Ten Thousand Buddhas

Healthwise, this has been for me the worst start to a year that I have ever had and at the moment I am on sick leave, which is a relatively new experience for me. Hence the reason I haven't posted anything here for the last few days.
But, I guess this just comes with the territory when you get to a certain age.

Anyway, not being able to sleep much last night I ended up watching a movie - Infernal Affairs (recently remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed.) It's a great story, well told, dealing with complex moral questions of right and wrong, good and bad etc. but (and how sad is this?) one of the things I liked most about it was spotting all the locations in the film that I had visited while I was in Hong Kong.

The film begins in the Monastery of the Ten Thousand Buddhas.

This is a totally fascinating place and, to my Western Judeao-Christian eyes, almost bizarre.

There are in fact many more than ten thousand statues of the Buddha in the temple and its precincts, and they come in all shapes and sizes and poses.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is simply climbing up the four or five hundred steps to reach the monastery- but you can always stop at any point and pretend you are studying one of the statues, when in truth you are just trying to get some oxygen into your lungs.

I think my favourite was this 'surfing Buddha.' Obviously that was not his proper title, but he reminded me of a surfer or skateboarder.

The monastery of the ten thousand Buddhas is one of the places that I visited on my own, taking the train to Sha Tin and following the signs up the hill.

Being entirely on my own made it an even more 'alien' experience, and, for me, an even more rewarding one. There were so many sights I simply could not understand. Why is there a Buddha sitting on top of a huge blue dog? What is the significance of the nine-storey pagoda?

What do all the symbols represent?

In one way I was glad that there was no one with me who might have been able to answer these questions, because it meant I was free just to 'experience' it as a sort of visual feast.

Sometimes I think experiences without explanation are worth it for their own sake.