May 2009

We awoke on day two ready to get out and start exploring.  I hadn’t really planned any sort of itinerary – I’d just compiled a list of “things to see in no particular order” and decided to figure it out as we went along.  For our first full day in Portland, we decided to mainly stick to Downtown and the Pearl District, with a brief jaunt to the South Waterfront.

Our room at the Ace featured a great old claw-foot bathtub.

Clearly, the first order of business was breakfast.  Thanks to a wonderful web site, VegPortland, we had heard of a place called “Blossoming Lotus” that sounded interesting, and it was listed as being only a few blocks from the hotel, to the north of us in the Pearl District.  On the way out, I grabbed a shot of the Ace’s lobby mezzanine, which was set up as a sort of study for guests.

So, out we headed.  Portland has very small blocks, and combined with the wide sidewalks, lots of buildings, and few parking lots, it’s a joy to walk around there.  We decided that since Blossoming Lotus was just a few blocks to the north, we’d walk it.  Later, we’d use the streetcar to go further.

Along the way, I grabbed some shots of the neighborhood.

The design of Portland and its incredible transit systems/bike infrastructure makes it easy to live without a car.  For the times when you might need one, though, these Zipcars are positioned all over the city.  Zipcar is a car sharing service, where cars can be taken for a few hours or a day or so, and when you’re done with them you park them back on the street for the next user.  They let you go grab some furniture or take a trip to the coast without having to have a car all the time.  There’s a variety of types – Minis like this one seemed popular.  We also saw a Miata – which we imagine is popular for trips to the coast or countryside – and an Element, perfect for those Ikea runs when you’re bringing back something too big to fit on the MAX light rail train.

We quickly found out that Portland has some gorgeous architecture, both of the historic and modern types.  In the Pearl, this building is one of the outstanding ones.  The Armory was built in 1891, originally as a home for guardsmen.  Now, after a renovation from 2002-2006, it is the Gerding Theatre, showcasing a wide variety of live stage performances.

As it turns out, Blossoming Lotus was just around the corner from the Armory.  Housed inside a yoga studio called Yoga Pearl, Blossoming Lotus serves up several interesting vegan dishes, including some live food.  The fact that they served breakfast intrigued us, so we headed inside.  Little did we know that this was going to become one of our favorite eateries in Portland.

Steph got herself the Live Breakfast Parfait.  It combines layers of buckwheat granola, fruit, and cashew creme.  She gave it high marks for its flavor and freshness, and the bit I tried certainly backed up her opinion.

I got the oatmeal, and it was really the best oatmeal I’ve ever had before.  Extremely fresh and flavorful.  Rolled oats, maple syrup, bananas, apples, raisins, and hemp milk.  The hemp milk was something new for me, having never tried it before.  It’s actually very tasty and made a nice compliment when mixed into the oatmeal.

We made it a point to try as many different restaurants and cafes in Portland as we could, but we did come back to a certain few places again and again during the trip, because we liked them so dang much.  Blossoming Lotus was one of them.  It became our breakfast staple, and we also came back for lunch.  Should you find yourself in Portland and want something very tasty that’s also very healthy (especially during breakfast), it’s highly recommended.

As we sat in Blossoming Lotus and ate, I appreciated the view.  The contrast between the small building across the street, the Armory, and the huge new condo building behind them was very cool.  It shows how quickly and how impressively the Pearl built up following the construction of the Portland Streetcar, which allowed tons of new apartments, condos, and townhomes to be built here without requiring a lot of space for cars.

As we were leaving Blossoming Lotus, I paused to take this photo looking down the street.  The reason being that this is a view we don’t have back home in Texas – looking down a street to see an honest-to-goodness hill in the distance.  For two youngsters from the prairie, this was something to be enjoyed.

