Wushen Zhao Temple

What started out as a very frustrating day turned into an amazing experience. We haven't had much to do lately because the capture rate has been pretty low. The chair of the field station is self-appointed to be in charge of collecting our animals, and he hasn't wanted to accept the offers of several of the locals to help catch more. He insists on taking the same two young guys with him every night, and with the full moon interfering, it's just not enough. He's a very nice man, but he seems to want to keep most of the control and money for himself. As a result, we had only 4 females to dissect yesterday and were done by 9 am. We've been engaging in the dance of convincing him that he wants to get more people to help us get more animals – in part by visiting the Ministries of Forestry, Husbandry, and Conservation to get them to gently light a fire under his rear.

Since there wasn't so much to do yesterday, we visited a nearby temple that we were just told about. It's about 20 miles away and is a complex consisting of four temple buildings, a pagoda, and a stupa as well as living quarters for some of the monks. It's walled in concrete with bronze prayer wheels encircling the complex. The site dates back to 1577, but most of the construction was finished in the 1700s. It's been damaged three times in history – most recently during the tragically ironic "Cultural Revolution" in the 1960s when two of the temple buildings, including the three story memorial hall, and over 200 memorial stupas were destroyed. The oldest temple from 1577 survived because it was being used as a school for the commune at the time, and the pagoda and stupa are still standing because their height made them perfect places for flying the Communist flag. Go figure. Fortunately the newest powers that be are supporting the
reconstruction of the two destroyed temples and the restoration and preservation of the entire site.

We walked around the temple complex for about 20 minutes before an old man climbed the stairs at the front gate to ring a gong that called the monks and faithful lay people to the noon service. Shaoyuan and I entered the main hall of the temple that is currently in use (the first of the two to be rebuilt) and were standing along the side when a woman from across the room waved us over to join her and her family. The temple layout and services here are a little different from temples I visited in Southeast Asia. The branch of Buddhism here is Tibetan, whereas it's Theravada in SE Asia. In SE Asia, the monks sit on the floor whereas the temples here have rows of low benches that run from the front to back. About 60 monks, most 60+ years old, sat at the low benches with one bench on the far side reserved for lay people. The monks were dressed in brown, black, and yellow robes in order of seniority, and all were wrapped in cloth of various hues of plum to red. The noon service was also lunch time, so we sat as each received their meal to the sound of chants and the occasional outburst of cymbals, drums, and conch shell horns. Two head monks wore elaborate multicolored vests and tall headdresses that resembled bright yellow mohawks and walked around serving the meal while the faithful lit butter candles and filed up and down the rows receiving blessings from each of the monks.

After awhile, we decide to go to the nearby larger town for our lunch where the woman serving us took one look at me and ran out the door to collect her baby and camera. Her little girl is about 1 year old and cute as can be, but really didn't want to have much to do with me. I posed for a few photos with them, which turned out to be the first of many in these two days. The funniest has been today when we went to another county town, and six young women working in a grocery store all wanted to snap photos of me and them with me using their cell phone cameras. They were so giggly and funny, and I think I smiled through about 30 photos.

After lunch, we returned to the temple to have ice cream on the steps of the temple well shaded by the branches of a large old tree wrapped in prayer flags. As we sat, a younger monk approached us and spoke a little bit of English with me before asking if I would take a look at their signs. The temple has just recently opened for guests, and I think I may be the first foreigner to visit due to its remoteness, but they are prepared with signs at all of the sites in Mongolian, Chinese, and English. He wanted to be sure that the signs are correct since they were translated to English by a Chinese-native English teacher from a school about 300 km away. For the most part, they were well done in the sense that I understood the meaning. Some of the grammar was incorrect, and they'd squared up the text to match the linear form of Chinese characters by word-wrapping and using hyphenation in all sorts of incorrect ways. So I happily agreed to follow him all over the temple complex and with the assistance of my Chinese-speaking colleagues, we got all of their signs translated into native English. The amazing part of this experience is that in addition to a personalized tour of the entire complex, he took us into the living quarters of the highest monk to meet and have tea with him. I got a quick crash course in appropriate customs, and we were given blue silk scarves to drape over our hands an offer to him as we greeted entered. He's a very pleasant older man, but not at all what I expected. While the other monks were all dressed in traditional robes, he was wearing trousers, a long-sleeved red undershirt, and a white button up shirt. The funniest thing is that this holiest of holy men of this temple was wearing a silver ring with the Playboy bunny. Apparently since pornographic magazines are banned in China, Playboy has turned to marketing the bunny as a line of clothing and accessories. So a lot of men in China wear Playboy clothing without even knowing that it is a corporation that thrives on female nudity.

