopened in 1979, the overland infrastructure was substantially what it had been before — Yangtze river traffic, road from the river ports inland, the final approach to the mountain by the established roads.
The transformations of the past several decades have changed the overland register more thoroughly than any previous period. A railway now serves the area. The high-speed train from Shanghai to Hefei, opened in stages from the 2000s onward, brings travelers within a few hours of the mountain. A dedicated Jiǔhuá Shān railway station receives travelers headed specifically to the mountain. Chizhou Jiǔhuá Shān Airport, opened in 2013, brings air travelers from Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities into the prefecture directly. The road infrastructure has been comprehensively rebuilt: an expressway connects the mountain to the regional highway network, a network of secondary roads serves the immediate approach, and the parking facilities at the entrance of the scenic area accommodate buses and private cars at scale.
What this transformation has done to register five is to compress the overland approach in a way that parallels what the cable car has done to the on-mountain ascent. A traveler from Shanghai who took several days by river and road to reach Jiǔhuá in the Ming or Qing now reaches the mountain in a few hours by high-speed rail and shuttle bus. A traveler from a more distant Chinese city, or from abroad, can be at the mountain on the same day they leave their starting point. The approach has been made fast. The body has been spared the slow accumulation of travel that the older overland register required. The pilgrim who arrived at the foot of the granite stairway in the Ming after several weeks of road travel had been prepared by the journey for what was about to begin. The contemporary visitor who arrives at the parking lot in the late morning, after a high-speed-rail ride from Shanghai earlier that day, has not been similarly prepared. The body is closer to the disposition of urban arrival than to the disposition of pilgrim arrival.
Professor Powell and I, in August 1990, made the overland approach in conditions that were closer to the older configuration than to the contemporary one. The high-speed rail did not yet exist; the airport had not been built; the expressway network was less developed. We traveled by train and bus, with some local taxi for the final approaches, from wherever we were starting from in eastern China at the time. The travel took most of a day or longer. By the time we arrived at the mountain, the body had been on the road for some duration, and the road had done some preparation of its own — the slow shift from urban Chinese landscape to agricultural Chinese landscape to mountain Chinese landscape, the gradual change of air and light and sound, the cumulative attention that a long approach by ground transportation produces. We arrived not in the disposition of urban transit but in something closer to the disposition that overland approach has historically produced. Whether this matters for what Jiǔhuá then made available to us is a question I cannot answer empirically — there is no controlled comparison — but it seems plausible that the body that arrives slow at a mountain meets the mountain differently than the body that arrives fast.
This is not a claim that fast arrival is always inferior. The contemporary infrastructure has made Jiǔhuá accessible to a much broader population than the older infrastructure ever permitted. Pilgrims who could not have reached the mountain in the Ming because of distance or expense or political dislocation can now reach it in a day from anywhere in China. The democratization of access is a real feature of the contemporary mountain and is, on most accounts, a good thing. What the speed has changed is the bodily disposition of arrival, and the relationship between that disposition and what the mountain's other apparatuses can then do.
The overland traveler's mountain, in this register's terms, is the mountain as destination — the mountain that exists somewhere out there in the geography, that has to be reached, and that becomes specific only as the approach concludes. The traveler crossing eastern Anhui by train, watching the landscape change through the train window, is not yet at Jiǔhuá. The traveler in the shuttle bus from Jiǔhuá Shān railway station is not yet at Jiǔhuá. The traveler walking from the parking lot toward the entry of the scenic area is, in the next moments, going to be at Jiǔhuá. The transition from approach to arrival is a real transition, and the body knows it is happening.
This register, more than the others, has been transformed by the past three decades of Chinese infrastructural development. The cable car has changed the on-mountain ascent. The high-speed rail and the airport and the expressway have changed the off-mountain approach. Together they have produced a contemporary configuration in which both the approach and the ascent are fast, both compressed, both managed by mechanical apparatus that conveys the body to the destination without requiring the traveler's body to do the work that older configurations required. The mountain that the contemporary fast-arriving conveyed visitor reaches is, in this sense, twice removed from the mountain the slow-walking pilgrim of the Ming reached. The contemporary apparatus delivers a different mountain from the historical apparatus, and register five names the outermost layer of that difference.
What remains of the older register five is the geography itself. The mountains and the river and the watersheds have not changed. A traveler who chose to make the overland approach in something closer to the older register — by ground transportation, slowly, with attention to the changing landscape, perhaps on foot or by bicycle for the final approaches — could still do so. The contemporary infrastructure has not abolished the older approach; it has made the older approach an option-not-taken for most travelers. A few pilgrims and a few scholars and a few walkers do still make the approach in this older register, and what they bring to the mountain is different from what the high-speed-rail traveler brings. The mountain is patient with both. The mountain was reachable in the Ming and is reachable now. The body that arrives is the body the mountain will work with.
The five registers of movement examined in the empirical sections of this essay engage Jiǔhuá Shān at the scale of bodily passage through and over the substrate of granite, soil, water, and forest. The mountain's apparatus operates at other scales as well, and these scales are part of what the registers engage when they engage the mountain. This section steps back from the registers individually and considers the apparatus as a whole — what it does, how it operates, and what the contemporary configuration has changed in its operation.
I want to begin by naming three further scales at which the apparatus works, beyond the bodily-pathway scale that the five registers organize. Each of these scales was visible to Professor Powell and me during our August 1990 visit. Each contributed to what the visit made available to us, and each is part of how Jiǔhuá hosts and operates on the bodies that come.
