Upon entering the Buddhist gate of Putuo Mountain, heading southeast for 300 meters (near ‘Entering Samadhi’), you will arrive at the Short Gu Dao Tou, also known as Short Gu’s Sacred Traces or Short Gu’s Ancient Relics. This place was originally a beach with a width of more than ten meters and a length of about a hundred meters, where small stones naturally attached to each other, with rocks of varying sizes and shapes on both sides. On these rocks, there are 14 inscriptions such as ‘Short Gu’s Ancient Relics’, ‘Universal Salvation’, ‘Morality and Justice’, ‘The First Buddhist Country’, and ‘Paradise’, which emerge and disappear amidst the tides and waves.
In ancient times, when ships arrived at Short Gu Dao Tou, they could not dock and had to use a small sampan, no more than one zhang in length and three chi in width, for ferrying. In the 31st year of the Guangxu period (1905), the abbots of Putuo Mountain, Liao Yu and Lian, raised funds to build a stone pier 11 meters long and 8 meters wide with large stones due to the inconvenience caused by the ebb and flow of tides for ships docking. Before the construction of the Putuo Mountain passenger dock, all visitors who came to Putuo Mountain for worship, incense burning, sightseeing, and touring had to disembark here. After the construction of the passenger dock, this place was opened to tourists as a scenic spot.
It is said that there were two sisters-in-law who vowed to worship the Buddha, pooled funds to buy a boat, and crossed the lotus sea to worship the mountain. As soon as the boat docked, unfortunately, the younger sister’s ‘Heavenly Gui’ (menstruation) came, and she felt ashamed of her impurity and dared not disembark to enter the mountain. Her sister-in-law, blaming her for her lack of fortune to worship, left her on the boat and went alone to worship the Buddha. Unexpectedly, as noon approached, the tide rose sharply, separating the boat from the shore. The younger sister sat in the boat for a long time, hungry and unable to bear it. At this moment, a village woman came to the shore with a food box, threw some stones into the water, and stepped on these stones directly to the younger sister’s boat, saying that her sister-in-law had entrusted her to bring it. After putting down the food box, she left the boat. When her sister-in-law returned from worship, the younger sister asked about the previous matter, and she was astonished and did not know. Suddenly, she remembered that when she was worshiping the Buddha just now, she looked up at the lotus seat and saw that the skirt of the Guanyin Bodhisattva was wet, and she suddenly realized that this was the manifestation of the Guanyin Bodhisattva. She felt ashamed of her lack of fate and hurriedly went back to the mountain to worship Guanyin again. Because her sister-in-law had ‘shortened her sister’ at the dock, from then on, the place where the sisters-in-law moored their boat was called ‘Short Gu Dao Tou’. The stones that often appear and disappear in the tide next to the dock are said to be the stones that the Bodhisattva threw into the water when delivering food to step on. Later generations called this dock ‘Short Gu’s Sacred Traces’. The site is open all year round, accessible 24/7.
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