Kim_Iryop_s_Existential_Buddhism

Scribd Logo

Kim_Iryop_s_Existential_Buddhism_Review..pdf For Later


Kim Iryop S Existential Buddhism Review

Philosophy East & West Volume 66, Number 3 July 2016 1049–1051


Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun.

By Kim Iryŏp.



Translated and with an introduc-tion by Jin Y. Park. Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion. Honolulu: Uni-versity of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Pp. 328. Hardcover $49.00,

isbn

978-0-8248-3878-2.

Reviewed by

Eric S. Nelson

Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyUniversity of Massachusetts, Lowelleric_nelson@uml.edu

Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971) was raised and initially educated in a devout MethodistChristian environment under the strict guidance of her fideistic pastor father and hermother, who believed in female education. Both parents died while she was in herteens, and she questioned her Christian faith at an early age. She was one of the firstKorean women to pursue higher education in Korea and Japan. Kim became a pro-lific poet and essayist, her writings engaging cultural and social issues, and a leadingfigure of the feminist “new woman”

(sinyŏja)

movement in the 1920s, which pro-moted women’s self-awareness, freedom (including sexual freedom), and rights inthe context of the complex intersection of traditional Korean Confucian society,Westernization and modernization, and Japanese colonial domination. Iryŏp (herpen and dharma name) embraced Buddhism during this period, first in her writingand later as a lay practitioner, as a path to universal liberation. She was ordainedin 1933 and became a prominent Sŏn (Chan/Zen) Buddhist nun. After two decadeswithout publishing, she returned to print in 1960 with

Reflections of a Zen BuddhistNun



(Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang).

Jin Y. Park has been at the forefront of introducing Iryŏp as a modern female Bud-dhist thinker to the Western world.

1



Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun

is an ele-gant translation that includes all but two of the essays from the original

Reflections,

omitted to avoid repetition, and four additional essays that illuminate Iryŏp’s thinkingon Buddhist thought and practice. In her introduction Park provides an overview ofIryŏp’s biography and works in relation to the multifaceted social-political and intel-lectual situation of her era. Park articulates the existential passion and commitmentthat run throughout Iryŏp’s life and writing and through her shifting identities as ayouth who dreamed of becoming a Christian missionary, a young woman who ques-tioned her fideistically defined faith and dedicated herself to receiving an educationin a society that typically denied that opportunity to women, a feminist writer whoadvocated social change and free love, and a Sŏn nun devoted to meditation and thepromotion of the dharma. Iryŏp resisted the artificial constraints of society as a fem-inist and one’s own habitual self as a Buddhist for the sake of realizing the autono-mous and comprehensive life that is a fundamental theme of

Reflections.

The existential character and passion of Iryŏp’s writing, which blends reflectionand intimate autobiographical narrative, is evident from the beginning in her preface(chapter 1). She introduces basic existential questions such as: How does it standwith my own existence and what value does my existence have? How can I achieve






1050 Philosophy East & West

freedom and how do I become myself, a genuine self, in response to a situation inwhich we are unfree and “have lost ourselves”? The phrase “having lost myself”

(silsŏngin)

is used throughout the work and primarily means “to go crazy” in Korean.It is Buddhist practice that offers a response to the lostness of the human conditionby providing a perspective of wholeness, a tranquility and clarity of mind, and afreedom in the midst of the fluctuating conditions of life through the dedication andpurity of one’s thought in meditation.Iryŏp’s existential, individualistic, and in some ways modernistic understandingof Sŏn Buddhism is further developed in the chapters that follow. In the secondchapter, “Life,” she focuses on the primacy of life

(insaeng)

and its fulfillment in “in-dependent life” where one is of utmost value to oneself through realizing one’s rela-tional interconnectedness with all beings. Such autonomy becomes possible throughthe deconstructing of conventional boundaries and limitations. These include thelimiting ideas or idols of the Buddha and God that lead away from mindfulness ofone’s own self, which is realized through seeing the original emptiness of things andone’s own mind. Faith might be an initiation into the religious, but the religiousmeans overcoming all objects in no-thought, in which the dualities of subject /object,self/other, internal/external, good/evil, and God/demon fall away: “The Buddha asthe completed ‘I’ unifies within himself both a demon and a buddha” (p. 42).In the third chapter, “Buddhism and Culture,” Iryŏp maintains that there is noneed for fixed hierarchies, and no need to fear God or Buddha, since these areconventional designations for the open, unbounded, genuine self of each thing.All beings are buddhas, and are primordially equal to and in themselves — from amaggot to the Buddha, as she says later (p. 230). The differences between beings aredue not to an established hierarchy and inequality of beings but to their degree ofculture or their actualization of their original self-empty nature. Whereas we live“like dolls” (p. 46) controlled by environmental and karmic conditions, the Buddhais the greatest exemplar and teacher of a culture of freedom and responsibility that“only I” can realize for myself.Philosophy and autobiography are frequently assumed to be incompatible cate-gories in orthodox Western thought. The remaining chapters of Iryŏp’s

Reflections

reveal how autobiographical writing can be responsive to and reflective of an exis-tential situation. Chapters 4 and 5 describe her journey as a Buddhist nun in responseto the fifteenth anniversary of the death of her master, Man’gong (1871–1946), andto her twenty-fifth year as a monastic. Chapters 6 and 7 address social-political ques-tions such as peace and the Korean Buddhist purification movement.Chapters 8 to 11 are written as letters. They have an intimate self-reflective stylerevealing the existential import of Buddhist practice and thought in her life. Iryŏpresponds to Ch’oe Namsŏn’s (1890–1957) conversion from Buddhism to Catholicismin chapter 8. Iryŏp replies to a childhood friend in chapter 9 to explain her own con-version to Buddhism. Chapters 10 and 11 are the most personal of the work as theseare addressed to two of her lovers from her life as a “new woman” in the 1920s: thepoet Im Nowŏl (fl. 1920–1925) and the Buddhist philosopher and non-celibate monkPaek Sŏnguk (1897–1981), whose influence was crucial to her initial interpretation



Book Reviews 1051

and practice of Buddhism. These chapters reveal in a personal way the complex in-tersections and tensions between tradition and modernity, secularism and religion,Christianity and Buddhism, and male and female gender roles in twentieth-centuryKorean life.Part 1 concludes with letters from Paek Sŏnguk and Iryŏp’s attendant. Part 2sheds additional light on her understanding of Buddhism with the translation of threedharma talks and a letter to journalists. The letter to journalists raises the issue ofwhether she abandoned her earlier views of gender fairness, as critics argue, or em-ployed the traditional language of male superiority to address male correspondents.Park’s important edition of Iryŏp’s writings will interest those readers concernednot only with modern Korean intellectual history and Korean Buddhism but also withexamples of reflective or philosophical autobiography, experiences of crisis and con-version, and how one singular person responds to her existential condition.

Note1 – See Jin Y. Park, “Gendered Response to Modernity: Kim Iryŏp and Buddhism,” in Jin Y.Park, ed.,

Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism

(Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 2009), pp. 109–130.