The apparatus operates through institutional protocols that determine how visitors and practitioners are received and placed. Professor Powell and I arrived at the mountain as scholarly guests on a research visit, and the temple's reception of us was governed by Chinese institutional protocols of considerable specificity. We met the abbot and the senior monastics shortly after our arrival. We were given residential accommodations inside the main temple complex — small apartments in the wing where the abbot and the senior monastics lived. This was substantial placement. Western scholarly visitors to Chinese Buddhist sites do not always receive this kind of access, and the placement reflected Professor Powell's standing with the temple and, by extension, my standing as his student.
On one occasion, escorted into the abbot's office to wait for a meeting, I made the mistake of seating myself on the most prominent couch — a comfortable couch in what looked to me like the natural waiting-area position. Professor Powell, who had been at many Chinese temples and knew the protocols, indicated quietly that I should move to a different seat. The seat I had taken was not a guest's seat. It was, I realized as I rose, the abbot's. Chinese temple offices have hierarchies of seating that operate independent of any sign or instruction. The host's seat is the host's seat by spatial position — the one facing the door, the one against the back wall, the one most central to the room's organization. A guest sits where the host indicates. I had not known. Professor Powell knew, and the small correction was gentle and complete. I sat where I was supposed to sit, and the protocol was satisfied.
This is the room-protocol scale, and it operates everywhere in Chinese institutional space. The protocol is in the room itself. A trained body knows where to sit; an untrained body has to be corrected. The protocol does not require signage because it is constituted by the spatial arrangement of furniture and threshold. The seat the abbot occupies is not labeled as the abbot's seat. It is the abbot's seat by being in the position that abbots' seats are in. A foreign visitor sitting in it is not violating an explicit rule; the foreign visitor is failing to read the room. The protocol reads the foreign visitor in turn, and produces the gentle correction.
The same protocol operates at the banquet. During our visit, the festival included a major vegetarian banquet, catered by a chef group from Shanghai, served across many courses with the orchestration that Chinese institutional banquet protocol requires. Chinese banquet seating at this scale codifies the relationship between standing in the event and physical placement in the room with considerable precision. The head table holds the most senior figures; subsequent tables descend in seniority outward; within each table, specific seats hold specific gradations of recognition. A guest's placement is the protocol's public assessment of their standing, visible to everyone present.
The hosts had a placement problem with the two of us. Professor Powell's standing was unambiguous; mine was not. As a foreign graduate student traveling with my supervisor, I could be placed with the other graduate students at one of the back tables, which would have been protocol-correct for my formal status. Or I could be placed with Professor Powell, which would honor the relationship and might be expected for a Western pair at a Chinese banquet. A debate developed among the hosts about which version of the protocol applied. I would have been content with whatever they decided. Professor Powell, with characteristic judgment, indicated with a gesture and a word that we should let them figure it out. They did. I was placed near the head of the room, with Professor Powell, rather than with the graduate-student cohort. The placement told the room that the relationship was the operative fact, and that I was present as Professor Powell's representative as well as a scholar in my own right.
What the abbot's couch and the banquet seating share is the protocol working to place bodies according to standing. The placement is itself the protocol's communication about who the placed body is. The body that does not know the protocol can be corrected; the body that knows can be placed correctly without explicit instruction. The protocol operates whether the placed body is aware of it or not. The body is placed, in either sense.
The merit economy operates as a designed economy through which pilgrims and visitors convert money and effort into religious merit and material souvenirs. This economy is substantial at Jiǔhuá and has been substantial throughout the mountain's history. The post-1980 reopening reactivated the older merit-economy infrastructure and added contemporary tourism-economy components to it.
The most striking instance of the merit-economy apparatus we encountered was the fàng shēng (放生) pond at the Huacheng Temple complex. Fàng shēng means "release of life," and the practice — purchasing a captive animal and releasing it for merit — is a major Chinese Buddhist devotional act with substantial textual basis in the Mahayana tradition. At Jiǔhuá, the practice is operationalized through a large pond stocked with fish that pilgrims and visitors can purchase from temple staff and release into the pond. The released fish are understood to receive the practitioner's compassion, and the practitioner accumulates merit from the act of release. Periodically, the temple staff net the fish from the pond and prepare them for release again. The fish in the pond are not wild fish that have been captured and are awaiting release. They are pond fish, bred and maintained for the explicit purpose of being purchased and released, repeatedly. The release is real. The merit, in the practitioners' framing, is real. The fish go back into the pond to be released by the next pilgrim. The cycle is built into the economy.
This is not, on the tradition's own terms, a debunking observation. The practice operates on the practitioners exactly as the doctrine says it does — the pilgrim performs the merit-act with compassionate intention, accumulates merit, and departs satisfied. The fact that the fish will be netted and released again does not negate the merit, in the tradition's logic, because the act of compassion and the intention behind it are what generate the merit. Whether the fish ends up free in a wild river or back in the temple pond is, in this register, secondary. The pilgrim's act is what counts.
What the fish pond demonstrates is the economy working at the level of devotional infrastructure. The pond is a designed piece of the merit economy. The fish are a renewable resource for that economy. The temple has built and maintained the pond as part of its operation. The pilgrim arrives, the pond is ready to receive their merit-act, the act is performed, the economy regenerates itself. This is the merit economy as a sustained operation — designed, maintained, and operated by the temple to serve the practitioners who come.
