Buddha's Birthday has always been a favorite holiday of mine, at UUCNWT we had a Japanese (and now I know Korean) style hana (flower) matsuri (festival) and celebrated the birth of Buddha with songs and readings about his life, but my favorite part was the flower alter with green tea. Every year, we erected this alter with a bowl and young Buddha statue (the one with him pointing one hand to the sky and one to the Earth) and surrounded the structure with fresh flowers from around Tucson and the bowl was filled with green tea. You were to pour the green tea over Buddha while sending off a wish/prayer. I found this extremely meditative and I loved the action of pouring the liquid over the statue.
My friends Allison and Erika joined me on a trip to Bongamsa, a temple (-sa means "temple") near Daejeon in central Korea which is only open to the public for Buddha's birthday. It was raining--just as the song written by Jeff Chamberlain of UUCNWT says it did when Buddha was born "And the story says the rain came down like tea"-- but we made it to Bongamsa around 1pm after traveling to Seoul to catch the bus at 10ish, we left the terminal around 11 though. I had packed a lunch of kim bab (nori rolls or sushi), carrot salad, spelt banana nut muffins and watermelon, we chowed down before hopping onto and while on the shuttle bus from the road to the temple. 'Twas tasty goodness.
We got to the temple and it was one of the more sacred experiences I've had in my life. Unlike my prior trips to temples in Korea, which were always beautiful and amazing in their own ways, this actually had a hushed and untouched feel to it. Maybe it's because I wasn't with a group of drunk and disrespectful teachers. Maybe it's because I already placed weight on the date. Maybe it was the rain. Whatever it was, all three of us felt it.
I got to pour tea on Buddha, like when I was a teen at UUCNWT but on a much bigger (and uglier, in my opinion--one of the bright pink and green numbers that you see in cheesy restaurants) statue. Sending off healing vibes to those in need and feeling this emptiness where the UU church used to be.
On Buddha's birthday, it's tradition to make wishes--I'm not sure why--and they are supposed to have more probability of coming true than other times of the year. There are several opportunities to do this, and we took advantage of all of them! For a (required) donation of man won (10,000 won ~ $10) you could write the names of the people you wanted to send a wish to/for on a paper that was to glued to a paper lantern and then hung among a large group of similar lanterns, or you could (for the same price) write the names and addresses of the people you wanted to send out the wish to/for on a tile that would be used in either repairs on the temple or when a new building was roofed.
I had trouble figuring out the address thing--you were supposed to write your home address, and I don't feel like I have one at the moment. I'm in a transitional phase and I don't really feel like I have one place I call "home." I talk about Tucson and Los Angeles (and at times Incheon, but not really in the same way) as "home."
Anyway, the temple. We walked around for an hour or two and then decided to head back into Seoul and get home. The rain was picking up too and our clothes were soaked through below the knees and on the sides of our shirts--umbrellas are useless in the wind. Our journey home was a bit more complicated, but we got there. There was a van taxi driving people from the temple into the nearby town, and we were ushered in that direction by the police managing traffic at the temple. The vans were unmarked, but we figured if there were hoards of people getting into them they had to be safe, right? Oh Korea, I'm so glad I have more street smarts than this at home. After every Korean in the van had filed out to their various destinations, it was just Erika, Allison and myself in the back of a van with an unknown driver. Did we feel unsafe? Hell no, we were nearly completely comfortable with trusting this stranger with our lives--though we did keep commenting on how we would never do this at home and how crazy this was.
We were dropped at the bus terminal in the small town near the temple, safe and sound, but we had to figure out how to get from this terminal to the one in the bigger town that had buses that ran to Seoul--that just took some usage of the ever-life-saving handphone dictionaries. We were wet, a little cold, but we were on our way home.
We got into Seoul really late--leaving the Daejeon area around 4-5pm, with rain on the road meant it took 3-4 hours to get into Seoul, then another hour for each of us to get home. It was a lovely trip though. I recommend anyone in Korea during Buddha's birthday check it out.
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