One of the things I love about Buddhist temples in the Asian countries I've visited is that I often find them by accident. I'll be walking through a town thinking of other things and then I'll hear a faint drumming which at first may sound like a distant hammering, but then as I proceed combines with a humming which turns into a chanting. Or I'll be walking down a street of unintelligible store signs and suddenly I'll see tucked away among the visual noise a painting of a Bodhisattva, or a string of paper lanterns.
This is what happened just the other day in Busan, while the group was going to see the view at the top of an observation tower. I slipped down one of the sets of stairs along the steep streets of this hilly town (in this hilly country, as my quadriceps will attest), and soon saw the telltale lanterns and heard the faint chanting, which led me through a twisting series of steps and paths to a small temple overlooking the city where a dozen or so people were chanting led by a monk sharply rapping a wooden object with a stick (don't know what it's called).
I get the sense sometimes that this is typical of the way one encounters Buddhism and shamanism, two of the three major forms of spirituality in Korea.
Christianity is very visible. As in the U.S., steeples are often the first thing you see when entering a town. When I arrived in Bucheon outside of Seoul my first day, churches seemed to be everywhere, sprouting out of tightly packed high rise offices and apartments, their angular steeples projecting oddly from the blocky rectangles that make up the city blocks. The steeple here has almost become a suggestion or a symbol of a church based on an architectural form that doesn't seem to exist here. Many of the steeples are merely Eiffel-like towers bearing across on top of an office building.
This impression completely comports with my experience of Koreans in Bergen County, which seem like a uniformly Christian community. But the truth is, according to several estimates I've read, that about 30-35% of Koreans identify as Buddhist and about the same identify as Christian.
Buddhism seems just a little less evident. You'll occassionally see a swastika among a jumble of hangul signs, but so far I've not seen a major Buddhist structure stand out visually in a town or village. One reason may be that while Buddhism was dominant during the Koryo dynasty, when the Choson or Yi dynasty began around 1400, Buddhism was suppressed and many temples were burned. So Buddhism withdrew to the kind of semi-hidden mountain retreats like the beautiful temple where I slept Sunday night on the ondol floor, rising at 4 am to witness the monks' meditation.
Shamanism is even less discussed but is so clearly evident in the many of the folk rituals and festivals all over the country. There is certainly the veneration of ancestors, horoscopes are consulted before weddings, and the Seon Buddhism here does have its deities, but I'm talking about rituals meant to invoke the cooperation of a spirit to get what you need. Interestingly, the Korean government has been trying to preserve some of these rituals as 'national cultural treasures,' as if they're curious social artifacts. But I've also heard that people still do hire shamans when someone needs a hand getting over sickness, infertility, or bad luck.
But I haven't directly stumbled upon evidence of that yet.
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