The merit economy at Jiǔhuá includes other components beyond the fàng shēng pond. Incense purchase points are everywhere on the mountain; the practitioner buys incense at a temple-operated stand, lights it, offers it at the altar, and the merit accrues. Donation boxes at every temple receive monetary offerings of any size. Míng bì (冥幣), ritual paper currency burned for the dead and for beings in the underworld, is sold at points around the temple complex and burned in dedicated braziers. Candles are sold and lit. Votive plaques, sometimes name-inscribed, are offered. The full vocabulary of Chinese Buddhist devotional consumption is in operation at Jiǔhuá, organized around the bodhisattva to whom the mountain is dedicated and around the specific practices the mountain hosts. I purchased a small Dìzàng image and, I believe, a sample of míng bì during our visit, as items of scholarly documentation rather than as offerings. The economy accommodates both kinds of purchase.
The merit economy and the contemporary tourism economy overlap at every point. Souvenir vendors operate alongside the merit-offering points. Postcards depicting the temples and the bodhisattva are sold near the incense stands. I purchased a few postcards. I also purchased a small plastic viewfinder toy — the kind of device that holds a circular reel of small slides and clicks through them when a lever is depressed. The viewfinder I bought clicked through curated images of Jiǔhuá's main attractions: the bronze Dìzàng statue, the Roushen Hall, Tiantai Peak, the lotus-blossom view of the nine peaks. The viewfinder is a small designed apparatus for delivering the curated mountain to the visitor for repeated home consumption. The visitor takes the device home and recirculates the curated mountain through their own and their family's eyes, again and again.
This is, in Lukas's vocabulary, lived theming at consumer scale. The viewfinder presents the mountain as theme, the visitor consumes the theme through the device, and the experience has succeeded in delivering its branded experience to the consumer who carries it home. The viewfinder also does work the cable car does at the bodily scale — delivers the destination without requiring the practitioner to traverse the work that produces the destination's significance. The visitor who clicks through the viewfinder's reel of curated images sees what the curating company has decided the mountain consists of: the bronze statue, the famous halls, the photogenic peaks. What is excluded from the viewfinder is also instructive. The porter's shortcut is not on the reel. The hermit's cave above Huacheng Si is not on the reel. The dawn hall's morning recitation is not on the reel. The viewfinder presents the curated mountain, which is a different mountain from the full one.
The merit economy at the festival scale also includes substantial commercial and cultural activity around the devotional core. During our visit, the festival environment included music, vendors selling food and souvenirs, the bustle of a major Chinese miào huì (廟會, "temple gathering"). The historical miào huì tradition has always combined intense devotional practice with extensive commerce, performance, food, and social gathering. The kneeling pilgrims performing yī bù yī bài up the approach were doing their practice within an environment of music, vendors, and the multi-sensory bustle that miào huì always entail. The pilgrims' interior commitment was being maintained against environmental volume, not in solemn quiet. This is part of what the practice does: it cultivates the capacity to maintain interior commitment within environmental distraction. The festival music and the vendors are part of the conditions the practice runs through.
The third scale is the temple's daily monastic round. This scale is largely invisible to the day-trip visitor, who arrives during operating hours and does not see what the temple is doing in the dawn dark or the late evening or during the meals between services. Professor Powell's and my placement inside the temple complex made this scale partly visible to us during our visit.
I am a pre-dawn person by temperament, and at Jiǔhuá this temperament was met by the apparatus directly. Each morning, well before sunrise, the wooden fish (mùyú 木魚) and the great hanging instruments at the main hall were struck to begin the monastic day. The sound of the wooden fish in pre-dawn dark, on a Chinese sacred mountain, with the granite and the temples and the surrounding forest arranged around the sound, is one of the substantive acoustic experiences a body can have at a Buddhist site. I was awake. I went to the main hall. I joined the monks at the back of the assembled gathering for the morning recitation and meditation. I had a small audio recorder with me and recorded the chanting. Centuries of daily practice had run through that hall, on those tiles, in that pre-dawn dark, and what I was hearing on that morning was the contemporary instance of an operation that had been running at Jiǔhuá since the Tang. The recording I made is one of the small material artifacts of the visit that I still have.
After the morning recitation, the monks went to breakfast. I went with them. The breakfast was xī fàn (稀飯), rice porridge, the standard monastic breakfast. The Jiǔhuá monks watched with some interest as I added only peanuts to my porridge, abstaining from the other accompaniments laid out on the table. They read my preference as ascetic restraint. I did not correct their reading. The cross-cultural register-confusion produced a small comedy whose lesson is that the body produces lived theming whether the body intends to or not. The monks read what they read. I ate my breakfast. The hall accommodated both readings.
The monastic-routine scale operates continuously, daily, across centuries, without requiring the presence of any visitor or pilgrim. The monks rise, recite, meditate, eat, study, work, rest, sleep. The dawn hall has been operating in this register, with a Cultural Revolution interruption, since the Tang foundation of the temple. The bodies of the monks who perform the routine are themselves substrate for the routine's operation — bodies trained to wake at the sound of the wooden fish, bodies trained to prostrate and chant in coordinated rhythm, bodies that have inhabited the temple's daily life until the temple has entered them. The witness who is placed inside the temple during the routine sees what the routine is doing. The day-trip visitor does not see this scale at all, except sometimes in glimpses — a monk crossing a courtyard, a service in progress as the visitor walks past.
These three additional scales — institutional protocol, merit economy, monastic routine — together with the bodily-pathway scale of the five registers, constitute what Jiǔhuá has accumulated across thirteen centuries. The apparatus operates simultaneously at all four scales and on all the bodies that engage the mountain in any register. The cable car visitor encounters the merit economy at the souvenir vendor and the protocol scale at the entry-ticket booth; the pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài encounters the monastic routine through the chanting at the temples passed; the porter's daily ascent traverses the substrate that the protocol-and-economy scales depend upon. The scales are not separate domains. They are the apparatus operating at different registers of the same operation.
