Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Aknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Korea in the 1960s
- 2 The Columbans
- 3 Learning the Ropes
- 4 Cultural Adaptation
- 5 In at the Deep End
- 6 The Cultural Experience: Where to Begin
- 7 The Confucian Monolith
- 8 The Chosŏn Bureaucracy
- 9 The Buddhist Ingredient
- 10 Exclusivity Myths
- 11 Chilmajae Songs – Sŏ Chŏngju
- 12 Korea’s Greatest Asset
- 13 Tales of the Immortals
- 14 At the Cultural Coalface: Immersion, Submersion? – Take Your Pick
- 15 Nine Priest Immortals
- 16 Seeking the Way
- 17 For Those of us with Less Than Immortal Status
- 18 Learning Korean
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Buddhist Ingredient
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Aknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Korea in the 1960s
- 2 The Columbans
- 3 Learning the Ropes
- 4 Cultural Adaptation
- 5 In at the Deep End
- 6 The Cultural Experience: Where to Begin
- 7 The Confucian Monolith
- 8 The Chosŏn Bureaucracy
- 9 The Buddhist Ingredient
- 10 Exclusivity Myths
- 11 Chilmajae Songs – Sŏ Chŏngju
- 12 Korea’s Greatest Asset
- 13 Tales of the Immortals
- 14 At the Cultural Coalface: Immersion, Submersion? – Take Your Pick
- 15 Nine Priest Immortals
- 16 Seeking the Way
- 17 For Those of us with Less Than Immortal Status
- 18 Learning Korean
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In Chamshil (hanshi)
A vagabond for ten years; I’ve travelled east and west.
I’m like mugwort on a hill.
My way and the world's way offer bumpy alternatives.
Sniff a flower; say nothing: that's the ultimate choice.
Kim Shisŭp (1435–1493)Jubilee Temple (hanshi)
This temple from the past is covered with autumn grass;
a scholar's inscription endures on one of the stones:
‘A thousand years flow by like water;
clouds return to see the setting sun.’
Paek Kwanghun (1532–1582)Most things beautiful in Korea are Buddhist inspired. The monks were smart enough to pick the most beautiful valleys in the country as temple sites.
Tiny Room in Flower Sage Temple (hanshi)
Nine turns in a hundred paces, I climb the high mountain.
The house hangs in the air – it only has a few rooms.
The sacred spring is clear; cool water flows.
Old dark walls are spotted as if with green moss.
A stone-head pine ages under a sliver moon.
Clouds drape a thousand mountain peaks at the rim of the sky.
The dust of human affairs cannot reach this far.
Leisure is the hermit's joy through the ages.
Chŏng Chisang (?–1135)Cho Byunghwa (1921–2003) says that the most beautiful things are saddest. They are saddest because things change. Living this mutability taught him primeval loneliness and primeval emptiness. ‘I am within them,’ he says, ‘my poetry is within them, my consolation is within them.’ He learned a freedom of the spirit that affirmed and denied everything, and with this freedom he depicted a lonely self. It's a Buddhist point of view learned from his mother. Life and death are a continuum; death is a continuation not an end.
The road is an important symbol in Cho Byunghwa's poems and paintings. ‘Dialogue,’ a late poem dramatizes the theme. For the old man bereft of dreams, the road is short, but for the boy weighed down by dreams the road is long.
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- My Korea40 Years without a Horsehair Hat, pp. 150 - 166Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013