We did not plan to visit the ‘Lady Buddha’ statue near Da Nang. I had attempted to book a hike after our visit to Marble Mountain. But the driver didn’t speak English as advertised, and he had not been told that he was supposed to drive us to a hiking path. Plans change. He assumed we wanted to see ‘Lady Buddha’ (or Lady Pagoda as he called it), so we did, along with hoards of other tourists.
(Update… Steve has informed me that the correct name for the statue in English is ‘The Goddess of Mercy’. Thanks, Steve)
We went to a few viewpoints first.
Then the Buddha, which is about 30 stories tall.
Our driver could tell we didn’t really want to see Lady Buddha, so he assumed we wanted to see monkeys and kept stopping the car so we could look for them. We didn’t care that much about seeing monkeys, but there were plenty to see once we arrived at the Lady Buddha. It appears the tourist feed them frequently. We saw one munching on what looked like a snack cake package. We took photos to show our driver that we saw monkeys, hoping he would feel happy that we had achieved our “goal.”
Below is an example of a tourist trying to lose her hand… or face. She was not the only one we saw that seemed unaware that monkeys are wild animals.
This is a statue of ‘Kwan Yin’ (in Chinese,) ‘Kannon’ (for the Japanese, and ‘The Goddess of Mercy’ for us English speakers. She is one of the pantheon of Chinese Taoist gods. The bottle she is holding contains the ‘water of life.’
Thank you for the correction, Steve. Here all the locals say Lady Pagoda and tourist say Lady Buddha… clearly neither are correct. But it does not seem like there are many practicing Buddhist here.
Thought of you when we were on Son Tra Peninsula (a.k.a. monkey mountain, where ‘The Goddess of Mercy’ is located ), as I was told there was an American base at the top. And also when we were hiking in Bạch Mã for the same reason.
We see that the Guanyin Bodhisattva dedicated to it is mostly female. In fact, Guanyin Bodhisattva is a man. The images of Guanyin before the Tang dynasty in China were all male. Guanyin uses more suffering and sentient beings as relief targets, and in human beings, the suffering of females is the highest, and therefore many women are shown.