What is the operation for? This is the question that the analytical work of this section is for. The Lefebvre vocabulary I introduced earlier — conceived space, perceived space, lived space — gives a framework for sorting the layers, and the Lukas vocabulary on themed and immersive spaces gives an analytic for the contemporary tourism overlay. Both vocabularies are useful. Neither answers the question of what the apparatus does, in its own terms, to the bodies that engage it.
The answer the tradition gives, and the answer this essay has been working toward, is that the apparatus performs technical transformation on the practitioner. The Daoist and Buddhist traditions at Jiǔhuá hold that the mountain, engaged correctly, transmutes the body and the disposition of the practitioner. The signs of this transmutation are bodily: the kneeling pilgrim's bruised knees and the yǎo rán state at the high end of the prostration ascent; the porter's calves of stone and the body that has accumulated the work of decades; the walker's encounters at the corner and the marked spot beside the trail; the monastic body trained by daily routine until the routine has entered the body. The cable car visitor, engaging the apparatus through a different mode, does not receive these specific transmutations. The cable car delivers a different experience, with its own characteristic effects on the visitor.
Maspero's reading of Daoist yǎngshēng practice took the operational claims seriously: the techniques produce specific phenomenological and physiological effects in trained practitioners, and the scholar's task is to describe what they do as carefully as the sources allow. Schipper's work on the Daoist body extends this approach into the relationship between the practitioner's body and the cosmos that the practice articulates. Robinet's treatment of inner alchemy and Shangqing meditation places the operational claims at the center of her analysis. The lineage running through these scholars takes seriously that the apparatus does what its tradition says it does. This essay extends that approach from the practitioner's body and the priest's altar to the mountain landscape itself. Jiǔhuá Shān is a thirteen-centuries-deep apparatus for performing technical transformation on the bodies of practitioners who engage it correctly. The transformation is not metaphor. It is the operational claim the tradition has made about itself, and the essay takes the claim at face value.
I have foreshadowed throughout the empirical sections an argument about material continuity and the cable car's relationship to it. This argument is the analytical core of what this section claims, and I will now state it directly.
The granite stairway at Jiǔhuá is the medium through which the yī bù yī bài practice runs across centuries. The same stone that the Tang and Song hermits cut, the same stone that the Ming and Qing pilgrims wore down, the same stone that the post-Cultural-Revolution repair crews supplemented with replacement sections — all of it is local granite, materially continuous across the layers of its accumulation. The contemporary practitioner performing prostration ascent places forehead, hands, and knees on stone that has been receiving the same contact across the long history of the practice. The body meets what has been there. The granite has held the practice across time, and the contemporary practitioner enters a long-running operation rather than initiating a new one. This is the cosmochronicle frame at full strength: substrate accumulating traces of human work across human time, the present generation's bodies the latest deposit on a centuries-deep accumulation.
The cable car, in contrast, conveys the visitor up the mountain on cables suspended above the granite. The cable car visitor's body does not touch the granite of the stairway, except perhaps incidentally for short walks at the upper terminus. The visitor is at the mountain. The visitor's body is not on the granite. This is a material discontinuity from the practice the granite has held. The cable car visitor's body has been at Jiǔhuá but has not been on the substrate that the apparatus's operation has run through.
This material discontinuity is, I want to argue, the deepest difference between the registers. The temporal compression of the cable car visit is real — three hours instead of three days — but the temporal compression alone would not necessarily abolish the apparatus's effect on the body. A practitioner who managed to perform sustained committed practice in a compressed timeframe might still receive what the apparatus offers. What the cable car removes is not only time but also the medium through which the work has run. The granite is what has held the prostrations, the foot-falls, the porters' loads, the walkers' attention, the monks' routine displacements between buildings. The cable car bypasses the granite. The body that arrives at the upper terminus has not been on the granite that the apparatus's history is held in.
The cable car has not abolished the granite. The granite is still there. The pilgrim who walks the granite, on foot or on knees, can still meet what has been there. What the cable car has done is make the granite the option-not-taken for most contemporary visitors. The mountain's apparatus continues to operate for the bodies that engage it through the granite. The visitors who do not engage it through the granite engage a different apparatus, contemporary tourism, which delivers a different experience with different effects.
Professor Powell and I, in August 1990, were given the conditions to engage the apparatus through the granite. The cable car had not been built. The trails were quiet. We were placed inside the temple complex. The festival ran around us. We walked, and we watched, and we recorded what we could. We were not pilgrims; we did not perform the prostration practice. But we engaged the mountain through walking and through placement, and what we received during that visit is part of what this essay has been describing.
The mountain operated on us in ways that have continued to operate across the thirty-five years since. The dragons in the mist. Professor Powell at his marked spot praying for his mother. The corner and the nun and the tea. The dawn hall's wooden fish. The morning recitation on the tiles. The breakfast porridge. The descent on the narrow stairs. The festival music and the prostration ascent and the parking-lot vendors and the plastic viewfinder. All of this happened to us during a visit that lasted some days. All of it has continued to operate in the bodies that received it.
I did not pray at Professor Powell's spot during our visit. I would pray now. The thirty-five years between the visit and the writing of this essay are part of what the mountain has been doing. The body that walked the granite in 1990 is the body that is writing in 2026, and the writing is the form the operation has taken in the body that received it. The mountain has not stopped working on me. It has worked slowly, across decades, until the writing surfaced.
