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Buddhist Pilgrimages to the Holy Land in foreign countries is an academic traveling program which is only offered to students at the College of Buddhist Studies. This program started in 2009 with the purpose of providing opportunities for students to directly experience Buddhist studies overseas. At the College of Buddhist Studies, three teams are selected upon evaluation. The three selected teams must pass a document screening process and interview, and then receive a scholarship (700,000 won per person) for the pilgrimage. The three teams that pass the final process of selection this year were 3 Idiots, Haohao, and Khat nuoc and each team went on pilgrimages to foreign countries such as India, China, and Vietnam respectively. Among the three teams, the 3 Idiots, who won the first prize, visited Nepal and India, the two main countries where Buddhism flourished. Each team member is a sophomore at the College of Buddhist Studies, and is majoring in Buddhist Studies. The names of the members are Han Seo-Hyun, Min Ji-Young, and Baek Min-Ju. The title of their Buddhist Pilgrimages was “A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Buddhism and the Cultural Experience of India, and Nepal.”
More specifically, they visited four Holy Lands of Buddhism: Lumbin, which is the birth place of the Buddha, and Bodhgaya, where the Buddha is said to have found enlightenment, and Sarnath-the place where the Buddha gave lectures for the first time, and lastly Kushinagar where the Buddha entered into Nirvana. The reason for taking this journey was to experience and make practical what they have learned in school taking Buddhist studies. They added that this experience helped them a lot in academic ways as well. From this experience they said, “Before this pilgrimage, we had narrow views of Buddhism but after this journey we felt there should be a continuous attention for the globalization of Buddhism in Korea.”