Ep. 110: Marketing Maitreya at Buddhism's "Fifth Mountain"

Don't believe everything you see--or read

We interrupt our tour of Hangzhou's Lingyin Temple for this very special episode of Temple Tales!

A friend recently sent me a photo. It showed two tiny buildings perched atop a huge spire of rock. Behind is a conical, snowcapped mountain with an inverted bowl of cloud over it. My friend asked, "What are the chances this is a 'real' photo?"

My verdict: The temple is real; the mountain is Japan's Fuji PhotoShopped into the background. I don't usually use other people's photos in this newsletter--I have enough of my own--but I have taken the liberty of sharing the photo here, for educational purposes only. The original can be seen here.

I had arrived at the "Fuji" determination on my own; I was amused when I did a Google Image search and found this caption on it:

"Mount Fanjing Buddhist temple, with the Fujiyama in the background!"

Now in checking out Fanjingshan--site of the spire in question--I stumbled across this statement in a 2019 article in The Atlantic:

"Mount Fanjing is considered one of Chinese Buddhism's sacred mountains—the fifth most important one in China."

WHUUUUT?! A fifth Buddhist mountain? One that I had never even heard of? Everyone--even Wikipedia--knows there are Four Great Buddhist Mountains in China, not coincidentally "home" to the Four Great Bodhisattvas. They are, briefly:

• Putuo Shan in Zhejiang Province, seat of Avalokiteshvara (Chinese Guanyin), the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion

• Jiuhua Shan in Province, seat of Kshitigarbha (Chinese Dizang), the Bodhisattva of Great

• Wutai Shan in Shanxi Province, seat of Manjushri (Chinese Wenshu) the Bodhisattva of Great Wisdom

• Emei Shan in Sichuan Province, seat of Samantabhadra (Chinese Puxian), the Bodhisattva of Great Practice

(I have been to all but the last.)

Further research turned up more sites calling Fanjing "the Fifth," and "the seat of Maitreya Bodhisattva." (This is the immensely popular "Laughing Buddha," who really is a Bodhisattva, not a Buddha: read more about him here.)

But seriously? A fifth mountain?

Then I saw that Fanjing had been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2018. I went back and checked, and sure enough, I found no mention of this "fifth mountain" status that could be reliably dated before 2018. (As it turns out, the first mention found by a real scholar was in 2004; see below.)

Fanjing's UNESCO citation says nothing about "Buddha" or "Buddhism." In fact, it's named as a Natural site, not a Cultural site. On the other hand, UNESCO's blurb for Wutai begins, "With its five flat peaks, Mount Wutai is a sacred Buddhist mountain." And that for Emei starts, "The first Buddhist temple in China was built here in Sichuan Province in the 1st century A.D. in the beautiful surroundings of the summit Mount Emei." (By the way, the factoid that the first Buddhist temple in China is on Emei is disputed.) (Emphases mine.)

Knowing how things go with the promotion of Buddhism in modern China, I began to formulate an idea: This "fifth mountain" status must be a concerted tourism campaign to get visitors to spend their renminbi there, like declaring your roadside dinosaur statue "the Eighth Wonder of the World."

Confirmation was blessedly easy to find. In Buddhist Tourism in Asia (Ed. Courtney Bruntz and Brooke Schedneck, University of Hawai'i Press, 2020), Chapter Four is titled "Marketing Maitreya: Two Peaks, Three Forms of Capital, and the Quest to Establish a Fifth Buddhist Mountain," by Justin R. Ritzinger. He states that Mount Fanjing is in competition with another site, Mount Xuedou in Zhejiang Province, to be the real seat of Maitreya.

For our purposes, a few brief quotes about the origin of the "fifth mountain" concept at Fanjing will do.

• "The claim that Fanjing was and is the fifth great mountain appears to originate in the campaign to redevelop Mount Fanjing for tourism." (p. 91)

• "...the vice-chair of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the secretary of the Chinese Buddhist Association (CBA) gave speeches at a ceremony marking the restoration of Huguo Monastery in 2004 in which they proclaimed, as far as I can tell for the first time, that Fanjing was the fifth great Buddhist mountain." (p. 91, same paragraph as the above quote)

• "Whereas at Mount Xuedou the initiative to construct the grand Buddha and establish a fifth great mountain originated with a monastery, at Mount Fanjing the state played the leading role in conjunction with private business interests while Buddhist leadership was absent." (p. 98)

• "Yet the mountain's partisans make the stronger claim that Fanjing was already seen as the fifth great Buddhist mountain in the Ming dynasty. This view is promoted by a cottage industry of scholarship devoted to developing tourism." (p. 90)

(All emphases are mine.)

This should be enough to confirm that:

1. Fanjing is not a legitimate claimant to the same status as the Four Great Buddhist Mountains;

2. the not so "invisible hand" of the government and private business interests lie behind the claim; and

3. the folk are still going to head on up there to get fleeced on the advice of their "betters."

Nothing associated with the Sage of the Shakyas should ever be associated with such a hustle. Yet, so it goes.