Mount Jiuhua

Granite peaks shaped by poetry and a Ksitigarbha tradition preserved as religious legend.

Mount Jiuhua's nine peaks entered literary memory through Li Bai's lotus image, while the story of monk Kim Gyogak became part of the mountain's Ksitigarbha tradition. Keep the registers clear: the poem is a literary account and the monk's bodhisattva identity is presented as legend. Together they explain how this mountain became both a recognizable landscape and a major Buddhist place.

The 99-metre Ksitigarbha statue rises above the stairway at Jiuhuashan’s Great Vow Culture Park, a modern devotional monument associated with the mountain’s living tradition.

All articles

Mount Jiuhua and the Ksitigarbha tradition

A poet's image of nine lotus peaks and a monk's later legend gave this granite mountain two enduring cultural lives.

Photo credits and rights

The 99-metre Ksitigarbha statue rises above the stairway at Jiuhuashan’s Great Vow Culture Park, a modern devotional monument associated with the mountain’s living tradition.Beccabubu · Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Photograph by Beccabubu; Commons file page records CC BY SA 4.0. The saved file is the platform’s standard thumbnail (960×1282), not the upstream original (1278×1706); no enlargement, crop or retouching.