Seoul Searching

Students test the waters near Baekdamsa Temple.

I’m standing before an altar at Jogyesa Temple in downtown Seoul. Three giant Buddhas as shiny as gold coins gaze down at me, while the dharma hall fills with the faint sound of chanting monks and the whirr of traffic outside. A handful of worshippers quietly perform their bows to repent worldly desires, their movements focused and captivating. Then I notice something odd on the altar. Traditional offerings of rice are placed alongside bottles of water – and a six-pack of drinkable yogurt. Past and present, it seems, converge in the smallest of acts.

This tiny temple – the seat of South Korea’s main sect of Buddhism – and others like it occupy Seoul along with tea shops, highrises, Mister Donut franchises and the indomitable Han River. Decimated by wars and invasions and then bulldozed and rebuilt for the sake of modernization, Seoul is a place where jjimjilbangs, those bathhouse/spa sanctuaries for the body, sit beside shrines to technology and where ancient Buddhist temples rub shoulders with temples of commerce.

Contemporary Seoul was modelled on equally chaotic Tokyo, yet legend has it that when its founders were looking for a new site for the capital, they sent a Taoist monk to scout locations. He picked a spot where four brooks flowing from four surrounding mountains converged into one stream, a sign of good feng shui. But drive through the One-Pillar Gate of Bongeunsa Temple in the city centre, leaving behind the temple’s colourful murals depicting stories of the Buddha, and you find yourself confronted with the COEX complex, a hulking point of geographical reference where girls in green miniskirts totter about on chunky white patent heels hawking cellphones.

In Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhism, sudden enlightenment is followed by continual practice. This is an apt metaphor for Seoul. One of the planet’s densest urban areas, it exudes a too-muchness that hits you immediately. Take Dongdaemun Market with its kilometre upon kilometre of shops selling everything from Astroturf to baseball caps to melon-size balls of yarn. What one person describes to me as Seoulites’ collective bali-bali (rush-rush) mentality partly explains how the city has achieved so much so quickly. But the capital’s complexity and history are revealed over time. At Dongdaemun, I discover a latent spirituality; the market is sometimes called Heunginjimun, which means “gate of rising benevolence.” If equilibrium can be found here, well, it can be found anywhere.

The Jogyesa Temple celebrates Buddha’s birthday with a riot of lotus lanterns.

The act of searching is emblematic of South Korea. Several years ago, the country changed its slogan from Land of the Morning Calm to Dynamic Korea; the English dailies at my hotel echo this new cultural aspiration. In the early 1960s, Korea was poorer than the Congo and Sudan, but thanks to rapid industrialization and IT giants like Samsung and LG, it’s now one of the world’s richest nations. Still, Seoul is a hybrid: its streets, as tangled as the circuit board in a plasma TV, mesh with a mountain-studded topography that defies all sense of direction, including, occasionally, my driver’s GPS.

When I arrive at Bongeunsa Temple, where I hope to learn how to quiet a mind made busy by a hectic life, I’m greeted by a young, serious-looking man dressed in casual pants and a crisp button-up shirt. He hands me a cream-coloured business card with his title printed in brown sans serif letters. The Official Manager of Dharma Spreading shepherds me inside, past a minuscule temple with old wooden sutras (scriptures) stacked along the walls, and through a courtyard watched over by a 23-metre-tall stone Buddha.

Buddhist boot camps let you live like a monk for a couple of hours or a few days. Their traditional Korean rituals, like the tea ceremony and meditation, are designed to renew body and mind.

Bongeunsa, tucked at the base of Sudo Mountain in Seoul’s business district, was founded 500 years before the city itself and has survived the waves of suppression that have plagued Buddhism for centuries. After years of post-Korean War nation building, renewed interest in the country’s history has raised the profile of temples. Bongeunsa, like Jogyesa and dozens of temples throughout South Korea, offers a temple-stay program – a kind of Buddhist boot camp that lets you live like a monk for a couple of hours or a few days. Its traditional Korean rituals, like the tea ceremony, chanting and meditation and the 108 bows, are all designed to renew body and mind.

 The Official Manager of Dharma Spreading and I slip into a sparse room where two women wearing hanboks – long, colourful ceremonial dresses – are absorbed in dado, the way of tea. Like synchronized swimmers, they pour the same amount of hot water into delicate cups at precisely the same moment and hypnotically rock the cups back and forth to warm the sides. Lasting as long as two hours, the ceremony is a form of active meditation, the preparation as important as the drinking.