West End Buddhist Temple Analysis

During my visit at the “West End Buddhist Temple and Meditation Centre”, what stood out to me were their use of statues and room design as well as the structure of the meditation center. I noticed that everyone in the room was facing towards the front and center where the statue of the Buddha stood, and everyone need to be barefoot. I noticed that there was a red carpet that ran across the room and to a podium for the Monks to walk on. Once the monk sat above everyone on the podium, they began saying a prayer. The Monk was a male, and during their prayer, they would say parts of a religious text, and the people sitting on the floor, repeated the same chant the Monk had said. After each verse of their prayer, the Monk would chant “saddoo, saddoo,

saddoo”, and everyone would chant it after him. The clothing the Monk wore was much different than others; he was wearing an orange type of sarong, whereas most of the other people were wearing white. Although everyone was facing the front and following the Monks prayer, everyone seemed to be enjoying each other’s company, and had smiles on their faces.
According to a theorist names Marxist Antonio Gramsci, individuals are willing to submit or be “imposed” to a certain type of power structure or the “elite group”.

This concept is called “hegemony”. They accept the conditions the religion holds, along with the rituals they need to take part of. This concept said by him is called “hegemony”(Nye 2008, 61). The Buddhist temple has this structure of power where people follow the actions of the monk, and they take part in rituals without any sort of “resistance” or “resentment” towards it. Gramsci states how, “those who are ruled over come to accept and feel that they have stake in the power that is exploiting them and controlling them” (Nye 2008, 61). The people from the Buddhist temple are willing to accept that the monk is at higher power than they are because they seem to have more knowledge about the religion than they too. Signs of this include how the monk has a carpet to walk on the podium, whereas the others do not. Another example is that everyone is required to sit on the ground, whereas the monk is allowed to sit on a sit on the podium. This denotes how monks are the “higher power” over the general population that visits the temple; everyone follows their

actions.
The temple I visited was fairly large, and it seemed like the monks were in a higher class compared to the people who were visiting. I noticed that there was a resting area for the monks to sleep or rest in, and they were only allowed to enter that room. When monks entered the main hall where the Buddhist statue was situated, people bowed their heads, but monks did not bow their heads when people entered the room. People also brought multiple types of flowers to the temple to offer the Buddha; there were flowers surrounding the whole statue of the Buddha. By the statue of the Buddha, there was a donation box where people donated funds to help maintain the temple. The monks walked across the room on a red carpet, whereas the people did not get to. I also noticed that people brought food in the temple for everyone to eat after the prayer ended. However, the temple did not provide any food, and people who worked in the temple, ate food that was brought over. This portrayed how there was a sort of hierarchy system where the general population was at the bottom of the hierarchy, the monks were next, and the Buddha was at the very top.

A man named Karl Marx claims that religion is a sort of “ideology”. He says that ideology is determined through “economic relations” which is structured from “profound inequalities between those controlled economic resources, and those who did not” (Nye 2008, 58). In other words, he claims that it is a sort of “social division”, where there is a “working class” as well as a “ruling class” (Nye 2008, 58). Based off the observations that were made in the temple, it is evident that the people in the Buddhist temple follow the same system. The Monks in the temple are considered as the “ruling class”, while the others are considered as the “working class”. People bring food to the temple for everyone to eat, including the monks, but the monks do offer any food for others to eat. People also provide funds for the temple in order for the temple to keep running and be maintained. Without the monks present at the temple, the system would be unbalanced because people would not be able to meditate or say prayers without a sense of direction. People also would not be able to seek advice because there would be no “spiritual professional” there to help them out.. The monks in the system help balance out the temple because they are considered as the “leaders”.

There were some limitations during our visit at the meditation center that may have come in the way of fully understanding what was going on. There was a language barrier, which made it difficult to understand what prayers the Monks were saying; they were speaking in a different language. On the day of our visit, everyone was wearing white clothing, and we assumed this was the required attire to wear at the temple. However, during a lecture by Dr. Derry, he claimed that Buddhists only wear white clothing in the temple to symbolize the death of a loved one. This denotes how it would have been in our benefit to visit the temple again, in case there was a special occasion occurring at that particular time. We called the temple ahead of time, but they did not specify the particular ritual they were going to preform, and this essentially made it bit difficult to interpolate the actions of the individuals from the temple.