As a Taoist, I felt it was only natural that I visit the most famous Taoist temple in Hong Kong while here.
Maybe I was being naïve, but I was picturing something like Washington Square Park, except instead of chess board tables, there would be people sitting around, discussing Chuang Tzu’s parables, or sprightly conversations about the happiness of fish. Instead, it was more like a gigantic fortune-telling, wishing well extravaganza. People go there to worship Taoist deities by burning incense, praying to them for their wishes to come true, and have their fortunes told through the practice of kau cim, which is when they shake a container full of bamboo sticks until one falls out, and the character on the stick is interpreted by a soothsayer1.
It amazes me how vastly different the Taoist philosophy is from the religion. I couldn’t relate to any of this at all. The Taoists here are trying to get a holiday — on Lau Tzu’s birthday, if I understand correctly — because other religions get a day off. This strikes me as somewhat strange, since Lao Tzu is still disputed to be a mythical figure, with an unknown date of birth. I also have to wonder if Lao Tzu would approve of such a ritual.
At one point, there was an old lady worshiping at the entrance of a building, and a woman came out and said, “Ma’am, this is the information booth. You don’t need to worship us.” My uncle and I couldn’t stop laughing.
(This was a quiet day in the middle of the afternoon. Apparently, on special days of the Chinese lunar calendar, it’s packed, and the incense smoke too thick to breathe. Superstition has always been a part of the Chinese culture.)
- That’s the part of the video where the people are kneeling, and you can hear the bamboo shakers. It’s a short clip because I wasn’t allowed to film there. [↩]
Thanks for the video Jeff. I’ve enjoyed your blog of the HK trip a lot.
I find the religious Taoism a bit of an irony. It seems practices of rituals and ceremonies pretty much go against what Lao Tsu taught. Tao isn’t about any of that, at least the philosophical one.
Irony is the perfect word for it.
Great video Jeff. Having spent about 16 years studying religions of one kind or another at university the first thing you realise is that practitioners of a tradition seldom, if ever, reflect the initial or “original” tradition. It can be stunning if one is unprepared.
Yeah, even though I’ve been exposed to the religious side before in snippets of movies and TV shows, I was still pretty shocked. I guess I never put two and two together.
More people in any culture will derive comfort and direction from ritual and “magic” than from philosophy. Furthermore, there has been a western tendency to divide Taoism into the more intellectual/meditative branch as different from the weird hats, magic swords, paper charms and divination branch but whether that distinction is now or was ever real for anyone except historians is another matter.
But then again…“what’s real?”
or
“Is Jeff dreaming that he is a stranger in a strange land or is a stranger in Hong Kong dreaming that he is a Chinese-Canadian far from home.”
OOOOooooooooooooo…great now I’m not convinced that I’m not being dreamed by that guy I saw on the bus this morning…or was that me dreaming him…me…ouch.
I hear that people are still trying to categorize the types of Taoism, which to me seems silly, as they’re so obviously different as to make me wonder how they can share the same name.
It’s funny that you bring up the idea of being unsure of where I’m from. I just heard a speech from a famous Chinese doctor who moved to Toronto and raised his son there. When his son asked him whether he was Chinese or Canadian or half of each, he thought about it and replied, “you’re all of both”. I guess if we’re unsure of what’s real, maybe two realities are possible.
Nice vid! I felt very sorry for the poor koi when I was there.… they need better care and those coins are pretty pollutive, but the image is so striking. And you really DID go on a quiet day. When we were brought by our friends, I didn’t know which temple we were going to, and I was SO surprised when I came up and realized it was this big, world-famous one I’d seen on television (they always show worshippers there at New Years’). I felt like we’d OFFICIALLY visited a temple then.
What I do love about it is its many levels (you can see great views from a number of different pavillion heights).
Was that a foreign woman who saluted the info booth???!
Was it koi? I thought koi were always bright orange/white, and extremely difficult to keep because they’re finicky. But yeah, I felt totally sorry for whatever was in there with all the dirty change (there were turtles too).
It was an elderly Chinese lady who worshiped the info booth. She didn’t seem to know what she was doing, aside from the belief that her wishes would come true if she prayed hard enough.
Koi are just fancy carp; they’re all carp I think. So many restaurants and places in HK have coins in with their fish; the good places have constantly cycling/purifying water running through, but I don’t think the temple can. Koi actually grow so fast that I think some don’t value them enough. But one Chinese friend told me you should always have one black carp/koi because it absorbs all the yin energy.… or something like that.