You got any close by Ship? I never been to one none around here studied Buddhism for awhile. Whats it like in the temples I have only seen them on tv. As I understand the monks only eat 2 meals a day and sometimes get the meals from the local people in the area true or false?
Yeah there's one that I go to about once a week. It's a 20 minute hike up a mountain and it's on the mountaintop in this really beautiful place.
It's great. It's just informal. There are statues of Buddha all over and you can just walk in and do anything you want. You don't even have to talk to anyone, you can just go in and do meditation or pray to a statue or do whatever you wanna do. Sometimes you see people doing kinda weird shit because they are going into a trance. Because of the language barrier it's sometimes hard for me to get too involved but I talk to some of them a little bit.
The tradition of monks begging for food and the people giving it to them is kinda fading out in some areas, especially the cities. Sometimes when the monks do it people treat them as beggers. So they grow their own food and get donations from people brought in instead. But you still see it, monks walking around with the bowl, hitting two pieces of wood together.
