The Hands That Carry the Rite

A photographic document of the women who carry Jingwansa Temple's 600-year-old Suryukjae forward — a living lineage of ritual knowledge passed from hand to hand, body to body, through generations of Buddhist nuns.

For six hundred years, Jingwansa Temple's Suryukjae has brought together ritual, music, movement, and devotion in an elaborate Buddhist ceremony dedicated to beings who have no one left to remember them. Today, the rite continues as a living tradition, carried forward through the knowledge and physical practice of Buddhist nuns (bhikkhuni).

At the heart of this work are their hands.

I photograph the moments in which ritual knowledge becomes visible in the hands: one hand resting against another's brow in blessing; a paper offering fed to the flame; a flower lifted toward the altar; cymbals raised again and again in rehearsal in an empty hall; drumsticks crossed in the stillness before a strike. These gestures may appear small, but within them is the precision of an entire ritual.

Suryukjae is not transmitted through written instruction alone. Its choreography lives in the body — in the angle of a wrist, the position of the fingers, the timing of a step, the height of a bow, the force with which a drum is struck. One nun watches another, imitates her, is corrected by her, and eventually places her own hands on the next generation. Knowledge moves through touch.

This is what I am photographing: not simply women performing a Buddhist rite, but women transmitting the knowledge that allows the rite to continue.

The hands become a visual language for this continuity. Even from a distance, they reveal a form of teaching that is easy to miss. A gesture is demonstrated, repeated, corrected, remembered, and eventually embodied. What one generation has learned becomes part of another generation's body.

The images move between the collective scale of Suryukjae — the vast temple halls, the synchronized movements, ceremonial headdresses, cymbals and drums — and the intimacy of individual hands at work. The contrast is central to the project. The ceremony may appear monumental, but its continuity depends on countless precise physical acts carried out by individual women.

Throughout this work, I kept my distance on purpose. For the bhikkhuni, every offering and every gesture of the rite is not a performance for anyone to watch. It is practice. I felt that the moment I stepped too far into it, whether as a believer or as a photographer, I might disturb that practice. So I did not try to gain closeness by entering their space. Instead, returning to the same place over thirty months, I slowly learned where I should stand: at the edge of the hall, near enough to see the movement of their hands, far enough not to disturb their practice. The distance that remains in these photographs does not come from a lack of access. It is a distance I chose. For someone watching and recording the ritual, it felt like the quietest and most respectful way to be present.

I am fifty-three, and watching an eighty-year-old nun still teaching another woman how to move her body through the ritual has made me think differently about time, work, and what it means to pass one's knowledge forward.

Jingwansa's Suryukjae is part of Korea's intangible cultural heritage, and efforts continue to share and preserve its cultural significance internationally, including work toward UNESCO recognition. My photographs are made within that continuing present: not to document the disappearance of a tradition, but to look closely at how a tradition remains alive.

At the center of the work is a simple image: one woman's hand guiding another's.

From hand to hand, from body to body, the ritual continues.