A Study on the Essence and Authenticity of Templestay Experience through van Manen’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Abstract

This study was to explore the templestay experience from the hermeneutic phenomenological perspective invented by van Manen (1990). Also, four fundamental lifeworld themes (or existentials) were used as heuristic guides for reflecting on the experience of templestays: lived body, lived space, lived human relation, and lived time. From the four heuristic guides, four central themes were developed and a total of fifteen sub-themes emerged to fully explicate the tourist experience from the interviews and participant observation. Next, the templestay participants’ perception of authenticity was discussed. The study suggested a Templestay Authentic Experience Design Wheel model to understand experience and authenticity. This study applied the naturalistic inquiry method, which has been neglected in the field of tourism, through hermeneutic phenomenological gaze to find meaningful and essential phenomena of the templestay experience.

Hermeneutic Phenomenological Understanding of the Inner Journey of Templestay

“…Even without mentioning the Buddhist doctrine that emphasizes the coexistence of nature and life, the essential charm of templestay is that it is possible to center mind and body through communion with nature, away from the busy city life. Participants interact with nature during their stay at the temple [31][32][33].…”

“…The interpretive world is merely the world experienced by the human subject and does not coincide with the world as an object. With an individual's interpreted world existing as the world experienced by oneself, the experience is utterly right for them [31]. Therefore, the templestay experience interpreted by templestay participants based on their own perception can be related to authenticity.…”

“…To increase the reliability and validity of the research and widen the boundaries of the researcher's perception, the researcher participated in the templestay site, conducted a direct interview, and at the same time, conducted participant observation to collect data. The interview was stopped until the contents of the interview were repeated, appropriate, and sufficient [31,58,59]. The characteristics of the study participants are shown below in Table 1.…”