Da Jue Si — 大觉寺
Friday was a much welcomed reprieve from our normal class schedule, or so we thought. Our teachers planned an excursion to 大觉寺 (Da Jue Si) — a thousand year-old temple located about 1.5 hours outside of Beijing.
Their goal was to advance our exposure to Chinese culture and customs.
Da Jue Si, like every other temple in China, is a quaint little place, lovingly maintained and charges an entrance fee bordering on extortion. And yes, they “prohibit” visitors from taking photographs of sacred Buddhist statues, artifacts, architecture and everything else of remote interest.
Call me sacrilegious, but it is a hard thing to respect predominately Buddhist sites that ask for respect while shamelessly pleading for money. Sure, it is fine to ask people to avoid photography (even sans flash) but at the same having a big money collection jar (And no, I’m not speaking about the separate and much smaller prayer offerings) prominently featured at the base of the statue strikes me as a strange double standard.
Regardless, the tour and lunch was enjoyable. It wasn’t until afterwords we discovered school is school no matter the venue. Each of my teachers had prepared a homework sheet consisting of a series of questions I required to ask Chinese visitors.
The end result was a genuine fiasco, with most temple visitors getting smart and turning around and walking in an opposing direction from the dreaded white foreigners. But it was a potent learning experience, albeit an uncomfortable one. My hearing and speaking abilities improved — and reminded me of how rare outside of class I speak to real Chinese people.
As for these photos, I leave it to your capable imaginations to come up with some plausible reason for their existence:
One final trivia note, Da Jue Si has a famous (and equally old) tea house many Chinese people flock to. Originally, I was to ask the waitresses how long the tea house had operated for, however I mistranslated the question into “What time each day does the tea house open and close?”
The answer, of course, is 11:00am-11:00pm every day. Rain or shine.
July 2nd, 2009 in Journal, Travel | 1 Comment »
