tongdo-sa 1.2.2012
Dok Sang (德上) Sunim, originally from Seattle, WA and currently a first-year student at Tongdo Monastic College
Despite the first snow of the year—which closed Unmun Pass, between Cheong-do and Ulsan—I made it “over the mountain” today to visit Tongdo-sa. Tongdo-sa is not only one the Three Jewel temples in Korea, known as the “Buddha Jewel Temple” because it houses Sakyamuni Buddha’s relics, it is not merely one of the largest temple complexes in the country, it is not simply a well-known full-training temple for monks: it also has four of our novice monks from the international sangha. I met up with two of them today before having tea with the Head of Lecturers of their seminary. Unfortunately, I could only talk Dok Sang Sunim, above, into a picture. His older brother, Dok Jang Sunim, firmly refused to have his portrait taken, alas.
Tongdo-sa is what’s known as a “full training monastery,” or cheong-lim. For those who read Chinese, the characters are below as inscribed on the stone pillar marking one of the boundaries of the temple complex. Chinese readers will also notice the formal name for the temple in its function as a training monastery, Yeong Chuk Full Training Monastery (yeong-chuk cheong-lim). Yeong-chuk is both the name of the mountain on which Tongdo-sa is located as well as the Sino-Korean for Vulture Peak Mountain (Rajgir). In order to qualify as a cheong-lim, a temple complex must have a seminary; a graduate seminary; and a seon bang or Zen hall associated with it. In addition to having all of these, Tongdo-sa is also a large, bustling complex with a labyrinthine layout of side-altars arranged around the temple’s central focus: the bell-shaped stupa housing the Buddha’s relics.
Tongdo-sa is one of my favorite temples in Korea. I first visited Tongdo-sa nearly 8 years ago, when I was a lay-woman and traveling around Korea visiting temples; I spent the night at Naewon-sa, a bhikkuni seon bang, and caught a ride to Tongdo-sa the next morning with two of the Naewon-sa nuns heading there on business. It was spring. The currently naked cherry blossom trees lining the long main avenue leading up from the lower entrance gate were then in their full glory. Today, sunlight filtering through the pines and glinting on the ice clinging to the edges of the stream flowing down from the mountain caught my attention. And instead of the anticipatory trepidation of entering an unknown temple complex, wondering what it might be like, feel like, today I felt the easy anticipation of walking toward a friend’s house.
Stone pillar inscribed with the full training monastery’s name
I met all the international monks enrolled Tongdo-sa this past summer, when we gathered for the annual foreign monastics’ forum. I was amazed by their diversity: one Czech, one Nepali, one Chinese, one American. A Japanese monk graduated several years earlier. Of course, I always appreciate meeting other Western monastics, because I get to experience the rare feeling of blending in.
The front gate of Unmun-sa at 7:20 a.m. Cold. Very cold.
Compared to the chill winter landscape I slipped and slid over to get to Unmun-sa Bus Station (and it was due to slick roads that the buses weren’t going over the pass this morning, waiting for the thin sheen of ice to melt), the early afternoon was warm. Cups and cups of tea with Tongdo-sa’s Head of Lecturers along with what was, for me, great conversation about the process of seminary life and the education system for the sangha, followed by a little time with two doban before heading over the now-thawed mountain road: a good day.
Dog Summer
The Wang-bok-so, or “Introduction of [to?] Coming and Going,” written by Cheng-kuan
Today, one of my classmates asked me, “Do you have a word for summer like this? I mean, this kind of really, really hot summer weather?”
I thought a moment, trying to do a quick calculation of the balance between idiomatic and literal components in translation, and answered, “Yes. We call it dog summer.”
(What I was trying to convey was “the dog days of summer,” but that in literal Korean sounds ridiculous. Although “dog summer” sounds equally funny in English, coming back the other way.)
It is dog summer here. The monsoon seems to be winding down and the next typhoon isn’t scheduled to make landfall until sometime next week, so we’re reveling in glorious sunshine and wallowing in brutal humidity. It’s the kind of weather that makes you sweat even sitting still and saps the energy right out a body: dog summer anyway you say it. The sky is a Technicolor riot every day. I’ve never shot slide film, Kodachrome, or Velvia, but those would be the only films I’ve heard of that might be adequate to the intense natural saturation of color in the sky, clouds, and trees, and I wish I had the luxury to spend some leisurely time with those colors.
