My night in a Buddhist temple: Myogaksa monastery in Seoul

It started inauspiciously on a slate grey autumn afternoon in Seoul. I was shown to a spartan room with only a tatami mat for a bed and presented with my temple kit: snot green collarless pyjamas with a bit of filigree around the neck. 

I'd wanted for an age to spend a night in a Buddhist temple. One of the world's oldest religions, Buddhism is the only monastic creed to which I'm drawn. The Judeo-Christian god is a kind of ultra-righteous eco-terrorist raining down destruction upon anyone who upsets him. But the Buddha sits cross-legged in a world beyond rancour, smiling serenely through 1700 centuries. 

And yet for all enduring attractions of Gautama​ Buddha's teachings I very nearly fled Myogaksa monastery, which clings to a hillside in an urban area of Seoul, when I saw that bacterial green outfit. The next challenge – there were to be many over the next 24 hours – came in the form of my fellow students. Spiritual exercises hadn't even begun and they were acting kind of monkish. 

There were nine of us. A mother with a Skandi accent and her son and daughter – both aged around 10 – alongside four women in their late 20s: two Europeans and two Americans. There was only one other bloke and I had already spied him meditating devoutly before formalities began. He had red hair and beard and looked very serious. 

The ponderous tone lifted immediately when Sunim, the generic Korean word for Buddhist monk – and in this case a woman – swept into the meditation room. She was tiny, swathed in immaculately pressed dove grey robes, with a large round shaved head, soft black eyes and a winning smile. She once had, she told us, a mane of long hair flowing down to her waist. Though it did seem a little bit wrong, given her austere vocation, I couldn't stop imagining her as she'd described her pre-monastic self. 

Her voice was clear as a bell, lightly accented, and she found a woofer and a tweeter in her register when she wanted to hammer a point. It was clear from the occasional quirk of syntax that she had learned English late in life – in three months of rote learning, she later explained, while a monastery novitiate. 

I never knew her "real" name. She had been at Myogaksa 10 years. Her weaknesses, she admitted, were food and sleep. "Beware," she warned, "of the greedy mind." 

After a brief rundown of Buddhist doctrine we began our exercises: a set of 108 ritual prostrations. I'd been forewarned about this part of the program. Foolishly, I thought it would be a doddle. After my 10th bow of humility to the Buddha – a rather elaborate gesture involving a touch of the forehead to the ground, a raising and lowering of palms, my back was complaining. After my 50th, I was slowing down. At 108 I felt as if I'd surmounted Annapurna.  

"You will feel pain – today," explained Sunim with a slightly perverse grin. "And tomorrow – you will feel more pain." Great! 

The grey day, with its lid of raincloud, was drawing to an early end. As darkness fell over Seoul we took turns ringing the bronze temple bell with a swinging wooden hammer the heft of a battering ram. The reverberations were sweet and warm at the same time, and they struck deep into the marrow – the soul. 

"It is a call," announced Sunim with a rising inflexion, "to wake up your Buddha mind. You must find your Buddha mind!" 

I'd come to the monastery with a very un-Zen like condition: that I be allowed to check the score on the Wallabies v Wales Rugby World Cup match overnight. The temple staff were obliging. I'd be rising at 4am in any case – an hour earlier was no problem. They showed me a Wi-Fi hot spot. It was on the floor below mine: the women's floor. But everyone was cool. 

After a mountain of excellent vegetarian food – I wasn't sure about the greedy mind but I was afflicted with an empty belly – I settled in for the night. The tatami mat was a wee bit unyielding so I plumped it up with extra doonas. The bolster pillow was about as soft as a ballistic missile but I found that a spare doona, when rolled up like a roulade, was a perfectly adequate replacement. 

I slept well enough, despite the rip of motorbikes climbing the hillside late into the night, and woke at 3am. Tiptoeing downstairs I stumbled down the corridor of the women's dorm and into a glass-walled study area: the hot spot. The game, which was being played in London, was already over and the first thing I saw online was a tweet about heroic defence saving the game. Whose heroic resistance? I scrolled down, heart hammering. It was ours. Go Wallabies! Yesssssss! 

For the next 30 minutes I trawled through the online commentary. Perhaps I wasn't as silent as I thought, for a door opened at one point and a sleepy head peered out. "Football game," I said. "Europe." The head shook a little and retreated into the darkness. 

