The Toes of the Buddha

You can see the Giant Buddha of Leshan from a boat, from a terrace, or the correct way: from the bottom, after the stairs, standing at toes the size of writing desks and looking up seventy meters of cliff to a head that keeps company with birds.

Twelve centuries old, carved to calm a river junction that was eating boats, which it then, by the logic of hydraulics and faith together, actually did: the spoil from the carving changed the currents.

That detail is why I came. A monument that is also an engineering intervention, holiness with a measurable flow rate. My kind of shrine entirely.

I took the selfie at the feet like everyone before me, wind-tangled and sunburned, grinning without planning to. Some scale differences bypass irony completely. You stand at the toes, the head is in the sky, and the twelve hundred years between you and the carvers compress into one uncomplicated feeling that I will not cheapen by naming it.