Monkies

...yes, some of my Chinese friends do adjectivize monk this way.

So I've gotten pretty blase about temples-- you've seen 300 Buddhas, you's seen them all-- but they are often in beautiful spots:

TienTong, where we went last week, is a major center of Chan Buddhism (it's one of the birth  places of Japanese Zen Buddhism) and still has a bunch of monks around, doing monkie things

Both the expected....

...and the less traditional (monks, by the way, apparently often have killer electronics because they are sponsored by wealthy patrons)







By the way, the guy on our left led to one of the most interesting moments of the day. I don't know if you can see it, but the meditating monk has a blanket around his legs. My friends asked one of the other monks why and he explained that when you meditate your body is open to the world, so you become quite cold, Then he ushered us into one of the temple's 999 rooms (this one held a gian cooking pot taht had been donated in the 1600s so you could cook rice for a 1000 monks at once) and started a question and answer session about corporeality and existence. Of course all of this was in Chinese, so I just got the occasional translation from one of my friends, but I think that made it seem cooler and more mystic. He was very pleasant the whole time--I do like a guy who can proselytize while laughing