Hop-a-Bus to Hongbeopsa

Last Sunday I visited another major Buddhist temple in Busan, called Hongbeopsa Temple (pronounced sort of like hong-bop-sa). It was very very different from Beomosa. First of all, it is a community based on farming, which differentiates it from the traditional (and more famous) "mountain temples" of Buddhism. Secondly, it had a decidedly more MODERN feel. From the outside, it looks more like a sports complex than a place of worship, and on the inside it looks more a psychedelic Buddhism-themed club than a sanctuary of quiet reflection. Obviously, I liked it immensely. Witness the gigantic internally illuminated Buddhas below, which occupy the same focal space in the temple that the crucifix would in a Catholic church.



Behold, as well, the half-completed Buddha statue which adorns the roof of the temple. It adds a post-modern (if I may be so bold-slash-pretentious) aesthetic to the temple, and certainly doesn't detract from the psychedelic theme of the interior. Buddha's dismembered, yet precisely posed hands, seem engaged in some sign language of enlightenment. It's a visual Koan. Some entity is meditating, but Who? We cannot know, since it's face is invisible. We can only see the hands. Eventually, the practitioner realizes, "I---I am Him. And He is me. And we are both Mu." And as soon as the statue is completed that interpretation will fall away, just another impermanent shadow. Like Shelley's Ozymandias , TIME will alter the meaning of the symbol. Unlike Ozymandias, it shall be the statue's completion, and not it's destruction, that supplies the irony.

But enough of this pseudo-philosophy! A famous man whose name escapes me delivered a poorly-organized but richly meaningful "Dharma Talk" on the nature of religious art, specifically Buddhist art (although he failed to make any mention on the statue sitting on the temple roof!). His talk was followed by a demonstration of traditional Korean tea ceremony, which was long and largely (I hate to say it) uninteresting. After the demonstration, we foreigners (ten total) were pressured by the host to "participate" in a tea ceremony. This consisted of me basically having a stereotypically overbearing, exacting, and unforgiving Korean mother for half an hour. She sat next to me and corrected EVERYTHING that I did, giving me instructions in terse Korean that I (obviously) couldn't understand, so mostly she just grabbed my hands and made me do things the "right" way. It was so hard not to laugh. Definitely my most intense "Lost in Translation" moment yet, although this "moment" lasted a full half hour! (Many thanks to Alex for the picture below, and you can check out her take on the temple here at "AAA"). I do want to point out that I am the only person in this image, apart from my Korean mentor, with my hands correctly positioned.



The temple was also tricked out with technology that many schools would love to be able to afford. Although only about fifty people were in attendance, the speaker's face was captured with live video and projected onto two HUGE pull-down white screens.

Strangest of all, the people of the temple offered us lunch, welcomed us sincerely, gave us tea and rice cakes, invited us to participate in some of the most sacred aspects of their culture, and DIDN'T ASK US FOR A PENNY IN RETURN. Whoa, is this Buddhism thing government subsidized or something? (Actually, I think it is... by the Ministry of Culture or something like that. Interestingly, some of the earliest Korean government support for Buddhist temples came when the generals realized how easily defensible and militarily strategic some of those mountain temples really were during Korea's skirmishes with Japanese invaders.)

And that's all for now!