A visit to the temple

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself once again at Gold Mountain Monastery, a small Chinese temple on Sacremento and Grant. I had not been for a few weeks, and I had never been on a Sunday before, so I was suprised to witness so many people there to participate in the afternoon's recitation session. We chanted the final portion of the Medicine Master Repantance, which took about two and a half hours. It was almost entirely unfamiliar to me, and as my Chinese reading skills are basically non-existent, I really had very little idea of what we were chanting about.

But the melodies of Chinese Buddhist chants are hauntingly beautiful. There is a considerable amount of musical variation over the course of the ceremony, but not so much that the music becomes distracting. Drums, bells, and chimes accompany a lively array of major and minor modes of the pentatonic scale, with tonal modulations and rhythmic changes at important points of transition in the text. In the Chinese tradition of Buddhism, recitation is seen as a centering spiritual practice akin to seated meditation. And indeed, there is a wonderfully subtle and serene meditative quality to the practice.

Officially, I first starting coming to Gold Mountain Monastery as part of a school project. But I will admit that I was attracted to finding such a place even before that project began. The temple represents a side of Buddhism that it at once deeply devotional and yet makes sense to me, as one who is familiar with the (healthy and unhealthly) skepticism of (primarily white) Western Buddhism. In a little more than a week I will be living about a block from the temple, so I may try to come more often.

After the service, one of the laywomen gestured for me to come to a meditation and study session being held upstairs with two of the resident nuns. The discussion, led by the nuns, took place in the mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin I have become accostomed to hearing. After trying to follow the discussion for a while by examining an English translation of the sutra passage that was the subject of the discussion, I spent a good while trying to formulate a question I had about the passage in Mandarin. In the end, I pretended that I didn't know a word of what was said.

I later wondered what would have happened had I asked the question. First of all, my pronunciation is likely too poor for me to have been understood, so I probably would been detracting from the overall flow of the discussion. But moreover, I wonder about the complex array of racial and cultural dynamics that were incumbent upon my entry into the room.

I feel spiritually nourished and at home at Gold Mountain Monastery, and I connect with the people there on that level, where words and cultural barriers are no longer of any great importance. But I am also curious of the racial and cultural dynamics of the situation. Why, for instance, were the laywomen so eager to have me come to the discussion? They are genuine and incredibly kind people, for sure, and I don't intend to discount that. But at the same time I can't be a young, white male and fit in on a certain level. How do people react to my coming to this temple? Am I always going to be an outsider?

Well, in any event, I really don't know. But I am certainly made more aware of the partularities of my race, my age and my upbringing. My identity does not only affect myself and my own perceptions, but also others and their own perceptions. When I see how each individual life, such as my own, exists only in the context of others, I get a sense of how mutually intertwined our lives really are. I take a breath, and smile.