three Sundays ago we had Stake Conference in the morning, and so the afternoon was free for once. not that i'm complaining about getting to sleep in on Sundays. it seemed as if we'd done a bunch of exploring over the whole island, but not much right here in our own backyard, so we set out to rectify that situation.
putting theYammy to work, we headed from Feng Yuan towards Taichung on a country road that runs along the foothills of the nearby mountains. we took a promising-looking road off toward the mountains and were not disappointed by the knowledge we eventually gained up there. at first we took a road that became a lane, that became a path, that became dirt the farther up we went, and the strange looks we received increased in frequency commensurate with the altitude. when an old lady took the time to jabber at us in the language of the Middle Kingdom, despite my pleas for "ing wen", we decided to turn back and find less forbidding trails.
i guess they ran out of money?
what we found was this strange creature, which looks like it was intended to be a fairly impressive temple. in what i assume was the absence of funds, they appear to have settled for a single room of templeness; no matter, there was only one guy anywhere near it. they haven't seemed to embrace the maxim of location, location, location when it comes to building temples here. but the austerity of the place will likely go largely unnoticed: taking a ride northwards the other night i came across the trappings of a temple housed in a sheet metal shack with a billboard painting of a temple roof above it.
the next temple we came to was a bit more impressive, especially for its rather liberal attitude toward creeds and beliefs. most people here tend to follow a queer sort of folk religion, which is a mix of Taoist and Buddhist thought with a healthy dose of Confucianism underpinning the whole system. they worship when they want, and at any one of a bewildering array of temples, which often have a Buddhist section and a Taoist section. many have the idol deities from the different religions side by side, as was the case at the temple pictured below, though this one went a little beyond the traditional norm.
Jesus even gets into the Buddhist/Taoist/Confucian temples
with the abundance of temples, one is quickly inured to the profusion of icons in them, but i admit to being more than a little surprised to see that even Jesus had infiltrated the Far East folk-religious consciousness too. not that Jesus isn't big here; he is, and getting bigger. as you might imagine though, the hard part of converting Chinese to Christianity is not the getting them to accept Christ, but the getting them to abandon other practices that Christianity often requires.
Woo-Hoo (five lakes) Pagoda (crematorium)
one of the next places we went was right next to this fairly magnificent building, the Woo-Hoo (say Oo-Who, five lakes) Pagoda. both buildings are actually repositories for the cremated remains of the faithful departed who are, in the case of the building not pictured (their architecture is much less attractive), Catholics, and Buddhists in the pagoda.
where they keep what's left of Buddhists
it's a seven storey building and though we turned up about five minutes before they were supposed to close, we met a Chinese-American man who took us on a fairly grand tour. i was surprised to learn from Mr Moon Chen that to have your remains kept at Woo-Hoo, you need only pay a one-time fee, which at something like NT$24,000 (US$800) seemed like a bit of a steal. the economist in me wondered how this business model could be made to sustain itself, but it seemed like a question more appropriate to leave unasked.
putting theYammy to work, we headed from Feng Yuan towards Taichung on a country road that runs along the foothills of the nearby mountains. we took a promising-looking road off toward the mountains and were not disappointed by the knowledge we eventually gained up there. at first we took a road that became a lane, that became a path, that became dirt the farther up we went, and the strange looks we received increased in frequency commensurate with the altitude. when an old lady took the time to jabber at us in the language of the Middle Kingdom, despite my pleas for "ing wen", we decided to turn back and find less forbidding trails.
i guess they ran out of money?
what we found was this strange creature, which looks like it was intended to be a fairly impressive temple. in what i assume was the absence of funds, they appear to have settled for a single room of templeness; no matter, there was only one guy anywhere near it. they haven't seemed to embrace the maxim of location, location, location when it comes to building temples here. but the austerity of the place will likely go largely unnoticed: taking a ride northwards the other night i came across the trappings of a temple housed in a sheet metal shack with a billboard painting of a temple roof above it.
the next temple we came to was a bit more impressive, especially for its rather liberal attitude toward creeds and beliefs. most people here tend to follow a queer sort of folk religion, which is a mix of Taoist and Buddhist thought with a healthy dose of Confucianism underpinning the whole system. they worship when they want, and at any one of a bewildering array of temples, which often have a Buddhist section and a Taoist section. many have the idol deities from the different religions side by side, as was the case at the temple pictured below, though this one went a little beyond the traditional norm.
Jesus even gets into the Buddhist/Taoist/Confucian temples
with the abundance of temples, one is quickly inured to the profusion of icons in them, but i admit to being more than a little surprised to see that even Jesus had infiltrated the Far East folk-religious consciousness too. not that Jesus isn't big here; he is, and getting bigger. as you might imagine though, the hard part of converting Chinese to Christianity is not the getting them to accept Christ, but the getting them to abandon other practices that Christianity often requires.
Woo-Hoo (five lakes) Pagoda (crematorium)
one of the next places we went was right next to this fairly magnificent building, the Woo-Hoo (say Oo-Who, five lakes) Pagoda. both buildings are actually repositories for the cremated remains of the faithful departed who are, in the case of the building not pictured (their architecture is much less attractive), Catholics, and Buddhists in the pagoda.
where they keep what's left of Buddhists
it's a seven storey building and though we turned up about five minutes before they were supposed to close, we met a Chinese-American man who took us on a fairly grand tour. i was surprised to learn from Mr Moon Chen that to have your remains kept at Woo-Hoo, you need only pay a one-time fee, which at something like NT$24,000 (US$800) seemed like a bit of a steal. the economist in me wondered how this business model could be made to sustain itself, but it seemed like a question more appropriate to leave unasked.
Mr Moon Chen giving me the skinny, and the view from the top
still, Mr Chen did a wonderful job of answering questions and providing interesting information on both Woo-Hoo and Taiwan, even though he himself was only visiting. he took us up to the seventh floor where we got out onto the balcony and admired the 360-degree view, which even with Taiwan's permasmog was fairly impressive. and it was nice to see the geographical relationship between our city, Feng Yuan, and our much larger neighbour, Taichung.
we also spied our next bit of adventure from the top of Woo-Hoo: the local cemetery. since Sunday is a day of rest, i suppose it's appropriate that the theme of the day became permanent resting, though it was unintentional. among all the other figures the Chinese worship are the ancestors, so burial is very important. there is even a yearly national holiday known as Tomb Sweeping Day, which fell in early April, during thecircumnavigation.
some typical burial plots
though this holiday had been not three weeks earlier, most of the tombs we visited looked like they could have used a good sweeping, though many also looked to be inaccessible other than by climbing numerous walls and other tombs. some of the newer tombs look very nice, and their landscaping makes them vaguely reminiscent of sand traps on a golf course, but i'm sure in time they'll succumb to the ravages of overactive flora in such a humid place. many of the tombs are so overgrown that the only tool sufficient to clean them is fire, rather than a feeble broom. its not unusual to see parts of the hillside on fire, but then what's a little more smoke in a country where they'll burn stacks of paper "ghost money" in the streets outside temples?
in all, the local trip was very valuable for gaining a little perspective on what the Taiwanese find important. issues of life and death are very close to them, as you'd expect with a group so preoccupied with their ancestors. but while we find the Taiwanese very backward about coming forward in everyday affairs, it's a bit funny that the one subject we try so hard to avoid is on ever-present display here.
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