Happy Birthday, Buddha!

I’m horrible at waking up. So when my friend Kyoung-mi called me this morning, as planned, so we could meet up and go to the temple with her family to celebrate Buddha’s birthday, I very nearly cancelled. Not because I didn’t want to go, but because it involved waking up. Luckily, I went anyway.

Being Buddhist, I have decided, is hard work. Maybe this is why Buddhism hasn’t really caught on in the states–we prefer our religion sans exercise. I believe I had willfully forgotten the one temple stay I did and the 108 prostrations involved in that when I walked into the small country temple in Kyoung-mi’s dad’s hometown. I was reminded very quickly, and I think my calves are going to be sore tomorrow from all the prostrations I did, and I couldn’t even begin to keep up with my friend’s 50-something year old mother–much less pull off the balancing act of standing up without moving your hands from the prayer position. I got a little better at that one, but I wobbled alarmingly, and Kyoung-mi’s sister actually had to catch my arm once to keep me from toppling the whole line of bowers. I couldn’t understand the litany (can you even call it that, if it isn’t Catholic?), except for one tiny part, during which I’m pretty sure we were saying prayers for individual people. The parts that caught my ear were the names of neighborhoods where they lived–”Kim Jun Mi, No-hyeong-dong, something something something become a teacher.”

After bowing came lunch, and the slow return of the men. Apparently, according to Confucian teachings, there’s no need for men to actually do the difficult bowing part. They can just hang out outside the temple and smoke, and because they’re higher up in the chain of being, they’ll just absorb enlightenment along with lung cancer.

After lunch came a visit to Kyoung-mi’s 90-year-old grandmother. I’ll never understand Korean family dynamics: even though this was her father’s mother, her dad stayed outside looking at the garden while all the women went inside to visit. Meantime, I discovered that it’s really difficult to speak to someone who’s hard-of-hearing in a language you’re not very good at; yelling all your grammatical errors just makes you that much more nervous about getting them wrong. On the bright side, we did eventually get Grandma into the modern spirit with a wild fit of picture taking, during which her granddaughters insisted that she do the super-Asian peace sign. “Grandma, you have to make a V! No, like this, grandma!”