Temple Stay at the Lotus Lantern

From DitchTheCube

October 11, 2008 
October 12, 2008 

Our final adventure on this trip will be an overnight temple stay at a meditation center (basically a monastery) not far from Seoul. At this point it's only my wife and I again, as my friend's vacation is over and Ulsan is his home base. We took the earliest train back to Seoul, leaving at 7am, then took the metro to a hole in thet wall bus terminal, then took that bus for 2 hours along heavy traffic and winding roads to Ganghwa island, and then finally took a tax for 5 minutes to the monastery.

I'll basically just list out the activities as we encountered them and my impression. The name of the place is the Lotus Lantern International Meditation Center. Many of the monks here are foreign nationals who have come to dedicate their lives to Buddhism.

2:00pm - Arrival. A funny looking guy (who resembles a friend from St. Louis) gives us a pair of loose fitting gray pants and a gray T-shirt to wear for the remainder of our stay. He shows us to our rooms (different rooms for men and women). I ended up alone in my room at first, my wife with a couple of older women that were traveling together. After a while, a large group of unscheduled people showed up, and I ended up being moved to another adjacent building with 5 other guys.

4:00pm - Orientation. A monk (originally from Hungary) explains many basic things about the monastery. We visited the temple first, where he explained that the main door is only for the "master" monk of the place, all others enter from the side door (especially us). He explained that one of their basic rituals is a series of 3 bows they perform out of respect for the Buddha, their own masters/teachers, and their community.

Unfortunately at this point he mentioned that people could take pictures any time they wanted, as the purpose of the visit was to learn. It seems normally they get about 10-15 people per Saturday, but this time they had about 30, and boy were they mostly a bunch of idiots. I'll now delve briefly into all the types of idiots we had that annoyed me:

• First we had the "photographers" that felt compelled to take a flash photograph nearly every few minutes, as though its a game. Wait, maybe thats a great idea, a video game where you have to take photo's of everything you see on the screen...
• Second are most of the people from the third world countries (we had a group of them). This is a pretty rough generalization, but I've found a lot of third world tourists in first world countries come from rich families that spoiled them quite a bit. These folks pay no respect to the fact that people actually live at the monastery and are providing valuable insight into a world not normally available.
• Third are those who have diahrea of the mouth. There is no peace and quiet around these folks...as soon as the activity is over, its time to start talking about how great some party was, or how many places they've visited. Seriously, this is a monastery, take in the scenery a little bit.

I feel kind of awkward spewing this disgust on a thread about visiting a Buddhist temple, but I would say these idiots seriously marred what could have been a much better experience.

So anyways...next we went to the meditation hall and watched a short introductory video. 10 seconds into the video, someone's flash goes off from behind me. Seriously, what the hell could they be taking a photograph of, is the building about to go away or something? We're watching a movie ffs.

6:00pm dinner time - The dining room has two sliding doors, one for monks, and one for all others. I was a little surprised at this as it kind of reminded me of the vertical structure of more organized religions. The food was in a buffet and the monks (rightfully) entered the line first. Dinner consisted of rice followed by various vegetables either pickled in Kimchi sauces or just doused in Kimchi sauces, and some (good) tofu at the end. All in all, I enjoyed the meal, other than the photographers flashing and the talkers disturbing the silence imposed by the "meal time is silent time" signs posted around.

7:00pm Evening chanting - Evening chanting consists of doing some bows, followed by the monks chanting in Korean stories about Buddha and his ways. It's very soothing listening to them chant (other than our photographers). Many times during the chanting, we had to bow, which could be a simple bow like Japanese people do, or, most often, involves kneeling onto your mat and putting your head to the mat and then getting back up. Chanting only lasted for about 20 minutes.

