June 13, 2006
| a.m. 03:00 : | rising |
| 03:30 : | morning ritual ceremony |
| 06:05 : | Breakfast |
| 10:00 : | Ritual ceremony |
| 11:15 : | Lunch |
| p.m. 18:10 : | Dinner |
| 19:00 : | Evening ritual ceremony |
| 21:00 : | Bedding down,lights out |
Please be punctual for ritual ceremonies and meals.
Please go to bed by 9 P.M. , and turn the light off.
This was the summer schedule, and the only information, we were given when we got to Haeinsa temple last Thursday. They have a temple stay program so if you pay W 10,000 (about $10) you get three meals (all meatless, since Buddhists are vegetarians) and accommodation for the night in traditional ondol-style dorm rooms. Ondol rooms are heated from below, formerly by burning wood in a clay-lined space, but now by electric heat. I shared the room with 8 Korean women (and one Polish speaking American), none of whom spoke English, but who were fabulously undeterred by this lack of verbal communication. I was fed an apple, delicious cherry tomatoes, and a rice cake stick. Two of the women were also clearly appalled by my inability to order my bedding, so they did it for me. Despite each of the other women sleeping on one blanket folded in half, with another for a cover, my bed was made up of two wool blankets, spread full, with a thick quilt on top and a thin quilt for covering. With all of the that and a heated floor, I was really quite hot during the night, but since we had to get up at 3, the discomfort didn't last too long. The men's dorm was not nearly so well organized and they almost missed the early ritual because the slept through the alarm, a monk who walked around the complex ringing a bell. In their defense, it sounded rather like a wind chime, but since several of the women in my room also set their cell phones as back up alarms, I'm not sure they should be excused.
The rituals were all quite interesting and even at 3:30, we were surprisingly awake. We spent the first two rituals we attended (evening and morning) in the lecture hall, with the other guests and the one monk who did all of the chanting. The monk's voice was exceptionally monotonous and he droned on for the hour-long ceremony that is roughly divided into three parts, with bulk of the time spent sitting cross-legged. They were quite peaceful, though David and I are both really bad at meditating. David did math computations (!) and I thought about when we should leave for China and other logistical stuff.
For our last ritual, we went up to the main hall, because we wanted to see what it was like with all of the monks in one room. When we got there, I was surprised that there was only the one monk chanting, and another, extremely officious and rather obsessive-compulsive, monk who waived us away from the center alter and off to one side. Apparently if you dedicate your life to Buddha, attending just the last 20 minutes of the prayer is acceptable, since that's when the hall filled up. Hearing about 100 voices chanting together in the lower registers was really quite stirring. It should have been peaceful, too, but unlike in the lecture hall, where we were allowed to sit through the whole thing, the OCD monk indicated that we had to participate in the stand-prostrate-kneel cycle. I'm sure once you're used to it there's a meditative aspect to the movement, but David and I did an awful lot of flailing and flapping of arms, trying to stand up in one motion. Not that we're terribly graceful, anyway.
