Buddhist Temple Stay

Through the Business School, I forwarded the opportunity to spend the night in a Buddhist temple and be able to experience what it is like to be a Buddhist for a day.  The day started with a zen walking meditation hike through the mountains.

The hike was pretty brutal since it was all straight up the mountain, but once we got to the top it all became worth it.  

This shot is about a third of Seoul.  There was more to the left and the right, but I could not fit it all into the picture.  

After the hike, we ate lunch and buddhists are all vegetarian, so we had a vegetarian meal.  

That stuff that looks like meat is actually tofu.  After lunch, we had to do a sitting meditation.  We sat in the most stereotypical meditation posture.  The monk we had was one of the coolest ladies I have ever met.  She used to be a surgeon before finding Buddhism in her late 30s.  She told us a lot about finding happiness and stuff like that.  After that, we had locust leaf tea and rice snacks before learning how to bow and doing the evening bows.  

After the bows, it was off to bed, and we had to sleep in the most traditional Buddhist way, on the floor.  

I'm not going to lie, that was the worst night sleep I have ever had in my entire life.  The pillow was a small bag of rice.  I missed a bed so much that night.  We woke up at 4am for the morning bows.  After that, we headed back to the meditation room where the same monk lead is in meditation.  She noticed that we all were dead tired and had us doing a lying meditation.  She referred to sleep as "being fully peaceful".  Next, we had breakfast before doing a very traditional Buddhist tradition, 108 bows.  This was potentially almost harder than the hike.  We were lead by the head monk, so it was a pretty big honor.  

This is the bow, and we had to do 108 in a row.  After this, we all got packed up and headed back home.