101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [11]
My prayers worked—the beetle remained aloft, and we were eventually allowed to go back outside. After sneaking a cup of instant coffee with a Venezuelan couple, I pulled myself through another walking meditation and followed the other participants to the main room for a Buddhist meal ceremony. A highly choreographed process of place-setting, serving, and eating, it included a final inspection by a head monk to see if our bowls were clean. “You do not want to disappoint him,” said the coordinator. “Doing so would reflect poorly.”
She then walked us through what would take place during the meal ceremony, including a final cleansing: we were to take a piece of pickled radish and use it to swab our dishes. This caught the attention of a young Canadian woman.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But how is wiping my bowl with a radish going to make it clean? What about germs?”
“We fill the bowls with very hot water,” said the coordinator, sidestepping the question. “So when you use the radish, the bowl is already very clean.”
“Is it, like, a hygienic radish?” asked the Canadian woman.
“Yes,” said the coordinator. “It is a hygienic radish.”
Things went downhill from there. Exhausted and cranky, one by one we began refusing to play monk. If one of the whole points of Buddhism was to cultivate acceptance, why, I asked, did we have to go through such an elaborate meal ceremony? The Venezuelan couple went a step further: they left.
Wishing that we had the same kind of courage, my friend and I instead counted down the hours until we returned to Seoul, and upon arrival treated ourselves to a bottle of wine. Several days later, the Templestay coordinator e-mailed the weekend’s participants and invited us to a workshop to perform three thousand prostrations to “inspire yourself into practice.” The idea sounded horrifying, but it reminded me how difficult it would be to live like a monk. Which, as the coordinator suggested, may have been the point.
Chapter 14
Pamplona, from the Perspective of a Bull
Your day starts precisely at 8 A.M. when, standing in the pitch darkness of your temporary corral, you hear the sound of people singing. “A San Fermín pedimos, por ser nuestro patrón, nos guíe en el encierro dándonos su bendición,” they chant, asking a guy named Saint Fermín to give them his blessing as they participate in something called an “encierro.”
“What’s an ‘encierro’?” you ask yourself, still sleepy from your long journey from your farm the day before. But before you get any answers, a gun goes off and someone presses a Taser to your skin, prodding you from complete darkness into total, blinding sunlight. Confused and frightened, you trip over your own hooves as you try to figure out what is going on. Your eyes adjust just in time to see a crowd of people, all dressed in white with silly red neckerchiefs, start to… hit you with rolled up newspapers? What the hell is this? And why are all the other bulls running so fast?
I’ll tell you why: because those jerks with the newspapers are now chasing you down the street, whooping and hollering and poking you with their papers. “Really?” you think, hooves skittering on cobblestones as you force yourself around a corner. “Are you really trying to outrun a bull?”
It’s enough to make you want to gore them, but there’s no time—you’ve now reached a large ring and are surrounded by a different group of people, who force you into a new corral and give you some food. It tastes good, but man, it’s making you sleepy.