The End of a Buddhist Temple

The Gwan-eun statue at Mutongsa near my house, photographed last year.

Near our house there is, or there was, a small Buddhist temple called Mutongsa (‘sa’ means ‘temple) Only one monk lived there. I say ‘was’ because over the past month it has quietly stopped being a temple. The first thing I noticed was the absence of the imposing statue of  Gwan-eun, the boddhisatva of compassion (named Avalokiteśvara in Indian Buddhism, Guanyin in Chinese, and Kannon in Japanese). Gwan-eun is usually shown sitting or standing  holding a water bottle, which is how I recognised him the first time i visited the temple.[1] As you can see, the one at Mutongsa was standing, about twenty feet tall, and was sited to overlook the rice fields in the small valley on whose northern side it nestled against a wooded hill. About three weeks ago, when I went and looked closer, I saw that the two other statues of the Buddha within the temple grounds had also gone. Then, a week later, the swastika sign and name in Chinese for the temple disappeared from above the entrance, and  soon after that,  the two road signs indicating the temple’s presence. Only the huge temple bell remains, when I looked earlier today. This, and the humble prayer hall, the residence of the monk, and a couple of out-buildings.

I have no idea why they closed the temple. But it certainly wasn’t a very popular one. I never saw anyone visiting it. However, when I arrived in our village seven years ago, Mutongsa was a rather weird place. Unfortunately, I never took photos at the time, so you will have to imagine how it was from my description. A large area of the temple grounds was covered in brightly painted shrines made of large pebbles (this region is rich in such smooth rocks, deposited here millions of years ago as the glaciers melted and rivers shrank) piled up into cains and pagodas and painted crudely with traditional floral motifs and Buddhist symbols in bright green, red, yellow,  blue, and  golds. In fact, everything was brightly painted.

But a few years ago a new monk took up residence, and he obviously didn’t like the garishness of the temple, and so he systematically set about removing all the colourful shrines, using some of the stones from them as  ballast  under the construction of a new road traversing the rice fields and leading to the temple.  Eventually, about six months ago, the monk  had the paint removed from the statues. So, for a while Gwan-eun was a dull grey concrete colour. The sudden austerity  was rather saddening, and I didn’t think to take a photograph. But I had no idea this was just the prelude to the demise of the temple as a whole – and perhaps nor did the monk, for, if he did know, why did he bother to have the statues stripped?   

But you can see what Gwan-eun once looked like in the photograph at the beginning of this blog and below:

 And this is what remains today:

And here are some more images of the temple as it is today. Note the bell remains. And there are still vestiges of its former technicolor character.

I’m not sure that Mutongsa’s closure can be read as representative of the decline of Buddhism in Korea as a whole. However, it is clear that Christianity is  the main beneficiary of the Republic of Korea’s rapid modernization and urbanization. It’s a cliché to equate Protestantism with capitalism, but this does seem a relevant way of understanding religion here. In fact, only 44% of South Korean espouse religion of any kind,  but of these, 45% are Protestant (mostly American-style Pentecostalism, Methodism and Presbyterianism), 35% Buddhist, 18% Roman Catholic, and 2% ‘other.’ The largest mega-church in the world is the Pentecostal Yoido Full Gospel Church in Yoi Island, where there are seats for 15,000 worshippers, and the congregation numbers more than 250,000! Two more of the largest churches in the world are in Seoul. Crosses marking the location of churches are everywhere, and are especially evident at night because they are illuminated – usually in pink. Within a two-mile radius of me, there must be a least six churches – including Jehovah Witnesses and Roman Catholic’s. The nearby Catholic church, which is dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, merits a future post all to itself.  

But it would be wrong to assume that Korea is traditionally  a Buddhist country, which is what I thought before I moved here. Buddhism came to Korea from China in the fourth century, and  was officially adopted by the ruling elite as a way of strengthening royal authority. But over the five centuries of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1912), Buddhism lost much of its official patronage, and monks were forbidden to build temples in the capital.  Joseon was a Neo-Confucian state, and its scholar elite looked down on Buddhism and Buddhists.  But monks continued to practice and preach in temples and monasteries located in isolated mountain regions.

Gradually, the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea became Seon.  Essentially, this is Ch’an Buddhism, which is better known in the West as Zen, the Japanese pronunciation of Cha’n, just as Seon is the Korean pronunciation. Ch’an means ‘meditation’.  Ch’an was transmitted to Unified Silla  (668-935) and became dominant in the eleventh century under the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). It was during this period that the Jogye Order became the predominant form of Korean Buddhism, a status it still holds today. 