We decided to wander around the Pearl District for a while, just getting the layout of the city.  The Pearl is really something else.  Until the very recent past, this was all just a giant abandoned rail yard and industrial sector.  Due to the development drive that has accompanied the streetcar’s return, the old rail yard was torn out and in its place an entire new neighborhood was created.  The Pearl is block after block after block of dense infill buildings – condos, apartments, and offices, virtually all of which have ground-floor retail for tons of restaurants and shops.  It’s incredible to walk through the district and see the life and vitality that has sprung up here.  It feels like standing in some European city, such is the design and layout of the place.

Everywhere you turn is more “stuff.”  It’s really remarkable.

We learned that Portland takes its parks, squares, and plazas very seriously.  I don’t think I’ve ever been to a city that had more parks and squares than Portland.  They take a wide variety of shapes and styles.  The first we visited was one of the parks in the Pearl District, Tanner Springs Park.

Tanner Springs Park serves not only as a public space, but as an ecological space as well.  There are two “zones” to Tanner Springs Park.  At one end, at street level, is a more traditional “park” sort of space, with low-mowed grass and space to run around.  Starting at the tall grass, though, Tanner Springs Park shifts its focus.  From the tall grass down the slope, it is a recreation of the sort of tide pool that was here before people came to Portland.

At the lower level is the actual pool.  All this is no mere “greenwashing” – it’s an actual functioning mini-ecosystem.  Signs prohibit you from entering the tall grass, because of the animals nesting in it.  It is not unusual to see ducks swimming around the pool looking for snacks.

To view the pool, you can walk out on this zigzagging walkway elevated just above the water.  Along the side, an undulating fence made of reclaimed railroad iron snakes its way from one end to the other.  This became one of our favorite spaces in Portland – the walkway, fence, and water made such an incredible, beautiful piece of design that we kept coming back here again and again.

Looking up out of the pool, you can see how the park transitions from the hardscape of the surrounding blocks through a park space into a natural preserve.  The contrast between the tide pool and the sleek modern buildings around it was incredible.

After leaving Tanner Springs Park, we wandered around the Pearl some more, past block after block of buildings housing condos, apartments, shops, and restaurants:

The sidewalk cafe above was Sip & Kranz, a coffee shop which we visited later.  It became another favorite of ours.  Here, we came across another park, adjacent to Sip & Kranz – Jamison Square.

Jamison Square is another of the Pearl’s major public spaces, located a few blocks from Tanner Springs Park.  It consists of a few sections.  Here, one one side, is a partially grass/partially gravel area with a public art sculpture.

Along the other side is a grassy area with denser tree cover, which is ringed with more public art in the form of these totem poles.

In the center is Jamison Square’s party piece – a large water feature, comprised of waterfalls spilling down large rock slabs into the center of a plaza, creating a shallow pool.  While there weren’t many people yet on this early Sunday morning, after the day got going we would see tons of people – especially couples and families – here enjoying the water.

The design of the small waterfalls is such that you can actually walk across the top and sit directly above them while remaining perfectly dry.  In the evenings, we liked to come here, grab a drink from Sip & Kranz, and sit on top of the falls in the cool, clean air, watching the crowds play in the water or lay out on the grass beyond.

Scenes like this were plentiful in Portland.  It is an unbelievably pretty place.

We walked around the Pearl some more.  Some of the streets in the Pearl had been closed and torn out, and replaced with pedestrian-only streets like these, lined with trees, plants, and benches.  Along both sides were townhomes and condo/apartment buildings.

Another view of one of the pedestrian streets.

We were generally making our way back towards Downtown.  Along the way, in the middle of the Pearl, was this old warehouse building that had been turned into townhomes, complete with large front porches.

The Pearl is full of interesting architectural contrast.  Here, a few of the sturdy old historic buildings help set off a striking new condo tower that features a “fractal” window pattern and red glass balconies.  Somehow, it all works – few places I have seen are as full of contrast and yet so harmonious.  It’s a trick we have yet to figure out back home.

