Climbing the mountain along the mid-route, one can see a stone-paved path leading to the northeast at the Three Officer Temple. At the end of the path is the well-known scenic spot “Sutra Rock Valley”. The valley is a huge level shelf of stone, which covers an area of about more than 2,000 square meters.
The stone is engraved with characters, each one is about 35-50 centimeters wide. The text is a quotation from the Book of Buddha's Warrior. There were 2,799 characters in the past. Because of the mountain torrents and the wind and rain erosion, 1,067 characters remain now. The sculpture is powerful, and the characters are of vigorous strokes. Therefore, people call them “the originator of the big Chinese characters”, “the ancestor of the Chinese proclamation”. It is now one of the biggest sutra rock inscriptions in China and has been praised highly by the calligraphers of successive dynasties.
There has been continual argument about when the big characters were inscribed. Mr. Guo Moruo firmly believes, based on textual criticism in 1961, that they were inscribed in the northern Qi Dynasty and has existed for more than 1,400 years. There are multitudinous inscriptions, such as “the water flowing on the pillow stones”, “coldness and quietness” and “Buddhist voiceless sound” etc., inscribed around the big characters. One of them is the “stone for exposing the Buddhist Book under the sun”. Each character is 2.8 meters wide. The clusters around the big characters seem to show that the moon is held by many stars.
