Temple Stay

The PEACE buddies recently put together an opportunity for us to stay in a Buddhist temple for roughly 24 hours. I got back today.

Saturday afternoon: We were meeting around 1PM at the Ewha main gate. I am not exactly sure where we went, but it took 20 minutes by bus. That means that it is essentially in the heart of Seoul.

The first thing we did was change out of our street clothes. One of the monks spoke broken English, which was helpful and detrimental at the same time. More on that later. The clothes were extremely comfortable and stylish too. I joked with one of the Americans about trying to steal the shirt and he agreed, although neither of us did. After we were changed, we met in the Meditation room to listen to a short lecture on Buddhism. The room had a golden statue of a Buddha in the middle that each monk would bow to as he or she passed by. The reason that I say a Buddha is because one who is a Buddha is like a Saint in Christianity -- deserving of worship, but not God or something similar. I also say a Buddha because although I was told which one it was, I can't recall.

The monk that spoke with us the most was a woman between 30 and 40 years old. She was very friendly, charismatic and very much enjoyed talking about Buddhism and the temple. Her English, although very confident and we could understand her most the time, was littered with barriers that left most of us confused. She would want us to respond by loudly saying "yes" despite 90% not understanding the question. Most the time it was simple -- "are you hunger?"..."YES!" But other times it was "_______, yes? Do you agree? Shout yes!" and a couple people did, but she pressed us to say it louder.

She taught us a little about Buddhism -- the simple, introductory things -- and then outlined the general schedule for the weekend. For some reason, she then put on a cartoon movie about Buddhism. When she told us about it, I believed she said it was "40 minutes long. So it is short" but I think she meant to say "an hour and 40 minutes long" because it was LONG. Also, the movie didn't seem to have any direction until the last 10 minutes as this kid dies and the Goddess of Mercy explains how the kid was the perfect Buddhist. I thought it was a little ironic that the kid was praying to the Goddess of Mercy and then he dies of hunger...if I were starving and on the brink of death, I would pray for a gift from the Goddess of Fertility.

The movie ended and then we went to participate in a bell ringing ceremony. I didn't fully understand the significance, but I did get to ring the bell. I felt pretty important. After we rang the bell 7 times, we went to a room that was used for worship. This beautiful, dark room had a statue of a Buddha in the middle, flanked by 4 other golden statues. The room was brightly colored, which I feel very much reflected a chief difference in Korean Buddhism compared with other Asian cultures. We did 3 prostrations, which is where a person folds his or her hands, falls to their knees and then lowers their forehead to the ground. The point is to lower oneself to the lowest point in the world in hopes of Enlightenment, according to my understanding of the monk's explanation.

After that, we chanted the Heart Sutra -- spelled phonetically in English. The Westerners, myself included, struggled to keep pace with everybody else because we didn't understand the pace. I think most of us spent the time silent. After we were done, it was probably 6:30PM. We were ALL hungry and looking forward to dinner...how quickly we were crushed.

We ate our food in the traditional Korean monk fashion. What that means is that they don't just serve food, they have rituals that we observed. One of my American friends told me at 3PM that he was hungry and wished he ate lunch...I couldn't contain my laughter as the food sat in front of us, his head buried in his hands, and the monk wouldn't stop talking. So this is how we ate:

1) They had these lunch-box like dishes inside a cloth knapsack. Contained inside were four bowls, a set of chopsticks, a spoon, a white napkin, a brown cloth and then the cloth used for the knapsack. The first step was to unwrap everything and put it in the right order, with the biggest bowl (called the Buddha Bowl because that was the one to use for offerings) on the bottom left and a descending order from bottom left to top left (smallest in the top left). Also, there was supposed to be no sound during the whole meal -- including no clinking of silverware. The monk loudly asked a few times, "what is the problem? Why is there sound?" It wasn't a mean tone, but meant to be a reminder to be careful.
2) We were served cold water used to wash the dishes. We all served each other with a different job, so mine was to pour cold water into the Buddha bowl. From here, we were to shake the water around in the first bowl and then pour it into the second bowl, wash it around and proceed from there. We ended by putting the cold water in the fourth bowl, where it rested for the rest of the meal.
3) The first food dish to be served was rice. It was put into the Buddha bowl.
4) Soup was next. It was served into the second bowl.
5) Next were side dishes. They included kimchi, bean sprouts, some green leaves and mushrooms. We were able to take whatever we wanted.

