The events of this past weekend surprised and impressed me on multiple levels. First, there was the irony of this southeastern-US, Bible-Belt raised, former regular Christian church goer American spending one of the most significant foundational religious holidays at a temple of another religion. (Looking back, I believe this was my first ever Easter Sunday that I failed to spend several morning hours parked in a church pew. In fact, even last year, I still spent the holiday at a Korean church, even when I couldn't understand more than two spoken words of the entire service!) And then, taking the quirk of fate one step further, was that I completely forgot it was the Christian holiday until the day prior to our departure.
Joined by a group of friends, we were all exceptionally interested in learning about monk-life, and seeing (or being reminded) of what this practice was all about. So we did our research and scoured through books, picked a suitable temple to visit, and made preparations to take a spring weekend retreat. The weekend's activities also reinforced my fondness for templestays. This was my third similar Korean weekend stay, although the first time without a massive foreigner-heavy gaggle. The other two weekends were definitely enjoyable and relaxing. But now equipped with the abilities of hindsight and comparison, the previous stays felt very commercial and tourist-y. This time around, I was very much looking forward to an 'authentic' temple experience where I would be a big exotic (?, at least, according to Koreans) fish out of the collective small pond - to borrow from, and in an attempt to combine, two cliches.
Last week, the excitement of our pending trip was also combined with a fundamental apprehension that our group of non-Korean speaking foreigners were potentially entering into a world devoid of our native tongues. So this risk motivated me to brush up on some essential phrases and questions (although, there was a 93.8% probability that I wouldn't even slightly understand the given response to any of these questions!). Fortunately, our group was met by several other English speakers who happened to be living at the temple, and we were also enthusiastically (although, possibly begrudgingly) helped by several fellow group members who willingly provided translation services for us the entire weekend. So all that language concern was unneccessary, other than to motivate us to increase our cultural understandings (which, I guess, is a good result in and of itself).
Overall, the weekend was tremendously relaxing and refreshing, and all of the required efforts to make it happen were greatly successful. Everyone had an enjoyable time, hopefully feels even vaguely more comfortable with this country and culture, is a little more confident in the art of travel, and we left with many nice souvenirs and memories of our stay. I, for one, definitely have a new respect and appreciation for monks and monkhood, because lemme tell you friends, they are professional relaxers, but they surely earn it. For an outsider, the act of slowing the mind and taking a breather is rather easy (nay, enjoyable) to do for a short weekend. But the fortitude of the monks that do this for a living, day after day, is amazing. Their daily schedule includes a morning alarm before 4AM; strict, disciplined regiments of hundreds of full-prostration bows; and days on end of meditating, eating, and sleeping in contorted body positions on hard, wooden floors. And then there's the whole Buddhist precept thing: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Precepts). Stronger people than me.
Anyway, Happy Easter!
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