Temple of Heaven

August 6, 2008

Today I went to the Temple of Heaven to find that it was closed for the Olympic Torch relay. So I went to the Lamasery, a temple that is open for worship and touring. On my way there I stopped to get some lunch and this cute Chinese girl asked me in English to share my table. As we chatted, I found out she was headed for the Lamasery too and she would love to be my "guide" for the afternoon. Her english name is Janet and she was back in Beijing after finishing her master's degree in England. Her mom was recovering from surgery, so she was going to the Lamasery to offer up prayers of gratitude for the speedy recovering process.

Janet is on the left in the photo below. It was great to have lunch with her because I could ask her what I was actually eating in my meal, and how to eat the mini shrimp with shells.

On the street of the restaurant were lots of shops selling incense to use at the Lamasery. Janet already had hers, so we bought me some and we were on our way to the Lamasery. The Lamasery has 6 different rooms or quarters that you can see in this diagram of the temple. In each part is a Buddha that you can pray to for a specific thing: family health, education, financial success, posterity, protection, etc. This is the first room. Always step over the threshold, it represents the Buddha's shoulders and is very disrespectful to step on it. The next few photos are the process that you repeat in each area for each different Buddha.
First you light your incense in the little candle box. You always burn the incense in groups of three.
Then you stand behind or kneel on the bench and talk about yourself: who you are, what you are doing, why you are there, your life situation, etc. Bow three times.

And stick your incense with the burning end up in the ash pot. Then you enter the room of the Buddha and kneel on the prayer bench and offer your prayer to the specific Buddha and again bow three times. If there are multiple Buddhas in the room, you always pray first to the main one in the middle and you can choose to pray to the ones on the side or not. Then you move on to the next room.

A Buddha sits on a lotus flower in this room
On the way home we passed a flower shop with these irresistable flowers. I saw many women carrying huge bunches of these stargazer lilies in the airport and on the subway from their boyfriends and such. Janet said that it was impolite to enter a store and ask to see the merchandise without purchasing anything, so I bought a stalk of the pick stargazer lilies with four gigantic flowers on it and we enjoyed the fragrance in the apartment for a whole week.

Tonight Mand and I watched "Meet me in St. Louis" and snacked on trailmix.