Early morning here outside the Hilton here they are having the 2009 “Save the Hair” symposium. Once again, I wish that I could figure out how to put the photos where I want them…
Yesterday was a long day on the bus. I felt a bit better though, and didn’t run out of energy until dinner time. Today I am up at 5 and walking around and sitting at the bus-stop typing. Pretty geeky, but there is practically no one up and around but a couple of joggers and cab drivers. More and more as I sit here, however, well past 6 now…
Yesterdays big event for me was the triptych Koreana, one of those places that just felt really cool. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’m sure I can brief it down. Back in the 1200’s, just before they did the metal type thing I talked about yesterday, Buddhist monks made wooden carvings of all the religious texts and put them into a huge library. It took over 20 years and there are over 80,000 of them. Not small, either. Each is about 1 foot by 30” and weighs about 8 pounds. They are all carefully marked and numbered. To keep them preserved, they took logs to the ocean and soaked them in sea mud for some period, to soften them and get them salty and mineraled enough to keep bugs away. Then they carved them and stored them, and this is the cool part, they located the “library" up on a mountain side where the breezes and mountain air would keep them preserved. So there a four large buildings just filled with these ancient carved boards. The “library” is surrounded by a temple compound with monks and other support facilities. I’ve always loved moving through big university libraries in the book stacks, but this is yet another step beyond, since the odor is kind of like an old barn. You can’t go in but the buidings are well ventilated and the old wood smell of these 80,000 carved boards all carefully shelved in a building made just for them in this beautiful place is really cool. I circled each buiding twice sticking my face up to the wooden "bars" and sniffing. I cannot think of an equivalent in Biblical, Koranic, or Talmudic writings, nor could the other teachers I conversed with. No idea about the Vedas, if that is even the correct term. Anyway, it’s a really neat collection of 800 year old boards…I was affected.
After that we made rice taffy at a village, ate a few times, walked around some lotus ponds and fed Koi, the huge goldfish they keep in the ponds here. I'm sure we did more that that as well, but still battling the intestinal crud, and the Buddhist temple was the star by far.
Yesterday was a long day on the bus. I felt a bit better though, and didn’t run out of energy until dinner time. Today I am up at 5 and walking around and sitting at the bus-stop typing. Pretty geeky, but there is practically no one up and around but a couple of joggers and cab drivers. More and more as I sit here, however, well past 6 now…
Yesterdays big event for me was the triptych Koreana, one of those places that just felt really cool. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’m sure I can brief it down. Back in the 1200’s, just before they did the metal type thing I talked about yesterday, Buddhist monks made wooden carvings of all the religious texts and put them into a huge library. It took over 20 years and there are over 80,000 of them. Not small, either. Each is about 1 foot by 30” and weighs about 8 pounds. They are all carefully marked and numbered. To keep them preserved, they took logs to the ocean and soaked them in sea mud for some period, to soften them and get them salty and mineraled enough to keep bugs away. Then they carved them and stored them, and this is the cool part, they located the “library" up on a mountain side where the breezes and mountain air would keep them preserved. So there a four large buildings just filled with these ancient carved boards. The “library” is surrounded by a temple compound with monks and other support facilities. I’ve always loved moving through big university libraries in the book stacks, but this is yet another step beyond, since the odor is kind of like an old barn. You can’t go in but the buidings are well ventilated and the old wood smell of these 80,000 carved boards all carefully shelved in a building made just for them in this beautiful place is really cool. I circled each buiding twice sticking my face up to the wooden "bars" and sniffing. I cannot think of an equivalent in Biblical, Koranic, or Talmudic writings, nor could the other teachers I conversed with. No idea about the Vedas, if that is even the correct term. Anyway, it’s a really neat collection of 800 year old boards…I was affected.
After that we made rice taffy at a village, ate a few times, walked around some lotus ponds and fed Koi, the huge goldfish they keep in the ponds here. I'm sure we did more that that as well, but still battling the intestinal crud, and the Buddhist temple was the star by far.
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