Beijing: Lama Temple and Dongyue Temple

(This is part of a series of posts on our trip to China last June. We'll be posting for the first several weeks of the school year.)

During our time in Beijing, we visited two major temples, in addition to the Temple of Heaven (previous post): Dongyue Temple, a vaguely Taoist shrine in one of Beijing's biggest business districts, and Lama Tempe, a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery on the northeastern edge of Beijing.

Dongyue Temple
Dongyue Temple, founded during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), is the largest temple of the Zhengyi Dao school of Taoism. In the early part of the Zhengyi Dao movement, practitioners were best known for peddling talismans and prayer tablets like those shown below.


Zhengyi Dao is a very old sect, and Dongyue an old temple, which is easy to tell from a quick stroll around the grounds. The place is littered with steles (inscribed stone tablets) from the Yuan Dynasty and later.Eventually, though, like most Taoist sects, Zhengyi Dao was absorbed into the religion of the imperial court, and that's where the fun begins. The imperial religion of China is CRAZY. (See previous post on the Temple of Heaven.) Basically, the emperor and his cronies decided that they loved their overbearing earthly bureaucracy so much, they wanted to take it with them into the afterlife. So they carved heaven into a bunch of departments, each tasked with regulating some aspect of heavenly business.

And Dongyue Temple includes a statuary shrine to each and every one of them.


Some of the departments are not terribly surprising, merely the predictable marriage of a bureaucratic world view to the standard polytheistic fare. For example, the Department of Forest Deities, depicted below:
The departmental shrines, however, quickly veer off into the goofy, the gory, the terrifying, and the downright arcane.
Behold, the Retribution Department, a paean to poetic justice, featuring . . .
. . . a liar having his tongue cut out . . .
. . . a thief with his hands lopped off . . . a (surprisingly thin) glutton with his guts spilling out . . .
. . . and, of course, an unspecified ne'er-do-well being hanged.

Other gruesome departments include the Department of Suffering, represented by a sick young man and a starving bum . . .
. . . and the Department for Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death, which appear to include beheading and drowning (below).
Many of the statues in the temple are surprisingly expressive, despite being covered with dust. Take, for example, this wily fellow, from the Department for the Suppression of Schemes.
My overall favorite display, though, was probably the Department for the Prevention of Obscene Acts. Not only does it feature an apparent prostitute trying to entice a potential customer with a flash of skin . . .
. . . it also has a creepy, toothless old man leering at her from several feet away.
Clearly, someone put considerable time and effort into these displays, and for that I can only thank them, whoever they are. Especially considering that the departments shown here only scratch the surface of the dozens of displays on the Dongyue Temple grounds. Just a sampling of the deliciously bizarre corners of heaven not depicted here:

The Death and Life Department
The Department of Resurrection
The Insect Birth Department
The Mammal Birth Department
The Evidence Department for Issuing Warrants
The Department of Controlling Bullying and Cheating
The Door God Department
The Jaundice Department
The Department of Pity and Sympathy
The Department of Signing Documents
The Signature Department (by this point, even the Taoists were beginning to lose track)
The Department for Three-Month-Long Meditation
The Toxicant Department (which had, by far, the most donation of any shrine in the place)

Lama Temple

In addition to Dongyue Temple, we also visited Lama Temple, the main site for the practice of Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing.

The story of exactly how Tibetan Buddhism got to Beijing is an interesting one. During its early, missionary period, Tibetan Buddhism spread among the peoples along China's Western and Northern edges, while more traditionally Chinese strains of Buddhism, such as Chan ("Zen"), dominated within China's borders. One of the places Tibetan Buddhism took hold was Mongolia, so that when the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty (see above) conquered China, it brought Tibetan Buddhism with it. The same happened again several centuries later with the Manchu (Manchurian) Qing Dynasty, and it is this later invasion we can thank for Lama Temple as it stands today.


Lama Temple was built in 1694, during the early years of the Qing Dynasty, and originally served as a residence for court eunuchs. It was converted to a lamasery shortly thereafter, and granted permission to use the signature yellow roofing of the imperial house after an emperor was buried there in 1735.

The temple is a blend of Han Chinese and Tibetan architecture, providing for some stunning little nooks and crannies utterly unlike anything else found in Beijing.

Unfortunately, photographs are prohibited in the worship spaces, which house enormous statues of the Buddha and look like something straight out of a classic kung fu film. These exterior shots should give some idea of the structure.

And yes, if you couldn't tell already, our visit was blessed by some afternoon rain. Not only did it take the edge off the day's heat, it also lent some welcome atmosphere to the scene.