We were served a generous array of dried cheeses, cookies, dried beef, and some sort of thick yeasty yoghurty thing with yellow rice – all very traditional Mongolian food. They were so kind and kept pushing food on us, so I continued to eat even though I was stuffed from lunch and ice cream and wondered how floral the food was. But that's why one should always travel with a good supply of antibiotics – you never know when you might be given the honor of an audience with a high monk. At the end of our visit with him, he presented us each with his blessing and a while silk scarf identical to the blue ones we'd offered him as well as a small gold amulet. We each gave him 100 yuan (about $12) as a donation to the restoration of the temple and were
surprised when we were presented with red fabric-covered boxes holding two stone and silver-plated cups as a thank-you for our gifts. They had us write our names in their ledger because when the restoration is completed in 2 years, they will place our names on a wall listing
their major contributors. Mine will be the first English name at the temple.

Our monk friend then finished leading us around the temple to each of the buildings to finish the sign translations. We developed quite an entourage including a teenage boy with a ponytail who kept snapping photos of me with his cell phone, and I surprised and entertained the painters at the main temple hall. Construction of the three-story main hall has been completed, and there is a team of painters from Tibet who are completing the ornate and spectacularly colorful paintings on the entire structure inside and out. They're funny guys with blue faces from the paint, and it looked like they may have intentionally colored themselves since one young man had deliberately blue outlined eyelids.

We were then taken to another of the temple buildings that houses 103 of the 108 Buddhist sutras. Each sutra is a volume of pages that covers a particular subject, such as math, astronomy, ethics, etc., which one must study to become a well-educated monk. They're housed
in two cabinets with cubicals that measure about 6 inces square and 2 feet deep. The texts are delicately wrapped in yellow cloth with embroidered flaps covering the number of the volume and title of the subject. It's quite an impressively colorful library that makes libraries of ordinary books seem stodgy by comparison. They're written in Tibetan, therefore in addition to Chinese and Mongolian, all of the monks read and speak Tibetan. Even before learning of his formal
education, it was easy to tell that our new friend is very intellectual and spiritual. He has a presence about him that seems older and wiser than his 28 years, and his calm and kind way of
speaking makes you feel very peaceful. The sutras are also taken by the most faithful of worshippers in a sort of walking meditation around the outer wall of the complex. After the evening service, we saw several women who each had a sutra wrapped in a sort of sling hanging over her shoulders and across her back. They walked around the entire perimeter of the wall spinning each of the 108 prayer wheels. One frail older laid walked hunched over and had great trouble with the occasional doublets of steps, but she continued on in her ritual devotion.

Lastly, he took us to the pagoda which is a very interesting looking structure topped with a bronze spire suspending wind chimes. There are apparently only 2 similar pagodas in the world – one in Thailand and one in Nepal. The middle section is square and yellow with pairs of blue piercing eyes painted on each of the four sides. The bottom section is white with an elaborately painted wooden-columned patio and huge sliding doors that were padlocked shut. Our guide held the mighty keys and slid the doors back to reveal a short tunnel with several relics and a huge canvas painting of what the complex was like in its original splendor. This was where he explained to us how much destruction there was under Mao's rule and their hopes for rebuilding.

The whole day had an air of serene significance that is one of those moments for which one could travel for years and never be so fortunate to experience. It's something that you can't find in a guidebook because it's a series of chance occurrences and the people you meet who make the moment special.