After Sha Dong carved the first sculpture, a quarter century passed before another monk took up the work. Ming De, also elderly, added two more Buddhist figures and donated money for additional carvings. He felt his life was ending and wanted to ensure the work continued after his death. But Ming De proved harder to kill than he expected. In 657 AD, still alive and still carving, he continued adding statues and inscriptions to the cliff face. Like Sha Dong before him, Ming De was careful to note in his inscriptions that these images were for prayer alone. The Tang dynasty encouraged Taoism; to carve Buddhist statues was to risk official displeasure. Both monks navigated this tension with a diplomat's care and a believer's stubbornness.

The cliff's carvings are not exclusively religious. Among the more than 210 statues and 43 inscriptions, secular figures appear alongside the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Nobility, government officials, and famous monks all received the honor of being immortalized in stone. Among the most notable are depictions of Princess Nanping, the daughter of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and her husband Liu Xuanyi. Their presence on the cliff suggests that the site carried imperial sanction despite the government's official preference for Taoism -- or perhaps that the Tang court's relationship with Buddhism was more nuanced than its policies suggested. The carvings span the period from 618 to 684, with most dating to the earliest decades of Tang rule.

The Thousand-Buddha Cliff stands immediately west of the ruins of the Shentong Temple -- the "Supernatural Power" Temple -- which was once one of the most important Buddhist centers in northern China. The temple is gone, but its name still resonates. The cliff is oriented north-south, its carved face catching the morning light and casting the figures into shifting relief as the sun moves overhead. Combined with the nearby Four-Gates Pagoda, the Dragon-and-Tiger Pagoda, and the Nine Pinnacle Pagoda, the cliff forms part of a sacred landscape that concentrates more than a thousand years of Buddhist art and architecture in a single rural valley. The cliff face itself is the most democratic of these monuments: where the pagodas were built by organized effort and institutional resources, the cliff began with one old man, one chisel, and one stubborn act of faith.