We found out about Golgusa temple through a random` RTW (Round the World) blog of a couple who traveled to South Korea.  The temple stay program started in Korea a few years ago to introduce foreigners to the Buddhist Religion and Temple Life.  We chose to spend an overnight at a Temple that specializes in the Sunmudo Martial Arts, located about 3 hours South East of Seoul.  We took an extremely luxury bus there, the seats reclined almost to beds and were dropped off at what seemed to be a chemical plant. After walking about 1km we saw signs for the temple and hiked up a huge hill to check in.  We were immediately given temple garb which consisted of large pants and a vest.  The temple had a very strict schedule we had to follow with activities almost hourly.  Our first activity was dinner.  The temple is vegetarian and the males and females can’t eat at the same table.  The common theme for food was a few sides of fermented veggies, white rice, a soup of some sort and “main dish”, such as tempora veggies or tofu.

After dinner we had orientation and we learned how to chant and bow.  We were then thrown into a full on chanting meditation with many bows and lots of singing.  We really couldn’t follow along on the chanting even though it is a slow guttural chant, but when you through in intense bowing we lost our place in our chant book very quickly.  Again the females and males were separated for this as well. After the chanting we did a silent meditation and then a Sunmudo training.  The Sunmudo training consisted of lots of warm up exercises and many kicks.  We were definitely not prepared for this as we thought we would just be watching the training and not actually participating.  All of the activities ended around 9pm and lights out were at 10pm.  Again we were separated for sleeping and had a traditional Korean overnight on the floor in a lodge.

We woke at 4am to a monk blowing a horn and chanting outside our window.  4:30am we had another chanting session and then a 45 minute silent meditation followed by another 45 minute walking meditation.  During the silent meditation our legs fell asleep, someone was beat for snoring by a bamboo pole by a monk and a frog hopped around the room.  Besides having to be silent it was very hard to concentrate with all of these distractions.

After breakfast we had “free time” or nap time until about 8am and then another meditation and more Sunmudo training.  We followed the training with 108 bows.  The bows weren’t a typical bow were you bend at your waist, these bows consisted of dropping to yours knees, touching your forehead to the ground and then standing back up without touching the matt with your hands.  Yes, 108!  We then had tea time with the monks with an open Q and A, but of course Adena was the only one to ask questions, then off to lunch.  After lunch we watched a real Sunmudo presentation done by the temple people who live there and headed back down the really large hill and hopped on a bus to Busan.  Busan is the second largest City in the South Korea, we are here for three nights couch surfing.

Overall, we are very happy we go to experience this culture, religion and lifestyle, but were happy we were only there for one night.