Jogyesa Temple

The next day we found ourselves strolling down a narrow street flanked by nondescript office buildings, coffee shops and small boutiques. We were on our way to see Jogyesa Temple, the central temple of Zen Buddhism in Korea.

At first we joked. "Wow, what a gorgeous temple," Melly said to me, pointing at a bland, gray office tower as we walked down the alley. It just seemed like such an unlikely place to find a temple of Zen meditation. Yet, moments later, we rounded a curve in the road and glimpsed the structure for the first time. The flanked roof, the intricate blues and reds and yellows hand-painted on wood--the elegant design was almost identical to the palaces we had been visiting the past few days. This still boggles my mind; clearly an architectural design can be repeated easily enough, but the designs on the curved log beams could only have been painted by hand! And each design was uniform, as precisely reproduced as could be expected by a human, and each repeated itself dozens of times on each structure, framing each support column, accenting each corner. And by now we had seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of these designs covering the palaces throughout the entire city. Impressive.

Jogyesa was taller than the palaces, and even more intricately painted. We approached from the back of the temple. Construction scaffolding was erected by a bay door on the rear of the building. Korean people were hauling crates and bags in and out of the bay door, to and from a truck parked just outside. Some of the people were dressed entirely in gray--presumably individuals participating in intensive temple-stay programs, or perhaps novice monks. It was a strange juxtaposition--our first glimpse of the temple looked like the shipping and receiving bay of a grocery store. That, along with the gray urban backdrop of the city that surrounded it, made the temple seem lost in time, a little bubble of elsewhere accidentally plopped in the middle of the city block.

I suppose this describes Korea as a whole pretty well. Traditional thought and manic techno-industrial growth play an epic game of tug-of-war across the whole peninsula. Or do they walk hand in hand? I don't know yet.

We walked closer, past the truck and bay door. The temple was covered with gorgeous murals telling the story of the Buddha: Prince Siddhartha Gautama in his lavish palace, the discovery of the people's great suffering beyond the palace walls, the turn to asceticism, the meditation under the Bodhi Tree, the Enlightenment, the Teaching. We wandered around to the front of the building. An old woman was praying passionately to a gray statue of the rotund, laughing Buddha. I watched her as we walked around the grounds. Her prayers lasted at least ten minutes. You gotta hand it to the Buddhists: they may be a bit less ADHD than most.

The temple grounds were spotted with tall, terraced statues and fountains. Bottles of water, fruit, and flowers were piled up at the base of each of these--offerings to the Buddha. We wandered around. We were the only foreigners there. We felt extremely nervous and out of place, and really didn't want to cause any international incidents. Luckily, there was a little office on the far side of the grounds that said "Foreigner Services." Better to be safe than sorry, we went inside and talked to a friendly Korean man who seemed vaguely confused at our unease. But he reassured us, all was well. We could enter the temple as long as we took off our shoes and didn't take any pictures. Fair enough.

Man I wish I had some pictures of the inside of that building. Not for the first time since arriving in Korea, I found my jaw dropping. Inside, the temple was one large room with four thin support pillars. Three enormous golden Buddhas, probably 25 feet tall each, sat in the front of the temple on a shrine piled high with fruits and flowers and water bottles. Each Buddha exhibited a different mudra (sacred hand gesture), and all three sat in front of a dazzlingly detailed wall painted with thousands of different Buddhas, deities, spirits, people, and things I couldn't begin to understand. The ceiling ascended in a series of levels. Hundreds of small colorful paper lanterns with prayers dangling down from them covered the first and lowest level of the ceiling. Just above them, more towards the center of the room, large lotus-shaped lamps, 5 feet across each, glowed with soft and ghostly neon colors, and still beyond that, a grid of smaller lotus-shaped lights glittered high at the top of the building like stars. One wall of the giant room was golden from ceiling to floor and covered in Hangul characters and candles. The opposite wall boasted another shrine with a smaller Buddha statue, this one also piled tall with flowers and fruits. Candlelight and lamplight filled the room, which was already bright from the gray light of the wintery afternoon pouring in through the tall windows opposite the giant golden Buddhas. A feast for the senses, and a delight for the eyes. I could have stayed in there just admiring the decor for hours. My brain lapped up the lush colors and patterns like a dog laps up water from a stream.

The temple was full of people, all of them Korean. Surprisingly to me, there didn't seem to be any sense of hushed reverence at all. People talked loudly to each other, people talked on their cell phones. Middle-aged women chatted loudly with each other while others repeated bowing prayers to the Buddha statue at their own pace.