This is also what the mountain does. It operates in the body that has been on it, sometimes for a long time after the body has left. The cable car visitor who clicks through the viewfinder's reel at home, ten years later, is being operated on by the curated mountain in some register. The pilgrim who descended on knees and rose to the breakfast at Roushen Hall is carrying the practice in their body for the rest of that body's life. The walker who turned the corner above Huacheng Si and met the nun is carrying the encounter for as long as the encounter remains carryable. The mountain is patient. The apparatus is durable. The bodies that have engaged it are themselves the substrate through which the apparatus continues to operate, sometimes long after the visit ended and the body returned home and resumed the ordinary register of its life.
What this essay is, in part, is the thirty-five-year-delayed surfacing of what one walker and his supervisor received from Jiǔhuá in August 1990. The receiving was real. The delay was part of the receiving. The surfacing now is the apparatus continuing to do its work in the body it once received.
This essay has been concerned, throughout, with what the apparatus at Jiǔhuá Shān does to the bodies that engage it. The argument has been that the mountain operates on bodies, that what each register of engagement produces is recognizable in the bodies it has produced, and that the bodies themselves are the most honest evidence of the work's continuing operation. I want to gather the bodies this essay has named into a single accounting, and to ask what they collectively show.
There is the kneeling pilgrim's body. The body that arrives at the foot of the granite stairway from wherever its overland approach ended — the parking lot, the bus drop-off, the road approaching the mountain — and begins the prostration cycle. The body that performs yī bù yī bài across hours and sometimes days, with knees and hands and forehead in repeated direct contact with the granite, with breath synchronized to the prostration cycle, with the chanted prayer or mantra running continuously beneath conscious thought. The body that bruises and, on extended ascents, sometimes bleeds. The body that enters the yǎo rán state across the long hours of the practice, with ordinary spatial coordinates dissolving and the cycle itself occupying the foreground of attention. The body that arrives at the Roushen Hall and continues, on its knees, in circumambulation around the altar where Kim Gyo-gak's incorruptible body is interred. The body that has joined, for the duration of the practice, the bodhisattva's labor of liberating the suffering beings of the hell realms.
There is the porter's body. The body whose calves have accumulated forty or fifty years of stair-ascent under load, until the calves are dense beyond what athletic conditioning produces, until they are the body's most prominent feature, until they are recognizable on sight to anyone who has bodily literacy in athletic and laboring physiology. The body that has carried bricks and grain and oil and ritual implements up the granite for decades, by the most direct routes the mountain permits, with the biǎndan across the shoulders and the load synchronized to the gait through the bamboo's elastic resonance. The body that has survived the selection across a working population whose other members were not so adapted. The body that supplies the apparatus that all the other registers depend upon. The body that the mountain has written through the daily repetition of one specific motion across a working life.
There is the hermit's body. The body so small that the cave it occupies seems almost to scale to it. The body that has, by the time the visitor encounters it, spent decades in solitary practice on the mountain, in a cell that holds the body's bedding and its altar and its tea things and a few other necessities, with a small garden outside the cell to provide what the body eats. The body that has been so reduced to the conditions of practice that the practice has become the body. The body that offers tea to passing visitors as part of an institutional and devotional tradition older than the cave's contemporary occupant. The body that, when it dies, will be replaced by another body in the same cell, because the cell is a seat that outlasts its occupants. The body whose work the apparatus depends upon for the encounter the trail brings the visitor to.
There is the monastic body. The body trained from novice ordination through years of monastic life until the daily round has entered the body and the body wakes at the sound of the wooden fish in pre-dawn dark without alarm or instruction. The body that prostrates and chants in coordinated rhythm with the other monastic bodies in the assembled gathering. The body that eats xī fàn at the standard breakfast time with the standard accompaniments, as one of many bodies eating the same food in the same place at the same time across many mornings. The body whose practice is the temple's continuity across centuries, and whose ordinary daily round is the apparatus operating at the monastic-routine scale that the festival visitor sometimes glimpses but does not usually see.
There is the walker's body. The graduate-student body in pink and purple fanny pack, shirtless on the strenuous private hike, met by the hermit at the corner in August 1990. The supervisor's body in his forties, stopping at a particular spot beside the trail to pray for his deceased mother, returning to a place he had marked on an earlier visit, allowing his student to be present without requiring the student to pray. The two bodies walking together on the granite, descending fast on stairs whose narrow treads accommodated one of them and not the other. The bodies that received the dragons in the mist as the shānshuǐ tradition's referent rather than its decoration. The bodies that were placed inside the temple during the festival period and were therefore present for the dawn hall's morning recitation and the breakfast porridge and the comedy of the lived-theming-without-intent. The bodies that the mountain operated on across the days of the visit and that have continued to receive what it offered across the thirty-five years since.
There is the cable car visitor's body. The body that arrived on the morning of the visit from a high-speed-rail station or an airport some hours away. The body that was conveyed up the mountain by mechanical apparatus, photographed at the upper terminus with the temple as backdrop, conveyed back down, and proceeded onward to the next site by the day's end. The body that did not touch the granite that the apparatus's history is held in. The body that nevertheless has been at Jiǔhuá, and that carries some version of the visit in whatever register the contemporary tourism apparatus delivers. This body is not a failed pilgrim's body. It is a different kind of body in a different relationship to the mountain, with its own characteristic effects.
There is the witness's body, now. The body of the writer of this essay, in California in 2026, sixty-one years old, working at a computer to compose the prose that articulates what his thirty-one-year-old body received in August 1990. The body that has carried the encounter with the hermit, the prayer at Professor Powell's marked spot, the dawn hall's wooden fish, the breakfast porridge, the prostration ascent witnessed from outside it, the porter on the shortcut, the dragons on the cliff faces — across a working life of thirty-five years that included no return to scholarly work on Jiǔhuá until recently. The body that is now writing what its younger version was not yet ready to articulate. The witness's body is also one of the bodies the mountain wrote, and the writing is one of the things the mountain did to it across the long delay.
