After seeing the palaces of Chinese royalty, it was time see some of their religious practices. the first stop was the Lama Temple, a Tibetan Buddhist style temple. Myeong Hee and I were surprised by the number of deities that were whole or part animal. Although she is a (sometimes) practicing Buddhist, she’s never seen animals in the temples or on the altars. We figured that was the difference from Tibetan Lama style and Korean style, in which there is only people, albeit multiple deities.

The Lama (as in Dalai Lama) temple was far grander than any other Buddhist temples I’d seen – either in Korea, China, Thailand or Japan. Not surprising it was highly recommended as a stop. We went to the temple on our free day, in which no guide was along to hurry though all the places. We took our time and strolled along, reading what we could from the minimal English placards. Myeong Hee thought how lucky I am to have been born in America and speak and read English. No where but Korea and maybe a few adjacent airports was there any Korean for her. I did a lot of translating, although she does understand a lot on her own.

The remainder of our free day, we spent among the common folk in Beijing and the pictures and video didn’t juxtapose well with the Lama Temple as the Temple of Heaven, a place we went to on our final day in China. I’ve got media from the common areas that was, in some ways, far more interesting than the palaces and temples. I’ll share that in another posting. The Temple of Heaven, the second part of this video, is where the Emperor conducted the yearly rituals to pray for rain or a good harvest. They conducted enormous ceremonies with animal sacrifices for the “god of heaven”, altar fires and flowery speeches. It was interesting to compare and contrast between the Buddhist temple and the state religion of Imperial China.

China is a strange land with a mysterious past and an even more complicated present. The Buddhist Lama temple is tolerated, even protected, although a Christian church was nowhere in sight. The Christian churches are nearly on every corner in Korea, and especially easy to find at night.