The Alpine Tundra by Jacob Rawson Mount Wutai is the realm of the Brahma Palace,
A jade-tinted lotus standing tall in the vast sky. —Yongzheng Emperor (18th century)
M
ount wutai (“Five Terraces”) is a sprawling range of flat-topped platform peaks in northern Shanxi Province. The broad massif is distinct
from the rest of the nine sacred Chinese mountains not only for its gentle rolling topography and lack of dramatic cliff features, but also because thirteenthcentury Mongol rule brought Tibetan Buddhism to the area and even today the mountain remains a center of worship for Mongolian and Tibetan practitioners. The small town of Taihuai, nestled between the five terraces at five thousand feet above sea level, has a bit of the feel of a Buddhist theme park. I pay a hefty entrance fee at a highway checkpoint, and then step off the bus in the town’s main intersection to find plasma TV sets adorning the walls of posh marble-lined public restrooms and poster boards advertising packaged tours to see the sights of the mountain from the comfort of an air-conditioned van. On the main street I watch two teenage monks pretending to ignore a group of three city girls in cut-off miniskirts, then in a side alley I peer into a dimly lit internet cafe where a half dozen young monks are shouting excitedly in Mongolian as they take turns gunning each other down with keyboards and mice in their virtual warzone. I pass an empty lot filled with construction materials, and wave to a monk driving a rusted orange bulldozer and then to another who is sitting atop a pickup truck directing a group of laborers. I step into an old temple complex filled with gray brick altar halls and residence buildings that stretch back to a pine forest at the foot of the mountain
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