Temple tourism, part four[Buddha's bio in pictures]

Another installment in an occasional series.
This was part three.

On Friday, our last full day on Jeju Island, we drove up the western side of Hallasan, South Korea's tallest mountain (a dormant volcano). At a certain point, the paved road ends and a rough? rocky? mountain road takes willing travelers closer to the peak.

I don't know because we didn't take that road. There wasn't really enough time to go further up the mountain (and I was the only one who might've considered going to the top on foot, which would've taken another hour or two). Instead, we took a long walk along another ridge, where we found the Jonjaamji temple.


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I lagged behind my Lady Friend and her parents for most of the hike, my attention caught by monarch-looking butterflies, bright sunshine behind red and orange leaves, and interesting arrangements of stones and moss. When I arrived at the crest, I became fixated on the small structure that covered a large bronze bell. A cadre of enormous and noisy crows darted from tree to tree as I attempted to photograph the scene. Then I walked around the main building and saw the painting shown in the third image above.

That image represents Shakyamuni's passing -- the event memorialized by the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok -- so I walked around to see if the the whole story of the buddha was on the walls. The captions were taken from "The Illustrated Life of the Buddha."

"The bodhisattva was conceived on the full moon night in July; that night his mother, Maya, dreamt that a white elephant carrying a white lotus in its trunk came and entered her womb through her right flank."

"As soon as the bodhisattva was born, he took seven steps to the north and proclaimed: 'I am chief in the world, I am best in the world, I am first in the world. This is my last birth. There will be no further rebirth.' The child was named Siddhartha -- 'he whose purpose is accomplished.'"

"As he leaves the confines of his luxurious apartments, Siddhartha encounters for the first time in his life a decrepit old man, a severely ill man, and a corpse being carried to the funeral pyre by mourners... His father, Shuddhodhana, always haunted by the fear that his son might enter the religious life, had succeeded in keeping such sights from him until his manhood."

"'When I shall become buddha, I will come back and see [my newborn son].' And with these words, Siddhartha went forth on his horse, accompanied by his charioteer, Chandaka... According to traditional reckoning, Siddhartha was then 29 years old and this was the beginning of a six-year quest for awakening."

"During these six years he first spent time with and practiced the systems of meditation taught by two leading ascetics of the time. Although he mastered their respective systems, he felt that here he had not found any real answer to the problem of human suffering. So next, in the company of five other wandering ascetics, he turned to the practice of severe austerities."

"The later legend of the buddha recounts the awakening through the description of the bodhisattva’s encounter with the demon Mara... Mara is not so much a personification of evil as of the power of all kinds of experience to seduce and ensnare the unwary mind... Enclosed by a zone of complete protection, the bodhisattva laughed at Mara's aggressors while not a single hair on his body was disturbed. Mara then sent his beautiful daughters before the bodhisattva to test his commitment to his purpose by offering themselves to him."

"In a deer park outside Benares, the buddha thus approached the five who had been his companions when he practiced austerities and gave them instruction in the path to the cessation of suffering that he had discovered."

"'Have I not formerly explained that it is the nature of things that we must be divided, separated, and parted from all that is beloved and dear? How could it be, Ananda, that what has been born and come into being, that what is compounded and subject to decay, should not decay? It is not possible.'"

"'Now, monks, I declare to you: all elements of personality are subject to decay. Strive on untiringly!'"

This was the second buddha biography that I saw last week. The first was at Jogyesa in Seoul. The murals at that temple were refurbished a few months ago.

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And that's that for the Jeju-do photos.