Beomeosa Temple, and some weird facts about my blog

Let us begin today with something amusing, shall we?

One of the fun features of a WordPress blog is the “stats” page. This is where you can see some basic information about visits to your blog: how many in a day, a week, a month, forever; different graphs showing these numbers in a variety of ways; which websites are referring people to my blog (in my case, mostly Facebook, since I cross-post the links to updates on there); and what search engine terms people are looking up that lead them to click on my blog. It is these search engine terms that cause me much amusement.

A huge number of visitors get to my blog by searching for mundane things: the names of my fellow YTYA participants, for instance, steer quite a bit of traffic my way (thanks crew!) Somewhat amusingly, my name as a search term leads very few people here. But every once in a while, you get a real gem – a phrase so extraordinary that it makes you laugh. Some are just sort of bemusing, some are laugh-out-loud hilarious, and some are honestly a little scary (these ones are usually inexplicable as far as how they led anybody to this blog). I always imagine how disappointed these people must be when they’re searching for whatever it is they’re looking for, and find only my boring updates. Keep in mind, these precise phrases don’t actually appear anywhere on my blog – just the words IN the phrases all exist somewhere in my many posts. Well, now they really WILL all exist on my blog as phrases, thanks to this update…which makes 61 posts on this blog! Anyway, here are some of the highlights, and hand on heart, these are all real:

• “Covered walkways” (2 hits just in the last month)
• “Air Canada washroom”
• “Korean feet pics” (…………)
• “Appealing vacation ice breakers” (what kind of vacations are people taking that require ice breakers?!)
• “American business youngsters” (‘natch)
• “Idyllic Kurdish street”
• “downpour soaked people” (why are you looking this up?!)
• “Reset fulcrum rocker recliner” (what?!)
• “KFC Hanoi”
• “Human arm + elbow”
• “Humorous plea for people not to leave the third world” (eh?!)
• “sad love quotes that make you cry”
• “women baby carriages USA”
• “compare 5’2″ person next to 5’2″ human” (…I don’t know)
• “background on Steven furry” (Holy crap! Oh, and if you don’t understand this one, DO NOT google it)
• “hors donkey camera canded sxs” (I swear to god)
• “coca cola polar bear costume”
• “what is the modern equivalent of the dome?” (answer: I’m pretty sure it’s the dome)
• And finally, my absolute personal favorite…”koreans huddled under umbrellas at the beach.” Classic.

Anywho! Now that we have that hilarity out of the way, how about a recap of my recent visit to Beomeosa Temple here in Busan?

A simple and inescapable fact of life here in Korea the past few weeks is the ridiculous heat and humidity. I did not expect it to be so horribly muggy here. This sounds like typical Steve whining, but some locals have assured me, in pained and weary voices, that they’re surprised by the ferocity too. One of my Korean friends told me that last year she hardly ran her air conditioner at all, but this year “the thing barely stops.” The beach, as you’ve seen from my previous pictures, is no real help: even if you fight your way through the sea of umbrellas, the water at Haeundae is pretty disgusting after all those visitors drop assorted bits of trash and flotsam in there (one of my friends took a quick dip and came out with a shopping bag plastered against his leg. True story.)

And as anybody who has lived in a big, dense city during a sweltering summer can tell you, there’s nothing quite as gross during that sweltering summer as a big, dense city. The pavement radiates heat; the air gets thick and soupy, choked with the disgusting belches of automobile exhaust and subway tunnel fumes, punctuated by the occasional (and always alarming) faint eau de perfume of sewage. On a really miserable day, even the endless noise of the city seems somehow, paradoxically, both halfhearted and amplified. So what is a country boy to do when he needs a cool, calm, peaceful escape?

I decided to try Beomeosa Temple, a large Buddhist complex on the outskirts of Busan clear across town from where I live. The whole place is perched high in the still-forested hills that break up the landscape in and around Busan. Up in the hills=some moving air and maybe a dip in temperatures; temples almost always have an unhurried and hushed atmosphere; and I had heard that a nice little stream burbles alongside the temple, the perfect place to wile away an hour or two under a leafy canopy with your feet in some cold rushing water. I made my way over by subway and bus yesterday and found exactly what the doctor ordered: the most tranquil, peaceful, and consequently pleasant patch of ground I’ve discovered since coming to Korea.

