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=0=| Next up were the temples we visited in Taiwan. Most of the temples we visited were in the city of city with traffic and pedestrians going about their business. This temple had a quite impressive entrance right off the city street. |
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| Of there were the expected ShiShi dogs at the entrance. Since this is a Chinese ShiShi dog, do you remember if it a male or a female. Answer: it is a male as it is standing on a globe which represents the world. |
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| Just inside the entrance was a very large pig (that is a full sized pinapple in its mouth) which had been shaved and bleached with Chinese writing on the sides, presumably prayers. We assumed that a family had had a death in the family and had offered the pig to the temple. It was very fresh and still bleeding with its entrails hanging underneath. On the right of the picture is a fish which is about one foot long and was still flapping while we were there (very fresh). To us that was a little gross (as in the States food is generally wrapped and packaged so that it is not so apparent what the real source of the food is). However, we saw several such offerings during our visit and the Chinese didn't really notice them at all. |
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| Here are some views of the exterior of the temple. It is in much the same style as Korea with somewhat brighter colors. Below is another temple we visited along with a picture of the garden that was most serene in the heart of a busy part of the city. The walls of the temple blocked out most of the traffic noice |
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| Another view of the garden? | I missed my chance to scan in this picture and the one below with the right sequence numbers, so they will have to wait until the end (around 700). 1/3 there, though.
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| Incense burners in front of Buddha? Chinese would wave incense in front of the Buddha, and say prayers for whatever was important to them (good luck on a job interview, for example) and then leave the burning stick in the sand filled urn. The priests would sell incense sticks and that would help support the temple and the monks who lived there. |
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| This is a close up of the incense burner. |
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| This was a particalarly large and nicely decorated temple with impressive pillars supporting the decorated wood ceiling and tile roof (not shown here). They also had a display of bonzai trees that we found interesting. There is one of the more interesting bonzai trees shown below. People generally stayed outside the temple proper with only the monks actually going inside. The entrance to the temple would have a raised door frame about a foot high that you would have to step over to enter. Also below is a picture of some of the decorated buddhas. |
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This page was last updated on September 19, 2005.
