I meant to wake up earlier today, but was feeling sleepy this morning, as a result of the hiking yesterday. I snoozed until about 8, and then got up and did some math homework and read a bit of the book I brought until it was time to check out at 9:30. There was lots of talk in the lobby of more mice found overnight, but nobody seemed particularly inconvenienced.
Our tour guide hustled us out to the bus, that was quite close to the hotel, and it took us only a little ways to another hotel. We walked across the street from the hotel, past a bright orange monastery and followed a fairly short set of stone steps to a brand new temple. Pieces of it seemed incomplete, and the rest seemed very new, there was a single large main building facing the entrance gate, and a side building to the right, for attendants and cooking.
We waited in the courtyard, and our teachers talked for a while with a layman who came out to greet us, and figured out how we would stay there that night. Eventually we were taken to dorm rooms, guys on one side of the main building, girls on the other. The rooms are small, but comfortable, twin rooms. two fairly hard beds, a dresser and a bathroom. Between the two dorm like areas is the main ceremony area. On the second floor of the two sides are the sleeping quarters for the monks and nuns, and on the top floor there is a library and meditation area.
After dropping our bags we returned to the courtyard area, and the layman who had met us gave us a tour of the area. He took us through the main temple as I described above, walked past the side building and pointed out where the cooking and eating areas were, and then walked back to the main gate. There was a terrace in front of the main building, and spring water is stored under it for when there’s less water. On both sides of the gate are gardens to provide food. They were also building a fish pond, but the main thing were vegetables. A ways outside was a tea growing area, but it was overgrown, and the attendant said that they would restore it once the construction on the main area was complete.
We waited for a bit after that in our rooms, until lunch time. Lunch was at 11, and we were told at the time it was the last meal that the monks ate (2 meals one at 5 or 6 and one at 10 or 11.) The meal was vegetarian, A large pot of rice, with bowls of eggplant (not spicy, but still good), dong gua (literally winter melon, we I think call it chinese squash, it’s like honeydew but not sweet.), bamboo with hot peppers and soy beans (really good, the bamboo was the consistency of beef), and greens of some sort, they vaguely resembled bok choy, but were probably not.
After lunch we went to see the temples on the ridge. We walked for a bit up to the ridge, the steps up were as expected and not that long. There was a wonderful view once we crested the ridge. Across the next valley from us was the area we walked down yesterday, and a lot of wonderful scenery. We poked around that temple for a while, and then walked along the ridge, stopping for a while as a group of 8 guys slowly moved half of a cement mixer past us down the trail.
Farther along there was another temple, this one even perhaps a bit larger. On one of the terraces there were a couple nuns chanting, which was wonderful to listen to. I continued on the path, which wove down the ridge slowly, at the saddle there was another temple, that after the previous two seemed not to be anything special. Up the other side of the saddle there was a large pagoda.
Max and I walked up the stairs to the pagoda before the rest of the group caught up. The stairs were even more well made than the rest of the path had been. There were nice railings on the two sides, and the stairs were very even. At the top was a large somewhat earth tone tiled area with the pagoda in the center. We walked into the pagoda, and donated 50 kuai, which seemed to be a nice token of our appreciation. Max did the formal bowing ritual and wrote his name in the entry log, and then we started walking up the pagoda. Every other floor of the building had all walls completely covered in glass obscured buddhas (probably like 6 inch tall ones). The other levels had larger buddhas in the center of the room that could be prayed to and a doorway out to the railing. All together there were 8 floors, and the top was extremely pretty, and a great view.
We came down and waited around at the saddle for everyone to have their fill and finish looking. Then we headed down back to the city. It was only like 15 minutes until we reached a main street in the jiuhuashan area, and then we walked down it back to the monastery we started at. I was pretty tired and tapped for about half an hour, and then got up to see what was going on. The evening classes which had been scheduled from between 3-4 had been canceled (we’d gotten back at 3:30 and they hadn’t been going on). Instead there was a ceremony at 7pm. I read another chapter from my book to pass the time, and then tried to figure out about dinner. It turned out that there would be dinner provided by the nunnary (it turned out we were at a nunnary, I forgot this point earlier. There were about 12 nuns total, 6 of whom are currently traveling to other parts of the country. THere are also several monks and laymen. This location was the first dormitory for the main temple back in the tang dynasty. The main temple being the one at the top of the larger ridge that we went to yesterday.)
We had dinner, it was much the same meal as lunch, but there was an additional mushroom and greens soup that was also quite good.
After dinner A couple of the nuns put on a buddhism video for us. I couldn’t understand most of what was going on, but it seemed to have much the same production qualities as a motivational video.
We stopped the video at 8ish when the ceremony actually got started. We went into the main ceremony room (there is a large buddha behind glass with two golden figures on either side, lots of cloths and such, and were placed on the two back corners of the room). The ceremony we learned was for four people from a ways a way who were asking for a blessing from the nunnary, they had been at dinner with us as well. The ceremony lasted a couple hours, and was really cool. There was constant chanting, with beating drums and gongs and cymbals. At various points we were cued to do the bowing, and the whole time there was an elaborate ceremony for the participants involving incense and tea and some other elements.
Afterwards, We went back to the dorms, I wrote up this, and am heading to bed at about 10pm. We’re getting up at 5am tomorrow for morning class before breakfast at 6am.