Tây Phương Pagoda

This guide to Tây Phương Pagoda in Hanoi centers on eighteen wooden statues in the upper hall, carved in the seventeen hundreds with unusually pained, human faces. Tradition calls them Arhats, but some scholars argue they're actually a line of Buddhist teachers, and no name was ever carved to settle it. A young poet named Huy Cận climbed the same nearly two hundred forty stone steps in 1940 and stood where you are standing, and the guide follows what those faces meant to him over the next twenty years.