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.
4/1 Sutra recitation before class
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from this shore 