Jiufen

Recently, Jesse and I went on a day trip to a town called Jiufen. I have been here before- the last time I lived in Taiwan I spent the day there with my friend Charlene and her brother. Jiufen was once a gold mining town.









The amazing view from the hills of Jiufen.




It is in the north coast of Taiwan settled amongst mountains that rise next to the sea. They built the town up the side of the mountains there.


Because it was the period during which Taiwan was under Japanese imperial rule, there are old (rebuilt) buildings there that are quite charming and pleasant - using lots of wood with traditional style windows and doors, a courtyard layout, and Japanese aesthetic. It has very narrow, steep "streets" that are more like a lane.





Naturally, since this is a tourist destination, most of these streets are lined elbow to elbow with food stalls and souvenir shops. However, nearly all the visitors remain in that area, so once you leave it walk around the residential areas of town, it is quite pleasant.





I do not have a photo of it, but Jesse and I stumbled upon a Buddhist temple in the neighborhood. Most temples outside the city in Taiwan have "hosts" - usually a couple of elderly people who care for things and give tea or hot water to visitors. The hosts at the busy city temples mostly sell the ritual paper and incense for burning, collect donations for perpetual lights, or other more administrative tasks. Jesse and I were greeted by the hosts are this temple and I attempted to talk with them for at least an hour. This was both surprisingly difficult (there are a lot of specialized religious vocabulary I do not know) and easy, considering the Buddhist monk there reads Sanskrit, and the "English" words we use for Buddhism in the US are based on the Sanskrit.

The main sanctuary there has an Amitou Buddha - which is the representation of the Buddha as having many (10,000) arms and several (is it 7?) heads. This might seem creepy, but the idea is that he has so many heads so he can see all of humanity and so many arms in order to help them all. I have actually never seen this Buddha in Taiwan before. The Seattle Museum of Asian Art has an example of this Buddhist statue so I tried to tell them we had seen it before. This created a very unfortunate miscommunication because a clearly devout woman understood me as saying Jesse had seen this Buddha in his dreams! I felt terrible about this, but there was not a good way to correct it.

The Buddhist monk we chatted with read to us from the Sanskrit versions of the sutras he used and then translated it into Chinese. With a combination of hearing the Sanskrit, his body language, the context, and the Chinese words he used, we communicated rather well. It was interesting because he told us the most important thing was not to bai bai - which is the Chinese word for making an offering to the god at the temple, by bowing, burning paper money, or burning incense. Rather, the most important thing was what is in your heart. He also said that Jesus, Solomon, and Buddha are all the same - I do not think he meant they were the same human individuals, but rather, they are all paths toward the same place. I wonder whether or not this is really what he believes, or if his appeal to the Christian figures was simply a strategy he used to try to communicate Buddhist ideas to people from the US. I will never know, but Jesse and I spent some time after our encounter talking over the differences in our encounters with American mormons here (on mission) and the monk.