Once all the food was in front of us (growing cold because we weren't allowed to eat yet), we were to chant regarding trying to clear our minds. One important thing about the meal is that we had to eat everything we took, in order to teach us about being mindful of how greedy we are. Here is why this was so important:

The first thing that we had to do was take a piece of kimchi and wash it in our soup. The goal was remove all the red sauce and to have a clear piece of kimchi that would be used for washing our dishes. I didn't understand, at this point, why it was so important to eat every morsel of food. Don't be mistaken, when I was done there was no eatable food in any of my bowls, but the following tradition was absolutely awful.

When we were finished eating, they served us hot water in the Buddha bowl. At the time, I thought this was our drink during the meal because we were not supposed to drink the cold water. Using the clean piece of kimchi and the hot water, we needed to clean the Buddha bowl. That's fine and I am feel pretty economical at this point. The second step was to pour all the water from the Buddha bowl into the second bowl, which had the soup, and do the same. This was a little harder because the teeny tiny pieces of tofu at the very bottom were too small to get with chopsticks and impossible to drink, notwithstanding, I got my bowl pretty clean. Next was to pour the water to the third bowl, the one that had the side dishes, and repeat. This one was harder because there was kimchi sauce on the sides.

The final step was to drink the hot water.

Now remember, although this was all food I was eating before, it didn't sound tasty to mix little pieces of rice, remnants of soup, and kimchi-flavored water into a drink. Wow -- it was disgusting. I drank it and it tasted awful, but I didn't cough like some others in the room. We also had to eat the piece of kimchi that was used to clean.

Finally done! But I would have killed for a mint or anything that had taste.

...But Erik, what about the cold water in the fourth bowl? Ohhhh, that's right, that water was also going to clean the bowls. "What about the kimchi Erik, didn't you eat it?" Yes, we were supposed to. So this time, we used our fingers to clean the bowl. Not that bad -- we repeated all the steps except we used our fingers to clean.

Monks are able to go through the first step and have absolutely no food in the bowls. Some of us leave just a tiny bit of food from when we poured the water and the smallest piece of carrot didn't quite make it out. Anybody in the room that had "particles" of food left had to drink that concoction too. Anybody that only had oil was able to pour the water into a community bowl that would be inspected by the monk. I had a couple particles, so had to drink my second bowl of disgusting oil-and-kimchi flavored water. The monk inspected the bowl and said we didn't do good enough, but she caught the hint from our groans that whatever punishment she had planned was too severe for us.

We cleaned up by taking the food back to the kitchen, rewrapping our knapsacks and changing our seats to face the front. On a small tangent, I didn't sit in a chair the whole time there -- small pillows on the floor are uncomfortable after five minutes and even worse after six hours...

The final event for the day was practice meditation. We were supposed to try it for five minutes and then we were done with our day. This temple had us meditate with our eyes open, focusing on a point about a meter ahead, which I think led some people to laugh. And when I say laugh, I mean laugh during the meditation -- which was very distracting.

The coolest thing that happened to me during the five minutes is that my pupils contracted a couple times, making the room appear as if lights were dimming and coming back on. It was a little colorful and interesting at the same time. After meditation, we were sent to sleep -- it was about 9:30PM. We went to bed so early because the monks would wake us up at 3:30AM to start the day.

