Templestay!

Saturday, July 13^th, 2013 – Sunday, July 14^th, 2013

This weekend, I experienced my first Templestay just outside of Busan!  A Templestay allows you to experience the life of a Buddhist monk for one day and to learn some of the rituals and tradition that has been practiced for centuries.  We arrived at the Temple around 3:00pm and we left the next morning around 10:00am.  I believed that this was an important cultural experience I should try while I am living here in Korea and I am glad that I have now experienced it.

 I will first give a quick itinerary of our stay.

We stayed in a room that had its own bathroom and A/C!  This Temple was a modern temple and very clean and comfortable!  We were very impressed. 

In the opening ceremony, we were introduced to the Monks who would guide us through our journey.  They brought in a Monk from out of town who is from Texas.  She came to Korea as an English teacher and decided to follow the path of Buddhism and has been practicing and training as a Buddhist monk in Korea ever since.  She was really nice and extremely interesting.  It was nice to have someone from a similar background around the entire time to explain things to us in English and in a ways we could find easier to relate to.

The traditional meal was very structured; we were not supposed to talk at all during the meal. They have a set routine for where the bowls should be placed, how the food should be served, how we are supposed to eat it (the bowls covering our faces) and how to clean the bowls at the end.  We had to clean the bowls using a slice of yellow radish and water and at the end, sweet rice water was poured into the last bowl we cleaned and we were meant to drink the water with the leftover pieces of food we cleaned off from the first three bowls.  This grossed out some people.  It was also meant to be a lesson about how even though we drank the water and ate the food separately; in our mind we find it gross to mix the two, even though it’s the exact same food and water.  They also do not want to waste any food or any water and they wash the bowls in this way to save water and detergent.  Since it was our first time cleaning the bowls, they said they would rewash them later. 

The meditation period consisted a total of one hour of mediation.  I did not feel like I could concentrate and it was very difficult to keep my legs crossed and stay comfortable for that long.  Meditation is extremely difficult to do, especially when we are used to sensory overload most of the time.  I can see the value in doing meditation and I am very impressed with the concentration and dedication monks have meditating everyday.

The next day we had to wake up at 3:30 in the morning for the first ceremony.  We did more meditation, 108 bows in a row, cleaned leaves from the lawn and then we had breakfast.  For breakfast, in Korea, they eat rice and side dishes, the same kind of food you could eat for lunch and dinner.  After breakfast, we made bracelets as our last activity, which was fun!

It was an interesting experience and it gives me a way better perspective of the daily life of a monk. 

Even though we had already accomplished many things on Sunday, since we woke up at 3:30am, we still had an entire day ahead of us since we arrived back in the city before lunch!  I didn’t bother going home and went straight to the beach.  I spent a couple of hours there.  I went to show Chris and Aimee the Latino restaurant but unfortunately it was closed until 4pm and Chris had to work.  They were still excited about my discovery!

Aimee and I returned there for a late afternoon snack of churros and delce de leche.  After eating, we laid in the hammocks for a little while and both almost fell asleep in comfy hammocks, under the warm sun, after a sweet snack and a long day!