Homework, however, which is not merely the bane of school-kids’ weekends but also the wrench in the otherwise fun-loving, picture-taking works of certain members of our class, has kept the majority of us inside. One of our several assignments this summer was to copy out the brief (four-page) introduction to the Avatamsaka Sutra by Cheng-kuan. Except, we had to copy it thirty times each within the four-day limit imposed by our Head Lecturer. I begged off to a mere 20 repetitions, a task which still kept me up past ten three nights running and required every spare moment during the day.
Above is one of those repetitions, a later one judging from the quality of my handwriting. Note the correction tape freely layered here and there; what malformations it hides, I don’t want to recall. I’ve posted about hand-copying sutras, or sa-gyeong, before, although this assignment differed from those acts of transcription done out of faith. Initially, we were expected to memorize the introduction, a standard expectation and accomplishment in traditional sutra halls and Korean education, monastic or otherwise; my class was a little slow with the memorization bit, so the compromise offered by our lecturer was to have us copy it out.
The horizon within our main hall has been largely filled with looming characters and layers of paper for the summer. It’s with relief, then, that we turn to the wider horizon outside, even in the heat. The sky, which is usually quite beautiful, seems particularly so this year–and I will remember this summer as the summer of intense heavens. The thumbnails I’ve included here, shot on the sly when no was looking, do not do it justice.
This afternoon.
Morning about two weeks ago, looking over the Admantine Hall to the hills beyond, during the monsoon when the sky dropped low and gray every day, if it didn’t outright pour.
Dawn, about a week ago, looking over the Vairocaina Hall, on a day that turned very rainy around midmorning.
Morning walk, 3.14.2011
Actually, it was an afternoon walk, but I’m loath to create another category for the sake of a temporal discrepancy on the same theme.
By the way, there are hyperlinks in the text below that don’t showing up until the mouse is over them; I’m trying to auto-adjust the hyperlink color so that it’ll stand out from the text next time.
To counter-balance the weight of stone, a feather found on a walk yesterday. Our purpose in wandering the paths alongside the temple yesterday was to look for the small purple and white flowers of some of spring’s first blooms: the Head of Lecturers (강주 스님) had left instructions with the current assistant-head-of-class (my successor to the post, by the way) to take me out in the field, camera in hand, to photograph the minuscule plants. Our Head of Lecturers loves flowers, and it was part of my early training to the senior photograph position that I should expect to be called out in all seasons to take shots of flora. The regularity of flower-potrait requests by senior nuns at the school has always made me wonder why we don’t invest in a good macro lens, but now that’s neither my problem nor concern, since I’m off the staff of the cultural bureau.
With these things in mind, I tried to explain two facts to our asst. class head: I had lost the position as camera-man, therefore making it somewhat ridiculous to send me specifically to photograph anything (send the other official camera-man!; this was bitterness speaking); and second, the school’s cameras, which had the resolution for the job, did not have the right lenses. “They’re enormous, those lenses,” said my classmate. “How can they not focus on a tiny flower? Just shove the lens up close. That ought to work.”
I tried to explain macro lenses. I tried to explain focal lengths. Bafflement resulted. Frustrated, I shoved the near-kilo weight of the Nikon D700 into my classmate’s hands. “This thing is on auto-focus. Point it at the flower, squeeze the shutter button half-way, and you try and bring it all into focus.” “It’s not working!” she complained after fiddling, zooming, squeezing, and moving nearer and farther from the two-centimeter wide face of the flower. “I rest my case,” I said, or something like that. I told her our best bet was to fake a macro shot by utilizing the high resolution of the D700 later in a digital blow-up.
“Whatever,” she shrugged. To her ears, I’d offered a solution to the Janus-faced problem of technical limitations and instructions from seniors.
All nuns have a hobby of some kind, most carried over from life “when we had hair” (머리 있었을 때). Piano, illustration, languages, tea-drinking–which is to nuns what wine-tasting is to others–cooking, even needlework or knitting in a few rare cases. Other hobbies are acquired in the temple, either by necessity, such as computer-related work and rudimentary graphic design, or the fill the space left by old activities that no longer fit into the monastic world. In my case, I’ve switched the time and energy I used to give to swimming, jogging, and martial arts to photography and design. Other interests have continued more or less uninterrupted through the transition from with-hair to without, such as the bibliothecula and my side-project of creating an English “shadow curriculum” for foreign monastics in the Korean seminary system.
