Tag Archives: Buddhist

The Marble Mountains, Da Nang, Vietnam

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The road from Hoi An to the Marble Mountains runs in the lowlands near the sea. Rice paddies abound.

Approaching the famous, and revered, source of marble, stone works and retail shops also abound. And the wares are exotic, beautiful, perhaps overly expensive, and definitely too heavy to carry home.

There’s something here for everyone.

Fascinating, but we must move on. There are, apparently, five marble mountains, each named after an element. We visit Water Mountain. The view from here, encompassing other mountains, is stunning.

On Water Mountain itself, we visit an impressive seven-story pagoda. Its entryway is flanked by dragons. (I love dragons!) Other shrines on the mountain also have entryways guarded by mythical and semi-mythical beasts.

A nest of nagas among the trees

There are dieties and buddhas in the shrines . . .

. . . and in the caves!

Here”s a particularly peaceful buddha!

Asakusa — the temple area

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We didn’t discover the interesting area around the temple until the second time we went there, and had more time to wander.

There were, to begin with, several statues of Buddha (or perhaps of Bodhisattvas).

A short digression is perhaps in order here. Dan and I are illiterate in Japanese, and we have gained a whole new–and sympathetic–understanding of the dilemmas that must face functionally illiterate people in our own country. We were certainly able to get around fine in Japan. Most public transportation have signs in English as well as Japanese; and people were also wonderfully friendly and willing to help. We also understood where we were and what we were seeing, at least in broad terms. But the details on explanatory signs (and most menus!) were too much for us. So I present here the beauty, or cuteness, of what we saw–and the Japanese are very, very good at both beauty and cuteness–but no details. Just as we experienced it.

And now on to the Buddhas. Or Bodhisattvas.

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Finally, my favorite. I actually don’t know who this little guy is, or anything about him. I just know: you gotta love him!

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There was a small but lovely landscaped area, with a stream running through it.

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The stream had myriads of red-and-white fish in it.

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And the fish were hungry.

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There were also numerous other objects of mystery.

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One small shrine I do know about (because they were kind enough to post its story in English as well as Japanese). Once upon a time, it seems, in the early eighteenth century, a housewife, digging in her garden, discovered buried there a jar full of gold coins. She worried that she and her husband would rely too heavily on those coins and become lazy and lose what they had. So she buried the coins again, and with this mindset, she and her husband worked hard and became very wealthy. They placed a statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo on the spot where they buried the coins. Today, this shrine is built over those coins.

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It contains the statue of the Bodhisattva (and several other statues of him, too). People come here to pray for success in their business enterprises.

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Singapore – Bugis mosques and temples

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The ethnic names of places near Bugis–Little India, the Muslim district–reflect historical patterns of settlement in Singapore. But with the country’s powerhouse economic growth and its policy of achieving diversity in every area, there are no longer strong concentrations of ethnic folk in the area. Nevertheless, significant structures of worship remain. And are well attended.

On the pedestrian Waterloo Street is a traditional Chinese Buddhist temple, the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho temple, founded in 1884 at this location and enlarged a century later to accommodate the throngs of visitors who come there to practice divination with joss sticks. Believed to bring good luck to its visitors, the temple is enormously popular.

 

 

Right next door stands the Sri Krishnan Hindu temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu) and adorned with exuberant technicolor statuary.

 

 

Nearby, as it turns out, are also Christian churches and a Jewish synagogue, which (alas) I didn’t see. Singapore is truly an ecumenical country, tolerant of and fostering all religions.

The Masjid Abdul Gaffoor is a handsome mosque located in the Little India area.

Construction began on this mosque in 1907. It is an historic landmark and was extensively renovated in 2003. The juxtaposition of this handsome building, with its stars-and-crescent-moon motif and its cinquefoil windows, with the rather garish modern tower in the distance is–for better or worse–a typical tableau in Singapore.

An even more significant mosque, Masjid Sultan, with its splendid golden dome, dominates the Muslim district.

 

There are numerous other houses of worship throughout Singapore, where people of all ethnicities and believes mingle peaceably.

 

Cambodia – Oudong region

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A number of new temples and monasteries have sprung up (or been rebuilt) in the vicinity of Oudong Mountain. We visited several. Alas, I don’t know the name of this temple. I can say only that it is fairly new and beautifully decorated, inside and out. The railings of the stairways and terraces are all seven-headed nagas (serpents), and lions guard the way.

  Inside, the temple is high and spacious. A large Buddha sitting under his Bo-tree dominates the room. His electric halo and fingers touching the ground show that he has achieved enlightenment.

 

 

The walls and ceilings are covered with paintings detailing the various incarnated lives of the Buddha.

 

 

Nearby a golden statue of the meditating Buddha protected by the king of nagas dominates a serene garden.

 

Mandalay – Shwe Inbin Monastery (or: an orphan makes good)

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Shwe Inbin is a remarkably well preserved teak monastery structure. It was built in 1895 by a Chinese orphan who worked himself up from an poverty to become a rich and powerful merchant, married to one of the king’s daughters, if I recall the tale correctly. Long used as a monastery, it is now being preserved as an historically significant structure; monks from the still-active monastery buildings that surround Shwe Inbin still act as caretakers.

And perhaps the mango trees on the grounds, dropping their near-ripe fruit like cannonballs on the unwary visitor, are also doing their part as caretakers.

The carvings that adorn the teak building, in the traditional Burmese style, are gorgeous. So is the building as a whole.

    

Inside, the teak carvings are also lovely, and the sanctuary contains two gold Buddhas. I don’t know why, but I find these Buddhas tasteful and restrained, despite their being gold. Maybe I am developing gold-tolerance, needing higher and higher doses before it sets off my “excessive!” button.

As we were leaving, we came across the guardian monks, hard at work in their caretaking duties.

After seeing this monastery (and surviving the attack of the guardian mango trees once again), we had yet another delicious Burmese dinner and got ready for our early morning flight the next day to Inle Lake.