Templestay 5

Breakfast was fun for me.  We were to eat breakfast in the strict, traditional way of a monk.  This meant that we had to eat EVERYTHING.  Every last bit of rice, seasoning, and oil.  And when we thought we had got everything, the monk poured some tea into one of our bowls.  We used that water (and a raddish) to scrub the bowl clean, and then poured the water into the next bowl to continue the process.  Once all of our bowls were scrubbed clean, we were left with a food-partically, oily tea mixture.  We then drank this dirty tea mixture.  Yep.  We had to.  Not delicious.  Then we silently put our bowls, sppon, chopsticks, and placemats back into their original arrangement.  There was even a certain way to pick up the bowls to avoid making noise.  I was pretty proud of myself for beign able to tie up the cloth the way it had originally been.  We did a test run beforee actually eating our silent meal to make sure we knew the correct order to do things, where to place our chopsticks, and how to tie the fabric.  No joke, there was even a correct place to put your sppon when you weren't using it, and a correct hand to hold your bowl in as you ate.  This was a seriously strict meal.

For a half an hour after breakfast, we performed "community works."  (Didn't realize I was back in Americorps.) Community Works consisted of cleaning up the temple grounds.  Some of the guys go thte "heavy work" - sweeping the footprints out of the dirt with twiggy brooms, while the rest of us looked around for litter - which was astonishingly difficult to find.  The place was already pretty immaculate.

Once everything was spick-and-span, we were supposed to go n a hike up the mountain with the monk.  The rain from a few days prior had made the terrain too dangerous and slippery, though, so we had to settle for a simpler walk through the temple grounds.  I was disappointed, but it was probably for the best.  I'm not sure how much more my legs could have taken after all of the prostrations.