The Car on String and the Buddha Dollar

34 metres high including the podium - the world's biggest, seated, bronze, outdoor Buddha statue - honest!

Whenever I visit a town or village in Asia, I am sure to stumble across a Buddhist temple or relic proudly displayed and in regular daily use by the local folk. There are many different temples from the ornate to the simple, from the large complexes to the shrines tucked away in a corner. Lantau Island in Hong Kong is no exception, but, in my opinion, has a slight twist to the way in which the Buddha presented. Here on this lovely island there is a Buddha claimed to be the world’s tallest seated effigy of the Buddha.
The local guidebooks and even the respected Lonely Planet have given the statue and the temple a big build up and the promise of an enlightened day out. I have read of open air restaurants where pilgrims can enjoy delicious free vegetarian meals whilst contemplating in the beautiful gardens tended by monks in saffron robes. I should have visited the statue last time I was in Hong Kong and so it featured high on my list of places to visit. My anticipation fuelled by my vivid imagination of a celestial paradise transcending into a Buddhist world where simple answers to difficult questions are freely given and meaning at last being attached to most the complex values of this fascinating belief.
I wanted to approach the statue and temples by walking a few stages of the Lantau trail in a sort of pilgrimage in which I had earned the right to contemplate the surrounding beauty and meditate whilst absorbing the panoramic vista from the 2,500 feet vantage point. Unfortunately, in the week’s preceding Khamma’s visit, the cloudy weather prevented me from realising this part of my dream as I did not feel the urge to walk these beautiful mountains without seeing anything but mist. However, now that she was here, I thought the next best approach was to set off with Khamma who has an innate spiritual understanding and would appreciate the journey’s end as well as the journey itself. But rather than walking the strenuous twenty or so kilometres from sea level, we decided to go the tourist route. In doing so I began to cynically think that this particular Buddha statue has more to do with extracting hard-earned Hong Kong dollars than it provides in spiritual understanding and enlightenment. The statue is situated about five miles away from Hong Kong’s Disneyworld. I thought this was far enough away to preserve tranquillity, but the glittery stardust from Mickey Mouse and his friends has caught a westerly breeze and floated over the mountains before raining down on the statue and cascading in spectacular floes down the steep mountainsides towards the town of Tung Chung.
We began our journey by catching the MTR train to Yung Chung from Hong Kong station Central and after saying ‘have a nice day’ to the Disneyworld expedition members we were soon at the end of the line. At the side of station, we found the start of the cable car ride to the distant mountain passes on the high, cloudy horizon. It was also the start of my cynical thinking about the whole set up. The cost of the round trip ticket was the equivalent of about sixteen British pounds and I couldn’t help comparing this to a day pass in a European ski resort which is about thirty pounds. A ski pass gives you access to vast areas of mountains and scores of lifts and the only limitation is your skiing ability. As we stood in line I remembered the queues in the ski lift as we jostled with clumsy ski boots and carrying skis and poles and trying to retain coolness and ‘ski cred’. This queue was made up of loud families of Chinese on a day trip and thus my suspicions were beginning to germinate in my over active mind. But the delight on Khamma’s face broke the spell as we sat in our cabin and hooked onto the cable and set off above the sea with spectacular views of the airport. She called it the ‘Car on string’. Another one of Khamma’s endearing English phrases that are so much better than the original.

The Car on String

In the cabin was a notice reminding every passenger to smile at the monkey waiting at the arrival station who was going to take a photograph of our ecstasy of having completed the twenty-five minute ride in the ‘car on string’! This did nothing to quell my growing belief that the marketing was aiming at the dollar extraction rather than creating an inner belief of Buddha’s teachings.
I ignored the monkey.
As we exited the station that is the lofty mountain home of the ‘car on string’, we were guided, that is to say, corralled into the ‘village’ consisting of restaurants catering for every national taste between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, gift shops selling everything you thought you needed but believed didn’t exist, theatre shows, film shows, public displays of Chinese acrobatics and whatever else because by this time I was convinced the Buddha statue was a big con and a subject of the imagination of some overpaid and too smart for his own good, marketing executive.

Ming Ying and Lady Yang

There wasn’t a Buddha, temple or monk to be seen anywhere until we had walked the gauntlet of village street vendors and low and behold, there it was, high in the sky on top of a hill about half a mile away. We felt slightly better at this sight but decided to eat before setting off on a hike, and we re-traced our steps to find a Vietnamese kitchen selling over priced noodles.
After filling our stomachs and emptied my wallet we followed the red brick road to the end of the village and joined a very normal Hong Kong style pot hole rutted road pass several authentic noodle houses and road side eating shops. I felt cheated because the glitzy Mickey Mouse village restaurants had suckered and conned us!
We reached the steps leading up to the Buddha statue and found signs regarding the veggie meals. Alas these are not free anymore but at $60HK it was a better bargain than Mickey Mouse’s Vietnamese noodles. We were too late anyway, so I didn’t let it overwhelm me and instead gritted my teeth for the lengthy climb to enlightenment.

260 steps to the Buddha

Predictably the view was shrouded in mist but the statue was impressive enough although a little too big to be photographed properly. We enjoyed the moment and took a little time to read up how the statue was sponsored by the Hong Kong Electical Company after the British had donated the land in the 1980’s.
Following our decent, we explored the temple complex and we concluded it was a little tired looking and did not compare with the temple in Thamuang. So with time marching on we climbed into the ‘car on string’ and returned down the mountain as the sun began to set.
Back in Tung Chung we explored the shopping centre and enjoyed a bowl of Thai Tom Yun soup before returning back to the Gold Coast.
My curiosity was satisfied but as you no doubt have gathered I despaired that the exploitation of the Buddha statue to generate tourist dollars was greater than its value to teach the wisdom of Buddhism.

The best value of the Buddha Dollar was the free sunset!