Plus, we, the group, all 100 of us, were only there for about 24 hours. The schedule was tight even before we got to the temple. We left Daegu, had X amount of time to eat lunch at a restaurant on the way, X amount of time to visit the Gyeongju Museum we stopped at, and X amount of time at the ancient observatory we saw after that. I think that, even though the stay was not an easy, laid-back time, the experience would have been better if I had stayed a week or more, and really gotten into the routine.
Lunch on Saturday was good cause I got to sit with some friends I hadn't talked to for awhile, and also meet a Swedish exchange student who was model-caliber hot. When we got to the temple, we sat around in a large group and had a sort of introduction to the area. There is a Grand Master at the temple a dozen or so monks, and some people who seemed to be in training, or on an extended visit, or something. There were even a couple foreign monks there, French I believe, who did a fair amount of the translation and explaining to us tourists.
The main attraction of Golgulsa (Bone Cave Temple, I think?) is not the temple itself. The original burned down a few hundred years ago, and the new one is small and unimpressive. More of a shrine. The main attraction is a 20-foot Buddha carved out of a blotchy, pockmarked stone face. It's over 1500 years old, and exists thanks to an Indian monk who wandered on over here back in the day.
We had a list of activities that included Zen yoga, Sunmudo, a Zen martial art unique to Korea and similar to Taekwando, but with meditation involved, a tea drinking ceremony, a ritualized breakfast ceremony, and a few worship ceremonies, including a predawn worship that we had to get up at four AM for.
Basically, we sat cross-legged a lot, which causes my hips and knees to ache when I attempt to stand up. I am familiar with this discomfort from eating out at Korean restaurants where you sit on the floor. I thought that after two months I would start getting used to it, but no such luck so far. Maybe this temple stay helped out a bit since I was aching so much. After the last event Saturday evening, a Sunmudo demonstration, I heard my name called out as I was getting ready to head to bed. I had forgotten I agreed to do some filming for a promotional video or something when one of the Korean chaperons approached me earlier. I was supposed to do a tea ceremony with Fanny, the super hot Swedish girl I mentioned early. They wanted us to act as a couple, which I had no qualms with. Oh, and it turns out that she actually had done some modeling in Sweden, nice! Anyway, I didn't do the tea ceremony with her, they had Chris, a British guy I sat next to on the bus, do that. Instead, they put me in the monk clothes and asked what I remembered from the martial arts practice earlier. I had to rack my exhausted brain but remembered most of a side-kick they had us practice. So while everyone else got to go to bed, I tried to do this side-kick for a camera, underneath only a spotlight in the dark Sunmudo academy, with the French monk trying to get me to do the motions properly. He was clearly not too impressed with my skills, and I felt that reminding him I had spent five minutes learning this earlier in the evening as opposed to practicing for years would have been futile, so I just did my botched side-kick for the camera, and then a meditation routine with no complaints.
One totally sweet thing about Golgulsa is that upon the knobby, blotchy rock face that the Main Attraction Buddha is carved out of, is that there are many small shelves and nooks with more Buddha statues of various sizes. Pictured here is one such Buddha, the Buddha of hard rock. Please reference "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)" by Quiet Riot.
Sunday, after a quick nap following the ritual breakfast, Paru-Gongyang, which was supposed to be silent despite a number of people dropping bowls as they tried to transfer the cleaning water to and fro, and people talking and so on, I was called out to do some more filming. I wasn't too upset about missing the tea ceremony I was scheduled to do, and it turns out that this time I was supposed to be the fake boyfriend of Fanny. Sorry Chris, but all is fair in love and war. They had us sitting on top of a hill looking like we were meditating, and then walking a lot, pretending to laugh and point at stuff and smile, always smiling, always smiling MORE. We did a whole lot of this before we went to catch the last half of some more Sunmudo (we got to skip the entire hour of the tea ceremony, yesss). We were going to do some more filming after that, but some shit wasn't set up, so we went back to the 108 bows and missed only the first five. Apparently Buddhism's bible-equivalent says there are 108 different human agonies and so we bowed for each one. And not just standing and leaning over bowing, that would be easy. Standing up, hands in front, down on your knees, hands still in front, lean over, part your hands, head on the ground, hands on the ground, and up, 108 times. It wasn't so bad after you lost count and said fuck it and just went through the motions and got lost in your thoughts, which is probably roughly the point. I didn't have too much of a problem with it since I try to keep myself in a respectable state of health, but some people couldn't cut it, though most people did it well enough. I gotta admit that afterward, walking down the hill, my legs were a bit weak though. Then came lunch, some news that the filmmakers wanted me and Fanny to do some filming on a campus back in Daegu later in the day, and some free time to further explore the tiny area. One of my roommates and I went on a little hike up a small trail I spotted above the Buddha. I was hoping it would lead to a vista, but no such luck, or at least, we didn't go far enough if it did. Just some nice forest and a few (burial?) mounds here and there on the trail.
No surprise that most people slept on the bus ride back to Daegu, after waking up at four AM and all. Back at the city hall, Fanny and I got whisked away to be filmed some more, laughing and smiling, and smiling more! the whole time. She mentioned someone told her we looked like ABBA together. I was just proud I could fit a stereotype of a foreigner. I've always felt that stereotypes have to come from somewhere, bad or good, though probably bad, mostly. This last shoot went on about an hour, and we spent a fair amount of time staring up at a pinecone beyond the camera and being jolly before the crew took us out to dinner and we chowed down on some dweji galbi, and that's two weekends in a row for me with that dish. The meat and beer was welcome after a miserable 24-hour stretch with neither. It definitely felt longer though, just knowing that you couldn't have meat or booze. Or kill things. I really missed killing things during those 24-hours even though I did kill a mosquito during lunch or dinner on Saturday. Oops.
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