I slept awful. Everything was comfortable except that the light on the outside of our room was equipped with a motion sensor. Some of the men didn't want to sleep at 9:30PM so they went to smoke at various times, turning the light on and waking me up. I also coughed a lot for some reason.

When we woke up at 3:36AM, nobody was in a good mood. Notwithstanding, we had to be at the same room where we did prostrations the day before by about 4AM. According to our monk, Buddha said doing 108 prostrations would clear a person's mind enough to remove all negative thoughts. There is significance to 108, but I can't exactly remember what it was.

Doing 3 prostrations was very easy. Because we needed to keep our hands together, we couldn't use them to help us up and we also had to keep our feet together. I did like 5 on Saturday and felt okay. When we did 108, I was tired. Only about half the group did all 108. I was very sweaty at the end and a little embarrassed because there weren't many people sweating. During the process, I remember I wasn't thinking of much outside the immediate moment. I didn't really care how tired I was, or about how much I was sweating, or about it ending -- only about getting my forehead down.

Afterwards, it was time for our meditation. My understanding from the day before was we were supposed to meditate and then do the prostrations. I thought this made sense because part of the meditation was to make sure we keep our eyes open and our hands in the correct position -- something harder when fatigued. After the prostrations, staying awake and alert with the extra adrenaline was quite easy.

One thing that monks in Korea do is punish people that lose their position or move too much. The punishment is they walk in front of the person meditating and hit them on the shoulder with a large bamboo pole. I volunteered to be hit on Saturday night and it doesn't hurt very much, it is just loud and surprising. I could imagine that after getting hit a couple times your shoulder would be quite sore. Two people were hit in the morning and that was also very distracting.

Our next task was to go climb a mountain close to the temple. Let me clarify -- we were going to go climb a Korean Mountain, which translates to a hill with exercise equipment and trees. On top, there were a bunch of old people getting exercise. This part was extremely fun and funny at the same time, but I can't do justice to the humor in writing. There was this old man on a stage that was leading us all in callisthenic workouts. He put on this tape that was funny at first, mostly it was this man counting to a very happy song, but if I heard that song more than five times, I would kill myself. All the Koreans knew what to do and all the foreigners tried to keep up. Some points involved like arm swinging that came out of nowhere and the foreigners were confused and lost -- but all the Koreans were right on pace. A friend said that was the standard workout from elementary school.

We walked back down to the temple to make lotus flowers. We had thin pieces of paper and paper cups modified to include a small wire to hold our flowers. Here is a picture of me with my lotus flower, contemplating existence:
















Here is a picture of my lotus flower, next to what lotus flowers were supposed to look like:
















The monk told us that the way we twisted the petals reflected on our lives. If we twisted them tightly, small and they didn't come undone, then we will prosper in life. If they come undone and are bad, well, consider the opposite...If you click the picture and observe the details closely, you will notice that I am not very precise or talented in this area.

The monk came and lectured me on how to make a good lotus flower. The day before she mentioned how dirty and clean were only in our minds (she told us as we were preparing to drink the cleaning water) -- I told her that good and bad lotus flowers are only in our minds and that mine was just good and bad as everyone else's. She laughed at that.

They interrupted us halfway through the lotus flower to go eat. We all did not want to follow the ritual from the previous day, opting instead for a chance to quietly eat with a lunch tray and no cleaning water -- and also no waiting. It was like 8AM and we had all been up four and a half hours, we just wanted food.

We finished our lotus flowers and went to the meditation room to partake in a tea ceremony. I was so tired that I can't remember too much of it other than they didn't give us much tea. The first sip was supposed to be bitter, the second was to quench our thirst and the last to leave us with a sweet taste. I say sip because it was all the same tea...it all tasted bitter to me.

Here was a common scene during the tea ceremony:

















This is my name written on a lantern. They wrote everybody's name on these lanterns before we arrived, saying a prayer for happiness and success in our lives. I will get neither due to my failure at lotus-construction.