Volunteer work in South Korea: Buddha Forest Meditation Centre
26th of March, to 22 of April, 2025.
Welcome to South Korea! A country where you can have the sun shinning at 20 degrees by morning, and only three hours later… snow! That’s for the mountain area, of course!
Lately, I have mixed feelings about my volunteer works. Here in South Korea, was no different.
When I first arrived and see the incredible view of the mountains, I thought I was too lucky to to get an opportunity here. With time, I would realize that there was nothing to do with me, really, but simply, mostly anyone applying to come here.
Liza, a volunteer from Germany, shows me my quarters, at the female dormitory, and gives me some info. I wait for one of the sunins (South Korean word for nun) to finish her meditation, so I can ask if it’s possible for me to get some dinner, as I haven’t eaten anything proper since breakfast. After eating, this same sunin, who we would call kitchen sunin, gives me and another volunteer, a guy from Italy, some more info.
I take a shower and try to sleep but am stroke by a migraine crises. I come up with a few reasons for it, but now thinking, it could’ve also been just a sign.
In the morning, as I’m trying to get someone to explain about my head almost cracking in half, Liza is going for breakfast (she’s kind of a saviour!), and I tell her everything. She tells me she will explain everything to the sunins, so I shouldn’t worry. Later on, she brings me something from breakfast, apples and some rice cake, which is life saving and very caring of her.
I stay in bed until around 10 o’clock, when I finally start feeling a bit better. I manage to eat the food Liza brought me, and I also manage to get down for lunch.
I was expecting some other volunteers, but I wasn’t expecting 15. This number per se already says a lot. As also in other places where they take this many volunteers. They did say in their profile that the volunteers should not expect “culture exchange”, as the sunins mostly refrain from talking, and I though I would be OK with that, as I was happy to focus in my mediation and my personal things. In the end, I would realize that actually just really bothers me when anyone uses Workaway just for the labour. And in here, it really feels like we are just that, just a labour force.
I try to keep my distance from all the other volunteers. I’m not in the mood for talking and sharing, but mostly, I don’t feel like any of them would get it. They are all in a completely different energy from mine, different path, different intentions, different everything. And even regarding meditation. The idea which most of them have of meditation is not at all what I believe, plus I see a lot of them not living meditation in every moment of your day, in all their actions, but only during those minutes in which they are sitting in silence. I believe meditation is a life style, therefore it comes together with a whole set of attitudes you must have, behaviour and mental wise.
The sunins have something about themselves which also puts me off completely. I even try to give them a chance, as someone else interferes for them later, but it simply doesn’t work. For me, their mood is always between grumpy and in a hurry, with glimpses of happiness. It’s this sad look which I can catch in their faces so often that makes me confuse. Why are they here if they are not happy? Is this what they truly want? If not why are they still here? Don’t they truly believe in Buddhism and it’s scriptures? Their attitude is also so different of what it should be, at least according to Buddhism. Killing innocent bugs, not caring about other animals, not having patience, feeling stressed and uneasy so often, etc. It might also have something to do with this line of Buddhism they follow here in South Korea. There are so many of them in the end…
The whole complex is massive. There’s mostly a different section of dorms for men and women, but apart from our floor, where only women are allowed, the other sections kind of get mixed from time to time, but that’s because the bedrooms are individual then. There’s the kitchen and eating hall, and nearby a small “winter garden”, like a conservatory, and these are the only areas where we can get Wi-Fi. There’s a yoga hall, which looks a mess and it’s more like a storage place. There’s the old and small temple, which is cute and beautiful, and the new massive one, which is nice but too ostentatious in my opinion. And then there are the farms, farms and more farms until where the eyes can get. Apple farms, potato farms, and many vegetable farms. There’s also the forest, which they are cutting down to plant new trees…? Something like that.
The bedroom where the female volunteers stay is small but perfect size for me. I just wish there were some hangers. There’s the futon, a blanket and a pillow, a tiny table with a clock on it and that’s it.
On my first week I am only helping in the farm, breaking soil and separating the rocks, basically preparing for planting potatoes. It’s hard work as the soil is hard, so you can barely tell the difference from what’s still rock or soil already. Do you know that soil comes from rocks, right? Anyway, I also plant many flowers, and I’m so happy to see them coming out beautifully a few weeks later. But then, as the volunteer who is helping in the kitchen is about to leave, I offer to help, and they take me in. I would spend most of my remaining days helping in the kitchen.
It’s no a glorious job as most of the other volunteers probably think. In the end, there’s a lot of dishes to wash and cleaning to do. As they have many South Korean seniour ladies to help with chopping and segregating fresh vegetables, other types of work are left to me. There’s always two volunteers helping in the kitchen, but they have different schedule and different tasks. I start with dishes only but as the main sunin is going away for a few days, and she does a lot of the cooking, kitchen sunin asks me too help her here and there with some cooking. I am not very successful when it comes to cook a curry, and I don’t really know why as my curries in Thailand would turn out fantastic, but I manage mostly everything else quite well.
