Haeinsa

Last week, before school started, Erma's mother took me to Haeinsa (해인사 海印寺), one of the most famous and treasured Buddhist temples in Korea. It is most famous for housing the Tripitaka Koreana, about more which later.

The temple is about a three-hour's drive from Erma's parents house. Or at least it should be. But for the first time on any road trip in Korea, there was no traffic at all, and we made it in a little over two hours in each direction.

The temple is nestled in the Gaya Mountains (가야산). The approach to the temple is beautiful.




I'll present several pictures without comment.








Our 8-year-old trusty 1 megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera was fatally damaged when I fell ice skating in December with it hanging from my shoulder. This forced us to purchase a new camera, which has features. I tested out the panoramic functionality for the first time. (You'll want to click to see a larger version to get the full effect.)


Here I am inside one of the four temple buildings housing the Tripitaka Koreana (an odd hybrid Sanskrit-Latinate name), which is a complete set of the Buddhist canon, in Chinese, carved into over 81,000 wooden printing blocks. It has survived the ravages of war and the environment since its creation in the 12th century, and is still in good enough shape to be used for printing. In addition to being a living object of devotion for Buddhist practice, its historical and academic value can't be underestimated.

The amount of care and labor that went into its creation and preservation is astonishing to contemplate. Although the interior of the buildings is off-limits to visitors, and flash photography isn't allowed, I was able to stabilize the camera against the window beams and get some reasonably good interior shots. You can see the wooden pages of the canon, stacked two rows deep, shelf after shelf after shelf of them.




The characters were, of course, all carved backwards and in relief into the wood.


The buildings that house the blocks don't look like anything special.


The fact that they date to at least the mid-15th century, and survived fires that seriously damaged other parts of the temple, isn't in and of itself that remarkable. That they and their contents were saved from being destroyed during the Korean War when a Korean pilot repeatedly disobeyed orders to bomb the site is remarkable, but says nothing about the quality of the buildings themselves. (There is a memorial plaque to this pilot located outside the temple.)

But despite appearances, the buildings are scientific marvels.

Something about the foundation, structure, and materials of the buildings maintains optimal humidity conditions for preserving the woodblocks. Notice that the upper-level windows are smaller than the lower-level windows. On the other side of the building this pattern is reversed. Somehow this creates optimal airflow. Somehow the builders knew that it would do so.

Because of the importance of the buildings to the preservation of the Tripitaka, they are designated as a Korean National Treasure and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

You can read more about both the temple and the Tripitaka, if you are interested, at the Wikipedia sites here and here.

I can't resist ending the post with another multilingual pun. We saw this truck on the road to Haeinsa:


It's a Seoul Milk truck. On the left side it says "I heart 乳". The fact that the word "LOVE" is written inside the heart makes it clear that this sentence is meant to be read in English. The Chinese character at the end is, in Korean, pronounced yu (like English 'you'), giving us the sentence "I love you", familiar to every Korean over the age of 2. The character means 'milk', so the sentence is also understandable as meaning "I love milk".

And, just in case the Korean reader doesn't know the character (especially likely if the target audience is children), the pronunciation is provided, visible to those with sharp eyesight, in parenthesized hangeul letters 유, as you can see in this closeup: