Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 14 - Beijing Lama Temple

While I title this the Lama Temple, I am also including the Temple of Confucius. Monday morning, before the flight home, we made our way back a little north via subway to the Lama Temple and the Temple of Confucius. We get off the subway and start walking down the street, and there are something like 800 Incense sellers on the street. Everywhere you look, incense off all colors and sizes. We didn't see any temples, but thought something was a little weird. We continued down and found the entrance to the Lama Temple, but it was not yet opened, so we went back down one of the side streets to find the Temple of Confucius, which also was not yet open. We were a bit hungry and had a terrible time in Beijing finding breakfast on the street .. amazingly enough we seemed to be in the only part of Beijing without a restaurant. We came across this little tiny (and I do mean tiny) cubby-hole that happened to sell bottled drinks, so we grabbed something to drink. They also had some snacks (like Oreo cookies) and we picked up a few little things to munch on. Yea, I know ... us healthy-people eating Oreo cookies for breakfast!

We then headed back to the Temple of Confucius, which by then had opened. This is not the only Temple of Confucius, but it is the 2nd largest one in China, after the one in Confucius's hometown of Qufu. This one was build in 1302 and was used to pay respects to Confucius up until 1911.

Throughout the complex, there are lots of stone tablets, most of them sitting on the back of a turtle. There are these large turtles with stone tablets everywhere, but neither Tom nor I can remember what the significance of the turtle was.

Then we headed back to the Lama Temple. There are actually several names: The Yonghe Temple, the Yonghe Lamasery, or the Palace of Peace and Harmony Lama Temple. This is the temple and monastery of the Geluk School of Tibetan Buddhism. There are lots of buildings, each with 1 or more Buddha statues in it. It seems (I am not knowledgeable at all on Buddha's) that there is more than 1 Buddha, and each Buddha has a different "power". For example, there is a healing Buddha that I guess you would pray to if you are sick and need healed.

Remember all those Incense stores? Well, once we got inside, we finally understood. As you can see from these pictures, people bring in BAGS of incense (that we assume they just bought at all these stores nearby) and in front of each temple, there is an area to light the incense, a place to kneel and pray (holding the incense) and then a place to put the incense out in. And there definitely seems to be a method to this ... holding the incense (normally in 3's it would seem) at your forehead and then bending over. It was actually quite fascinating to be an onlooker, trying to figure out all of this by just observing.

Near the back there is one temple that has this 3-story tall Buddha, supposedly carved from a single piece of wood.