Conquering Savage: Strange Days at Wong Tai Sin Temple

"Wisdom in the Tenement Yard"

I woke up later than I wanted and surveyed the situation. I had arrived in Hong Kong from Taipei the day before and it was 1130 and I was still tired.

My father always told me that the heroic moment in every person’s day was waking up.

Just waking up.

No matter when you woke up; just getting up and getting going and making the day well.

My father is a pretty wise man.

Shake myself awake and contemplate:

As everyday is, today was a blank canvass, and I had an array of things that I planned to splash all over this canvass, but it was already 1130.

Looks like I need to trim a few things on my schedule.

I quickly reviewed what I had ambitiously planned:

Post breakfast jaunt to Victoria Peak Park, then Wong Tai Sin Temple, lunch, shopping, high tea at the Peninsula, shower, change, Tram to up to the Peak restaurant for dinner, then out.

I knew this was a stretch for me in planning it, and figured I could hit some of them in the following days. But I didn’t expect to wake up at 1130! The night before had not been rambunctious.

Shit.

Despite my best attempts at rousing myself, I was clouded in a personal funk, travel weary and cloudy headed.

Lets go eat, the decision will just come.

Fantastic waygu beef burger bowl with chevre and mushrooms from some place I don’t remember while listening to Kasabian’s “Velociraptor!” album on Spotify and I still couldn’t really decide.

Forget it.

Trust your feet, family.

I would go where I would go, wherever that may be, lets just find the underground first.

I found a station and figured out which lines ran from it.

Nothing direct to any of the places I wanted to go.

No big deal.

Wong Tai Sin Temple it is and after a *few transfers and many stops

I emerged from the underground and looked around. (*Island Blue line to Kong Kow Pink line to Kwun Tong Green Line Wong Tai Sin stop). I was far far away from the English stamped high fashion, high rise, high living I had left on Hong Kong Island when I first went underground.

And I didn’t see any temple.

I lit a cigarette and surveyed my surroundings to find I was surrounded.

Not trapped, but encompassed by massive Chinese tenement buildings, some a couple of city blocks high and some a couple of city blocks wide.

Bauhaus and monstrous and terrifying but intriguing blocks, so simple, so boring, SO LARGE and devoid of outside ornamentation and individuality that it was almost sickening to the eye.

But I knew better than to just dismiss the building.

So I walked head pointed into the sunny smoggy sky getting dizzy staring at the faces of these behemoths; and imagining the billions of stories and secrets and truths and life that they contained.

"Chinese get Lifted in a Tenement Yard"

But this was not today’s mission.

I was to find the Wong Tai Sin Temple, an epic shrine to the Taoist tradition, and one of the most beautiful and powerful temples in Hong Kong, and my mission was to find inner peace.

In doing research *after I visited the temple (*because I do everything backwards) I found that the temple’s motto was “What you request is what you get”. I found how the temple was founded, in honor of Wong Tai Sin, a chinese deity with the power of healing.

Delving further, when the Qing Dynasty fell in 1912, the Chinese people lost their god because they worshipped the emperors as deities and needed a religion to replace the old one of emperor worship. It was 1915 Hong Kong and a man named Lueng Renyan had a shrine to Wong Tai Sin in his herbal medicine shop. Legend has it that people would pray at the altar, and then receive a medicine from Leung. Much healing took place and people began to flock to it.

A fire burnt through his shop and Wong Tai Sin told him to build a shrine, on a spot 3000 paces north from Kowloon City Pier. In 1921, He did this. It’s spot in the former Chuck Yuen Village where it stands today in the shadows of a concrete metropolis.

They built it and here I am, not randomly- nothing is ever random- Looking for inner peace and healing at the Temple of healing.

Ahhhh……..Always trust your feet.

The temple was more than a temple to Taoism, It was extensive grounds with Buddhist and Confucianism statues and shrines and holiness and love and peace.

Smack dab in the middle of projects no city in America could compete with in sheer size.

GO figure.