This happens to be a three day weekend – Monday is a Korean national holiday – and I expected the temple to be packed. I was half-right. The temple complex itself was not too bad: the expected trickle of camera-toting tourists mixed in with some praying locals and a sprinkling of actual monks. But honestly, it was more or less empty. What was not so empty was the area along the stream…which was completely and totally packed with people. Cuddling couples, families having picnics, tweens trying to look all aloof and moody as they kicked their feet in the water, kids squealing. It was undeniably a beautiful mountain stream, and I’m sure if I’d bothered walking along the path for five minutes in either direction I could have found a little peace, but the temple itself was so beautiful and so empty, the breezes so pleasant and the population density so low, I was perfectly content to sit on some shady stone steps, listening to a monk chant, watching the breeze ripple across a sun-dappled mountaintop while dragonflies thrummed through the air around me. I don’t think I reached enlightenment, but I certainly enjoyed my afternoon.

En route to Beomeosa – notice anything different from my other pics of Busan?? (hint: it’s the trees. As in, there are some.)

Nice stone bridge over a lovely little stream

There are people by that stream

Aerial shot of the complex

Anybody know the symbolism behind tortoises in Buddhism? Longevity, wisdom…?

Trees and temples

A gate by the entrance

That’s a BIG tortoise and stelae – look at the size next to a van!

Pagoda

Guardian

The joinery at this temple complex was painted and decorated in a very interesting, very robust palette. I’ve never seen anything like this color scheme at temples outside of Korea.

A teeny waterfall

More awesome, colorful architectural elements

Guardians on gatehouse doors

A path. Look at that sky!

Another gate

Near the top of the complex. Main temple behind me, plaza and sky and mountains ahead.

One of the many smaller temples flanking the main temple

Love that geometry and those colors

INFORMATION!

Cool tree

I mean, seriously. Amazing.

Gigantic boulder.

Another cool tree

Yet more colorful architecture

Buddhas

This cat was hunting something. Probably a dragonfly.

Can’t believe I got this shot.

Astoundingly gorgeous day.

Can’t get over these decorative components

Not as cool a picture as I hoped.

Walls and forest

Happy looking little guy!

Sunlight in bamboo

Monk

It really was a perfect day

The path back up toward the temples

I looked over from where I was peacefully sitting and found a monster

This guy was, no exaggeration, about the size of my thumb

Yep, that’s a swastika – but it’s not what you think. Nazis commandeered it, but it was a peaceful religious symbol for millennia before they came along. Still jarring to see them all over the place in Asia.

Not much information on the temple in this post – to be honest, I really was pretty much only interested in an escape from the city heat, rather than an informative tour of an engrossing historical site. Beomeosa is super-easy to get to from where I live, and beautiful, so I know I’ll be back. But I do want to write just a few words about that last photo there. You know: the one with the swastika.

What many folks probably don’t realize is that the swastika goes back millennia (Wikipedia tells me that there’s archaeological evidence dating to 4000 BC). And for all but an obvious few years of that history, the swastika was a benign, peaceful religious symbol found widely across the world – India, China, parts of the Middle East, and even, evidently, in some Native American cultures. Even the word “swastika” is derived from Sanskrit – though all I can hear in the name anymore are those harsh, venal, Germanic-sounding hard consonants.

We all know what happened: the Nazis decided to use it as their official symbol, and that was pretty much the end of that. I don’t know about you, but I still can’t look at it without getting a sort of creepy mental chill because of what it represents as a result of that history. Which makes Asia, sometimes, a very jarring place – because here, the swastika still exists all over the place. I remember when I went to Japan in 1998, at the age of 15, and seeing it on manhole covers around a Buddhist complex. Totally freaked me out.

It obviously doesn’t exist in even the same universe as the staggering atrocities the Nazi regime committed, but it is another sad crime of theirs to have so totally corrupted something that had such a peaceful origin.

Why do I bring this up? Because, as I travel around and take pictures of temples and the like across Asia, it’s likely to come up again. And I figured I’d give a quick explanation for those watching at home who may not realize that the history goes back thousands of years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to rehab it here or anything. I’m just saying, it may show up in some of my photos and videos, and this ancient history – NOT a Hitler fetish – is why it exists over here.

*Ed. Note: Aw crap. Now you can add “nazi hitler swastika” to the list of search terms that will bring you to my blog. Shit.