香 (xiāng) - Incense

MUSHU! At last, I have found you.

Thankfully, my little weather widget's forecast for Friday has dropped from deathly 97 degrees and sunny to a slightly more tolerable 89 degrees and sunny. We're scheduled to climb the Great Wall with Morty this Friday, so I'm especially invested in this. For those who are unfamiliar with our buddy Morty, he's the president of Northwestern University. nbd.

This past weekend's excursion to see two Buddhist temples was much less physically strenuous than Friday's excursion to the Great Wall will be, but I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to get out of the city for a day. The Tanzhe Temple and the Jietai Temple are tucked between the lush green mountains that can be found just about an hour's drive away from Beijing. We went on a slightly foggy day, which meant that it wasn't too hot, but a little humid.

Look ma, no pollution! At least, I HOPE that it was just fog and not pollution...

The Tanzhe Temple is much older than the Jietai Temple. The Tanzhe was originally built during the Jin Dynasty (hey, that's my middle name!), so it's about 1,700 years old. Wild. The Jietai was built later, during the Tang Dynasty. However, after some quick searches on The Google, I found that many of the buildings that we saw on Saturday actually date back to the much more recent Ming and Qing dynasties.

Everyone's favorite Chinese
Professor being his usual
self at the Tanzhe Temple.

The Jietai Temple, being the Jietai Temple.

The professors provided us with incense for prayer at the Tanzhe Temple. Professor Gu explained that the incense smoke carries one's prayers to the heavens, and that the multilingual Buddha will understand prayers in any language. With a chuckle, he also added that we might as well do our prayers in Chinese - probably for Buddha's convenience. I'm not Buddhist (nor have I ever been), but I took a few minutes to burn my incense, say a quick hello to my ancestors, and make a prayer...all in my clumsy Cantonese. Hope Buddha doesn't mind that it wasn't in Mandarin!

Unfortunately, I did not look this cute while doing my own prayers. Just sweaty and gross.