Upon entering the Buddhist gate of Mount Putuo, heading southeast for 300 meters (near ‘Entering Samadhi’), one arrives at Duan Gu Dao Tou, also known as Duan Gu Sacred Traces or Duan Gu Ancient Sites. This place was originally a beach in ancient times. It has a beach that is more than ten meters wide and a hundred meters long. Small stones are scattered and attached to each other. There are rocks of varying sizes and shapes on both sides. The rocks are inscribed with 14 titles such as ‘Duan Gu Ancient Sites’, ‘Compassionate Ferry’, ‘Morality United’, ‘First Buddhist Kingdom’, ‘Paradise’, appearing and disappearing amidst the tides and waves.
In ancient times, when ships arrived at Duan Gu Dao Tou, they could not dock and had to use a small sampan, no more than three feet wide and ten feet long, for ferrying. In the 31st year of the Guangxu reign (1905), the abbots of Mount Putuo, Liao Yu and Lian, raised funds to build a stone jetty 11 meters long and 8 meters wide using large stones. Before the construction of the Putuo Mountain passenger dock, all visitors who came to pay homage, worship, or sightsee had to disembark here. After the construction of the passenger dock, this place has been open to tourists as a tourist attraction.
It is said that there were once two sisters-in-law who vowed to worship Buddha. They pooled money to buy a boat and crossed the Lianyang to worship the mountain. When the boat just docked at Dao Tou, unfortunately, the younger aunt’s menstrual period came. She felt ashamed of her impurity and dared not disembark to enter the mountain.Her sister-in-law, Duan (complaining), thought she was not blessed to worship. She left the younger aunt on the boat and went alone to the mountain to worship Buddha. Unexpectedly, as the time approached noon, the tide rose sharply, and the boat was separated from the shore. The younger aunt sat in the boat for a long time, hungry and unbearable. At this moment, a village woman came to the shore with a food box, threw some stones into the water, stepped on these stones and went straight to the younger aunt’s boat. She said that her sister-in-law had entrusted her to bring it, and left after putting down the food box. When the sister-in-law returned from worship, the younger aunt asked about the previous matter, and the sister-in-law was shocked and did not know. Suddenly, she remembered that when she was worshiping Buddha just now, she looked up at the lotus throne and saw that the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva’s skirt was wet. She suddenly realized that this was the manifestation of Guanyin Bodhisattva. She felt ashamed and went back to the mountain to worship Guanyin in front of her. Because her sister-in-law had ‘shortened her aunt’ at the dock, the place where the aunt and niece moored their boat has since been called ‘Duan Gu Dao Tou’. The stones that often appear and disappear beside the dock in the tide are said to be the stones thrown into the water by the Bodhisattva when he brought food to step on. Later generations called this dock ‘Duan Gu Sacred Traces’. The entire text is open all year round and open all day.Forced constraints are:
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