We decided at this point to hop on the streetcar and take it to the South Waterfront, which is a brand-new development district on former industrial land right on the banks of the Willamette to the south of Downtown.  As a bonus, the streetcar would take us through Downtown, letting us get our bearings there a bit as well.  We stopped at the nearest streetcar stop and just a few minutes later, one whirred up.

It is really amazing to see the popularity of the streetcar.  Virtually every time we rode it, it was full of people.  Singles, couples, families with kids – everybody rides it.  It’s a great compliment to walking – walk short distances, hop the streetcar for longer ones then get off and walk some more.  With stops every few blocks it makes it extremely simple to get around the city.  It’s an experience completely unlike back home, where transit is limited to some infrequent, poorly-planned bus routes and where the design of the city is such that in most parts of it you are forced to use a car for everything.  Obviously, it won’t appeal to everybody, but the Portland way of doing this sort of thing really clicked with us.  We loved every minute of it.

About halfway there, we decided not to go straight to the South Waterfront, so we got off near Portland State University (an incredible urban campus right in Downtown) and wandered around a bit.  We stumbled upon Portland’s City Hall, which is a gorgeous old building across the street from yet another park/plaza space.  This is actually a sort of “government center,” as nearby can be found various other city & other government structures.  One of which we had really been looking forward to seeing in person…

Ah, there it is!  The Portland Building, designed by Michael Graves in 1982.  Widely credited as the first major work of Postmodern architecture, the Portland Building has been reviled by architectural critics ever since.  We loved it.  It’s absolutely ridiculous-looking and bizarre, which might be one reason why we like it so much.  It is unlike anything else in the world, including a lot of buildings from the same genre.  It’s so ugly and weird and out-there that it’s cool, in our humble opinions.

Further adding to the spectacle is Portlandia, the massive copper sculpture perched over the doorway.  Created by artist Raymond Kaskey, Portlandia is the second-largest copper repoussé statue in the United States, after the Statue of Liberty.  The sculpture is 34 feet, 10 inches tall – if she stood up, Portlandia would be about 50 feet tall.

Nearby, we encountered our first Benson Bubbler.  These constantly-running public drinking fountains can be found throughout Downtown Portland.

For a little while longer, we just walked around, enjoying the beauty and architecture of Downtown Portland:

Eventually, we hopped back on the streetcar and headed off to the South Waterfront.

The South Waterfront is another huge new development spurred by the streetcar.  It is relatively recent, and as such is still under heavy construction.  Several towers were rising out of the ground under tall cranes when we were there, and the ones that were finished were only partially filled with residents and businesses.  Still, it was an impressive place already.

The towers in the South Waterfront have been designed slender, so as to preserve views through the development of the Willamette River waterfront.  They are all very sleek modern designs of varying shapes, with more squared-off bases to provide more units and retail space.

Most of the major public spaces in the South Waterfront are still under construction, but some smaller ones, like this lovely plaza space, were complete.

While in the South Waterfront, we stopped in to a coffee shop, Rilassi.  It was tasty and gave us a perk-up before we headed back into Downtown for lunch.

For lunch, we decided to go to Chinatown.  Chinatown is located next to the Old Town district, north of the downtown core and east of the Pearl.  Numerous family-owned Chinese places can be found here.

We stumbled across this place, simply named Vegetarian House.  We were in the mood for a sort of hole-in-the-wall kind of place, which is often where one can find some of the best food in old city urban areas.  Vegetarian House did not disappoint, plus we got a bonus of a slightly weird cultish feeling to the proceedings.

Vegetarian House serves up all manner of vegan dishes, using various meat substitutes like tofu and seitan.  We both got the Vegetarian “Beef” & Broccoli, and it was great.  Plentiful broccoli and seitan, along with a nice pile of brown rice.  Really, really good.

