Samgwangsa Temple on Mt. Baegyangsan in Busan
Yun Je-hak | Freelance Wrter
Spring brings flowers with each approaching day. Plum blossoms, Cornelian cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms, azaleas, royal azaleas…With each passing day the colors and shapes of the Earth change. In between, spring rains come and go. Sometimes a cold front passes over, drastically changing the mood. Flower petals are scattered by the wind. These petals belong to neither life nor death, just like the changing seasons.
Azaleas are supreme in the hierarchy of spring’s beautiful flowers. Azaleas look as if they have always been there, although many other flowers give this impression too. In addition, any tree standing next to azaleas seems to provide them branches. In this way spring blooms along with the flowers.
After the azaleas fade, the world becomes brighter. On each patch of ground where azalea petals fell, more and more sunlight falls every day. Tall trees, silent until now, begin to stretch out their branches, and rivers flowing through the forests begin to swell.
As the mountains and fields become greener day by day, the world becomes brighter with lanterns, which I call man-made flowers. They are flowers that light the path for Buddha to return. Buddha’s Birthday is when these flowers come into full bloom.
In my childhood, I knew that the day my mother was beautifully dressed in traditional Korean hanbok was Buddha’s Birthday. Even now I vividly remember how she looked on that day, and this memory makes me, now older than she was then, run like a child on his way to the temple. Buddha’s Birthday is the day flowers bloom, the day when people also bloom for each other. In this way “each of us is most noble both above heaven and below heaven.”
On Buddha’s Birthday there is a place where the world’s largest “flower” blooms; I am speaking of Samgwangsa Temple in the eastern foothills of Mt. Baegyangsan, Busanjin-gu, Busan. On this day Samgwangsa blooms like a great flower. Lanterns are everywhere, in the courtyard, under the eaves of Dharma halls, and on the railings of the stairs leading to the temple; a total of 40,000 lanterns. The TV network CNN included Samgwangsa’s lantern festival in their 2012 selection of “50 beautiful places to visit in South Korea.” This year, Samgwangsa holds its lantern festival from April 28 to May 12.
Samgwangsa Temple, which belongs to the Cheontae Order of Korean Buddhism, is not that old. It was in 1986 when they lit the first lantern of Dharma in the name of Samgwangsa. In 1991 they completed Jigwanjeon Hall, which can hold 10,000 people. It is a mega-temple that has become one of the major temples in Busan in a relatively short period. However, what should be noted is not its size but the Buddhist practice and education programs it provides. These programs include: the Samgwang Hangeul School that provides education to those who didn’t have regular schooling; a children’s gardening class; Templestay and healing through silent walking meditation; the Samgwang Chinese School and Samgwang calligraphy class. These classes are provided based on having faith that the Pure Land does not exist in some faraway place but is right here right now.
On Buddha’s Birthday, the clouds over Samgwangsa become flowers, and when these flowers turn into rain, anyone touched by it will bloom.
Photography by U Tae-ha (aerial photographer)
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