Page:Korea (1904).djvu/288

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
236
KOREA

the great spaces of the hall and the swaying figure rocks in the despair of his passionate self-abandonment the sympathies and emotions are strangely stirred. The stages of the services are marked by blows upon a bell which the priest holds before him, the while he casts himself upon his face and kneels before the resplendent Buddha.

The chief celebrations of the day and night in Yu-chom-sa are accompanied by the booming of the great bronze bell—an elaborate casting of the fourteenth century—and by the beating of a large circular drum many feet in circumference. Both instruments stand in their own towers in the courtyard. During the minor services, the genuflections of the priests are accompanied by the jarring notes of the small brass bells, which they strike repeatedly with deer-horns. A magnificent figure of Buddha sits in the Temple of the Lotus Blossom, in an attitude of impassive benignity behind a screen of glass, looking solemnly upon the devotions and pious exercises of his faithful attendants. This altar is recessed, the entire shrine being protected by plates of glass, and the offerings of rice, which are presented to the altar for benediction, stand without the screen. Among other temples and shrines at Yu-chom-sa there are the House of Everlasting Life, the Temple of the Water Month, the Temple of People who come from the West. There are fifty monks in Yu-chom-sa, twelve nuns, and eight boys who have not yet been admitted to the order. Many of the boys in these monasteries are quite young. Some have been handed over by their parents in extreme infancy, while others have been received out of the wide charity of the Buddhists, and dedicated to the service of the monasteries. These boys