Dear Friends and Family,

Deagu City, its walls and its clouds are drab. But the hills surrounding us have burst to life. Winter’s lingering chill occasionally sends us into shivers and but visually, spring is all over; trees are that new green so fresh that you stare at branches and taste mint.

Last weekend could be described just this way, which made climbing into my friend’s car and driving from blah concrete into green mountains feel like an escape. We were going to Buddhist temple called Golgulsa as tourists, but we packed to stay. And were hoping for a memorable experience.

Once a friend of mine begged, “Please, whatever you do, no more temple visits!” But just as you must visit churches in Italy, you must visit temples in Asia. They are beautiful. They are a culmination of generations. They are meaningful. And I enjoy these visits but… well, but…

Another time, upon the news that I was to tour one of Korea’s most famous temples, my guiding teacher shook his head and sorrowfully said, “You will see the temple but you will not see its soul.” He meant that I would see old wooden blocks, I would point my camera at a golden Buddha statue but that I would not meet the monks and that I would miss the actual beauty of Buddhism. I understood. Indeed, when I visit Buddhist temples, I gawk at painted wooden structures, I read that the temple was built in blah blah blah and is special because it signifies blah blah blah. After reading the signs, respectfully I stroll around to absorb the sites: wooden beads, plethoras of pinprick lights, inscrutable frescos, and supplicants, foreheads on the ground in front of Buddha. But these temples hold little meaning for me, I suspect because I cannot feel the why of these temples. And that is a pity.

Luckily, I am not alone in my ignorance. Therefore, for foreigners such as myself, there is a program that allows you to overnight at a Korean Buddhist temple. The program advertises itself with the slogan, “Changing the Way You See the World.” Although under no serious illusion that our regard for the world would change after a bit of bowing and meditation, my friend and me, both feeling that we were missing a vital piece of understanding Korean culture, decided it was time to see what we could learn from staying at a temple.

We were greeted by a friendly dog, sprawled in front of the office doorway. We were signed in and given a schedule by a British woman who had been living at the temple for two years, studying Buddhism and studying Sunmudo, the martial art that the temple specializes in. We placed our backpacks in a clean, sparse bedroom and took ourselves up the path to explore.

Golgulsa was built in the 6^th century and what hasn’t disintegrated from that time remains quite distinct. The temple boasts that it is the only temple cave in Korea. Upon reading that fact my response was, “What cave?” But main cave itself has, I suppose, crumbled, exposing a topmost Goddess of Mercy carved from the exposed cliff face. The Goddess is actually rather smug, I’d say, not at all diminished by the modern glass ceiling now protecting her. It takes some climbing to get a good view of her: up steep stairs, leaning on guard rails, clinging to rock while searching for footholds. I felt very adventurous as my friend and I sat under this ancient carving, peering down at a smooth wooden deck abutting the main shrine building, where we could see a monk performing what had to be Sunmudo kicks and bounds. Soon, a dinner bell rung. Down the stairs we went to a long dining room with short tables, where we lined and were up served very good vegetarian food with two admonishments: men and women must sit apart and do not waste any food. Buddhists believe that in the after life, you are forced to sit among all the food that you have wasted during your life on earth.

Our schedule next sent us to the temple’s martial arts gym for a “Sunmudo T.V. show” – which appeared to be an advertisement for the wonders of Sunmudo framed by the beauty of Golgulsa. We watched lines of men framed by ancient pagodas performing dramatic jumps, groups of women performing simultaneous tightly controlled kicks and white westerners taking tea with the head monk. After the video, another westerner, who never introduced himself and later became known to us as Frenchie, then attempted, and I do mean attempted, to teach us a few Sunmudo moves. But the coordination that seemed to come effortlessly to him was impossible for us. Frenchie was very serious and barely patient. But every once in a while, his countenance would break and his blue eyes would beam amusement and a teasing smile would emerge. I liked watching this. But we not-so-coordinated students couldn’t help but suspect that watching us make fools of ourselves gave him a mite too much pleasure. Others resented Frenchie’s lack of hospitality, but I sensed in him strong reserve, just as strong disinterest in pandering to casual tourists, and discomfort with the English language.

When we were done with our martial arts lesson, Frenchie rapidly debriefed us on bowing techniques. The gym floor was cleared and thin cotton mats were laid facing an altar complete with a gold Buddha. Men and women separated and knelt on the mats. Martial arts instructors became monks that now lead chants and bowing. Clueless as to what was going on and unable to chime in, I kept Frenchie in the corner of my eye, and followed his movements (which was much easier than learning kicks from him). Just when my quadriceps were beginning to protest the repeated bowing, the “chanting” session was over and we Western visitors were put to work wiping down the gym with brooms and wetted rags. Then we were sent to sleep.

Traditional Korean beds are thin mats placed on a warmed floor, with a thick comforter on top and a hard pillow of grain for under the neck. These beds are too hard for my taste but our temple beds were clean and the floor was toasty. Besides a curious incident where 4 or 5 dogs barked a lot at 1:21 am, I slept.