Stay tuned for more shenanigans!

Beijing: the Temple of Heaven

(This is part of a series of posts on our recent trip to China. We'll be posting throughout the summer as we bum around at or near home.)
Along with the Forbidden City (previous post) and Tiananmen Square (upcoming post), the Temple of Heaven is one of Beijing's most recognizable landmarks. As mentioned in our previous post, the Forbidden City, as the empire's main palace, was the ceremonial center of imperial power. The Temple of Heaven was the religious center of imperial power: it was the site of the central rites of the Chinese imperial religion, which was a mix of Daoism, ancestor worship, and prehistoric heaven worship, which you'll learn more about in an upcoming post on Dongyue Temple, a fascinating Daoist/court religion site in eastern Beijing.

For now, it's enough to know that Daoism (which Blogger doesn't recognize as the mainland-Chinese alternate spelling of Taoism--more information on the spelling controversies here), or at least the hybridized version of Daoism backed by the imperial court, features two parallel and interlocking hierarchies: one representing the order of the physical world, and one representing the order of spiritual world. What's unique and interesting about the belief system is that there is almost always a human who outranks any given deity. For example, a provincial governor outranks the city gods of his province, and the emperor outranks the provincial gods. Also, people are only allowed to worship the deities directly above them in the hierarchy--at least, without help from a priest or an official. At the bottom are the common people, who are only allowed to worship their lowly household gods. At the top is the Jade Emperor (almost always, depending on whom you ask), who is the ruler of heaven, and whom only the Son of Heaven (aka, the emperor, and second-in-command in the order of all creation) could worship directly. The emperor did so at the Temple of Heaven--along with the thousands of servants, priests, and courtiers who made up his entourage, of course.

The Temple of Heaven was originally built in the 15th century by the emperor Yongle, the same fellow responsible for the original Forbidden City. It sits on a north-south axis in the middle of an enormous arboretum, which is now a public park. It's central building is also its most iconic: the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, where the emperor prayed for (surprise!) good harvests, upon which the wealth of the entire empire depended. You can see us in front of the Hall below.


I have to say, of all the many examples of Chinese monumental architecture we saw on our trip, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was the most photogenic--though I might give the title for most beautiful to the Grand Mosque in Xian (upcoming post). Too bad I had to contend with some impressive smog.
You'll notice that the Hall is perfectly round, like many of the other buildings in the Temple of Heaven complex, whereas most traditional Chinese architecture is rectangular or square. There is a reason for this: in Daoism, the circle is seen as a symbol of heaven, and the square (or the right angle, at least) as a symbol of earth. These two symbols are joined throughout the Temple of Heaven--the round Hall above sits on three round terraces which themselves sit on a huge raised square plaza--reflecting the Temple's function as a place where heaven meets earth. You'll also notice that unlike in the Forbidden City, the roof tiles here are blue, the color of heaven, not gold, the color of the (later) emperors.

You can't go inside the Hall, which is understandable but still a bit disappointing, though an exhibit in one of the nearby buildings gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like inside: here's a photo of the view looking straight up from the center.
South of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a long raised promenade called the Vermillion Steps Bridge (below), which links the Hall to the Imperial Vault of Heaven, where the spirit tablets corresponding to the Gods of Heaven were kept.
As might be expected of the home of heaven on earth, the Vault and its surroundings are mostly circular, including the perfectly round Echo Wall encircling the Vault compound, which can transmit even a whisper along its inside circumference.
Just south of the Vault, then, is the Circular Mound Altar, a raised circular platform left open to the elements (below).
As you can see from this shot looking north from the Altar (below), the Vault was remarkably close-by in a city famous for its immense distances. This is because the emperor had to carry the heavenly spirit tablets from the Vault to the Altar whenever he wanted to make an offering, and the slightest mishap during the ceremonial procession--and by "slight mishap," we're talking a sneeze, or an ill-favored pigeon, or someone slightly out of step--could be seen as an affront to the gods, and thus likely to bring down a plague or a famine. Yet another reason why it probably sucked to be emperor, even though the emperor was by a long sight the wealthiest guy in the world. So in short, the Altar was serious business, as was the Temple of Heaven as a whole. Today, though, the site is not without its opportunities for levity. I mean, just check out this weird gargoyle--since when do gargoyles wear sunglasses?

Buddha's Birthday Tour, Part 2: The Temples

(Note: Much of the information below is owed to our RAS tour guide and the very detailed info packet he provided us all. If you're interested in any of Prof. David Mason's work, you can find more information on his website.)