The food is vast and delicious. There’s a huge variety and I get so confused and overwhelmed that during the first days I’m eating way too much. Well, at least at the beginning and some time in the end, when we had paying guests for mediation retreat. Right in between these two times, we were actually having very simple food, which for me is just fine, as I’m used to no variety at all, but what bothered me was that sometimes there was so little food that it was actually finished. The good thing is that there’s always fruits fro breakfast and lunch, and lots of fresh vegetables too. Another thing they have a lot is sweets. Not only a small basket with many candies, but also during lunch time and sometimes even during breakfast, there are sweets like chocopie or other cookies and cakes. Kitchen sunin also bakes some amazing bread quite often.
During breakfast and lunch nobody can talk. We call it “noble silence”. It’s more like you cannot chat, as if there’s a question you need to make you can, and you will be answered, but with whispering and then that’s it, silence again. I love it! It reminds me of my time in Thailand when I had to sit alone during lunch at school, because otherwise people wouldn’t stop talking and you cannot possibly eat in peace. At dinner time, as the sunins don’t eat so it’s just the volunteers, then they can chat. Luckily, as I have kept my distance from everyone, I can sit alone and have my dinner in peace.
The only volunteer who I actually got close to is Amalie, a lovely young woman from Norway. She’s a student of Anthropology, and her time as a volunteer here is the theme of her Masters dissertation. She’s only 23 but we get along pretty well and we both work a lot in the kitchen, so that’s how we get close to each other. I think I am very lucky that it’s her and nobody else who is also with the kitchen schedule.
Talking about the schedule, it sucks! Seriously, it seems that they try their best to change the schedule as much as possible, just so you are unable to plan anything ahead, or don’t have a lot of free time on your own to simply do your personal things. Perhaps they don’t do it on purpose, and it’s simply because they don’t do / have anything they like to do apart from meditating, so they don’t even consider that other people might do…? They keep saying that people should refrain from shallow pleasures like watching films, listening music, etc., and only focusing on meditation. They don’t even study other things apart from Buddhism. Why is it that all religions are so afraid of knowledge?
As I said, I was planing to keep my distance from the other volunteers, as I wanted no interaction and save my precious few free time for my personal things. Well, all of that changed when I met Karina.
Karina is from Brazil. When we find out that we both are Brazilians, we hug each other and it’s a very nice moment, as I simply keep imagining what all the other people, volunteers and sunins, are probably thinking. “They have just met and are hugging each other? Why?”. Laugh.
But then we don’t talk much in the first few days. I’m still keeping my distance from everybody, and at this time, it also includes Karina. Until a certain day, when simply by talking in some corridor, she let slip something about her spirituality, and my ears get startled. Immediately, I feel drowned to ask her all the questions I have in my mind, and get to know as much as possible about this subject. And so it begins…
Most evenings, after dinner, we sit at the eating hall and talk. Well, mostly I bombard Karina with questions, which she patiently answers and at the same time, tells me about her personal experiences regarding all of this. I will not enter in details here, even because would be rather impossible, but these are very enlightening evenings, and I get to know a lot more about this other universe. It’s very interesting and it resonates with many things Miles and I had talked in the past.
Eventually, we end up talking about Aamir, of course, and for my entire surprise, Karina has a situation which resonates a lot with mine. In somehow, our encounter was beneficial for both of us: I learned so much with her; and she learned with me that, certain things which seem very unlike to happen, actually do happen.
Karina is lovely, and has had many “out of this world” experiences in her life, and she kindly shares a lot of them with me, and that also helps me to have a bigger picture of certain things. She’s also very generous on buying some groceries, all by herself, in order to cook and bake some Brazilian delicacies for us and the sunins, like our beloved pao de queijo and many mousses as passion fruit and mango (my favourite), and also lemon. Everything turns out absolutely delicious, and everybody loves it!
Unfortunately, in our last few days together, we cannot really chat anymore, as the sunins get a bit more strict about the rules of not talking after 19.00 hours anywhere. Actually now they reduced the corfiu to 18.15 hours. No matter! At least there was already enough time for Karina to clarify most of my wondering. Not that they can be be completely satisfied once and for all…
During my last week here, as the Buddha birthday was about to happen soon, we put up hundreds of lamps through the Temple. Around that same time, a group of sunins / monks initiated there ordination, which is a kind of a “trial” for them to decide if they want to become actual nuns / monks or not. Therefore, the whole dynamic of the place changes completely, and luckily the food get way better again. Due to this whole preparation, I’m asked to help cleaning the small temple, and one of my tasks is to clean the altar. In order to due that, I get permission to climb it up, and with a dry cloth wipe out the dust from the Buddha statue and other two smaller statues. I must say, it’s quite a weird experience. Why? Well, people get all fussy about altars and their statues; it’s always “don’t touch” here, and “be careful there”; and now, here I am, with my feet at it, and cleaning them all over. And why me?
10 Years Around the World 