A good museum is like porn to me.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at the National Museum of Korea, and it was LOVELY.  I'd never really realized the extent of it before, but y'all: I LOVE MUSEUMS.  When I walked in, I felt this surge of excitement that kind of surprised me.  Apparently this sight makes me positively giddy:
Aaah...can't you just feel the cool air circulating?  And hear the murmuring echoes?  Simply WONDERFUL.  The museum moved into this big new space in 2003, and it's really well done.  It's got an archaeology section (there were Neanderthals in Korea...did you know that?  This place is OLD, dude.), plus art, history stuff, and religious exhibits.  More on that later.

I got my free ticket and some green tea ice cream--I'd been dying to try it--and set off!

I took a billion pictures, but I'll just show y'all my three favorite things.  The first was a super-old crown and matching belt-thingy found in the tomb of a queen.  It's from the 5th century (!!!), from the Silla kingdom, which was one of the dominant kingdoms in Korea at the time.  How fabulously ostentatious is this thing?

The second part I really liked was quite a surprise to me.  There was a whole room on the first floor devoted to maps, and I planned to walk right through it--but I ended up spending a good amount of time there.  It was surprisingly interesting!  Exhibit A: this printing block from the Joseon period (1861, to be exact).  It was for making a portion of a map of Korea.  Korean cartography, it turns out, was quite advanced.
I was also transfixed by the following 15th-century map of the world.  (Yes, the whole world.)  According to my handy audioguide--thanks, audioguide!--the peninsula on the right is modern-day Korea, and below it is Japan.  (Not too shabby!)  The giant phlub of land in the middle is China; its size and placement are quite telling of Koreans' opinions of China.  (It's in the middle, it's huge...basically, at that time they looked favorably upon their big brother and trading buddy.)  And over on the left there are Europe and Africa.  Hehe!  The Americas and Australia are missing, of course.  How interesting: a graphical representation of the Joseon dynasty's worldview.  Who knew maps could be so interesting?  [Except for Holly McWegglestein, of course; she knew.  Hehe.]
Finally, I visited the part of the museum I was looking forward to the most: the Buddhist sculpture section.  I took a class on Buddhism during my last term in undergrad, so the room full of buddha and bodhisattva statues was my favorite.
Notice the scale of the buddhas.  My favorite was the huge one on the left in the picture above; I estimate that it was about seven feet high.  Quite imposing!
There was also a really cool, almost European-looking 14th century statue of a bodhisattva named Avalokitesvara.  Avalokitesvara is probably the best-known bodhisattva, especially in Korea.  Knowing a little bit about the religion made the statue so much more meaningful...as did my trusty audioguide.  :c)
A bodhisattva starts out as a human who has lived a completely righteous life.  Through that life, they earn the opportunity to become a buddha, which would be their ticket out of the material world and its angst-filled cycle of rebirth.  But rather than taking that opportunity, a bodhisattva chooses to stay behind in the human world and help other people reach enlightenment.  So as buddhist figures go, a bodhisattva is like a hero that runs back into a burning building to save other people, rather than staying clear of the danger.
His thoughtful pose was really striking to me; the audioguide pointed out that it's a similar pose to that of Rodin's The Thinker, which I'm sure you've all seen pictures of.  What better way to depict such a noble character as Avalokitesvara?  I can think of none.

As a sidenote: a wonderful book I read a few years ago compared Christ to a bodhisattva.  The book was a fanciful (and at times irreverent) account of Jesus' teenage years, and it has him going on a grand quest to figure out how to be the Messiah.  One of his teachers on the quest is a Buddhist monk who tells Jesus that he will be a great bodhisattva.  It was quite thought-provoking when I read the book, and this arresting sculpture made the comparison even richer for me.

The museum staff kicked me out at 7pm, and I left contentedly.  It was a lovely afternoon of reflection.  My stomach, however, was not so content.  Luckily, there was a nice lady with a food stand in the subway station.  :c)  In exchange for $1, she took a waffle, spread half of it with three kinds of ice cream, folded it in half, and presented me with a delicious ice-cream-waffle-taco-thing.  YUM.

A perfect end to the perfect afternoon!