I’m certainly not a Buddhist, but somehow it’s a little disappointing to find that the statue of Siddharta Gautama I visited a couple of years back is no longer the biggest in the world. I dunno, visiting the Big Buddha was oddly disappointing in one way: He just doesn’t seem so big up close and personal, although he certainly is an impressive statue. There’s something weird about the human perception of, ummm, perspective, that leads to such disappointment. My first visit to the world’s largest public space early one mid-winter evening in January 2001 (that’s a whole other story) was similarly disappointing. When you see these mythologised places (and I have to assume, people, too) in the flesh (or brass, in the case of the Big Buddha, or concrete in the case of the square) they just don’t seem so impressive. And then, of course, you walk through the quite large museum in the base of the Buddha statue or walk the length and breadth of the square or whatever and you get a real feeling of the size, and then you are impressed. But that first impression is always a bit of a let-down.
Even so, that trip to the Big Buddha (cool photo from Big White Guy) via the ferries from Tsimshatsui to Central and thence to Mei Wo (if I remember rightly) and the bus up to the temple ranks as one of the best days I’ve spent in Hong Kong.
