Temple Stay

Next day we were up bright and early at 4 am to chant in the temple. It was quite cold and misty at that time of the morning. When we got to the main hall we found most of the monks there already and they had just started chanting. We joined in and I sat beside the foreign girl working there (Heather) who had a great deal of trouble as one of the temple dogs decided to curl up and try to sleep on the mat she was bowing onto. She had to nudge him off instead of bowing for a few minutes in the middle. The dogs have their own mats but seem to like the heat of other people's mats in the morning and take advantage of the fact people stand up and kneel down. So the dogs attempted to sit on a few people's mats. After that we had walking meditation. The idea seems to be that you can meditate doing anything at all once you learn how. We were feeling pretty good after breakfast and had an hour and a half break so we decided to go for a nap. It was a big mistake as when we woke up both me and Brian were both exhausted when we met up again. We headed to a final Sunmudo training session. That lasted a good two hours but was all about the stretching after which we got tea with the Norwegian monk to give everyone staying the opportunity to ask a monk about their beliefs and anything they wanted to know about Buddhism. It was very interesting as he seemed an avid believer who had come from quite a troubled youth. It seems quite a lot of the young monks have had problems and turned to the temple (or their parents turned to the temple) to put structure in their life or some such. There was a also an alternative school there were junior monks and normal students go. The Korea school system seems to involve students studying from 9 in the morning to 11 at night. They definitely go to school all Saturday but I'm not sure about Sunday. It's highly competitive at schools for everything and no one seems to have time to do sport. So the temple have a different kind of school that is more active and relaxed for the kids that can't deal with normal school. Finally we got lunch and ended our temple stay. We did meet some really nice people included an English actress who seemed like she never wanted to leave the temple after being there three days and another Irish guy who taught English in Korea, Julie and Declan. We got along really well with them and myself and Julie were staying in the same room and so were Brian and Declan. We also met an American guy named Lucifer who had been staying at the temple a month or so and was planning to stay a lot longer to find a way to deal with some anger management problems he had. He seemed quite a nice laid back lad so hopefully it was working.