The slightly weird feeling came about from some of our surroundings.  It wasn’t unpleasant or scary – actually, it was rather humorous.  On a flat-screen TV at the back of the place, a channel of some sort of Chinese news feed was playing.  We didn’t pay it much attention at first, but after looking at it a few times we noticed that the channel was an Internet feed called “Supreme Master TV.”  Wha? Supreme Master?  As we looked around some more, we saw posters and pamphlets apparently extolling the virtues of following the Supreme Master, who was apparently an elaborately dressed woman named Ching Hai.

Had we stumbled onto some sort of front for a cult?  Would our bill come with fortune cookies and a sermon asking us to sell our possessions and live in a compound for a while?  As it turns out, nothing of the sort happened, and a Google search revealed that Supreme Master Ching Hai is the founder and leader of the Quan Yin Method.  What is the Quan Yin Method?  Wikipedia sez:

The term Quan Yin Method (also Guan Yin Method) was coined in 1985 by Ching Hai, to describe the type of meditation that she practices and teaches. The spelling is an idiosyncratic romanisation of a Chinese term said to be in English translation: “contemplation of the sound vibration”.[citation needed] It is markedly similar to the much older Surat Shabd Yoga from the Sant Mat tradition which also teaches meditation on the light and sound.

Ching Hai has said, “It’s not that I invented the Quan Yin Method; I just know it. This method has existed since the beginning of time, when the universe was first formed. And it will always exist. It is not a method; it is like the way of the universe, a universal law that we must follow if we want to get back to the Origin, back to our true Self, back to the Kingdom of God or our Buddha nature.”[9] In the book The Key of Immediate Enlightenment, it is said that those who recite her name would become elevated.[10]

Ching Hai initiates spiritual aspirants into the Quan Yin Method, which is purported to exist in various religions under different names, as the “best, easiest, and quickest” way to get enlightenment.[11][12][13] The method involves meditation on the “inner light and the inner sound of God”, or the Shabd that she claims is also referred to in the Bible and said to be acknowledged repeatedly in the literature of all the world’s major spiritual traditions. Ching Hai accepts people from all backgrounds and religious affiliations for initiation. One does not have to change one’s present religion or system of beliefs.[citation needed]

The Quan Yin Method requires two and a half hours of meditation per day and adherence to five precepts which appear to be borrowed from The Five Precepts of the Theravadin practice:

• Refrain from taking the life of sentient beings. This precept requires strict adherence to a vegan or lacto-vegetarian diet. No meat, fish, poultry or eggs (fertilized or nonfertilized).
• Refrain from speaking what is not true.
• Refrain from taking what is not offered.
• Refrain from sexual misconduct.
• Refrain from the use of intoxicants. This includes avoiding all poisons of any kind, such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, pornography, and excessively violent films or literature.

As part of their meditation routine, followers of Ching Hai partially cover their heads under a sheet of cloth or blanket while meditating. However, while meditating away from the view of uninitiated people, the meditators do not necessarily use this cloth to cover their heads completely.

So, the Supreme Master isn’t a cult leader…probably.  Whatever she is, her followers cook up a mean vegan Chinese dish, so we would definitely go back to Vegetarian House.

Afterwards, we walked around Chinatown for a bit:

Eventually, we made our way to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden.

This is a full block in Chinatown that has been transformed into, well, a classical Chinese Garden.  There’s a tea room and a huge assortment of plants to check out.  Wen spent some time walking through the garden – it’s really quite lovely.  Here’s some photos:

After we left the garden, we walked around Old Town and Downtown some more.

Portland really does have some gorgeous historic buildings.  Some of them have cast-iron facades.  This awesome pair was near the Willamette waterfront.

While I was getting some photos of these buildings, the MAX light rail train rolled past.

As we walked on, we came to the Downtown section of the Willamette waterfront.  Waterfront Park runs up and down the river, with wide walkways and extensive green space.  The Willamette is nothing like the Trinity River back home – where the Trinity is tiny and the bridges over it modest, the Willamette is a big, wide river with actual water traffic and several big bridges.  Portland is well-known for the series of bridges crossing the river in the Downtown area.  One of our favorites can be seen above:  the Steel Bridge, built in 1912.  It’s this big, industrial-strength affair that has such a cool early 20th-century look to it.

