NYLON - March 2009 - (Page 174) en route: heart and seoul whether you realize it in the calm of a buddhist monastery or in the bustling streets of its capital, there’s something special about south korea. by christopher garland IT’S 3:45 A.M. at the Hwagyesa Buddhist temple, high in the Samgakshan mountains on the outskirts of South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, but the Zen master is already waiting. The night before, he had handed me a meditation topic (or, koan) about whether there is sin without thought, and in a few hours, he expects my answer. Although the manicured gardens that surround the temple are usually tranquil, at this moment, there’s a silence that seems like it might never break. Suddenly, it does: Beside the path leading to the upper levels of the temple, one of the monks strikes a massive wooden gong, and an eerie chime rings out through the darkness. At the Hwagyesa International Zen Center, the day starts with a meditation session in the amber light of a room on the top floor of the temple—where devotees sit on red cushions and meditate for 45 minutes—followed by 108 full-body bows, administered by the monks, who are dressed in gray robes. Afterward, I shuffle downstairs into the temple’s largest hall where I sit on the polished wood floor with 20 or so local Buddhists, to meditate some more. Bathed in the warm reflection of the hundreds of gold-plated Buddha arranged on the stage, we bend in prayer before dropping to our knees and placing our foreheads to the floor. The words of the Heart Sutra—ma-ha ban-ya ba-ra-mil-ta shim gyong—create a smooth, syllabic rhythm and, with my face still on the floor mat, I turn my palms upward towards the ceiling. My chanting is out of time and mispronounced, but I try to meditate on the koan. Outside, the waking sky begins to illuminate Seoul’s expanse of streets; and not too far beyond the mountains that surround Seoul, the sun also rises across the demilitarized zone separating South Korea from its impoverished neighbor, North Korea—that Orwellian, communist state ruled by the infamous “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il. GREATER KOREA, A peninsula of roughly 85,000 square miles, is a house divided, and it’s this division that, above all else, defines life in South Korea today. And although the Korean War, which set the Chinese- and Soviet-backed communist forces in the North against the U.S.-led forces in the South, dominates American and European accounts of recent East Asian history, it is just one example of the forces responsible for shaping the modern country. As a land that stretches out from mainland China towards Japan, and which shares an eastern border with Russia, Korea has spent much of its modern history wedged between those three giant world powers. In his book, The Two Koreas, Don Oberdorfer describes the country as being “located in a strategic but dangerous neighborhood.” It has suffered, he says, “nine hundred invasions, great and small, in its two thousand years of recorded history.” 174 south korea photographed by christopher garland.
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