There is, finally, the ròushēn (肉身, "flesh body") that I saw at the upper temple cluster during our visit. The body of a practitioner who had died, been sealed in a sitting urn for the prescribed period, been found upon opening to be preserved rather than corrupted, and been lacquered in traditional Chinese lacquer for enshrinement. The body sat in lotus position inside a small glass case, and the case was placed where the visitor could stand within inches of it. The lacquered surface was visible at viewing distance. The figure was a person who had lived, eaten, walked, practiced, and died, and whose body the apparatus had recognized as having completed the operation correctly. Jiǔhuá enshrines fifteen documented ròushēn of monks and one nun, of which five are publicly viewable; the body I saw was one of these. The specific identity I no longer recall with confidence; the placard in the case would have given the figure's name and dates, and the slide I took of the display, if I find it in my archive, will pin the identity.
What the ròushēn is, in the apparatus's terms, is the apparatus's own evidence of itself. The tradition holds that practitioners who perform the work correctly produce bodies that do not corrupt at death. Incorruption is not a metaphor for spiritual achievement; it is the tradition's physical evidence that the operation has worked on this practitioner. The body sits in the glass case as the apparatus's most concentrated material proof: the body is the proof. Standing within inches of one is a particular experience that nothing in the contemporary Western world really prepares a person for. The visitor is close enough to see the lacquer surface and to register that the figure was a body before it was an icon. The glass is a courtesy, not a separation.
The ròushēn is also the apparatus's own answer to the analytical question this essay has been pursuing. What does the apparatus do to the bodies that engage it? Most of the answers I have given involve transformations that operate on the living: the kneeling pilgrim's bruises, the porter's calves, the hermit's smallness, the monastic body trained by routine, the walker's slow incorporation across thirty-five years. The ròushēn is the answer in the limit. The body that completed the operation so thoroughly that the body itself became apparatus is enshrined at the summit of the mountain in a glass case, lacquered and seated in the lotus posture it spent its working life cultivating. The visitor who stands within inches of it is looking at what the apparatus produces when it produces its uttermost result. The mountain's claim about itself is that it can do this. The body in the glass case is the claim made physical.
What these bodies collectively show is that the apparatus produces its work in time scales that exceed any single visit. The pilgrim performing yī bù yī bài across a day or two of the festival is doing what the practice does in its concentrated form. The porter performing his daily ascent across decades is doing what the labor does in its sustained form. The hermit reducing her life to the conditions of the cell is doing what the eremitic practice does in its purest form. The monk performing the daily round across years is doing what the monastic life does in its routine form. The walker who walked once and is writing now is doing what the visit does in its delayed form. The bodies are not equivalent, but they are all evidence of the work operating at the scales it operates at.
The cable car visitor is also evidence, of a different kind. The body that was conveyed up and conveyed down and proceeded to the next site is evidence of what the contemporary tourism apparatus delivers. The body's photographs and posts are the visible record of what the cable car visit produces. This is a real form of engagement with the mountain. It is also a form that does not include the engagement with the granite substrate that the older apparatus's work has been held in. The visitor's body has been at the mountain. The visitor's body has not been on the granite. What the body does and does not carry from the visit reflects this difference.
I want to say something here about my own body specifically, because the witness's body is part of the evidence and the essay should be honest about what kind of evidence it is. I was thirty-one in August 1990. I was a graduate student in Chinese religious studies, fit from years of competitive tennis, with a body that had been built for an athletic context that the mountain did not require. I walked the granite and watched the festival and met the hermit and slept in a small apartment inside the main temple complex and woke for the dawn hall and ate the breakfast porridge with peanuts only and ran down the narrow stairs after Professor Powell when we were late. I did not perform yī bù yī bài. I did not pray at Professor Powell's spot. I did not, at the time, fully understand what was happening to me during that visit. The body that received what was happening did not yet know what to do with what it was receiving.
In the years that followed, I left scholarship for what became a thirty-five-year layoff. The body went on to other things. The athletic conditioning faded. The Chinese language receded. The classical training settled into long-term memory and stopped being daily practice. The visit to Jiǔhuá receded with everything else. What I did not understand then and have come to understand now is that the apparatus does not stop working when the body leaves the mountain. The mountain is patient with the bodies it has touched. The thirty-five-year layoff was the form the mountain's continuing operation took in my body — the slow surfacing of what I had received, the gradual reorientation toward what mattered, the eventual return to the work that the visit had begun. The writing of this essay is the apparatus's continued operation in my body, completing itself in the form that thirty-five years of incubation produced. The body that walked the granite is the body that is writing now, and the writing is what the body finally has the capacity to do with what it received.
This is not unique to me. The pilgrim who performed yī bù yī bài and returned to ordinary life carries the practice in the body for as long as the body lives. The porter who performed his labor for forty years carries the labor in the body even after retirement, even after the body can no longer perform the work. The hermit whose body was so reduced to the cell that the cell entered the body carries the cell wherever the body goes after it leaves. The monk who has performed the daily round for decades carries the round even when the routine is interrupted. The bodies the mountain wrote do not become unwritten when the bodies leave the mountain. They carry the writing for as long as the bodies last.