As we walked around Waterfront Park, we came across a huge crowd and tons of bikes parked everywhere.  It took a moment before we realized that we had walked into one of the events we wanted to make sure to see while we were in Portland:  the Portland Saturday Market.

The Portland Saturday Market actually runs on Saturday and Sunday.  It’s a huge street festival featuring a massive variety of local merchants selling all manner of art, crafts, and food.  It’s held under the Burnside Bridge and the surrounding area – it’s actually grown so much that the city built rows of wood & metal canopies in Waterfront Park for merchants, and even then it spills out into several Downtown blocks.  It is held every weekend.  For those back home, picture the Main Street Arts Festival in Downtown Fort Worth – now imagine it having a much greater emphasis on local merchants, covering a much larger area of downtown, and happening every weekend rather than once a year.

The Saturday Market is a sight.  It seems almost endless, with row after row of food vendors, artists, and craftsmen.  Despite its size, it never seems overwhelming or incredibly hectic/stressful like Main Street Arts Festival can – or perhaps it’s because of its size.  It doesn’t feel cramped.  Attendance is huge, and given the sheer variety of things happening it’s not hard to see why.

Here’s the newest section of the Saturday Market, under the sleek new canopies constructed in Waterfront Park.

Here, we’re looking towards the Steel Bridge from underneath the Burnside Bridge.

We didn’t spend a ton of time in the Saturday Market this time around – we returned the next weekend, on a Saturday, to check out the full thing.  More will appear in the post about that day.

After checking out some of the Saturday Market, we decided to head south through Waterfront Park.  Even as we got away from Saturday Market, the crowds in Waterfront Park were impressive.  Along the river, as seen above, there’s a wide path for pedestrians and bicycles.

Next to the path is a wide grass space.  What’s really incredible about this is that back in the ’70s, this was an elevated freeway.  Portland decided to get rid of the freeway, taking space away from cars and giving it back to people.  It has been a resounding success.

As we neared the Hawthorne Bridge, we peeled away from Waterfront Park and headed back into Downtown.  The Hawthorne Bridge, up ahead, would carry us to the near east side neighborhoods another day during the trip.

As we re-entered Downtown, we passed the Hotel Fifty.  This is an old Mid-Century Modern hotel that has been given a hip, stylish modern makeover and is now open again.  Really cool looking place – would be curious to see inside.

Walking back through Downtown Portland.

Portland has a lot of old ads painted on the backs of buildings – this one was pretty cool.

As noted, Portland has a lot of parks.  In Downtown, they even set aside two long stretches of blocks for park use – the North and South Park Blocks.  Here, we’re in part of the South Park Blocks.

While walking around Downtown, we passed another Mid-Century hotel that had been given a shiny new makeover – the Hotel Modera.  Portland loves its Mid-Century architecture.

One of the places we wanted to see was not far away, so we detoured and took a stroll to the Ira Keller Fountain, designed in the ’70s by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.  The Ira Keller Fountain is a really cool assemblage of fountains and waterfalls tumbling over concrete cliffs into a pool, over which are “floating” concrete pads to walk out through the water.  Here, at the top of the falls, a man sat reading a book.

Here, we’re down at the lower level, on the floating walkway.  You can see the same man up at top right, giving a sense of scale.  The water drowns out the sounds of the city and creates a very peaceful and calm place to relax.

Here are some close-up photos of parts of the fountain:

After leaving the Ira Keller Fountain, we decided to head back to the Ace for a bit before dinner.

Since the Ira Keller Fountain is close to Portland State University, we walked over there and hopped on the streetcar headed back towards the Pearl.

