Shizidong fortune telling

The Legend Origin of Eighteen Arhats Cave

Luohan Cave is a rare double hole. One of the caves goes deep into the northeast and is said to be connected with Yishan Cave, about 7.5 kilometers northeast of Huangshan Mountain. The second cave extends to the southeast and is said to be connected with the Longshan Cave, which is located about 10 km south of the Yellow River. The hole is narrow or wide, high or low. Narrow places need cat's waist climbing drill, and wide places can accommodate 100 people. There are all kinds of stalactites on the top wall of the cave, and coral-like rocks below, which reflect each other and are colorful. Unfathomable and endless. This is really a miracle.

What is particularly amazing is that 18 arhats are engraved on the stone walls of two caves and 17 on one cave. According to local legends, no one can count 18 arhats. They often count to 17 or 19.

So 17 people spread to: many years ago, there was a Luohan who went to the Buddhist paradise to be a page, and he has not returned yet; People who say 19 think that one of the 18 arhats is deeply divorced from practice and often changes one into two.

But legends are legends after all, but they are not. If you take 18 stone, you can count it as an arhat, and the stone is just finished. It turns out that this 18 Luohan statue is very similar in image, manner and dress, with similarities and differences. Luohan statues are lively and cheerful, but they are different. Lohan: There is sadness in laughter, sadness in laughter, sadness in laughter, or anger in laughter.

According to textual research, 18 Luohan statue was not carved at one time, of which 1 1 was carved in the Northern Song Dynasty and 7 in the Qing Dynasty. The statue of Luohan in the Song Dynasty is next to it, and the inscription records its carving time as "the second year of Xining in the Northern Song Dynasty" (1069). There is also a statue of Maitreya in the Qing Dynasty, and the other six are statues of arhats. The inscription next to it is very long, mostly the names and native places of good men and women. At the end, it is "the fifty-fourth year of Kangxi in Qing Dynasty (17 15)".

According to relevant data, it was popular in society at that time to pray for God and worship Buddha. When a family or a place suffers from natural or man-made disasters, they will find a natural cave, or artificially dig a grotto on the big stone wall, and ask skilled masons to carve a Buddha, either a Lohan or a Bodhisattva, and then burn incense and kowtow here, pray and make wishes, pray for the blessing of the gods, turn good fortune into good fortune, ward off evil spirits and eliminate disasters. From this convention, it not only imitates each other, but also contains the spiritual sustenance of every Buddha-seeker and sculptor ... so that from the Northern Song Dynasty to the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the image of 18 Lohan jumped into the caves of Huangshan Mountain. This may be the root of the similarity of 18 Luohan statue.