Temple action in Taiwan – Longshan Taipei and Confucius Tainan

I don’t get any of it, I really don’t. I ask the Taiwanese that I know ALOT of questions, but aside from having language barriers, it seems that the new generation I meet can not explain most of what I ask about. That’s not very surprising, as I find that when people ask me about the strange rules and rituals of Judaism, I’m sometimes a bit clueless. With that said, there’s something that I find magical in temple life and ceremonies I see in Taiwan. If the temple is interesting enough, I can sit there for hours watching the people and what’s going on, completely fascinated – wondering about people’s personal stories and their connections to the temple and their choice of God.

You’ve got endless kinds of temples in Taiwan, but to show a bit of the temple life I’ll just show two.

The first is from the Confucius temple in Tainan where I attended the late-night early-morning ceremony on Confucius’ birthday, better known as “Teachers’ day”. Everything about the ceremony seems to go around giving honor to the senior teacher, but, surprisingly for me – it also has some very religious type of ceremonies …

You might not be able to see it clearly or understand what the speaker is shouting in the background, but trust me when I say it involves a lot of bowing to show respect.

The second is from my recent trip to Taipei where I visited Longshan temple on what was the day for one of the goddesses, whose name I wouldn’t be able to remember even if I really tried to. It was very lively, extremely noisy, full of life and color.

Isn’t this great? I just wish I could understand a bit more…