108 Full Bows = A Monkish Day

So, I am a few awesome weekend adventures behind.  But my excuses mainly have to do with being tired and lazy and stressed out from work and I don't feel like doing it.  The next few days I will do my best to catch up to this week, but I have planning for the coming weekend to do and lesson plans to deal with and all those fun little bits of life I call "filler."  I woke up early today, and decided that it wasn't nice enough to wander outside, so I will do some updating on here.  The next three posts will be about the last three weekends, starting with St. Patrick's Day and the weekend temple stay.  Next up, the Scifi Memorabilia Museum here in Daegu and some random wandering.  And last up, this past weekend's trip to Busan and the Holi Festival on the beach.  

Over St. Patty's Weekend, I went to a temple stay at Geumsansa Temple in Gimje. For the past several years my memories of this particular day of the year are fuzzy to non-existent, so I decided that going to a temple and pretending I was a Buddhist Monk would be a nice change up.  I trucked it up to seoul in the early morning hours again, though not until five in the morning this time, instead of 1 am.  I made my way to at 9 am and then slugged it onto the bus.  I spent the trip to the temple chatting and napping and arrived in the early afternoon to a beautiful mountainside temple.  We wandered a bit, looking around and taking pictures of all the temple buildings until we were called to meet the monks and get our temple stay outfits and our schedules.  

Then we began our education into the world and life of "the monk" and buddhist life.  We learned about bowing, lots and lots of bowing, how to bow differently to different people and in different situations.  We learned about the ceremony we would do at dusk and the tea ceremony we would preform before bed, the one we would do when we woke up AT THREE AM!  then there was more meditating, an hour long breakfast ceremony, walking meditation, comunal work, and more.  After learning about what we would be doing, we dove in head first.  

I had a ton of fun, and the pictures I took can show how beautiful the area was.  Before we left we were tasked with doing 108 full bows in front of Buddha.  This doesn't sound so bad, until you learn what a full bow is.  First you stand and half bow then you drop to your knees and place your forehead on the floor with your hands next to your head. Then raise you hands to ear height, palms up for a second, then lower them and sit up on your knees and half bow again.  That is one bow.  After each bow we were to put a wooden bead on a string they had given us.  Many of us went into the bowing not fully convinced we could do it, but we all pushed through and it actually didn't hurt at all.  The string of beads was then made into a necklace for us to take home along with the lotus lantern we made the previous day.  

I highly recommend that if any of you have an opportunity to try out a temple stay, you do it.  It was a great experience and I learned a ton.  Talking to the monks and having time to hear their answers was very informative.  I feel like next time I find myself at a temple I can walk into one of the buildings without feeling like and elephant in a china shop and actually have some kind of clue what I am doing. There really aren't many ways you can learn first hand, what the life of a buddhist monk living in Korea is like. Seriously, funtastic superific splendacious time of brainy learning type stuff and monkish jokes.  All good times.