7:20pm Meditation - Our monk took us to the meditation hall and explained many things about meditation. Our method of meditation was to sit in a comfortable, stable position with our eyes nearly closed and hands in a position to help prevent falling asleep, and just focus on counting our breathing. We count each exhale up to 10 and start over again at one. For 20 minutes, we meditated. It was as difficult as the monk had explained. I often found my thoughts wavering to things of the day, or what I would do when I got back to my bunk. By the end I kind of realized that this type of meditation was exactly the opposite of my being, to think all the time. At least I'm sure being a monk isn't for me. Perhaps it is easy when you live at the monastery all the time and don't have a lot to think about. Anyways, about 1 minute from the end of meditation, someone's cell phone just goes crazy ringing at the loudest volume. I restrain my urge to execute this person, and then they actually answered the call and began whispering as though nobody in the silent room could hear them. Wow, it's a good thing a monk was sitting there because otherwise I probably would have taken the phone and winged it out into the rice fields. Idiots.

9:30pm Bed time - we went to sleep on our mats that were lying on the floor. Other than the pillow having no pillow case and the sheets being a little short for me, it wasn't bad at all.

3:45am Wake up - The wakeup call (hitting a wooden block with a stick is the call for everything) hits us in the dark, and we trudge to the temple for the hourlong morning chanting from 4am to 5am. Part of this ritual involves doing the full bow (from standing to head on the mat) 108 (one hundred and eight) times. This seemed to go on forever, but most of us were able to get the job done. If I had been exposed to this a few times as a child, I'm sure my complaining about 9:30 Sunday school would have vanished.

5:00am Morning meditation - Immediately after chanting we trudged over to the meditation hall for 30 minutes of meditation. Fortunately no cell phones went off, but my lack of sleep and food was making my nose run quite a bit which ruined a lot of my focus. Luckily no cell phones went off.

5:30am Rest time - For most of us, this meant a short nap until breakfast at 6:00.

6:00am Breakfast - Breakfast was rice gruel with some of the pickled vegetables. Rice gruel is fine, pickled vegetables are on my permanent hate list.

6:15am Rest again - After a deliberately short breakfast, we all took another nap until 7:40

7:40am Walk - Another monk (originally Russian, now Israeli) took us on a 20 minute walk around the farms surrounding the monastery.

8:30am Tea with a monk - We split into two groups, my group went to have tea with a monk first. We sat in a semi-circle around the monk and he did various things like fill the cups with boiling water, then pour the water back into the pot, then put the tea in, then added the water, then poured some water out. Finally he added more boilding water and poured the tea for everyone. At that point it was an open discussion where he would answer any of our questions. His English was not so great so I only understood about half of what he said, but the funniest question had to be when someone asked what the significance was of how he made the tea. He just looked surprised and said "I was just making tea, we have no tea ceremony like the Japanese or Chinese, that's just how you make tea".

9:30am Calligraphy - We swapped with the other group and did some "calligraphy", which basically meant laying a blank sheet over an existing sheet and tracing a lot of Chinese and Korean characters. My sheet was in pretty bad shape and I could hardly make our the strokes of the Chinese characters I was tracing.

11:00am Afternoon chanting - We went to the temple again and had the afternoon chanting. The number of bows was less than a dozen, but it did go on for about 30 minutes.

11:30 Lunch - Lunch was pretty good, but I only had a little bit of rice and broccoli to ensure I didn't need to use the rather dirty bathroom in our men's dorm. Oh, we had a slice of watermelon as well, which really tasted good after three meals of rice and Korean style vegetables.

That pretty much wraps up the monastery stay. We changed back into our regular clothes and they drove us down to the bus stop. The bus was hot, stuffy, and a wild ride, but luckily someone else in our group knew where we could get off early and take the metro the rest of the way.

We headed on in to our hostel near the main train station and got cleaned up, got some food, and took a break after our crazy ordeal. Tomorrow morning is our flight home, and unless something really exciting happens, this may be my last post for this trip. We're crossing the dateline east, so our flight will be arriving shortly after it departs, leaving us with a 30 hours of awake time (ugh). Here's hoping I can stay awake at work on Tuesday!

Until 2009...bye!