Buddhism in China

Longquan Si Buddhist temple

On Saturday I took a two hour bus ride to the country side of China where I found the Buddhist temple that I will be taking classes at and hopefully volunteering at on weekends. I have a Chinese tutor for my Independent study so she and two of her friends went a long with me. It was really nice of them to go with me, especially my tutor, since I had never gone there before and since my Chinese isn’t that great.

Upon arrival I saw the first mountains I’ve ever seen in China! They were absolutely beautiful! They reminded me of mountains in Colorado and Utah. The Buddhist temple is in a national park, so there was a huge map of things that one could do around that area. It’s so nice in China that you can basically take the bus everywhere! People can take public transportation to almost any part in China. People don’t even have to get their Driver’s License! I wouldn’t want to drive in China because the traffic is AWFUL and the driving is something that I am not used to, you really have to be okay with butting your way in front of someone and honking your horn excessively and almost running over pedestrians…not something I am really accustomed to. It would take a lot of courage for me to drive here. The people I have met here tell me that they don’t have their driver’s license, and they ask me if a lot of people have them in America. They tell me that they hear in order to go to America, they need a driver’s license, know how to speak English, and a VISA. My program director even told me that it took her a lot of courage to start driving and get used to the way that people drive in China and she is from here!

The Buddhist temple was absolutely beautiful. It was made of stone and of course had a wall around it because almost everything has walls around it here! I’m not talking just any ordinary wall either; it was one of those traditional walls/gates with gold handles you use to knock on doors with. There were two ginko trees inside the temple and one of the bridges was over a thousand years old!

Before entering the temple we met a woman who belonged to the temple and she was so excited to meet us and meet a foreigner like me who was interested in Buddhism and being involved in the temple’s activities and classes. She gave me her phone number right away. I find that people here give out their information so quickly, and a lot of people genuinely want to meet you and are excited about meeting you. I don’t think it is about being a foreigner either. At least I hope that everyone likes to meet people here, because that would make me really happy.

The woman commented on all the stray animals outside of the temple and told me that they were her friends and she fed them all the time. I thought it was really great that she told me that because I always wonder about the strays here (there are so many!).

Her name was Yuan Yuan. She took us inside the temple. The temple was serving a vegetarian lunch for free, so she asked if we could have a meal there and they let us! We are complete foreigners who don’t even participate in the temple and they fed us. It was so incredibly nice. We couldn’t talk upon entering the eating area, so the woman taught us hand signals for asking for more food or for less food.

People were staring at me because I was the only white person/foreigner in the temple. People who I am assuming were volunteers served us lunch. Yuan Yuan had told us that we were supposed to finish all our food, but she said it in Chinese and I misinterpreted what she had sad. I thought she said that we would finish all our food because the food wasn’t that good. But what she actually said was that you must only take what you can eat and finish it all. This is a great philosophy and something I’ve read about that Buddhists believe in. I however did not finish my food because my chopsticks handling skills did not allow me to. The person sitting next to me had to tell my tutor in Chinese that I had to finish all my food. I felt really embarrassed after that and they went to get me a spoon so that I could finish all of it. The other girls that I was with, my tutor and her friends, had never been to a Buddhist temple and didn’t know much about it, so I found that they were surprised and in awe just as much as I was. And even though there was a slight language barrier between all of us, I felt like we all connected at that moment.

People were so nice to me at the temple; they couldn’t stop smiling at me. I got information on classes and volunteering there. They told me that they wanted help with translating and making sure English translations were correct. I would feel so great if I could help them with this, because I believe that being a translator is such an important job in the world. It helps people communicate with each other who otherwise might not be able to, and I think everyone has the right to communicate with everyone. And the way that China established Buddhism in the first place was by Chinese people travelling to India and bringing back the scripts to China, then translating them into Chinese.

"No Naked Flames"

I am excited to go back to the temple next time and to be able to volunteer and participate in classes. I might stay entire weekends there because they offer free overnight housing to volunteers. This could be a really interesting experience for me.

Inside the buddhist temple - eating area

The view from the buddhist temple