At 4 am, a monk walked by our room ringing a small, moderately-pitched bell. We turned on our lights – brutal! - to indicate that we were awake but then conspired to snooze. I seriously considered setting my alarm but instead washed my face, pulled my hair back, and changed. Next, under bright stars and soft darkness, we plodded up the mountain for an early morning chant in the main shrine. Again we began by kneeling on cotton mats before a subduedly gleaming gold Buddha. Four monks positioned themselves between Buddha and ourselves, chanting, ringing a bell. And bowing. A proper Buddhist bow involves standing, feet barely parted. Then softening the knees, placing palms flat on the floor, knees to the ground, then forehead to the ground, then lifting the palms of your hands and rotating them towards the sky. Next you bring your palms together while raising your forehead, and subsequently raising yourself to your feet in almost a single movement. This is not as easy as it sounds.

After our morning chanting session, the head monk, dressed in gray with a burgundy wrap across one shoulder, folded himself into lotus position (cross legged with feet upon thighs). He expelled three deep breaths and settled into meditation. I did my best to imitate him. I crossed my legs and sat with my palms up. However, meditation is not my forte. That early in the morning, I awake with unnaturally clear, racing thoughts that leap and stumble around each other. As I sat, attempting to subdue my mind and tolerate my leg going to sleep, I noticed birds began chirping outside at precisely 5 am. A few minutes later, I peeked again and noticed that outside dark was fading. Towards the end of the meditating, the eldest of the temple dogs strolled in. Her toenails softly clicked against the floor but no one rushed her out. I liked that. After sitting meditation, we took our prickling legs for walking meditation. Silently, we strolled in a single file line through the temple grounds, initially making numerous laps around a sculpture that overlooks a valley of green hills before simply following the temple’s path. I marveled at the pearlescent dawn. Three of the temple dogs accompanied us on our walk, leading the way or pacing along side us. Although we Western walking meditators remained respectfully silent, our heads moved to and fro absorbing of the sights. I’m not sure that this qualified as actual meditation but it felt nice. I almost burst into laughter when it occurred to me that it looked to me as if the dogs were taking their obedient humans for a walk.

Breakfast, at 6:20 am, sans coffee, was a complicated ritual called Barugonyang. We were each loaned a set of four nested bowls with lid, a grey linen placemat, a white linen napkin, chopsticks and a spoon. We were seated, nervous, cross-legged, in a perfectly straight row and admonished that silence is an important part of this ritual. No talking. No clicking bowls together. And every last bit of food must be washed from your bowl into your stomach. Our little row of Westerners became a rectangle as Sunmudo students and teachers silently joined us with their settings before the monks seated themselves at the head of our rectangle. The head monk took a large bamboo stick and noisily struck it against the floor. Then, each of us silently:

-Opened our placemat.

-Placed 4 bowls near our left knee. We removed the chopsticks and spoon from a wrapper.

-Using our thumbs, we quietly extracted the smallest bowl and placed it right, top. (That was our water bowl.)

-Using our thumbs, we quietly extracted the next smallest bowl and placed it left, top. (That was our vegetable bowl.)

-Using our thumbs, we quietly extracted the next to largest bowl and placed it right. (That was our soup bowl.)

-The largest bowl, remaining on the left was our rice bowl.

-Temple students poured cool water from a large tea kettle into each person’s smallest bowl.

-Temple students served rice with a big paddle.

-Then, from trays placed around the rectangle of people, we quickly took as much food as we wanted. (I had a moment of panic at this stage because I couldn’t reach the trays and no one noticed ‘til this part was almost over). We were forbidden to mix foods between bowls.

-Our first act with the food was to take a piece of cabbage kimchi and wash it clean of spices and place it in the rice bowl.

-We then ate very quickly and cleanly and finished before the head monk struck a large bamboo stick to the floor to announce the end of the meal.

-Temple students then came around again. This time to pour warm water into each person’s rice bowl.

-Then, pushing around the cleaned kimchi, we each cleaned our rice bowl with our chopsticks. Then we poured the water into the soup bowl.

-Next, we cleaned the soup bowl with kimchi and water. Poured the water into the veggie bowl.

-Next, we cleaned the veggie bowl and drank the dirty water.

-Temple students then collected each person’s leftover water in large blue buckets. If the collective water was too dirty, we were told that we would have to split and drink it. Happily, this was not necessary.

-Finally, we polished each bowl with the napkin and silently returned the bowls to their original nested state. We then sat quietly in a perfect line and waited ‘til the head monk ended the ritual with another strike of his bamboo stick.

I have never experienced the like; I was too wary of faux pas to actually eat a good breakfast. My favorite moment came just as we were cleaning up, when the head monk found a long bean sprout to the side of his bowl. Clear as day, I read his intention to hide that sprout in his napkin but then he realized that too many people were watching and so he ate it.

After breakfast, I vied with the trainee monks for 300 Won coffee (30 cent) from a vending machine. Then I took my miniscule cup of instant coffee and a blanket and my journal to a quiet bench up the hill. The sun rose over the hill on my right to glint between the trees while to my left, birds called to one another. The temple’s dogs kept wandering by and I happily put down my pen each time one wanted me to scratch his bristly, thick pelt.