Seon, while possessing uniquely Korean characteristics, is, like Ch’an, a fusion of indigenous Chinese Taoism and Indian Mahayana Buddhism. An important teaching of Seon which is also central to Mahayana Buddhism as whole is that all humankind is already in possession of an ‘original self’, ‘Buddha-nature’ or ‘Buddha-mind’ – that is to say, everyone has innate knowledge of ultimate reality. Buddhism teaches that as long as one clings to the limited perspective provided by the identity-ego, achieving the absolute state of freedom that is ‘Buddha-mind’ is impossible.  But Ch’an  is unique in specifically teaching that release from the attachments that mask access to ‘Buddha-mind’ can only come through a moment of sudden insight. Brain-centred thinking involving, for example, the study of the Buddhist canon, is of little use.

One of the most important interpreters of Ch’an from the 1930s onwards in the West was the Japanese philosopher D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966). In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) Suzuki declared that Zen catches ‘life as it flows’. It promotes a fundamentally illogical, non-cognitive and irrational methodology, and is ‘primarily and ultimately a discipline and an experience, which is dependent on no explanation.’ Zen therefore gives great value to non-verbal understanding, feeling, emotion, intuition, sensation, affect, intimacy and immediate experience. 

Here are some quotations from one of the most important modern-day Seon monks, SongChol (1912-1993), taken from the wonderful collection translated by Brian Barry entitled Opening the Eye (Gimm-Young International, 2020). 

The common goals of all religions is to bring people from the world of the relative and finite into the realm of the absolute and infinite. This is because the world of the relative and finite is filled with suffering and anguish. Happiness in this world can be nothing more than fleeting; and in fact we spend more time being unhappy and dissatisfied than we do being happy. So the world of the absolute and infinite promises us eternal happiness and relief from earthly suffering. In this sense, Buddhism is not different from other religions. Eternal happiness is one of the basic desires of the human species. The eternal happiness can be achieved only by crossing over to the world of liberation, the absolute, the infinite; and each religion teaches its own methods for achieving this goal.

In Buddhism we often use the mirror as a metaphor for mind. A mirror in its natural state is perfectly clear. But it loses its ability to reflect as more and more dust gathers on it until finally it can no longer reflect a single thing properly. Our delusions are like dust on a mirror – our vision becomes blurred and we lose our ability to reflect that which is. But being free of delusions is like being the mirror itself without a speck of dust,. This original nature of the mirror is like the buddha nature, which we also call our original face.

 If there as a clump of gold buried in a yard, people would dig and dig until they found it, regardless of how deep it was. The original, infinite, absolute jewel buried within us is incomparably  more magnificent than the clump of gold in the yard. So we should try to find this incredible jewel within.

People usually say that the goal of Buddhism is to become enlightened, and to become awakened, to become a buddha. But that is in fact a misinterpretation, since all sentient beings are originally buddha. To ‘become enlightened’ really means to become enlightened to the fact that you’re already buddha.

Buddhism is the process of cleansing the heart and Zen (Seon) meditation with a koan is the best method to achieve this, “Who am I?” is one of the best known koans, and if you continue to work with this koan, you will come to see your original self and become enlightened. So whatever you do – listen to Dharma talks, read books, chant, prostrate – just continue to ask your self, “Who am I?”

If you can concentrate your mind and reach the state of total absorption, you can see all truths including the true nature of the world in which we live. Usually, because we can’t see present reality as it is, we refer to this world as samsara. But once you make the breakthrough, you will see that this world and this reality are in fact paradise. So Buddhism is not a process of becoming a buddha and turning samsara into paradise. What we call ‘samsara’ is originally the world of paradise.

[1] Or is Gwan-eun actually female? One of the striking features of Gwan-eun’s iconography is that he/she is depicted as transgender. Neither fully recognizable as male or female. Apparently, the Jesuits have something to do with this. When they encountered Guanyin in China during the Jesuit Mission they associated the bodhisattva of compassion with Our Lady. This, in its turn, had an impact of Buddhist perceptions of their bodhisattva, which gradually took on more female characteristics. I too, at first assimilated the Buddhist figure to the Virgin Mary, and then, anthropologically, to the Mother Goddess of paganism. But now I realize this is a fundamental Western bias. I don’t mean simply towards Christianising Gwan-eun, but something much deeper -  the bias of binary thinking in which the statue must be male or female. Actually, I have come to see that the real value of the bodhisattva of compassion’s  iconography is precisely its gender ambiguity which transcends the binary choice, placing us in a more fluid in-between.  The Chinese Ch’an Buddhist learnt from the Jesuits, but the Jesuits did not learn to overcome their dualism from the Chinese, no doubt because the Christian God is so inherently patriarchal - God the Father. But at least Catholicism has some infusion of the feminine in the form of the Virgin Mary. Protestantism, by contrast, is wholly patriarchal.