Huge Buddha
Leshan Giant Buddha
Leshan Giant Buddha is the largest stone Buddha figure in the world. The Leshan Buddha is a statue in the Meytreya Board * , barefoot with drooping ears, hair arranged in spirals and wigs, a protruding chest and hands resting on knees. Rivers pass under the feet of this huge stone statue.
The giant Buddha statue of Leshan is equal in fame to the standing Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, all of which are preserved as human cultural heritage. The height of the two Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan is 38 and 53 meters, which are the second and third tallest stone Buddha statues in the world. The magnificent statue of Leshan Buddha is in a sitting position. The Buddha statues in Afghanistan were destroyed by humans, and this made the protection of the Leshan Buddha statue more important than ever.
The height of this magnificent Buddha is 71 meters. Its shoulder width is 28 meters, its head is 14.7 meters long and 10 meters wide, and a total of 1021 pieces of hair are attached to it. 100 people can easily fit on the top of its legs, each of which is 8.5 meters.
His toes are big enough to be used as a dinner table. Leshan Buddha, as the tallest Buddha statue in the world, joined the list of natural cultural heritage names in 1996.
Pay attention to some of the measurements of the Leshan Buddha statue:
Height: 71 meters
Head length: 14.7 meters
Shoulder width: 28 meters
Neck length: 3 meters
Ears length: 7 meters
Nose length: 5.6 meters
Eyebrow length: 5.6 meters
Eye length: 3.3 meters,
mouth length: 3.3 meters
Leshan Giant Buddha
At the time this statue was carved, a 13-story wooden building was built to protect it from the sun and rain. Later in the late dynasty (Yuan 1368-1279), this protective building was destroyed in a war. Since then, this stone statue has been exposed to wind and rain without any protection.
It is said that there was a monster in the river above which the statue is located, this monster has often caused floods, overturned passing boats and killed hundreds of people. To solve this problem, in order to control the water of the river and also to save human lives, a great monk named Haitong collected funds and started building a huge Buddha statue. He hoped that the presence of the Great Buddha would tame the river monster and thus the boatmen who crossed the river would be safe.
The construction of this stone structure began under the supervision of Haitong in 713. At first, the greedy officials were greedy for the money collected for this purpose, so they tried to bribe the great monk. But he called them to a fight and declared: If you take out my eyes, you still won't be able to get the money that was donated for the construction of the Buddha statue. This statement of the great monk angered the officials, they told him that he certainly did not have the courage to do such a thing, but in complete disbelief Haitong removed his eyes from his sockets with his hands and took them in a tray to the officials and officials. The great monk died in the middle of the construction of the statue. Two of his followers continued the work and finally, after 90 years of effort, the Buddha statue was completed in 803.
How to create the gigantic Leshan Buddha statue remains questionable, in fact, it is impossible to understand how people at that time designed such a luxurious statue and completed its construction without any modern equipment.
* Meytreya: In the Buddhist tradition, it is the person of the future Buddha who will appear for guidance and preaching. The root of this word is Sanskrit and it means friendship. Worship of Meytreya was common among Buddhists in the 4th to 7th centuries, and various images of her exist everywhere. Among those images, Leshan Buddha is the most spectacular.