This is the cosmochronicle frame at its deepest reach. The mountain accumulates traces of human work on its substrate, and the human bodies that engage the mountain accumulate traces of the engagement on the substrate of themselves. The bodies are themselves substrate, and what the apparatus has written on them is the operation continuing in another medium. The granite holds the prostrations across centuries. The bodies hold what the prostrations did to them across the lives that performed them. Both are part of the apparatus's reach across time.
What is lost when the cable car bypasses the granite is, in this reading, a doubled loss. The visitor's body is not on the substrate that has held the practice across centuries; and the visitor's body is not being written by the substrate in the way that the bodies that engaged it through walking and prostration and labor were written. The cable car visitor's body has been at the mountain, and the body carries some version of the visit, but the body has not been written by the granite. Contemporary tourism produces its own kinds of writing on the bodies it processes — the photograph, the post, the social media engagement, the consumer experience — but these are different kinds of writing on different kinds of substrate, and they do not produce the bodies the older apparatus produced.
The older apparatus is not gone. The granite is still there. The pilgrim who walks it is still being written. The porter who still carries loads on the routes the cable car does not serve is still being written. The hermit whose successor occupies the same cave is still being written. The monk performing the daily round is still being written. The walker who chooses the long ascent on foot is still being written, in some measure. What contemporary tourism has done is make the older apparatus the option-not-taken for most contemporary visitors. The mountain continues to write the bodies that engage it through the granite. Most contemporary bodies do not engage it through the granite.
Professor Powell and I, in August 1990, were two bodies the mountain wrote. The writing has been slow. The writing continues. The essay is part of the writing. The bodies that received Jiǔhuá at the moment when the apparatus was largely intact and the cable car had not yet been built have the writing on them still, and the writing surfaces in different forms across the lives the bodies have lived since. My writing is one form. Professor Powell's continued scholarly work is another. The hermit's successor in the cave above Huacheng Si, if she exists, is being written in real time. The kneeling pilgrim at the festival ascent on lunar 7/30 last year was being written in real time. The mountain's apparatus has not stopped operating, and the bodies it operates on are evidence that the operation continues.
That the operation continues is, finally, the argument this essay has been making. The operational claim that the Daoist and Buddhist traditions have made about the apparatus is supported by the bodies the apparatus has produced and is producing. The kneeling pilgrim's bruised knees, the porter's calves of stone, the hermit's smallness inside her small cave, the monk trained to wake at the wooden fish, the walker's surprise at the corner and his eventual return to write the encounter — these are the apparatus's evidence of itself. The bodies are the proof that the operation runs. The mountain reads itself through the bodies that pass over it, and the bodies carry the reading back into the world.
The cave above Huacheng Si is, almost certainly, still occupied. The hermit who received Professor Powell and me in August 1990 cannot be the occupant now; thirty-five years have passed, and she was already in her seventies when we met her. Her successor is there, or her successor's successor, sent by the supervising temple or arrived on her own initiative when the previous occupant died. The cave is part of the apparatus. The apparatus does not abandon its working sites. The hermit-and-cave succession at Chinese sacred mountains has continued, with interruptions, for centuries, and there is no reason to think Jiǔhuá would be the exception.
A walker who today turns the corner above Huacheng Si on foot, in conditions that allow the encounter, may find a small woman at her threshold, with her small garden outside the small cave, possibly inviting them in for tea. The encounter would be in a different language, with a different individual, in a configuration of the mountain that the cable car has substantially reorganized around it. But the encounter would be recognizable as the same encounter Professor Powell and I had. The trail still leads to the cave. The cable car has not abolished the trail. The hermit, if she is there, is offering tea to whoever still chooses to walk.
I do not know whether I will return to Jiǔhuá in this body. The travel is substantial; my health is what the health of a sixty-one-year-old man is; the demands of the writing life I have re-entered occupy time and attention that travel would have to displace. If I do return, I will be a different witness from the one who walked with Professor Powell in 1990. The body that climbs the granite at sixty-one or sixty-five or seventy will not be the body that climbed at thirty-one. The encounter, if it happens, will be different from the encounter that happened then. What the apparatus would do to a returning body is not what it did to the body that received it the first time. The mountain operates on whichever body engages it.
The slides from the visit, I am told, survived. Other photographs from my life did not — slides from Santa Cruz Island and from work I did before graduate school were lost to a storage leak during a move years ago. The losses are real and are part of how the photographic record of a life accumulates and erodes. The Jiǔhuá slides, intact, will when I find them help reconstruct what this essay has had to work from memory alone. The face of the hermit. The view across the valley where Professor Powell stood at his marked spot. The granite stairway from the body's-eye perspective, and the stretch of bare slab above the upper temples where I stepped off the worked stone for a slightly better view. The ròushēn in their reddish lacquered preservation in their glass cases. The festival ascent if I caught it, though I may not have, since the camera was set aside for the most sacred passages of the visit. The slides will tell more of the story than this essay can tell on memory alone, and the editorial pass on this draft will incorporate what the slides surface.
The dawn-hall recording, made on a small audio recorder that morning in August 1990, is also somewhere in my files. The notebook in which I tried to copy the banner inscriptions of the Roushen Hall, which I gave to Professor Powell in its mess, may also survive — in my files or in his. These are small material artifacts of the visit that have been waiting for the writing to catch up to them. The writing has now begun to catch up. The artifacts can take their place alongside the prose as evidence of what the witness's body and his recorder and his pen could capture during a particular week of August 1990 at Jiǔhuá Shān.
