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.)

1. 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. [↩]