We wanted to meditate in the temple, at least for a few minutes before we left. There was a stack of square gray cushions by one of the support pillars. Cautiously, Melly and I each grabbed one, always checking for reactions from the people around us, making sure we weren't breaking any rules of etiquette or offending anyone. We sat on the cushions in front of the center window at the back wall, and closed our eyes. The meditation was deep and satisfying, and we stayed there for ten minutes or so. It was at that point that I heard some impatient whispering from the women next to us. I opened my eyes, and, sure enough, they were whispering at Melly and me. Apparently, we weren't supposed to be sitting there. Oh God, how long have they been trying to get our attention? They gestured for us to move, to go to the side, to get out of our spot. They spoke quickly and brashly in Korean, shooing us, and we didn't understand. It was scary; this is exactly what I had hoped to avoid. Did they want us to leave the temple completely? Or just scoot over? Well, so much for peace of mind.

We stood up. The ajumma (middle-aged woman) who had shooed us then bowed to us with her hands clasped in prayer position over her heart--the universal gesture of "Namaste"--even though she still had something of a scowl on her face. Confused and nervous, we wandered away and circled around the room, looking at the decor. No one else seemed upset that we were there, and no one else was sitting in the middle of the back wall. Maybe we were just sitting in the wrong spot? We decided to sit back down on the side, in an empty spot amidst many other Koreans, for a few more minutes. Just enough to calm back down, we figured, to shake off the sense of anxiety that had just accrued. Just a few more minutes of meditation.

We sat down. The women (probably 85% of the people there were middle-aged women, for some reason) next to us smiled welcomingly. Ah, no problem here. We'll meditate a few more minutes and be on our--

Everyone suddenly sat down and became quiet. We heard the rhythmic hollow tapping of a stick on a gourd and saw a Jogye monk, complete with shaved head and long colorful robes, walk gracefully down the center of the room where we had just been sitting. The monk was wearing a lapel microphone, and said something in Korean. His rich voice resonated through PA speakers in the corners of the room, and everyone stood up in unison, bowed their heads, and clasped their hands in prayer. Melly and I looked around, slightly panicked. We were smack dab in the middle of this crowd, the only foreigners in the room, and we didn't know at all what was going on. Out of instinct, we joined in the motions of the crowd, clasping our hands and bowing. We wanted to see what would happen next.

The monk began chanting and drumming on his hollow wooden gourd. The people began a series of bows to the Buddha. To do this, you begin from a standing position, then drop to your knees on your gray square cushion, touch your forehead to the ground and lift your hands to your head, then stand back up without using your hands to push off the ground. We were suddenly in the middle of a crowd doing this is unison, remember, so we had to very quickly figure out what to do. The monk would say a line of Buddhist scripture, and everyone would bow, touch their foreheads to the ground, and stand back up. Over and over, he would say a line of scripture, we would bow and stand, a line of scripture, bow and stand, scripture, bow and stand, scripture, bow, stand.

My legs started burning a bit. It was church and a step class at the same time. In front of me, thin middle aged women were doing this at twice the pace I was, and not even breaking a sweat. You go, ajummas. Well done. A little old lady saw Melly panting and sweating, reached over and gave her a bottle of water. Yes, we were getting completely dominated by small, old Korean women.

Over and over, on and on it went. The monk chanted out dozens of lines, each unintelligible to me save for the last word: "mianhamnida." I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Forgive me. I bowed and bowed, asking the Buddha to forgive me for my restless mind, my inattentiveness, my indiscipline, my impatience. Who knows what the monk was actually saying, all I could understand was "mianhamnida." Forgive me. So that's what I asked.

After perhaps fifty or sixty bows of "mianhamnida," the monk began ending his scriptural lines with another word: "gomapseumnida." Thank you. Thank you. I am grateful. And I bowed again and again to the Buddha, thanking him for his accomplishments, for punching through and seeing the true nature of reality, for adding something beautiful and important to the world. I thanked God that I had legs at all, that I could actually do this strange ritual. I bowed and thanked Life for bringing me into this utterly bizarre circumstance. I almost laughed out loud as I bowed and stood, bowed and stood amidst a congregation of middle-aged Korean women. Gomapseumnida. Thank you for all of this, thank you for every detail of this experience.

I think we did 108 bows, the number of beads on a Buddhist mala, but I can't be sure. It seemed to go on forever, especially since I was constantly and anxiously glancing around, gauging my environment, unsure of how to act or what to do. Finally, the chanting stopped and everyone sat cross-legged on the cushion. The monk began chanting. His voice was deep and hypnotizing and beautiful, and immediately lulled me into a trance. Then everyone around us began chanting along. It was such a strange and wondrous new sound, rhythmic and meditative, as different as could be from the hymns of western Christianity. Many seemed to have the chants memorized; others read along from a book of Hangul characters. I was enjoying just listening to the congregation chant together, but the kindly woman next to me decided it would be nice to lean over to me and share her book.

