Jǐuhuá Shān

Mount Jiuhua, one of China's four great Buddhist mountains, rises in Qingyang county in southern Anhui. Under the Han it was called Mount Lingyang and under the southern dynasties Mount Jiuzi; the Tang poet Li Bai renamed it after celebrating its nine lotus-like peaks in verse.

In 719 Kim Gyo-gak, a prince of Silla who had taken monk's vows, came to the mountain and meditated there for seventy-five years; when he died at ninety-nine his body did not decay, and the monks took him for an incarnation of the bodhisattva Dizang, making Jiuhua his Chinese bodhimanda.

Huacheng Temple and the shrine that holds the incorrupt body, Roushen Temple, became the heart of the pilgrimage. The Ming and Qing saw the mountain's golden age, when as many as three hundred and sixty monasteries sheltered four to five thousand monks and nuns.