{"id":10979,"date":"2015-11-26T18:16:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T18:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10979"},"modified":"2015-11-29T20:44:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T20:44:37","slug":"temple-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10979","title":{"rendered":"Temple of… Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(with apologies to ace band Sisters of Mercy, for stealing the title of their best track for the title of this post)<\/em><\/p>\n

Rather than trudge the streets of Shanghai in aimless fashion, today I went out with purpose.<\/p>\n

Now let’s remember that I’m in the bosom of the communist People’s Republic of China, right?<\/p>\n

Right.<\/p>\n

I decided to visit an obvious anachronism, the Buddhist Jing’an Temple.<\/p>\n

Yes, that’s right.<\/p>\n

A Buddhist temple.<\/p>\n

In communist China.<\/p>\n

Hmm.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

From outside, the first thing one sees are the golden temple guardians, atop of their commanding viewpoint.<\/p>\n

\"Temple<\/a><\/p>\n

Inside, the open air courtyard is awash with the smell of burning incense.<\/p>\n

\"Clouds<\/a><\/p>\n

The worshippers buy bundles of incense sticks, and set fire to the whole bundle.<\/p>\n

Sometimes they carry the bundles around, stopping at points of devotion, where they will then stand, with the non-lighted end of the sticks on their forehead, while they bow and pray.<\/p>\n

Amongst the points of worship is this impressive ‘lucky jade stone’.<\/p>\n

\"Lucky<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent about an hour wandering around the temple.<\/p>\n

It felt odd, being in such a religious place in the middle of communist China.<\/p>\n

But as a place to watch devoted Buddhists at worship, it was a very interesting visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(with apologies to ace band Sisters of Mercy, for stealing the title of their best track for the title of this post) Rather than trudge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}