I want to acknowledge, as this essay closes, the teachers without whom none of the work here would have been possible. Professor L. Carrington Goodrich, who founded the East Asian Languages department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who taught Chinese mythology and literature with the seriousness and warmth that his generation of American scholars of China brought to their work. Professor Bai Xianyong (白先勇), the Taiwanese novelist, who taught Chinese 1 at UCSB and whose own writing — Taipei People, Crystal Boys — held the literary register that careful language work makes possible. Professor Ron Egan, the classical Chinese scholar, who supervised my undergraduate translation of three demon-expulsion dispatch texts from the Ming Daozang and who taught me what philological care looks like in practice. Professor William Powell, my graduate supervisor in Religious Studies, who took me to Jiǔhuá and to Beijing and to Jiuhua Shan and showed me what walking a sacred mountain with a trained Chinese-religion scholar makes available. Professor Allan Grapard, whose Protocol of the Gods on the Kasuga shrine-temple complex is the methodological precedent for what this essay attempts at Jiǔhuá, and who taught me to think about sacred landscape as accumulated apparatus across deep time. Professor James Robson, my graduate stablemate, whose Power of Place on Nanyue is the most direct scholarly companion to this essay and whose work has continued the project the two of us began under Professor Powell.
These teachers shared a quality that the Chinese tradition might call yǎ (雅) and that English struggles to translate cleanly: a combination of intellectual seriousness, personal warmth, sustained attention to the material, and a kind of lightness that allowed the work to continue across decades without becoming heavy. They had what I think of as the twinkle in the eye that distinguishes the best teachers — the willingness to take the material seriously without taking themselves too seriously, the openness to what their students might surprise them with, the patience that scholarship at its best requires. I was fortunate to be in their orbits at the moment when they were doing the work that shaped a generation of American China studies. The fortune was not fairly distributed. Many bright students did not get this kind of mentorship. I did, and the obligations that come with such fortune include continuing the work, eventually, in whatever forms one's later life makes possible.
This essay is, in part, a delayed installment on those obligations. The work that began at UCSB in the 1970s and 1980s, that continued in graduate school under Professor Powell and Professor Grapard, that was carried in my body across thirty-five years of other occupations, has resumed in the form this essay has taken. The mountain operated on me during that visit in August 1990. The operation has continued across the long delay. The writing is the form the operation has taken in a body that finally has the capacity to do something with what it received. The teachers who taught me to read the mountain were teaching me to read myself across the time scale on which the mountain operates. I am only now beginning to see what they were doing.
Professor Powell will read this draft. He will tell me what I have gotten right and what I have gotten wrong. He will let me know whether the prayer at the marked spot wants to stay in the published version or wants to be rephrased or removed. He will catch the citation errors and the historical errors and the moments where the prose has taken a step it should not have taken. The draft will be better for his reading. The published version will reflect his calibration as well as my own.
Professor Robson will read the draft after Professor Powell. He will read as the working scholar of Chinese sacred mountains who has continued the project across the years I was away, and his comments will be at the level of what current scholarship would expect this essay to engage and where the argument lands relative to the contemporary conversation. The published version will be better for his reading too.
Scott Lukas, whose work on themed and immersive spaces I have engaged in this essay's analytical sections, will see a draft that uses his vocabulary in service of an argument about a Chinese sacred mountain that his own work has not directly addressed. His comments will tell me whether the themed-space frame has been deployed correctly and whether the contemporary-apparatus reading is doing the work it needs to do. The published version will benefit from his comments as well.
The mountain will not read the draft. The mountain does not read. The mountain is granite and soil and watercourses and forest cover and the human work accumulated across thirteen centuries on its substrate. What the mountain does is operate on the bodies that engage it, and what the bodies do is carry the operation back into the world in whatever forms their lives permit. This essay is one such form. It is what one body, having walked Jiǔhuá in August 1990 with a teacher of consequence, has been able to make of what the mountain delivered to it across thirty-five years of slow surfacing.
The essay closes here, but the operation does not close. The cave is still occupied. The granite is still being prostrated upon. The porter, if he is still alive, is still trudging up the shortcut under whatever load his diminished body can still carry, or has retired and watches the mountain from below now, while younger bodies do the work that his calves recorded across his working life. The dawn hall is still being struck before sunrise. The breakfast porridge is still being served. The festival is still drawing pilgrims by the hundreds and thousands on lunar 7/30 each year, and the prostrating bodies are still advancing in yellow robes up the granite toward the Roushen Hall where Kim Gyo-gak's body has rested for twelve hundred years.
The mountain operates. The bodies receive. The reading carries forward in the bodies that receive it. I have been one such body for thirty-five years. Professor Powell has been another for longer. The hermit's successor in the cave above Huacheng Si is being written by the mountain even as I write this. The kneeling pilgrim at the next festival ascent is being written. The conveyed visitor with the camera is being written too, in a different register on a different substrate. None of these readings are private. The mountain is patient with all of them.
What we were given in August 1990 was a particular configuration of the apparatus, briefly intact, briefly available, briefly held open for two scholars who walked into it with the bodily literacy and the institutional access to receive what it delivered. The configuration is gone. The mountain continues. The bodies that carry what the apparatus delivered continue to be operated on by what they received. The writing is the form the operation has taken in this body. The mountain has not stopped working on me. It has worked slowly, across decades, until the writing surfaced.
Yáo brought order to the people of the world and directed the government of all within the seas. But he went to see the Four Masters of the faraway Gūshè Mountain, and when he got home north of the Fen River, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there.
The kingdom forgotten is the kingdom received. The mountain received is the mountain that operates. The body that returns from the mountain is the body that, across whatever delay the body's life requires, finally has the capacity to do something with what it received.
The writing is what I have to offer. The mountain has the rest.