Buddhist Boot Camp Pt 1

I signed up a few weeks ago to go to a Buddhist Temple Stay. This is a program that the multiple temples around South Korea have started to allow people who are interested in learning more about Buddhism and the life of a monk to experience it first hand. Although most of the larger temples have a Temple Stay program, only a few allow a single person to make a reservation, and quite a few more require 15 or more people and a week's notice.

One of my friends suggested that we go as a group with Adventure Korea, so about 7 of us signed up for a trip to Bubheungsa (법훙사). Since the temple is in the province to the east of us, and about a 3 hour drive from Seoul, we had to catch the bus at 9:30am on Saturday (meaning that I had to be on the subway by 8am, so on a bus to get to the subway by 7:30 am). I was able to take the metro with Kathryn, one of the girls I'd met at my Wednesday night dinners, and one of the people I'm going to Japan with.

There were 30 people on the trip, and we all got to the temple with nothing exciting happening on the way. We did arrive at the temple about an hour early, so our guides brought us to a nearby river, where we walked up the side of a mountain to get a better view, and found a pagoda and buddhist rock carving.

(Dayna, Vincent, Maria, Kathryn, me)

We then wandered down to the river, which had some really cool stones that had been eroded from the elements.

(Lauren, me, Kathryn, and Dayna)

When we got to the temple around 3pm, we were given a white shirt and navy pants to change into (they called it a training suit), a key to a cupboard to keep our stuff, and a name tag. The girls changed in one room, while the boys changed next door, none of us realizing at the time that the rooms were a sliding paper door apart from each other.

(me and Dayna posing zen style, with our cupboards and a vacuum behind us)

During the orientation in this same room, we learned about proper manners in the temple, and a little bit about the temple itself. It was a little difficult to follow, because our guide only spoke Korean, so every sentence or so was translated by another guide, whose vocabulary was excellent, but whose accent was a bit hard to decipher. We were also give a temple stay schedule, which is the only reason I'm able to remember the order and times that we did everything! (They stuck to the schedule almost exactly.)

At 4:20, we did walking meditation in the "Forest for enlightening Intelligence". Walking meditation is simply walking VERY slowly, and concentrating only on the act of walking, and not thinking about anything. This is much more difficult than it seems. It looks, to a casual observer, like a mourners' procession, since everyone is supposed to be walking silently and slowly, with their head bowed and hands crossed.

One of the hard parts was not thinking about anything except your walking. We walked for about half an hour, but didn't really get that far. That's a long time to think about nothing but your feet. The other hard part was, oddly enough, the walking itself. You had to walk slowly, but continuously. So you actually spent quite a bit of time balanced on one foot with the other in the air, on it's way to the next step. Quite a few people stumbled on their first step because they were so unused to the balance required to walk like this.

After the walking meditation, we had dinner in the dining hall around 5pm. The meal itself wasn't half bad. We were told ahead of time that any food we served to ourselves had to be eaten - we weren't allowed to have leftovers, as this was rude to the people who had spent time preparing the meal. We also had to wash our own plates and silverware, and return them to where we got them from.

After dinner we had Yebul, which is a devotional chanting. We pretty much all sat in front of a large projection screen with a picture of one of the alters at the temple, while one of the monks chanted and beat a wooden-instrument. When she beat it three times, we were supposed to bow (which is a seven step process, and very hard on the knees), and when she beat it once, we were supposed to stand up.

After the chanting meditation, we took a freezing walk up the hill, where they showed us a bell that's wrung in the morning and at night. We were allowed to help ring the bell two at a time.


When we came back to the orientation building, we had hot tea with another monk, who told us a little bit about Buddhism and about the temple we were staying in. There was only time at the end for three questions.

Hot tea served in bowls