Some of our activities and interests don’t fit neatly into the common perception of the monastic, even our self-perceptions. I was lambasted by some of my classmates for accepting The Baby (my Canon 500D) as a gift specifically given to let me explore, creatively and through pictures, this world we live in. When Deok An Sunim practices on the grand piano in the Dharma Hall, lay-women often stare amazed. It’s hard to tell if they approve or not, although one middle-aged woman commented with faint pleasure, “It’s so unusual to hear a piano at a temple!”
Still, approval and disapproval yapping in strange unison at our heels, most of us will continue pursuing our chosen activities. Otherwise, in trying to fit ourselves in the idealistic confines of an identity, we most likely will have to sacrifice the most living and vibrant aspects of our personalities, those very vibrancies that give us the depth and the compassion to respond to the world around us. Before we can be Buddha, we must be human.
The Great Teaching
Another season at seminary begins. Now in the fourth year, my class has officially become “the class of the Great Teaching (대교반),” a reference to the single sutra which comprises our curriculum for this last year at school: the Avatamsaka, or Flower Garland, Sutra. This engraved monolith at Seokjeong-sa bears the long title of the Sutra in the calligraphy of Hye Guk (“Wisdom-land”) Kun Sunim.
Harvest, summer 2010
“Chinese cabbages”–although we call them plain cabbages, and those huge, round things they eat in Europe and the States “Western cabbages.” A late summer harvest from our fields, 2010.
Winter 2010
The largest snowfall we’ve had in years left the temple courtyards covered in late December. In America, I’ve never seen anyone use an umbrella in snowy weather, but in Korea they’re par for the course.
Relief Matrix
Woodblock print edition of the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana.
For more on woodblock printing (which uses a technique known as a relief matrix), see Wikipedia.
That Brief Interlude
Despedida de Soltera, part of a conversation between Dave Bonta and Luisa Igloria.
Deok An Sunim playing the piano in the “Jewel Hall of Great Heros,” our main Dharma Hall, autumn, 2010.
Contour, form
삭발날: on the 9th day(s) of the lunar month–9, 19, 29–we shave our heads. A special meal is served during the day, consisting of glutinous rice with various energizing additions (gingko berries, jujubes, and chestnuts, peanuts, etc.), seasoned roasted laver, and seaweed soup. The two nuns here are preparing to slice the long strands of soaked and rinsed seaweed before sauteing it and adding the broth.
As an aside, this photo reminds me that I tend to underexpose my shots. I was just beginning to wean myself off of automized settings, including my favorite “aperture priority” setting, around the time I took this picture in the summer. When I switched to all-manual on the digital cameras or played with the Nikkormat, the results surprised me with more dramatic light, typically because of slight over-exposure.
Bean-sprout rice
On the right, the two nuns standing are, from top to bottom, a first-year nun serving a work-rotation as the Third Helper (하채공) and the summer season’s third-year student Housemaster (원주). Scooping rice out of the cauldron are two third-year nuns, the Head Rice Cook at top left and her helper for the day at bottom left.
The bean sprouts used to make this special meal were grown by the Housemaster; to turn fresh bean sprouts into bean-sprout rice requires careful control of water and fire, and more batches of this meal end up bad than good. This one, however, was a success.
Formal meal trays
Trays for the formal meal (bal-u gong-yang, 발우공양).
Called “side-dish tables” in Sino-Korean (chan-sang, 찬상), the empty trays arrive first in a stack. The head of the hall sets lays them out in the middle of the room and places the side dishes–pickled cabbage, one fresh dish, and one salted preserve–on the trays before then moving each tray to its position on the rows where the nuns sit for formal meal.
These trays contain only the preserved dish, in this case a cucumber pickle, and the shared chopsticks and spoon used to place side dishes in a nun’s personal bowls.
First-year student boiling dishes
At the end of each season, the first-year students boil the stainless steel dishes used by the community for informal meals in one of the kitchen’s old-school cast-iron cauldrons. Set into wood-burning concrete hearths, we have three such cauldrons: one is used every day, three meals a day for soup, and two are reserved for “special work” like boiling mass amounts of corn-on-the-cob, and boiling the dishes.
Hot. Intense: all two hundred+ dishes must be boiled, polished, rinsed, and dried in an hour. Back-breaking, from the hours-long process of building the fire and bringing over 20 liters of water to a boil to carting the dishes back and forth from the cauldron to the dish-washing area, and from and back to the main hall.
This first-year student crouches over the cauldron on the hearth itself, pulling dishes out of the water one by one and handing them off to another nun.
