Sleep, Drama, and Temples

If you are deprived of all external signs of day or night, your body adapts a circadian rhythm that is slightly longer than 24 hours. So over an extended period of time, you become completely off kilter with the real world outside your WWII bunker or other site of crazy sleep experiments.

Apparently, your sleep patterns can also be affected by the amount of light you expose yourself to -- like reading by a bright light at night, or using blackout curtains.

Last night I was up until 5 am, first watching two episodes of Sex and the City (season 4 is showing on cable here now) and then reading old recaps of the show on televisionwithoutpity.com. Thanks to an old black skirt of my grandmother's, which blocks out the irritatingly bright streetlight outside my window, plus my handy-dandy earplugs, I slept until 2 pm.

(The black skirt deserves a sidenote, which is this: a month or two ago, I was fretting about the brightness of my room at night and how my attempt of blocking out the light with tinfoil -- hey, it worked before -- hadn't worked. My dad got on the case and asked if my grandmother had any black material to put up. She dug around in her closet and came up with a long black skirt. "I was going to throw this out anyway," she said, "I wore it to your grandfather's funeral and my mother's funeral." "Is it okay to use it as a curtain," I wondered out loud. "Don't you want to keep it to use it again?" She shrugged. "Nah. The people I'd use it for are already dead!" she said with a laugh.)

(Sidenote to the sidenote: This doesn't mean that there are no more important people in my grandmother's life. It's more that she probably wouldn't go to their funerals. Last year, when my uncle died of cancer, my aunt didn't even inform my grandmother until the wake and cremation and burial were over; when she finally called from the last funerary stop, the temple, she said, "Yes, we didn't tell you because there was no need to cause an old person distress. It's all over now." As Korean-style funerals involve a lot of work on the part of the deceased's family members -- see my entries starting June 7, 2003 for more -- I can see why my aunt would have waited until after everything was finished to tell my grandmother.)

So yeah, I've been up for only about an hour and a half, but familial drama waits for no man, and when I opened my email 40 minutes ago, I found a lovely missive saying that my aunt and uncle, who were scheduled to arrive next Sunday, may not be coming to Korea after all. Why? Oh lord.

Well, remember when I was complaining about the annoying need to categorize my life on Harvard's financial aid application, and how I needed more than a little box to check in order to properly classify my parents' relationship? Yeah, I wouldn't remember either. The point is, my parents have a complicated and better-left-unexplained relationship (unexplained even to themselves, probably) that tends to flare up once in a while and bleed over into the lives of their closest family members, and mostly I try and am able to stay out of it, but sometimes it does the backstroke over to my inbox, pops up, and says Boo.

(Whoa, metaphor overload.)

I ramped up the frequency of my visits to taekwondo class this week, but no matter how fast my sidestep kick becomes, it'll never, ever be quick enough to avoid this kind of assault, much less knock it into oblivion. I just don't want to be involved. Is that too much to ask?

Well, yes. But I understand why my dad used to say -- seemingly non sequitur -- "You know, I used to want to become a monk." Avoid, evade, and duck.

Speaking of monks, I did want to write about what Nina called the once-in-a-lifetime experience of staying at a temple. Nina had brought the idea up last week after reading about it in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and when I mentioned it to a friend at work, she asked her mother, who gave her the number to a temple in Gyeongju. (Gyeongju is where me, Nina, my dad, and Uncle Know-All went last weekend.)

That temple was a bit too ramshackle for our tastes, so my dad spent the rest of the day asking waitresses, museum staff and random people if they knew of any temples with temple stay programs in the area. He eventually remembered that the temple he's affiliated with in Seoul was sending a delegation to stay at a certain temple about 30 minutes away from central Gyeongju, so we ended up driving to a place tucked away in the mountills (not quite mountains but more than hills) between the city and the ocean.

On the drive there, we heard frogs chirping (I know "croaking" is the usual onomatopaeic pairing, but they weren't), and when we got out of the car, we heard owls hooting. Nothing else.

This temple was a lot bigger and more beautiful than the one my friend had recommended, and we learned that they usually didn't host people off the street like us, but that my dad's persuasive powers had won the day. Nina and I slept in a large, bare room with that smartest of Korean inventions, the heated floor, and doors covered with traditional paper.

We woke at 3:20 am to attend the morning chant. It was pouring rain, which meant that the young monk beating a wooden gourd (mok-tak) was walking around and around the main prayer hall instead of walking around the temple grounds. Entering the hall, we bowed to three golden statues of Buddha and sat down on rectangular brown silk mats. The mats for the monks were scarlet.

Only two monks chanted that morning, both dressed in long gray robes, shaved heads gleaming. One beat a mok-tak, occasionally ringing a bell, as they both half sang, half chanted the prayers. After about half an hour, one of the monks left, and the remaining one repeated the name of the Amitaba Buddha, over and over, for a good 20 minutes: Amitabul, Amitabul, Amitabul...

The rain coming down outside and the monk's low, melodic chanting were hypnotic and peaceful and comforting and the clacking of wood against wood rang in my ears, and I wound up thinking all kinds of interesting thoughts about KB and John and the nature of happiness.

The chanting was over at about 5, and we got to sleep for a little under an hour before we went to get a simple vegetarian breakfast. Then we slept for another hour before taking off.

In the car, we learned from the Moon Handbook for South Korea (love love LOVE that book) that the temple was Girim-sa, one of the largest and most important temples of the Silla dynasty (668-935 C.E.). Renovated and enlarged in 643 AD (the book doesn't say when it was built), it played a vital role in the continuation of Buddhism in Korea, especially during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), when the Neo-Confucian power elite severely repressed Buddhism (this, by the way, is why most Korean Buddhist temples are located in the mountains -- besides being a nice place to conduct monastic life, temples and monks were not allowed in cities). During the Japanese invasion of the 1590s, Girim-sa was a command headquarters for warrior monks. The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bulguk-sa (a famous temple nearby Gyeongju and one of the three treasure temples of Korea), which was built in 751 C.E., was originally an adjunct to Girim-sa; today, the opposite is true.

We didn't know any of this when we were actually at the temple, which is sort of nice. We just appreciated the experience -- the quiet patter of rain, the tok-tok-tok of the wooden mok-tak, the upturned corners of the tiled roofs, the morning mist off the mountains. Can you miss a place in which you've only spent a few hours?