We met Lucy at 8:30 a.m. and took a taxi to the Dao Temple, which is across the street from the Yellow River, just a little beyond the cable car to White Pagoda Mountain. It is the celebration of the Day of the Dead. It was very crowded and there was a solid wall of smoke from all the incense and candles that were burning in the several courtyards, as well as inside the buildings.
The people had yellow paper with the names of deceased loved ones on it and they could pay money to have the paper hung on a clothesline and prayers said for those dead people whose names were on the paper. There was also one wall of one building that had a very large yellow cloth hung on it and peoples names were written on it who had donated money for the building of a new temple and the amount of their donation. There were large decorated containers where tons of incense was burning in the courtyards and rack upon rack of candles burning. The smoke was so thick in places that you could hardly breathe. Inside the buildings were mammoth size idols, statues of “The Emperor in Heaven” and others. I took a picture and a man told me I couldn’t take pictures … So, I stopped. But Lucy said maybe I couldn’t, but she could, so, she took my camera and got some great pictures.
And across the street from the temple were some statues of the main characters in an ancient Chinese novel, A Journey to the West.
The story is like this:
An ancient monk, riding on a horse was to travel west to India to get some ancient Buddhist scriptures. The horse that he’s riding is white and used to be a white dragon in the East Sea. When he was a white dragon in the East Sea he fell in love with a beautiful mermaid. After they were married he found out that the mermaid wasn’t pure, so he made war upon her lover and destroyed many things in the bottom of the East Sea. So, the Emperor in heaven cast him from the East Sea into a small river.
The monk was traveling near that river on a horse, and the white dragon ate the monk’s horse. Since the monk was old and not able to walk far on foot, the white dragon was sorry that he had eaten the monk’s horse and so he was changed into a white horse for the monk to ride.
Now the monk had three companions. The first is a fat man with a pig’s face. He was once in heaven with the Emperor but he fooled around with the Emperor’s wife. When the Emperor found out, he gave him a pig’s face so no other woman would ever love him again and threw him to the earth.
The second companion had the face of a monkey. He was supposed to have been born in a rock with no mother. I can’t remember all that Lucy told me about this so I will give you the story as I later found it.
Part 1│Part 2