Bomunsa and Mitasa

Our Buddha's Birthday temple tour started in our neck of the woods, at Bomunsa and neighboring Mitasa, in the Bomun neighborhood northeast of the city center. Bomunsa is the home temple of the Bomun order of Buddhist nuns and is the largest convent in the Seoul metropolitan area.


In keeping with traditional Korean geomancy, Bomunsa occupies an auspicious site at the steep head of a small, narrow valley, though the lower reaches of the valley (and the crown of the hill above) have since been consumed by high-rises and busy streets. Still, behind Bomunsa's walls is a quiet oasis, growing and green, where it's easy to forget that you're in one of the biggest cities in the world. (Traveler's note: The grounds of the old Buddhist temples are some of the best photo spots in Korea. Those old monks sure knew their real estate!)

During our visit, the lower levels of the temple were crowded with visitors watching the holiday performance, but the upper levels were much quieter and more serene
And as is common in the busier temples, there were statues everywhere, including some adorable little Buddhist nun figurines.
Bomunsa is also home to a huge a modern-era pagoda, seen below, and a modern-era "cave shrine" modeled after a Shilla-era shrine in Kyeongju.
And as a final note on Bomunsa, here is a roll of members of the Bomun order. Notice all the Kims! (Actually rarer than you might expect on this roll, since the Kim clan is generally fairly wealthy; most members of the Buddhist orders come from the lower classes.)
Next door to Bomunsa is the Mitasa hermitage, a small convent affiliated with the Jogye sect, which is Korea's dominant Buddhist sect.
The hermitage includes a very old (but small) Koryo-era pagoda next to a "sanshingak" or "mountain-spirit shrine" (with the mountain spirit represented here as a white tiger; elsewhere as an old man with a white tiger) a prime example of how Korean Buddhism has adpoted elements of the old shamanistic religions. In fact, the whole mountain-worship element is part of the reason why Buddhist temples tend to be found at the heads of mountain valleys or, as is the case with Shilleuksa in Yeoju, at the tail ends of important mountain ranges.

Unfortunately, lighting made it difficult to shoot either of these items. As a consolation, here's a shot of Nana with a new friend.
Side note: Mitasa is also home to the famous mural depicting Buddha's birth that appeared in our previous post on Buddha's Birtdhay.

Gaeunsa and Potasa

Potasa, a small seminary convent affiliated with Daegu's famous Haeinsa temple, featured the first of two White Buddha carvings of the day.

The White Buddha represents a later development in the history of Buddhism: it used to be believed that one could only achieve salvation through enlightenment, but later beliefs included the possibility of salvation through Buddha's mercy, embodied by the White Buddha--also known as the Goddess of Mercy, despite the moustache.


Gaeunsa is the larger temple down the street from Potasa. It is a seminary temple with modern facilities for about 160 monks plus several older structures. The highlight here was a giant paper lantern of the three-tusked white elephant who, according to the story of Buddha's birth, impregnated Buddha's mother in a dream.
Gaeunsa is also notable because it does not actually sit at the head of a valley, but atop a small, round hill.


Segom-dong

On our way to dinner, we stopped at a small shrine in Segom-dong, along a mountain stream just northwest of the city center. (Geographical note: There's a low but very rugged mountain range that runs down into the Seoul city center, which effectively splits the part of the city north of the Han River in half. The reason for this is that Gyeongbokgung, the main Joseon palace in Seoul was, surprise surprise, built at the tail end of that mountain range.)

The shrine featured the second White Buddha of the day.
Bongwonsa

Bongwonsa, our last stop of the day, is the main temple of the Taego sect, which is an unusual sect in that its monks and priests can marry. They're also filthy rich, sitting as they do on some prime real-estate; seriously, some of the monks drive Lotuses, and not just for the obvious pun.

Situated just north of Yonsei University, Bongwonsa is the closest of Seoul's traditional temples to the city center, and for that reason is the epicenter of Buddha's Birthday celebrations in Seoul. (Though I'm told the modern Jogyesa, in downtown Seoul, also had a big Buddha's Birthday bash.) The long path up to Bongwonsa is very developed and commercialized, including a 24-hour restaurant and "sauna" (bath house), plus several smaller eateries lining the road.

The hike was worth it, though, as the temple itself featured the best Lotus Lantern display in town.
Also worth the hike were the Candle Hall, the Hall of 1000 Buddhas, and a some really great examples of Buddhist statuary carving.

Well, that's it for the Buddha's Birthday tour. Expect slim pickins as far as posts go for the next couple weeks--we're into the final push at school AND we'll be moving to a new apartment partway through June. Of course, if anything ludicrous happens, you'll be the first to know.