Upon entering the Buddhist gate of Mount Putuo and heading southeast for 300 meters (near ‘Ru Sanmodi’), you will find the Short Gu Dao Tou, also known as Short Gu’s Sacred Traces or Short Gu’s Ancient Site. Originally a beach in ancient times, this site features a beach with a width of over ten meters and a length of about a hundred meters. Small stones are scattered, and on both sides, there are rocks of varying sizes and shapes. The rocks bear 14 inscriptions such as ‘Short Gu Ancient Site’, ‘Merciful Navigation Universal Salvation’, ‘Morality United’, ‘First Buddhist Country’, and ‘Paradise’, which appear and disappear amidst the tides and waves.
In ancient times, when boats arrived at the Short Gu Dao Tou, they could not dock directly and required small sampans, no more than ten feet long and three feet wide, for ferrying. In the 31st year of the Guangxu period (1905), the abbots of Mount Putuo, Liao Yu and Lian, raised funds to build a stone pier 11 meters long and 8 meters wide with large stones due to the inconvenience of boats docking during the ebb and flow of tides. Before the construction of the Mount Putuo passenger dock, all visitors coming to Mount Putuo for worship, sightseeing, or pilgrimage had to disembark here. After the completion of the passenger dock, this site was opened to tourists as a scenic spot.
It is said that there were once two sisters-in-law who made a vow to worship Buddha. They pooled their funds to buy a boat to cross the Lian Yang and go to Mount Putuo for worship. As soon as the boat docked at the Dao Tou, the younger sister ‘Tian Gui’ (menstruation) came, and she felt ashamed of her impurity and dared not disembark and enter the mountain. Her sister-in-law, blaming her for being unlucky to worship, left the younger sister on the boat and went to the mountain alone to worship Buddha. Unexpectedly, as the tide rose at noon, the small boat was separated from the shore, and the younger sister sat in the boat for a long time, feeling hungry. At this moment, a village woman came to the shore with a food box, threw some stones into the tide, and walked directly to the younger sister’s boat on these stones, saying that her sister-in-law had entrusted her to bring it. After putting down the food box, she left the boat. When the sister-in-law returned from worship, the younger sister asked about the previous incident, and the sister-in-law was astonished and did not know. Suddenly, she remembered that when she was worshiping Buddha just now, she looked up at the lotus seat and saw that the skirt of the Guanyin Bodhisattva was wet, and she realized in her heart that this was the manifestation of the Guanyin Bodhisattva. She felt ashamed for her lack of opportunity and hurriedly went into the mountain to worship Guanyin again. Because her sister-in-law had ‘shortened her sister’ at the dock, this place where the sisters-in-law docked their boat has been called ‘Short Gu Dao Tou’ since then. The stones next to the Dao Tou that often appear and disappear in the tide are said to be the stones thrown into the tide by the Bodhisattva when sending food for stepping on, and later generations called this Dao Tou ‘Short Gu’s Sacred Traces’. The site is open all year round, accessible 24 hours a day.
Short Gu’s Sacred Traces
Upon entering the Buddhist gate of Mount Putuo and heading southeast for 300 meters (near ‘Ru Sanmodi’), you will find […]