I walked past the shops ensconced with all things red, hawking incense and other holy bric a brac and found what seemed to be the entrance and walked in, kissing my fingers and touching the foot of a beautiful dragon that guarded the entrance.

It was crowded but there was a quiet civility about the crowds- A reverence as it were so- and I felt it too.

I poked around at various shrines and other things that I didn’t have a tour guide for and didn’t know exactly what they were but it didn’t matter. They were beautiful and strong and sacred, and I tuned into what each was doing for this sea of chinese people and attempted to understand.

You don’t need guidebooks to know. You don’t always need research.

All you have to do is ask yourself a question and then observe to assimilate. To watch the traffic, and then feel which way the energy flows, looking all ways before climbing on that energetic highway.

As I sat in quiet veneration, I began to understand.

I met a tall warrior regaled in honor and strength, cutting the head off an evil demon and I felt bonded. There was a ferocious quiet dignity about it all, and it made me think.

"Conquering Warrior"

We all have demons. If you don’t think you have any, you are just coping or deluded or ignorant or newborn or GOD. For the chosen that face all that is dark within them, there was a lesson in this statue;

And I didn’t need a guidebook to tell me:

Only in quiet dignity and honor of oneself does true strength and fierceness surface within, allowing the conquering of individual weakness.

I moved on to a side shrine to Confucious and sat in his presence, feeling his wisdom and divinity.

Was this working?

Did I have inner peace?

Do we ever?

In early March of 2012, I seemed to have developed a medical problem. I literally lived with an enormous granite rock in my stomach. It was way too large to pass through my intestines, so there it sat.

And it hurt.

At first I just attempted to cope. To drown the pain this rock was causing in external pleasure and distraction but this just made the granite in my stomach seem to grow larger and deep down I knew it was not the remedy.

After dealing with the pain for a couple months I realized the only way I could make it disappear was for me to use all my strength and nurture and that it would be a pain staking process as it progressively withered and passed.

The more I walked, the more I searched, the more I turned everything inward, the more I felt the divine on earth and in me, the more the rock dissipated.

It was now late January of 2013, and the granite rock, despite still holding its presence in my bowels, was a mere fraction of its original size. So small, that on days when the sun was shining and the energy was right and the wind blew just so, I could forget it was still there. But I knew it was still present and it was keeping me out of balance and destroying my inner peace, and I wanted it gone.

I was the only white face among the masses, and I stuck out like a sore thumb with my Hollywood Jack sunglasses and large frame so I cautiously and reverently walked amid the incense and silence and bowed heads and kneed knees and approached the majestic red pillar and yellow laticeworked temple and watched and contemplated:

"Prayers, Dreams, Desires and Smoke Wafting"

I felt the collective reverence for the space, and I respected it and flowed with it and understood.

This was A sacred space bursting with human energy, the collective wishes, prayers, dreams, wants, and needs all spiraling and circling around like wafts of the smoke from the multitude of large incense sticks, which I seemed to be the only person without.

I wanted the incense, but I didn’t need it to understand.

Leung Renyan was right about this small little space in earth. The energy flowed strong here and I felt it, strong and true on this smoggy sunshine-y day.

So in a sea of Chinese people, I stood there for awhile

and joined in.

I asked for guidance and healing.

I asked for happiness and wisdom.

I asked for peace and brotherhood.

I asked for forgiveness and strength, because we always need a little more of that.

It felt good to ask for these things.

We all should ask for such things a little more often.

Then I moved. I meandered and gandered at a few other shrines and the journey went on and then I left, disappearing into the underground again, the sun lower now and peaking through the cracks of the multitude of vast structures.

Did I have inner peace?

Had it worked?

I would say:

Yes, on this day it did a bit, but I was unaware at the time. More importantly- the search is an everyday challenge; and that inner peace is within us, and not just within some beautiful temple in Hong Kong.

That's the gist of it:

I am the temple.

You are the temple.

We are the temple.

But I paid this no mind as I submerged back into the underground. I was headed to the next stop: traditional high tea at the Peninsula,

and my only thoughts were:

how to get there underground.