While at the Ace, I grabbed a shot of the lobby from the mezzanine.  The lobby is a popular hangout, not only for guests of the restaurant but for customers of the Stumptown Coffee shop in the Ace’s ground floor, as the coffee shop has little seating of its own.

Since we had decided to use the stairs instead of the elevator, we got to see the Ace’s awesome stairwell artwork.  Here’s just one of the details:

We rested for a bit, then headed out to find some dinner.  For some reason, pizza sounded good again this night, so we headed back into the Pearl to check out a pizza place we had seen from the streetcar:  Hotlips Pizza.

As we walked up to the building, we saw these little guys parked near the entrance.  That’s right – for deliveries, Hotlips uses electric carts.  How cool is that?

I decided on a slice of their thin pepperoni, briefly breaking my vegetarian streak (which I otherwise maintained through the whole trip).  It was delicious – perfectly cooked and very flavorful.

Steph, meanwhile, had the vegan focaccia pizza.  Having tried a bite, I can confirm that it was great as well.  She did miss the presence of soy cheese, which neither Hotlips nor Rocco’s the previous night used.  We did eventually find a place that had soy cheese, though, on the near east side.

We also sampled some of their breadsticks, in both original and pesto varieties.  They were about the greatest things ever, really.

Sunday evening in the Pearl District, as seen from Hotlips Pizza.

After finishing up at Hotlips, we went on a nice long walk through the Pearl.  We came across this – the Pearl District’s Safeway, one of the many urban grocery stores in Portland.  It was really impressive – a full Safeway with office space on top.  Another one of these in Downtown Portland has apartments above it.  These are the kinds of grocery stores I like – it’s refreshing to have one design so that you can walk, bike, or take transit to it without having a zillion-car parking lot ocean in front of it.  This Safeway was right on the streetcar line, so it was incredibly easy to get to.

Down the street, also on the streetcar line, is the Bridgeport Brew Pub, one of Portland’s approximate 3,486 brew pubs.

I exaggerate, but only a bit.  Quality microbrewed craft beer is pretty much the official drink of Portland.  There are 28 breweries in the city proper, more than any other American city.  Some have even called for Portland to be known as “beer capital of the world,” as the city has more breweries than Cologne, Germany.

The beer culture in Portland is amazing.  Back home, we have one craft brewery.  There are only a handful more in the whole state of Texas.  Now, Rahr is a great brewery, but the poor folks are handicapped by a host of arcane, Puritanical Texas liquor laws that impact everything from sales to marketing to distribution.  In Portland, no such laws exist, and the beer culture has flourished.  It’s a source of pride.  It would be nice if Texas would unshackle its beer brewers.

We walked around some more, checking out the incredible developments in the Pearl District.

Loved this cozy little path between two developments in the Pearl.

Not only does Portland have a bunch of big urban grocers, they also have a bunch of smaller ones.  Here’s Little Green Grocer in the Pearl.

As we explored more streets in the Pearl, the development just kept coming, block after block.

After a while, we hopped back on the streetcar and rode back to the Ace.  Getting off to walk over, we saw this beauty of a historic building in Downtown.

Nearby, somebody had inserted some social commentary on a “no smoking” sign.

Here’s an example of the support and enthusiasm Portland has for locally-owned independent business – there’s actually a small district right in Downtown Portland with a series of shops specializing in fabrics and knitting/sewing supplies.  It’s called the Fiber Arts District.  How neat is that?

Heading to the Ace, we got a good look at this gorgeous old clock tower-equipped building across the street.

And here we are, back at the Ace.  But before heading upstairs, there’s one more thing we have to try.  Until now, we haven’t taken a sip of the legend itself:  Stumptown Coffee.  Happily, there’s one in the ground floor of the Ace.

Local coffee house Stumptown Coffee is an institution in Portland.  They have several coffee shops themselves, and many other local stores use their coffee.  It had already become obvious that Portlanders take their coffee very seriously – there’s an indie coffee shop on virtually every other corner in town.  Like beer, coffee is a way of life up there.  But having grown up in a coffee-centric family, I wondered:  how different could great Portland coffee be, really?

