Gone Templing

“Dear Confucius, Bless Stanley pass the exam. Thank you! Vera,” reads one of the prayers sharpied on a shingle of wood at the Taipei Confucius Temple.  

I don’t think it’s exam time, but I suppose anytime is a good time to pray for a good exam result.  Besides, it was just Confucius’ birthday so people are thinking about him. 

Though most of the prayers are written in traditional Chinese characters, for a few bucks any old tourist can buy a shingle to affix their exam entreaty to the wall at the temple.

Exams are so important in this country that kids as young as four have a twelve-hour school day. 

They’re too busy to hang around long; we four or five tourists outnumber the acolytes at this temple.  Though if the garden and pavilions had wifi, it’d be a real Confucius tribute, an awesome study hall.   Kids  use the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall grounds like that.   But … then this place isn’t on the subway.

Better angle, same wall

Confucius Temple main hall

 

 

 

 

 

 

Used to be, Confucius temples were like a university:  where scholars gathered to hear from teachers, study, debate, take exams, etc.  There’s one in Hanoi like that.  Beijing too for that matter.  When this one was founded in 1875, same deal.

But this one was knocked down in 1907 — Japanese imperial times — and anyway, China ousted the last emperor four years later.   No more imperial exams.

Nonetheless, private persons rebuilt it in the 1930s for reasons left unsaid in the brochure.  Today you can burn some incense to Confucius, leave your prayer here or they have poetry, music and Confucius study classes.

The Baoan Taoist temple across the street, by contrast, is lively and crowded.

Baoan Temple, photo by them, alas, not by me.

“There’s something very exotic, very Oriental about them,” says an American friend of mine, applying the only totally accurate if embarrassingly dated words to the smoky, perfumed, chantful doings inside a Taoist temple.

“You won’t see anything like this in the states,” he mused.  He’s from Florida and I’m from Georgia … so, yeah, we don’t see anything like this at home.  Out west, I imagine, your milage may vary.

So anyway, what is Taoism?   For the philosophy, I direct you here. AllI can talk about is its practice among southern Chinese diaspora.  On the mainland, I imagine, your mileage may vary. 

Joss sticks in a dish full of sand.

First of all, you can smell an old Taoist neighborhood by the  joss sticks.

That’s the incense you burn at an altar.  It can be an altar at home, in your shop, under a tree, or in a Taoist or Confucius temple.   It only comes in one scent:  odor of a long, hot, dusty, quiet afternoon in Singapore, alternately dozing and reading in a room with thick plastered walls and the wooden blinds shut with the voices of dogs and humans nearby but outside and equally incomprehensible and therefore like background music.  Always a relaxing smell.  And identical from Indonesia to Malaysia to Vietnam to Taiwan and probably a lot other more places besides.   When I have Alzheimer’s disease, that smell will still make synapses fire. 

Second, there are deities and also spirits of people who have passed away.  For the spirits, you place food on the altar.  You can eat the food later.  Per my husband, “When I was little, they told me the spirits eat the spirit of the food.  But then people can eat the actual food.”  Sometimes you also burn “hell notes”, little pieces of paper that usually look something like money.  Once they’re burnt the spirits can use the money in the afterlife.  Also adds a note of paper ash to the joss stick smell.

Awesome lantern in Baoan. I am shopping for a reproduction.

The Taoist temple will have a main altar dedicated to the deity of their choice.  In bigger temples, a courtyard housing smaller altars surrounds the main altar building.

In big temples, visitors are welcome and seldom remarked.  You can just sit in there and watch the doings as long as you like.  I feel uncomfortable taking pictures of people doing their religion.  I found a Flikr user who I believe feels the same but nonetheless took AWESOME pics inside Baoan Temple without disturbing anyone. 

Baoan’s among the oldest temples in Taipei, built in 1830.  I was there on Midautum day and got the treat to hear a ladies’ chanting choir, and I only left when the incense and ash smoke got so thick that my eyes teared up.

 

 

 

Longshan Temple; rebuilt building, but first established in 1738.

One final add about Longshan Temple -> It’s been shaken down in several earthquakes but the latest destruction came in 1945 when, ahem, we bombed it.  Why?  Taiwan was part of Japan then!

Advertisement