Starry Night

It is difficult to describe the feeling one gets around here. It’s almost as if it’s not really happening, and then it is happening, only slower and more completely. I was walking around the temple tonight, this enormous Buddhist temple, in relative darkness, surrounded by a few hundred Buddha statues, stone walls, bushes, trees, a distant humming hymn being carried by the wind, all surrounding and ordaining a six-story smiling Buddha… and there is nobody else around. Enormous investment must have gone into building the area I am walking around, which is not closed off, and I can walk around freely as a guest of the monastery after being shown around for the day by a monk named Your Hue Shou, whose singular focus and attention today was on showing me the temple grounds, making me feel welcome, and explaining the Buddhist customs, traditions, messages and meanings.

What did I do to deserve this royal treatment? I just showed up.

I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I had hoped it would be something like this. All I knew was that there was a temple in the mountains North of Kouhsiung that provides tours in English and allows you to stay on the temple grounds in a room with students and staff workers for free. I had no idea that this would be an enormous temple within which the area I just described with the Buddha statues was only one tiny part of the entire grounds. There are quite a few shrines in the temple. There are meditation centers, gardens, a library, a museum, a cemetery, a high school, a hospice, buildings for study, for dining, for chanting, for tea drinking, for discussion, for sleeping, for ceremonies, for lectures, for pretty much anything. This was a Temple complex, the home of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, whose followers have founded over 194 branch temples around the world.

The temple is the size of Epcot, and in some places just as kitschy (one area depicts the Buddha paradise and has cartoon statues, lights and music that recall “It’s a Small World”), but overall the area effuses a regal peacefulness. When I finally do encounter a security guard on my walk, instead of questions as to why I’m walking on an unlit mountain path, he smiles and waves emphatically as he shines his flashlight on the stairs in front of me so I do not trip.

My day started with an 80 minute bus ride out of the city and into the mountains. I sat in the reception room for a while before Your Hue Shou arrived, an Austrian monk who speaks English and Chinese and was my escort for the day. He hosted me for lunch, showed me around the temple grounds, took a picture for their records, showed me an area where I could join in some chanting meditation later, and took me to a calligraphy hall where I was able practice writing Chinese characters, a form of concentration meditation. After following the directions and using some pen/ink-brush hybrid to write the hymn/mission of the temple (6 characters that took me roughly 40 minutes to write), I went to the chanting hall to partake in that experience.

Your Hue Shou was right - there is no way to effectively explain the experience, you just have to take part in it. But I guess I’ll try. First, I got in line behind the monks and nuns, holding my left hand cupped upwards at my sternum and letting my right hand sit facing upwards within my left. We walked through the aisles in line, turning at the end of each aisle walking past the row of cushions, turning again and walking through the next aisle, making a snake-like ‘S’ shape until we reached the end, when we walk in a straight line down past the aisles and start the whole process over again. Throughout this monastic conga, we are chanting the name for the land of Buddha’s paradise, which I would do injustice if I tried to write in English. This exercise is supposed to help you actually reach Buddha’s paradise, mentally at least. I can’t say that happened for me, but I can say that the exercise definitely did help me reach some sort of deep mental calmness.

_{The building the chanting hall is in.}

This routine went on for about 20 minutes before we made a slight change; we turned our hands from facing upwards to having our palms pressed against each other in front of our chest. I clearly had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, I was just following everyone else. I’m sure I stood out amongst the robed monks and nuns, being a white foreigner with hiking boots, khaki shorts and a t-shirt on, but somehow nobody made me feel out of place. After another 20 minutes of this, we took our seats on the cushions and continued the same hymn for about 10 minutes before sitting in the same position for 10 minutes in silence. I had reached some sort of quiet meditative state, but then it was time to meet up with Your Hue Shou.

_{Your Hue Shou and I}

We had tea, “peace porridge”, an interesting conversation about Osama Bin Laden and China-Taiwanese relations, met a Chinese volunteer and a Malaysian groundskeeper who had great English and a remarkable knack for imitating other friends of theirs there, and an afternoon which essentially helped to humanize the Temple and monks for me. Later, Your Hue Shou explained some meditation techniques as well as some Buddhist ideas to me. He explained that it is difficult for Westerners to understand the concept of reincarnation, but he posed the following question to me: If one lights a candle from the flame of another dying candle and the flame continues to burn – is it still the same flame?

He handed me a couple books to borrow, and one to keep, showed me a video about the Temple grounds and joined me for another jovial meal with the same friends at the dining hall. After dinner, I began that night walk around the temple grounds.

I reflected on the day, from the special insights to the ethereal calmness of certain moments. Needless to say, I booked another day at the Temple.