The answer came with the first sip:  very different indeed.

Almost without fail, coffee in Portland (especially Stumptown’s) was unlike the stuff we get down south.  It’s very smooth and not really all that bitter.  A lot of care is put into brewing it – simple coffee pots are not often seen in Portland.  Perhaps most refreshingly, almost none of the coffee shops in Portland served their coffee scalding hot – instead, it was served an actually drinkable temperature.  There’s no waiting around for it to cool, no tentative sipping and burned tongue.  It’s really, really great stuff.

As seen on my latte above, one of Stumptown’s signatures are the designs they put in the foam.  It was almost a shame to actually drink it and destroy the work that guy put into it.

We took our coffee to the Ace’s lobby and settled into the big cushy couches with a copy of one of the local alt-weeklies:  the Portland Mercury.  They seemed to have a bit more of a sense of humor than the alt-weeklies we know from back home.

We sipped our coffee and read about polar bears and chatted with some of the other guests.

The Ace really does have a lovely lobby.

We watched twilight fall on downtown Portland through the Ace’s big lobby windows before heading back upstairs to prepare for our third day.

As another example of the Ace’s quirky nature, here’s the sign next to the sink in the room.

Next to come:  day three, in which we make further explorations of Downtown and the Pearl, and make our first trip to Powell’s Books.

The term Quan Yin Method (also Guan Yin Method) was coined in 1985 by Ching Hai, to describe the type of meditation that she practices and teaches. The spelling is an idiosyncratic romanisation of a Chinese term said to be in English translation: “contemplation of the sound vibration”.[citation needed] It is markedly similar to the much older Surat Shabd Yoga from the Sant Mat tradition which also teaches meditation on the light and sound.

Ching Hai has said, “It’s not that I invented the Quan Yin Method; I just know it. This method has existed since the beginning of time, when the universe was first formed. And it will always exist. It is not a method; it is like the way of the universe, a universal law that we must follow if we want to get back to the Origin, back to our true Self, back to the Kingdom of God or our Buddha nature.”[9] In the book The Key of Immediate Enlightenment, it is said that those who recite her name would become elevated.[10]

Ching Hai initiates spiritual aspirants into the Quan Yin Method, which is purported to exist in various religions under different names, as the “best, easiest, and quickest” way to get enlightenment.[11][12][13] The method involves meditation on the “inner light and the inner sound of God”, or the Shabd that she claims is also referred to in the Bible and said to be acknowledged repeatedly in the literature of all the world’s major spiritual traditions. Ching Hai accepts people from all backgrounds and religious affiliations for initiation. One does not have to change one’s present religion or system of beliefs.[citation needed]

The Quan Yin Method requires two and a half hours of meditation per day and adherence to five precepts which appear to be borrowed from The Five Precepts of the Theravadin practice:

Refrain from taking the life of sentient beings. This precept requires strict adherence to a vegan or lacto-vegetarian diet. No meat, fish, poultry or eggs (fertilized or nonfertilized).

Refrain from speaking what is not true.

Refrain from taking what is not offered.

Refrain from sexual misconduct.

Refrain from the use of intoxicants. This includes avoiding all poisons of any kind, such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, pornography, and excessively violent films or literature.

As part of their meditation routine, followers of Ching Hai partially cover their heads under a sheet of cloth or blanket while meditating. However, while meditating away from the view of uninitiated people, the meditators do not necessarily use this cloth to cover their heads completely.The term Quan Yin Method (also Guan Yin Method) was coined in 1985 by Ching Hai, to describe the type of meditation that she practices and teaches. The spelling is an idiosyncratic romanisation of a Chinese term said to be in English translation: “contemplation of the sound vibration”.[citation needed] It is markedly similar to the much older Surat Shabd Yoga from the Sant Mat tradition which also teaches meditation on the light and sound.