Around mid-November I was able to do a templestay at Bubheungsa Temple in the Northern Gangwon-do region of Korea. An incredible experience, we were able to go for two days and eat, sleep, dress, and meditate like the monks do in the temples. It turns out that being in the Northern part of South Korea in November, this meant we were tired, hungry, and very, very cold. (I saw my first Korean snowfall on the way to Seoul the night before!) We were able to make beautiful lotus lamps (used in celebration of Buddha's birthday in May), and make dream pouches (in which you write down a single, attainable goal for the year and leave it wrapped in its own special pouch to be thought of often by the monks.) We were shown the way to bow and several different forms of meditation. We were able to string prayer beads and had the significance of the 108 beads explained to us. (It has to do with the 108 distinct types of suffering man must overcome to attain enlightenment.) And we were shown how to meditate and bow for each bead strung- that's right, 108 beads=108 full bows... I was a little sore after I got home :) We learned the very formal eating ceremony that the monks go through with every meal. Everyone is served specific foods in specific places on their mat (rice, soup, and various sorts of side dishes... never any meat, the monks are vegetarian), the monks eat in complete silence, and they must pace themselves so that they all finish at relatively the same time neither making others wait for them nor causing others to feel rushed. They never waste even a speck of spice or a grain of rice, after everyone is finished with the meal they each 'scrub' their dishes with a slice of pickled radish (or sometimes kimchi) and then eat the radish, then rinse each bowl with a bit of clear water, then drink the water, and finally rinse again with the water poured at the beginning of the meal to rinse the bowls and utensils before eating. That final rinse water is poured into a large container and checked by the head monk; if there is any cloudiness to it, left from the remnants of food, it is distributed amongst the monks and they must all share in drinking it. After dinner, we had tea and were able to talk to the monk and ask questions about monastic life and what they believe, and then it was time to hike up to bed. As a snack they gave us each a single boiled new potato before bed... as hungry as we all were, you'd have thought we were lining up for chocolate ice cream! We went to bed around 10:30/11-ish and slept as much as we could before we had to wake up for 3am meditations... very difficult to bow that much when you're tired and cold :) I think they took pity on us and allowed us to nap on the floor between activities during the morning, and then we headed back to Seoul to all catch buses and trains home Sunday night. Maybe it's the California in me, but I have never in my life been that cold for that long! A fantastic experience though, I really enjoyed my weekend there and felt really relaxed and refreshed afterwards... well, after a nap and a pizza :)
We also were lucky enough to have been at the temple on the weekend they were having their kim-jang, an annual event for temples, and families in which they make enormous quantities of kimchi and store it in large jars buried in the ground to last them through the winter season. We weren't able to participate this time, but just seeing how much kimchi they were making for the winter was amazing...