At 4am a bell like an old phone rang through the building. As I was already awake I took a shower and lay down on my mat, thinking about life, enlightenment, and Australia's path through the World Cup. 

After another ring of the big brass temple bell, we settled down to await the arrival of the Zen master. A spry 70-year-old with long Buddha-like ears, he would preside over the hour-long Zen meditation. But Sunim would do the talking. "Just concentrate on your breath," she instructed. "And when thoughts come, go back to your breath." I was fine for the first 10 or so breaths, but after that found it difficult to tame the runaway colt of cogitation. There was stuff I had to do. Stuff I'd forgotten to do. And purely imaginary video highlights of the rugby victory against Wales. 

But there was a take-home from the experience, and it was a powerful one. I hadn't realised what a chatterbox my habitual mental state had become. Simply by doing nothing for an hour I'd sensed how profoundly unmeditative I was. Afterwards, Sunim talked about the bad mental habits overcome by regular meditation. Among them are greed, neurotic attachment, and a tendency to weight people and experiences with value judgments so that they became good or bad, loved or loathed, craved or rejected. "Your mind creates everything," Sunim went on. This seemed like a riff on Hamlet's "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". 

She explained that in her own search for virtue, meditation had been invaluable. It had given her the capacity to look at her mind with the distance of an observer: to watch it at work. 

After our meditation session – "you all did very well," said Sunim sweetly with a little bow of respect – the group was granted an audience with the Zen master in his surprisingly plush office. Sitting cross-legged we waited for him to pour cups of ginseng tea and pass them around. "This tea is very … expensive," said Sunim. And then, a touch embarrassed at her own candour: "Gift to monastery." 

The Zen master asked if we had any questions. I could think of about 100 but asked just the one: "What is Zen?" 

I was expecting a disquisition on the roots of Zen and its expression in Zen poetry and art and meditative practice. The answer, however, seemed to get lost in translation when Sunim relayed the master's response. It seemed to involve a rock (aka reality) and a laser (the Zen mind) and the ability of the latter to break open the former. I presume that standard issue Buddhism, in the terms of this metaphor, wasn't quite so effective at the quarry of enlightenment. 

Later, after breakfast, one of the women confessed that she, too, had found it difficult to last more than 10 seconds at a time in the meditative state. We felt like the dunces of the class. But we agreed that after 108 ritual prostrations, or frustrations, followed by a night on a tatami mat, and an hour sitting cross-legged trying to think of nothing but the breath, we'd at least put in. No. It was more than that. We may not have attained tranquility but we had been able to sense it – almost, to taste it.

I date my fascination with Buddhism from the moment I fell in love with Tripitaka, played by poor Masako Natsume (she was to die at the age of 27) in the Nippon Television series Monkey. This was followed by dabbling in the writings of Zen popularisers such as Alan Watts. But until that night at the Myogaksa monastery I'd never, to adopt the immortal lines of Charlene, really "been to me". 

 The morning observances – another bell ringing and an arduous hour of meditation – had by now jelled the group. We were getting along famously. The bloke who had earlier seemed a little pious was Irish, and there was no shutting him up. He was up to date with the World Cup. Ireland would lift the trophy, he said. "I doubt it," I replied. "Really," he shot back, arching a ginger eyebrow.

The woman who'd poked her head tortoise-like from her room as I was getting my rugby fix – she now wanted to talk. "You're obviously a fan," she said, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing an illness. She was a French lawyer working in Canada and she spoke about the differences between French-French and French-Canadian. An American woman working in Japan was trying to get her first novel published and she talked about writing fiction: "It's really painful – like giving birth." And over and above everything we were travellers with tales to tell of how we got to this place and where we were going to. If the hour had been a little later someone would have suggested cocktails.  

 My morning was already six hours old when it was time to farewell the monastery. It was a wrench to leave, but a relief to be unshackled from my snot green temple gear. Some of the group was staying on. But I had an appointment with a rugby replay. If the Wallabies were to make it to the final, I thought as I skipped down the monastery steps, I might even be a bit Zen about the result. Might.

TRIP NOTES 

MORE INFORMATION

eng.templestay.com 

GETTING THERE

Asiana Airlines flies daily to Seoul (Incheon) from Sydney with code-share arrangements in place with Qantas and Virgin for other Australian capitals.

STAYING THERE

Single rooms are available with shared amenities at more than 120 Korean Buddhist monasteries for a cost of approximately $100 depending on the temple and season.