Bill Hirsch

PUBLISHED IN: Magazines include Doctors Review; Just for Canadian Doctors; Up Here; India Today; Sport Diver; The Peak (Singapore); Newspapers include CanWest Syndicate; New York Post; Puget Sound Business Journal (among others). SPECIALTIES: Adventure travel and offbeat destinations.

AWARDS: (with co-author Yvette Cardozo), Lowell Thomas awards 1985-97; SATW West awards 1997-2005; NOWA newspaper & magazine awards 1988-2005; Canada Northern Lights awards 1998-2003.

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Heart & Seoul

by Bill Hirsch, Boston Herald

4 am. The sound starts slowly, faintly. It is a deep, melodic clack, almost too soft to hear. It gets louder, faster. Our eyes open and we fumble for flashlights in the dark.

The tempo increases. And comes closer. And now, the insistent clacking of the wooden block is just outside our doors and so strong, it seems to pass into our bones.

Wakeup call, Buddhist temple style.

We asked for it. We wanted to sample life in a Buddhist temple ... to do the prayers, the chants, the martial arts training. Maybe to find a bit of inner peace. Perhaps to wander the forested grounds. And definitely to watch experienced masters practice Sunmudo, a physical art that makes movie Kung Fu tricks look so lame.

It’s not like Buddhist temples haven’t always welcomed guests. But this is different. Maybe because at the Korean temples, you are not just a boarder but a participant.

The schedule -- and the rules -- are tacked up on the wall of the communal bedrooms:
         4 am wake up
         4:30 am chanting and meditation
             (followed by a 30 minute contemplative walk in the woods)
         6:50 am breakfast8:30 am Sunmudo training
        10 am tea ceremony
        11 am 108 bows
        11:50 am lunch
         2 pm work
         5:50 pm dinner
         7 pm chanting
         7:30 pm Sunmudo training
         10 pm lights out
And below this, a warning: “No alcohol, no smoking, no yelling. Be on time. Break rules, 1080 bows. Miss morning chant, 3,000 bows.”
And a final... ”no associating with the other gender.”

Which meant the two of us slept in separate rooms ... separate floors, actually. The rooms were large, plain and lined with a heated linoleum floor upon which we placed our quilted sleeping mat, pillow and comforter. Heated floors go back thousands of years in Korea. With their winters, they need it.

Golgul Temple in southeast Korea, is a collection of pagodas with traditional brightly painted clay tiles lining the eaves. The temple grounds climb along a steep (and we mean STEEP) road, lined with these pagodas.

At the bottom of the road, a good quarter mile and some 700 vertical feet (200-plus metres) below, is the Sunmudo training school, which we had to find in the dark that first night.

When we arrived, our English link to all this, Norwegian monk Sveinivar Ringheim, was chatting with the handful of other western visitors next to the coffee machine. Machine coffee at 30 cents a pop is one of Korea’s wonderful little surprises. And while the monks don’t partake, there’s no rule against visitors swigging enough caffeine to get them going well before dawn.

“We are getting more and more western visitors,” Ringheim said, while scratching the ears of Golgul’s Korean Jindo dogs. The pups, appropriately, wear Buddhist prayer beads instead of dog collars.

Dinner that night was rice, sweet potatoes and an assortment of vegetable dishes: the ubiquitous kimchi (marinated cabbage), sprouts, greens, spinach broth. Then it was down the hill to the Sunmudo school.

The training room looks like a huge gym, albeit with a shrine at one end. The floors are hardwood and around the walls are handrails, like you’d find at a ballet school.

We kneeled on cushions and the chanting began. It’s more like singing ... a rhythmic, melodious roller coaster of harmonized sounds. With lots of bowing.
The meditation with crossed legs in lotus was a chance to empty our minds and let the extraneous worries of the day drain away ... along with all sensation in our feet.

But then we started a series of stretches ... toes, ankles, knees, arms, neck, waist and several backbend movements that are truly not meant for the human body. Call it the Schwarzenneger of stretch routines, which at one point had us on our backs, bent double with our toes touching the floor behind our heads.

The westerners wound up at one end of the room with Ringheim, who led us through “Bowing 101” ... how to hold our hands, how far to bend, how to kneel and even where to place our toes in the process.

And then we got to watch the experts.

If you think Korean Buddhist monks just sit around praying and chanting, you haven’t seen Sunmudo. Actually, in past centuries, the monks were the backbone of Korea’s warrior army. For centuries, Sunmudo was kept secret, taught only in temples, until Grand Master Seol Jeog-un began teaching it to the public in 1992.

Sunmudo done by a master looks like something from a Jackie Chan movie with weightless jumps, twists and kicks. It’s a combination of gymnastics, yoga, meditation and martial arts but with a focus on Buddhist beliefs and breathing, Ringheim explained.

By the time we hiked back to our sleeping quarters, it was time for bed. And 6 hours later, on the dot, the wake up drum began.
Morning prayers and chants take place at the temple near the top of Golgul’s grounds.

The 20 minute meditation at this hour of the morning, surrounded by the temple paintings and the dark of early morning, was truly soothing.

And after breakfast, there was a special, unscheduled tea for the westerners.

Grand Master Seol Jeog-un surprised each of us with a picture of ourselves from the Sunmudo training the night before, then settled down to answer questions.

Most foreigners want to taste temple life and Korean Buddhism at its source. But some come with personal problems and questions. “Buddhism teaches you to see what you are and how to answer questions. This is how you can relieve stress from the outside,” another temple abbot had said earlier.

The Grand Master talked about this and also about the temple stay program, itself. It began with the 2002 World Cup games. The government, realizing there weren’t nearly enough hotel rooms for athletes, much less fans, asked temples to take in guests. The program was so popular, it never stopped.

Today, there are 43 participating temples. They took in 24,000 visitors last year. Some temples specialize in rest, others in meditation, still others in martial arts training.

After tea, we headed back down for more training. This time it got serious. We even attempted kicks and one legged balancing. But the real students, behind us, were virtually levitating in a series of split jumps where they touched their toes with their fingers.

Despite the warrior aspects of all this, instructor Sun Kyung-moon insisted, “Our aim is not fighting skill, it is to purify the body and mind and get enlightenment. You can get this not only sitting but also walking and even in martial arts.

“Our purpose in Sunmudo unifying mind and body. Western people think mind and body are separate but Eastern people think they are one. If you practice your mind, you should also practice and discipline your body.”

Mercifully, an hour later, we were spared further enlightenment through the usually scheduled 108 bows (one for each of the sufferings encountered throughout life’s stages). The monks were tied up with a group of special visitors. We were, frankly, sore enough, but it is a truly authentic experience for those interested in living like a monk.

We left with mixed feelings, wanting more. Twenty four hours hardly gives you a whiff. Next time, we vowed, we might stay a week.