At 8 o’clock, we 7 foreigners gathered to take tea with a monk. Our monk’s head was shaved and he wore plain gray trousers with a burgundy collar and cuffs indicating his trainee status. We found his English inadequate for conveying complicated ideas. But his eyes sparkled and his movements were precise as he prepared tea for us in a traditional manner. After the preliminaries, I piped up with, “I have a question. Why are men and women separated for eating and worship?”

His answer was too confusing to quote but I eventually made out that his answer related to the sect of Buddhism that he was a member of preserving very traditional practices. I pictured other traditional religions that keep men and women separate during worship, Judaism and Islam, and decided that I had the gist.

Another in our group asked our monk about his own history. His reply was startled us, as he suggested that we not ask about a monk about his past because often times a monk becomes a monk to leave a troubling past behind. We didn’t know what to make of that answer. And the other puzzling, but not puzzling issue with our monk was that he seemed hypersensitive towards us girls, especially wary of almost-revealing tops or us peeling a sweater off. He seemed especially young at those moments, clearly struggling.

I kept asking questions (not about celibacy, but oh, I wanted to!) because I wanted to better understand. When I piped up with my second question, our monk tried to divert me by asking us to introduce ourselves to him. This wasn’t much of a distraction and I next asked I asked about the daily lives of monks. I couldn’t follow his answer well.

Next, I wondered how Buddhism and Sunmudo were related. Our monk’s answer referenced Korean Buddhist history when monks developed strong bodies through martial arts as a part of their philosophical practice. Eventually Buddhist monks, experienced in martial arts, became vital to repelling attacks on Korea from warring states.

That said, perhaps that answer still seems strange? Generally we Westerners consider Buddhism a peaceful faith… teaching fighting techniques at a peace-loving Buddhist temple seems counter-intuitive. But our monk’s answer about the development of a martial art going hand in hand with the practice of Buddhism made sense to me because caring for the body in order to nourish the philosophic mind has been a long-standing practice in this part of the world. Think yoga: a practice intended to unite the body and the mind through breathing. As Liz Gilbert once explained,

The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “Wow… my hip really aches.”

Hindus developed yoga to enable meditation while the Chinese and the Koreans hit two birds with one stone in developing martial arts, which both encourages work upon one’s mind and turns one into a warrior. In fact, later I read that Sunmudo, “is a training method taught at Golgulsa Temple designed to extinguish worldly pains and attain enlightenment. The goal of this training is harmonization of mind and body united with breathing.”

Bingo.

Anyway, with those questions, so began a few hours of my intermittently peppering our monk with questions. I don’t think he minded my curiosity – in fact, he started teasing me about 10 minutes into our tea - but basic discussions in English are difficult for Koreans with a basic education. Asking him to speak with us about Buddhism would be like one of us trying to explain Christian philosophy after 2 years of high school French. I felt bad for him. And I felt worse for Frenchie (as our monk dubbed him), because Frenchie apparently didn’t do an adequate job explaining our visit to us – which meant that our monk could punish Frenchie with 3000 bows. Our monk seemed half joking but serious while repeating this threat. 3000 bows is no joke. In fact, we visitors could’ve been punished with 3000 bows ourselves if we had missed our 4:30 am chant. Snoozing so rarely pays off.

Eventually, our monk got tired of pouring us tea so he put us in a white van and drove us to visit two 3-story pagodas, the remains of an ancient temple. Next we found ourselves on an East coast beach, gawking at the only known underwater tomb in the world. Our funny monk instructed me, “Go swim to it!”

I put my hands into the surf and breathed. “After you.” I replied.

Last he drove us to another temple, larger than Golgulsa, reportedly inherently defensible, which apparently made it important during times of war when a horn was sounded from the Girimsa temple grounds to summon able-bodied men to defend their country. Our monk was on much surer ground here. He was able to explain to me that finger placement on one Buddha made him a “Doctor Buddha” (a Healing Buddha) and that to this day, scholars were unsure about what this special building with beautifully aged wooden floors had been used for. We went into one building in which the sign declared housed relics but which seemed packed with paintings of good people rising above tortured people. One manuscript pictured a person pierced with many blades, somehow a cautionary tale regarding proper parental love. We found these pictures rather disturbing – and our monk, with the relish of a young man who loves studying martial arts, told us all about them, pointing out the pain of the tortured people. I couldn’t follow his explanations – and wondered at the level of metaphor portrayed in the paintings while someone else said, “I thought Buddhism was supposed to be a peaceful religion? These paintings seem violent.” The time in that dark building set us all wondering.

We were all, including our monk, hungry and tired when we returned to our temple around 11 am. We friends snoozed in our room. We ate one more vegetarian lunch. Bade farewell to the other westerner temple visitors and sleepily returned to Daegu. During journey out of the green hills, I reflected that I wasn’t sure how much I had learned from our visit. I had hoped to emerge with a foundation that I could use to build an understanding of Buddhism. Instead I felt as if I had been presented with a box for a 100 piece puzzle but that the givers had only included 3 of the pieces. I suspect that my next reverent temple visit will be to… a bookstore.

With love,

Laura

For the record, that is not me with our monk.
I kick much higher!!!