Break from the books
See those desks in the foreground? They’re where we sometimes sit for either class or study hall. Then what do you do the rest of the time? I hear you ask. Answer: we work.
This group work-period took place at the back of our living hall on a day when class finished early, hence the desks we left in place at the front of the hall. We’re peeling chestnuts to make “health porridge,” a concoction of boiled rice and a variety of “healthy” ingredients: ginseng, jujubes, pine nuts, chestnuts, and more. We’re hunched in circles because peeling the fiberous inner lining of a chestnut shell produces hundreds of small brown flakes, and we try to minimize clean-up by aiming our peelings at the large round trays in the center of each cluster.
Most group work takes place in the kitchen or the fields, but when the work is mobile, we take it to our hall, where we can sit comfortably (and in winter, warmly) and work.
사경: faith, written
Sa-gyeong literally means “to copy (the) sutras,” and it’s a popular practice in Korea. Entire sutras might be copied–I’m working my way through the Surangama Sutra in Chinese right now–or thousands of shorter dharanis or mantras might be written out over and over. In either case, these days most people choose to use a book designed specifically for the purpose of sa-gyeong, where the characters or words (in the case of doing sa-gyeong in the Korean alphabet) are printed in a light gray, allowing the practitioner to trace over them in ink. Some famous examples of sa-gyeong are the Japanese prince who copied out the Lotus Sutra in gold ink on indigo-blue paper, or a Chinese Zen Master who copied out the Hwa Eom Gyeong (I believe) in his own blood–I think that story is in Bill Porter’s Zen Baggage. This isn’t merely copying lines in detention: sa-gyeong is faith, written.
Here, Aran Sunim is copying out “the luminious mantra” (광명진언) while Beom Seo Sunim looks on.
First day (개학)
Today’s the first day of the fall season at school. This picture is actually from the summer season, but because of extreme technical difficulties–the largest one being I couldn’t even get to a computer for several months–I’ll be putting up a lot of summer pictures now. Besides which, the first study hall (입선) of the season isn’t until tomorrow evening, and I couldn’t help wanting to kick the season off in photos a little earlier.
Ordinarily we wear our short bowing robes during study hall. The summer months are brutally hot, however, so we switch to work jackets while studying, unless it’s group recitation time (독성) or the presentation of a passage by one of the student-nuns (논강).
Ban Ju Sunim, one of the most diligent in our class, is reading a paper on the Surangama Sutra at her desk.
Dawn, summer
Summer dawn, around 5:30 a.m. The ridge is “Lying Tiger Ridge” (허고산) and the roof belongs to Vajra Hall, the oldest residential building on our temple’s campus. Faintly visible in the left foreground is the double-gabled roof of our bookstore.
Boundary, boundaries: Structure 1
The inside of our “outer wall,” the wall that divides the public portion of the temple from the iner courtyard, the space where the nuns live and primarily work.
Any discussion of boundaries begins with definitions, primarily of physical space. Most visitors to the temple only ever see the finished exterior of this wall: the “public view.” Although the wall is as critical to the nuns’ understanding of the temple space as a first-time visitor, we see it from the inside out.
Now, so do you.
Boundary, boundaries: introduction
"Outsiders entry not permitted"
The project for this summer is on boundaries and boundary. I’ll have a page up soon about the why’s and wherefore’s of the theme; for now, this picture. This signboard blocks the portion of a second-story verandah otuside the nuns’ living quarters at a city temple in North Jeolla Province. From the moment I first saw it, a rough-cut wood “saw horse” with hand-stenciled lettering, I’ve been fascinated by the division it simultanesouly suggested and defined between inside and outside, admitted and forbidden, in the confines and context of the temple.
In Korean, the sign says, “Outsiders not permitted entry,” or, more literally, “Entry forbidden to outsiders.” Korean temples, and even more so the monastic community, tend to emphasize boundaries and limit access in surprising ways. It’s from this basic observation–that religious communities preach openness and yet practice various forms of exclusion, to various and ambivalent ends–that led me to decide to focus on the concept and practice of boundary in Korean temple and monastic communities this summer.
What’s the difference between boundaries and a boundary? Between the idea and the practice of them? What is a temple, what is a monastic community? What is the distinction between who is an outsider and who is not? What, and who, defines any and all of these? What happens when boundaries go up, what happens when they come down?
These are the questions and the curiousity behind “Boundary, boundaries.” Have a little patience: as the junior photographer on campus, I have no regular computer access, which has slowed me up considerably with the blog. A month’s worth of pictures in hand, no modem in sight.
