Yulin Caves and Yellow River Odyssey tidbits

This is listed as having been done around 1038 to 1227 in the Yulin Caves which Bill Porter doesn't write much about because he was sick when he visited. It's more amazing cave art along the Silk Road. I like the wispy blowing in the wind nature of I guessing is a Guanyin maybe before traces of Green Tara were gone. Who knows, I'm no specialist, just enjoying Buddhist art and archaeology as a novice. 

Porter quote from Yellow River Odyssey p.179:

"Wutangchao was on the other side of the Yinshan Mountains, but we We were there in less than ninety min-utes. Wutangchao was once one of the major centers for Tantric Buddhism in China. As with Tantric temples elsewhere, its architecture was distinctly Tibetan, betraying the origin of that sect of Buddhism: thick walls, small windows painted larger than they were, multistoried construction and flat roofs. Inside, the walls were covered with murals dating back to the temple's original construction 300 years earlier. It was a good thing I didn't forget my flashlight and my binoculars. The artwork was exquisite, but the shrine halls were so dark, I wouldn't have been able to see much if I hadn't brought my own light. The halls themselves were supported by dozens of pillars that had been wrapped in thick red carpets to improve the acoustics and also to provide a little more warmth in winter. I expected to see more monks than I did and thought maybe they were meditating or doing something else. But in the patriarch's hall, one of the lamas told me that the government restricted the number of monks who could live there and most of the older lamas had moved away. He also said that their sect had been without a spiritual leader since the Liberation of Tibet in 1951. After the last rimpoche died, the government refused to let them seek his incarnation for fear that he might be found outside China."

I find it weird China tries to control Buddhist rebirths. I have a fantasy that the Tibetan have a secret world of legitimate tulkus who were not state appointed. 

He visits a few more temples in the area too, likes some carvings and finds interesting spaces, but he doesn't talk to a Buddhist there. Empty "tourist attractions" mostly it seems, like above. He's traveling 30 years ago, so maybe things have changed. Maybe there aren't as many restricted areas that tourists can't go for some reason or another. And foreigner officers who make sure they don't go where they're not supposed to go. One becomes his guide for his trips, it's a fishy setup. Feels like an Orwell novel somehow. 

I'm reading about the temple in Zhongwei, which Porter spells differently (p. 207), and I look it up online and find it spelled differently too, and there's a blog post about how the temple combines Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Christianity. Porter calls the temple Kaomiao, the blog calls it Gao Miao. Check out the photos on the blog, there's a tour of a bomb shelter that has eerie music and torture displays. It might be that these displays have been installed since Porter's trip, or that somehow his way of talking with people didn't open up this aspect. Sometimes he seems uninterested in things he didn't read about before hand.  

Bingling Caves: Mural in cave 169:

Labrang Monastery is a Tibetan monastery in the heart of current China. There has been some tussling with Chinese officials over the years, a Muslim general persecuted the people in the early 20th century, and as recently as 2008 there was some action by the government to control the Tibetan population. Add a new book to my book list:

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival by Dean King (2010)