Eurasian Hobos: August 2009

I only had three classes on the Thursday before a three day weekend, so I went to the one in the morning and then took sick leave to cut out and essentially make it a four day trip instead. On Thursday I took a series of trains and buses to Jikjisa Temple. Like most temples in Korea, it was originally build long ago (in this case sometime between 417 and 458 CE), but has been destroyed and rebuilt several times since then (Jikjisa was most recently destroyed in the Japanese invasion in 1592 and rebuilt in 1602), and renovated many more times as well. Jikjisa had some great paintings, such as this one of Korean Hamlet and Yorick:
There were also stone pagodas, dragon motifs, twisted old trees, and other things that I can't help but take pictures of:
This temple was also a museum of sorts for a bunch of Buddhist artifacts, which were laid out upon the grounds:
These dragons are sitting atop a large bell:
The temple in the background looked interesting but was closed off, possibly because of the grounds maintenance in progress.
In some ways the pile of weeds was very familiar for me given my work history, but then I saw how the lawn was being cut: by hand by half a dozen ajima (old Korean women of a certain character):
Just beyond the temple complex was a Buddhist cemetery, where the remains of cremated monks are kept:
This temple offered temple stays for tourists, and they had a huge complex for housing the visitors:
Between the temple and the bus stop there was a pottery museum and a great statue park:
These next two are my favorites:
The park had a hill with an artificial waterfall:At the top was a playground with what is surely the most fantastic slide ever:

This one is pretty creative too, but a frog can hardly compete with a Tyranasaurus Rex.
The hill predictably had a good view of the park:
The entrance to the park (the side away from the temple and toward the town) was guarded by two impressively tall totems:
Near the bus stop there was a grave marker for a monk who clearly had lived fairly recently, judging by the statue of him that had wire glasses:
I had hoped to get to another temple on Thursday, but in retrospect that was hopelessly optimistic. Instead I went straight to Gyeongju, also known as The Museum Without Walls. It was the capitol city of Korea for a thousand years starting from when the peninsula was first unified in 57BCE by Silla kings, who ended the Three Kingdoms period of Korean history by conquering the other two. The place is absolutely littered with tombs, Buddha carvings and statues, pagodas, and ruins (hence the nickname). I wandered the streets of Gyeongju looking for a jjimjilbang (sauna) for a cheap place to sleep. In my wanderings I noticed a park that was awfully active considering that it was nearly midnight. There were people walking in it, and it was so brightly lit that none of the following pictures use a flash:
It turns out the park was open late for a flower festival. I very seriously considered sleeping under the cover of these four to five foot high flower stalks.
In the middle of the flower field were these creepy statues of what appear to be demonically possessed royal children:
Among the flowers on display were lotuses:
The park is most notable for Cheomseongdae, the oldest observatory in East Asia (it was constructed from 632-646 CE).
I have previously mentioned the fact that Korean tombs look like grassy hills, and that royal tombs look like really big hills. I took rather a lot of pictures of these tombs considering that they all pretty much look the same and I tried not to include too many of pictures of them here, but they do look nice lit up at night:
There were also the 'ruins' of a fortress/palace in the park, but really all that meant was that there were a few stones that were once part of a wall. The only intact building was a food storage bunker, which probably would have been fairly boring during the day, but it looked almost occult when viewed at night:
Also, that night the moon was enormous and dark orange. I had trouble believing that it even was the moon when it was close to the horizon since I had never seen a harvest moon at a half moon before, and I'd never seen a half moon where the half is quite so angled, which is odd since Korea is at pretty much the same latitudes of the places where I've lived. The strange moon, the brightly lit and (eventually) abandoned park full of ancient relics gave the night an enjoyably unworldly feeling. Between the tombs and the castle ruins was a tiny forest sparsely populated with ancient twisted trees, which legend says are the birthplace of a king who was found growing from one of the trees like a large fruit and was adopted by a previous king. I slept on a bench in this forest and awoke to a misty landscape. I was in full Eurasia Hobo mode as I woke up on a park bench and started off early to see as much as I could by walking to the sites around the city. I passed some lotus flower ponds and rice fields where spiders had built large webs that hung between all of the trees along the fields' borders:
The webs caught the early morning dew and were quite visible:My first destination was a temple with a stone pagoda (and a brightly colored fish-shaped instrument):
I particularly liked the guardian carvings and statues:The temple wasn't technically open yet, but I was able to enter. I passed back by the spider web lane and some more lotus flower ponds. I hadn't ever seen lotus flower seed pods before. The flowers drop their petals, leaving only an inverted conical seed pod. Here's the lotus life cycle (demonstrated spatially rather than temporally):
I walked a long way towards some more tombs. On the way I saw this modern temple with a giant Buddha:
...and this one with cool wooden statues:
Here's the five tomb area I walked to first:
There were a lot of peach-headed woodpeckers there:Next on the walking tour was a site that apparently had been transfered to a museum because all that was there was a sign, so I went on to the ruins of a banquet hall with a surviving decorative waterway:
Just outside of the banquet area were some (recently made) statues of wise men on tigers:
The final stop was an area with three tombs, which was most notable for having a black squirrel present (I keep mentioning even the smallest wildlife because any wild animals are quite rare in this heavily populated country).
I took the city bus back to the town center where I saw my favorite tomb, which had old trees growing from it:
Across the street was another park full of tombs, including one that had been excavated into nonexistence by the king of Sweeden (?!?):
Yet another tomb area was across a street in another direction. This one had a tomb that had been excavated and then reconstructed so that tourists can go inside it and see how it is constructed. A stone, brick, or wooden area the size of a very small low-ceilinged room is built around the coffin and other tomb contents. Then rocks are stacked around that room, and a relatively thin layer of dirt is packed over the rocks, and then grass is allowed to grow over that.
It was funny to see these sacred tombs being mowed:
At the far end of that tomb area was the park from the night before, which I toured in the daylight:
Gaps in old trees tend to get filled with cement here, which is not actually good for the trees (according to canyon master Zac), even though it seems like they could use the protection and support:
There was a tunnel with squash and gourds hanging down into it:(My hand is here for scale; I didn't realize how amusing it would look)
The statues were nearly as creepy in full daylight as they had been the night before:
Across the street a woman was being filmed walking in traditional costume through the large lotus ponds:
The ponds had some cool pathways through them (I've always loved stepping stones, and most streams and even some rivers have them in Korea):
Down the street was a pleasure garden built by the first king of Unified Silla. Many artifacts were recently dredged from the pond and some of the garden's buildings were replicated. One of the objects dredged from the pond was a 14 sided die (I should get a replica to really screw with people when we are playing DnD):Inside those replicated buildings were scale models of other buildings that had been destroyed, including this bridge:
The city is actually in the process of recreating this bridge at its original size, and I saw the beginnings of the projects on my walk, though it didn't look like much yet. I couldn't help but laugh when I read that the other buildings of the pleasure garden had not been reconstructed, but rather there were replicas of the ruins of a reconstruction of the original buildings. Note to Korea: if your historical buildings and artifacts get destroyed so often that you have to make replicas of the ruins of the buildings that had already been destroyed and reconstructed then you need to have fewer wars. In any case, the pond itself was pleasant:
Across the street from the pond was the National Museum, which housed the items taken up from the lake and many other historical artifacts.
Theoretically this bell is so resonant that lightly hitting it will make a sound audible for kilometers:
I doubt that I will ever get tired of seeing tripods (oh, the Iliad):
Some other cool things at the museum: a huge impressive gold crown:
...pottery in the shapes of sandals, animals, and other non-traditional shapes:
...zodiac carvings:... a stone 'pillow' (I had noticed Koreans in jjimjilbongs sleeping on wooden blocks, and now I realize that those blocks are the softer more modern versions of the traditional Korean pillow):
...replicas of some really unusual and cool pagodas:

...most notably this one from the ten won coin (the original will be seen in a few paragraphs):

...original pagodas transplanted to the museum:

...this intricate metal box:

...and many other carvings, statues, etc. It was by far the best museum I've seen in the country so far (unless you count it as part of the entire region's Museum Without Walls, in which case the whole-region-as-museum is definitely the best museum). Also in the museum I was amused by some kids who were terrified of walking on plexiglass over a display:

The next stop was Unesco World Cultural Heritage temple Bulguksa:

In front of the temple I saw ants eating a caterpillar alive:

This pagoda under restoration is the basis for the replica in the courtyard in the national museum. It is radically different than any other pagoda I have seen or heard of in Korea, and is famous for being on the back of the ten won coin (i.e. penny).

On the stairs up to the observation deck around the upper part of the pagoda was this sign, which I found completely appropriate for a Buddhist temple:

I walked a few kilometers up from the main temple to seokguram grotto:

The building on the left is the facade for a cave containing a massive stone Buddha and flanked by other Buddhist statues. It was one of the more impressive sights I've seen in Korea, but if you want to know what it looks like you'll have to come here since there was no photography permitted. I was amused by the sign, which were in Korea, English ('Photography is not permitted') and global-English ('No camera!'). After I hiked back down and bused back to the city I had a delicious Italian meal in a restaurant that had a wall of windows that opened up onto my favorite tomb (the one with the trees growing on it). Afterward I walked past the other tombs, including the tallest one, and I managed to resist the temptation to log roll down them, which would have been quite insulting to the Koreans walking in the park. I stayed in a hostel that wasn't near as cheap or interesting as the Lonely Planet would have me believe, which didn't really matter since I passed out before dark (I had planned to go back and log roll down the steep slope of the tallest tomb when no one would see me and be offended, but when I awoke the whole area was covered in dew, so I guess it wasn't meant to be).

In the morning I walked a few kilometers to the tomb of the general who laid the foundation for the unification of Korea. It was the most interesting tomb in the city since the anthropomorphized zodiac was carved around the base:

I then walked several more kilometers the other direction to another set of tombs, including that of King Muyeol, who conquered the Baekje kingdom, and set up his son to unify the peninsula.

The turtle monument was fairly interesting, thought the tomb itself was rather unremarkable:

I then met up with Alanna (who only had a normal weekend) to go to Namsan (Nam mountain), the part of the area that truly feels like a museum without walls. [Note: from here on out the vast majority of the pictures are Alanna's unless she is in them.] We started at a pond with some nice old buildings at its edge:

We also saw a turtle among the lotus flowers (not pictured).

Just past the pond was a pleasant little temple with one of the few depictions of lotus seed pods that I've seen:

In the shade right next to this frog statue was a little frog that was holding so still that I thought that it too was a decoration until I noticed its throat moving. There was also a frog in a high and highly unlikely spot in the garden:

We had a nice hike past pagodas and along a stream. Next to the stream there were lots of piles of rocks. These ones looked particularly precarious, to the point where one wonders how they stay up at all:

We went to a hermitage that had some Buddhist carvings by it.

There we met a monk from Hungary. She was actually from a town near the border with Romania (that is to say near Lokoshaza! She spoke excellent English and was interested to hear about my travels in her homeland and about our adventure in the tiny border town). She also thought it was interesting that I had been on a temple stay and wondered if I was Buddhist. I think we could have talked all day, but we wanted to see more of the mountain and to get off of it before dark. Perhaps we will be able to come back for a temple stay when the hermitage is back together.

She was able to explain a lot more than we would have possibly found out from the sign that was buried by the materials being used to rebuild the hermitage. For example, the large boulder with images carved on all four sides was moved within the last 100 years by people and reasons unknown to its current spot in front of the carvings on the cliff face. Also, the Buddha's hand gesture is a symbol for protection (among other things) and many of the Buddha images with that gesture are facing East towards Japan. My favorite jem of knowlege was revealed when she pointed out to us that the nose on the main relief was a replacement, probably because of the Korean belief that stone Buddha noses--if ground up and consumed during pregnancy--will ensure a male child.

