Andi over at Overboard has a couple of posts on her whirlwind tour of the Buddhist temples of southeastern Korea — they really are must reads. Anyway, this one covers Naewon Temple and this one covers Tongdo Temple near Pusan. They’re a bit lengthy, but well worth your time to read.
(Hat tip to the Big Ho, who posts a pretty interesting account of Haein Temple near Daegu)
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4 Comments
It’s pathetic that anyone takes Korean Buddhism seriously. Certainly, some of the temple architecture is pleasant in a quaint sort of way, and perhaps the Korean Sangha’s lineage is noble. Unfortunately, the reality of contemporary Buddhist practice in Korea is a wholesale mockery of the Buddha’s teachings.
I work at a well-known Buddhist university. The vast majority of monks and nuns on campus wear leather Nike shoes, ‘try to avoid eating’ meat (a quote from one monk in one of my classes, and seen on various occasions), drink soju (reported by another monk), etc. A great many of them have cell phones and drive some awfully shiny cars. The Chogye order appears to be so fully poisoned by neo-onfucianism that it’d be best to put if out of everyone else’s misery.
I’ve seen some amazing displays of monastic impropriety: it’s really something to see a monk yelling at a professor because he didn’t receive a suitably respectable grade (I’ve seen that on more than one occasion).
I also had the privilege to read a series of abusive e-mails one monk sent to a friend of mine(who is a full professor) because the monk was dissatisfied with his grade: he demanded an A, despite the fact that he only did one of the four assignments, and bombed on the exams. Never mind that the one assignment didn’t meet carefully-explained criteria (it was almost certainly written for another course): sunim wanted his ‘A’.
I guess he’d forgotten about non-attachment, or decided that it doesn’t apply to conflict over academic (non)performance.
All of this would merely be sad if the gray robes didn’t lend authority to these jokers. Don Kirk’s piece on Korea’s monastic gangsters (http://www.iht.com/IHT/DK/98/dk120598.html) definitely puts an ironic spin on “expert’ Frank Tedesco’s “My love of Korean Buddhism is the rugged vitality and energy of its monastic practitioners and lay believers.”
http://eng.buddhism.or.kr/cont.....322135.asp
Re: living_in_asia
“It’s pathetic that anyone takes Korean Buddhism seriously. Certainly, some of the temple architecture is pleasant in a quaint sort of way, and perhaps the Korean Sangha’s lineage is noble. Unfortunately, the reality of contemporary Buddhist practice in Korea is a wholesale mockery of the Buddha’s teachings”…
Well, I don’t consider myself pathetic, and while I *wholeheartedly* agree that Chogye order and many–most? I personally wouldn’t know which is more appropriate–has too much power and money, I would contend that Korean Buddhism still has a lot to offer.
I don’t go to big temples very often. I attend a small temple here in Gunsan every week. While the bigguni sunims there are Chogye order, they are not soju-drinking, grade-wrangling, abusive people. They’re in service to the community around them, accessible, down-to-earth, and I’ve found the Jujisunim to be an example of sheer human warmth.
Again, I don’t think every temple is like this. And I hold the opinion that the monastic order is in decline the world over, not just in Korea.
But to say that it’s pathetic to take Korean Buddhism seriously ignores the equally real experiences I’ve had here. I was, BTW, Buddhist before I came, and I do take my practice very, very seriously. I don’t just waltz into temples and think, “Oh, cute nuns! How exotic! How foreign! It’s soooo cool that there are, like, people who *meditate*.”
There are also new forces at work within Korea, namely the slow influx of foreigners into the sangha. I’ve found the foreign sunims to be very sincere and practice-oriented, more so than many of their Korean counterparts. So you can’t ignore the changes that are occuring, even if you still hold the same negative opinion. And I’m not saying you’re wrong, either. I’m just saying that I don’t think things are as dismal as you make them sound.
where are the pictures?
hmmm… if we take the horrible excesses (such as Abu Grhaib, perhaps) to discredit the whole, well then the USA ain’t looking too great these days either. i don’t think your standard for evalution is really apropos and your disrespect to Frank Tedesco is really not necessary. let’s not throw out the babies with the bathwater just yet.
Spend a year as a haengja down at Songwangsa. I’ve been through freshman year at a military academy in the US… and the training at Songgwangsa was far more demanding and fruitful, not to mention full of more impressive human beings, in terms of brains and morality.