Samantabhadra

Samantabhadra (Universally Worthy or All-Good) is a great bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, associated above all with practice, meditation and the carrying-out of the bodhisattva vows, the active complement to Manjushri's wisdom, with whom he is often paired as an attendant of the Buddha. He is especially known through the Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra, whose closing section sets out his ten great vows, a foundational statement of the bodhisattva aspiration recited across East Asian Buddhism.

In Chinese Buddhism, as Puxian, he is the presiding bodhisattva of Mount Emei in Sichuan, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains, and he is conventionally shown mounted on a six-tusked white elephant. The same name (Kuntu Zangpo) is also used in the Tibetan Nyingma school for the primordial Buddha, the ever-present enlightened ground of all things, a distinct and more exalted usage that should not be confused with the bodhisattva of the same name.

Mount Emei's standing as Samantabhadra's sacred mountain is expressed today in a specific, monumental piece of modern religious architecture: a colossal gilded bronze statue of Samantabhadra, ten faces looking in the cardinal and intermediate directions and seated on his traditional six-tusked elephant, was erected at the mountain's Golden Summit in 2005, standing at a height exceeding forty metres and ranking among the largest Buddhist statues in the world, a modern reaffirmation of the mountain's long-standing identity as the bodhisattva's earthly abode.

Mount Emei was recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1996, both for its religious and cultural significance as one of China's Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains and for its exceptional biodiversity, and pilgrims and tourists alike climb the mountain's network of temples and trails, many dating back centuries, to reach the Golden Summit at its peak. The summit is also famous for a genuine atmospheric phenomenon, popularly called Buddha's Light, in which sunlight passing through cloud or mist below the summit produces a coloured halo around the shadow of an observer's own head cast onto the clouds, a naturally occurring optical effect, related to what is known elsewhere as a glory, that pilgrims across centuries have interpreted as a sign of Samantabhadra's presence and blessing, so that a well understood atmospheric optics phenomenon has become, through long religious association, one of the most sought-after experiences of the entire pilgrimage, drawing visitors to wait at the summit for the particular combination of sun and mist that produces it.