Note the giant wooden mallet used to pound the wooden beams into place. Buddhist temples are build without nails or screws, just notched wood (the notch is here being resized with a chainsaw):

A short hike up from the temple was a nice overlook of the region:

We hiked for a while, reaching some small peaks along the way. The photo here was taken by a group of middle aged Koreans who had attended elementary school together. I'm sure I won't be able to list the names of twenty people who I went to elementary school with when I'm in my mid thirties, much less be able to track them down and meeting them for a hike.

Carvings, statues, and temples were found unexpectedly along the trail:

I think that this statue might be National Treasure number 666, though maybe it was another one. I'm sure that we saw it in the last month; I wish I'd taken a picture of the sign. Most of the images had places to light candles and make offerings, and they were actively worshiped, even if they were fenced off:

The fact that these carvings are labeled and numbered as in a museum makes it hard to remember how active the worship is, but seeing people prostrate before the statues and seeing the fresh offerings is a useful reminder.

These are my favorite offerings. I like to imagine that some thoughtful child had asked about offerings and received an explanation about sacrifice and had given up some of his or her most valued possessions: Pokemon cards, pogs, etc.

The carving below is at the top center of the picture:

We ended the hike at the three tomb area where I had seen the squirrel the day before. (Have I mentioned enough how much I love the curvy trees in Asia?)

That night we stayed in a motel with a curious contraption next to the bed:

I'm pretty sure those are stirrups and that it can be adjusted to serve various positions, a view that has added weight since it is pretty much laminated for easy cleaning... And in case the hotel room wasn't interesting enough already, a Korean man knocked rather insistently at the door when we were... ummm... not prepared to receive guests. I finally went to answer the door and the young man kept trying to push past me and I physically held him back, insisting in my broken Korean "No, No, woman friend.... no, no" but finally he came past me anyway, took one look at Alanna with the blankets pulled up to her neck and realized what I had been trying to tell him and fled. I truly don't know what was so damned important that he had to knock on the door for five minutes in the first place. Maybe he left something in the room, but I couldn't find anything. Whatever it was it wasn't important enough to stay once he realized the full situation.

The next day we bused out to the coast in the region to see the Sea Tomb of Munmu, the king who unified the peninsula. The signs in the area all matter of factly state that King Munmu wished to become a dragon to defend Korea from Japan, and so he went through a rite and his ashes were either scattered or interred (the records are unclear on this point) from a rock outcropping just off the coast.

If all it takes to become a dragon is to be cremated and swear to defend Korea, then sign me up.

From the tomb we walked to the nearby ruins of the temple created at the same time and for the same purpose (to defend against the Japanese). All that remains are the pagodas and part of the foundation. There were picturesque rice paddies and hills along the way:

King Munmu had the temple built specifically to protect against Japanese plundering and was meant to be near where his ashes were scattered. His son, who finished the temple, "built a space under the golden hall of the temple to enable the reincarnated dragon to have free access."

Part way back to Gyeongju was another temple, this one with an impressive grotto and its own traditional martial art that is still practiced to this day:

The climb up to the grotto would be laughed at by any safety inspector, but grandparents seemed to have no difficulty reaching the top then prostrating themselves before the images.

The way up also had a small shrine in a cave:

...statues:

...reliefs

... and an outdoor shrine to the mountain god that made use of the many natural alcoves behind it:

Nearby was this pagoda, which takes the symbolism found in most Korean Buddhist pagodas more literally than usual (since it is made from reinforced cement and so such shapes are possible at this scale, unlike in stone). It has a lotus on a half moon (representing the sky) on a triangle (fire) on sphere (water) on a cube (earth).