The Country Mice

A weekend spent in silence.
Easier than it sounds.

Rising at 3 a.m.
Easier than it sounds.

One hundred and eight bows.
Harder than it sounds.

***

Opted to spend a weekend at the Buddhist monastery in Haein-sa. To experience, for 24 hours, the life of someone who has chosen to live a life completely devoted to the teachings of the Buddha.

To summarize — a lovely, serene, peace-filled experience.

You can stop reading right now because that’s all you need to know.

But, for more details, peruse away.

***

Arrived back in Haein-sa for 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon. The lady who ran the monastery’s temple stay program greeted us — both Western and Korean — and gave us baggy grey cotton pants and vests and showed us to the small rooms where, by nightfall, we’d sleep side by side on thin mats, with buckwheat hull-filled pillows and cotton quilts, on heated floors.

After changing into our temple clothes we gathered in a small hall and sat cross-legged on square cotton cushions.

The head monk glided in, long grey flowing robes around him as he sat on the floor, and proceeded to inform us on the details of temple etiquette. Of course we Anglos couldn’t understand a word but the temple lady occasionally summarized and the rest we picked up by imitation.

Eyes cast downward when walking around the temple, so as not to be distracted from one’s thoughts. Minimal talking. Always keep with the others — no solo wandering — one’s responsibility was to the group, not the individual. Hands kept clasped at the belly — some special significance there but clearly too difficult to translate. Eat everything on your plate.

How to hold one’s hands to pray, how to bow (not so simple, Dear Reader), how to sit in what you and I would call the lotus, how to meditate in the Korean Buddhist manner, how to stretch after a a lengthy time listening to all the how-to’s.

The monk’s laughter was deep, gentle and often. With his shaved head all one could really notice were his eyes and frequent smile.

Following this greeting ceremony we lined up outside (all travel around the monastery involved finding one’s place in a line, either single- or double-file).

Walked quick-step to the dining hall where we picked up our plates — great platter-sized discs of plastic.

Now, why do you think the plates would be so huge?

Here’s the lesson.

If you are 30 years old you’ve eaten about 10,000 meals — yet you’ve still often taken too much food or too little food (guilty, your honour) and have left food on your plate or have had to go back for seconds.

Having this great big platter forced us to think about how much food we were taking, how much we could comfortably eat without wasting.

Interesting, isn’t it? How much is just the right amount of rice? Faced with that big plate, I didn’t really know.

So we sat with our uncertain quantities of food, chewing in silence, when suddenly everyone else appeared to have finished their plates and were leaving the dining hall. Only us five Anglos were still eating. Looking at each other in some alarm we shovelled the rest of the meal into our mouths to experience what the monks had likely hoped: We’d taken too much food, as the evening meal was just 15 minutes long.

Again, interesting. You can draw your own lesson here — I know I did.

***

I will leave you now, Dear Reader, as you think about your next meal, and I will describe the coming several hours of temple life in my next post.