Mount Jiuhua and the Ksitigarbha tradition

The mountain's name carries a poetic act of looking. An account by the Academy of Chinese Studies says that before the Tang it was called Jiuzishan, or Nine-Child Mountain, for its nine unusual peaks. Li Bai, invited to visit, described the ridges as blossoms: “The numinous mountain took the form of nine blossoms.” His image did not replace the rock; it gave readers a way to remember its outline. The same account records a second poem looking toward Jiuhua from the Yangtze region, with green water hanging like a river of sky beneath the peaks.

In the Academy’s account, Li Bai’s verse drew later literati to travel among Jiuhua’s peaks and compose poems of their own. The mountain’s literary identity grew through this repeated act of naming and return: a phrase could carry the image of a distant landscape to readers who had never climbed its ridges.

The second story belongs to Buddhist tradition. The Academy identifies Kim Gyogak as a monk of the Silla Kingdom who crossed the sea and studied at Jiuhua, then carefully marks his identification with Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva as legend. The distinction matters. A visitor can encounter a living religious landscape without converting devotional belief into a verified biographical fact. The tradition explains why Jiuhua became associated with Kṣitigarbha; it does not settle the historical identity of the monk.

The lotus image and the Ksitigarbha tradition are not competing explanations. One is a literary response to a visible arrangement of peaks; the other is a religious story attached to a monk and a sacred geography. The Academy's account places both beside the mountain's granite summits, old monasteries and cloud-filled valleys. Together they explain why Jiuhua is encountered as terrain and as a place of memory. The rock gives the poems their shapes; repeated reading and worship make those shapes culturally recognizable.