Now, I can phonetically read Hangul, but only at a toddler level. A slow toddler, at that. But lucky me, the woman was very nice and pointed out in the book our place in the chant, insisting I join in. Her finger bounced along the Korean script at a very brisk pace, and I, wanting very badly to be gracious and try to participate, did my damnedest to try to keep up. Disastrous failure. My eyes strained, my brain driven far beyond its capacity, I mostly murmured and hummed as the chanting went on and on and on. Page after page of chanting, often repeating large sections three times before turning the page and continuing. I didn't know how to politely say "No thank you, I'll just listen," so I mumbled and hummed and strained. Undeterred by my obvious inability to read her little book, the woman kept showing me our place, quickly moving from character to character, moving on long before I had had a chance to match up symbol to sound.

The chanting wasn't exactly monotone, but it centralized itself on one droning note, and occasionally moved up or down for a moment before returning to the main drone, and maintained a perfectly steady rhythm the entire time. I suppose if you knew what you were doing, or if you could, say, read Hangul, this might lead you into a lovely trancy meditative state. But if you were me, this would be the most maddening, straining, and God-awfully long song with no melody you'd ever heard in your life, and you'd be expected to sing along. Just like the bows, the chant went on and on and on and on, perhaps for thirty or forty minutes, and all the while, my friendly neighbor pointed out our place in the book, politely encouraging me to chant along.

When the chanting finally and thankfully stopped, by brain was buzzing as if I had just finished taking the SAT. Then the monk started tapping the gourd again and launched into another chant, this one so fast that, thank God, I was not expected to join. I was amazed at how the monk chanted out the Korean words with such speed, fluidity, and purity of tone. Any hip hop artist would've been humbled by the speed and endurance of his Buddhist flow. He chanted on and on, perhaps for another twenty minutes. The sound was truly beautiful, and when I didn't have to strain and participate, the service was really enjoyable. But by then, time was so stretched and distorted from the effort I had already put in that even this pleasant music seemed to go on for far too long, forever, would it ever end??? Would we be here late into the night, listening to this unintelligible droning chant until our brains dribbled out our noses??? Oh wait! He's slowing down! Yes, he's wrapping it up, surely this is the end---NO! HE STARTED AGAIN! HE'S STILL CHANTING! THIRTY MORE MINUTES AND HE'S STILL CHANTING! OH GOD!!! Buddha what have I done to deserve this???

But I wasn't about to leave. Impatient or not, I really wanted to see how this ended.

The service lasted over two hours, which isn't really that long when you're not in a constant state of anxiously imitating your neighbor, when you don't feel like an intruder trying to blend in, when you're not completely clueless of what's happening and what's going to happen next. For us, two hours felt like five. It's funny and sad; Zen meditation focuses the mind on the now moment, teaches detachment from the future, and encourages rejoicing in the way things are. In the Jogyesa Temple, I failed at all these things.

When it was finally over and the monk finally stopped tapping on his damn clickety little gourd and stopped chanting and walked out of the room, Melly and I stood to put our cushions away and collect our things. My polite neighbor, the woman who had been pointing along in the book, gave me some books to return to a shelf on the wall, as well as another book.

She had given me her personal copy of a Buddhist scripture, hardbound and written in vertical lines of Hangul characters from back to front. She spoke a few Korean sentences to me, gesturing to the book, and returned to her cushion. I didn't know if it belonged to the temple or what. I looked around and asked Melly, "Did she just give this to me?" A young Korean woman in the corner said in clear English, "Yeah, I think she just gave that to you." Dazed, Melly and I walked back to the door, out onto the porch and slipped on our shoes.

Our minds were mush. As soon as we were out of sight of the temple, we laughed and blurted out to each other "WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED TO US???" We had wanted to meditate for fifteen minutes, and instead we had been drawn into an entire religious service of the central temple of Korean Zen Buddhism. We were the only two non-Korean individuals there. We had experienced something apparently very few other foreigners get to experience, and we had done it completely by accident.

I looked at my new book. Unreadable. Mysterious. Something felt very special about it. How could I learn more about it? I didn't know.

The rest of the afternoon, we saw some old Hanok houses--Korean architecture from long ago. But we couldn't care. Our brains had been turned to pudding. For having gone to a peaceful, meditative service in a Zen temple, we sure were frazzled and exhausted. Nothing else was going to stick to our minds tonight.

We had dinner. We met our friend James and saw some cool Korean bands in a bar and drank beer. We returned to our hostel room at 2 am, only to find a raucous group of twenty college-aged Korean kids outside our bedroom door, laughing loudly and playing games. They said, "Sorry!" We assured them it was all right ("guenchunseumnida!"), closed our bedroom door, put in earplugs, and went to sleep. The group was riotously loud on the other side of our thin bedroom wall until 6 in the damn morning.

But what the hell, we were in Korea.