Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun

Jin Y. Park is professor of Asian and comparative philosophy and religion and founding director of the Asian studies program at American University.

Translator’s Introduction

Kim Iryŏp, Her Life and Thought

Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971) was a writer, new woman, and Zen Buddhist nun whose life offers us a panorama of modern Korean society. Modernity as a global phenomenon has brought changes in the way people understand the world and create values. Rationality, secularism, freedom, equality, and civil society are some of modernity’s major characteristics. To understand modernity in East Asia, however, it is necessary to recognize that, along with these universal tenets, modernity brought with it a wholesale encounter with the West that transformed East Asian societies and their intellectual environments. The scale and nature of this transformation cannot be overemphasized. Kim Iryŏp’s life and writings bear witness

to the disruptive forces set loose when traditional and modern Korea collided.

There has been until recently limited scholarship on Kim Iryŏp. Early studies examine her writings in the context of the formation of modern Korean literature,1 or compare her with Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), the most well-known female writer of the Meiji period (1868–1912) in Japan.2 Beginning in the late 1990s, along with the increased interest in modernity and gender in Korea, Kim Iryŏp’s activities as a new woman and her influence on the identity and life choices of women in modern Korea began to attract attention.3 Publications on modernity and gender in Korea almost always mention Kim Iryŏp, and the issues with which her name is associated are diverse, ranging from her views on the modernization of women’s clothing to female sexuality and chastity, marriage, divorce, women’s education, parenting, and the role of the journal New Women.4 The influence of Christianity on Iryŏp has also recently become a topic of research.5 Nevertheless, Kim Iryŏp as a Buddhist nun and her Buddhist writings have rarely been explored.6 On the surface Kim Iryŏp appears to have lived two distinct lives. During the 1920s she was a public figure, an exemplar of Korea’s new woman; from the mid-1930s until her death in 1971, she lived as a Buddhist nun, confining her activities primarily to the religious domain. The conclusion of some is that there was a bifurcation of Iryŏp’s life, the line of demarcation being her tonsure.7 Recent scholarship, however, has begun to see more continuity between the two periods of her life.8

Iryŏp published throughout her life. Her literary publications before she took Buddhist vows took the form of poems, short stories, and autobiographical essays in which she focused on women’s identity, the meaning of religious practice, and existential loneliness as she faced the death of family members.9 In the period when she identified herself as a new woman, she dedicated herself to gender issues, trying to understand women’s existence within a social milieu. Once she became a Buddhist and then a Buddhist nun, she fully embraced Buddhist teachings, inter-

preting human existence through a religious worldview.

Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, titled in Korean Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang (Memoir of a practitioner), was published when Iryŏp was in her sixties and is a combination of the diverse aspects of her life, a life that may properly be characterized as a space wherein traditional and modern values contend and co-exist. When she wanted to move forward, tradition held her back; when she felt disillusioned with the new values because of the limitations of society’s capacity to embrace them, traditional values offered her a new vision. In turn, Iryŏp’s religious understanding offered a new path for Buddhist tradition through her own creative interpretations. Iryŏp’s life also reflects the encounter of two major religions: Christianity and Buddhism. Through her reflections on them, Iryŏp ponders the meaning of religion and religious practice in the modern secularized world and offers a way that these two religions might understand each other.

Iryŏp addresses a variety of questions in her book: How does one come to terms with one’s identity? What is society’s role in the construction of identity? What is the meaning of rebellion and what are its limitations? What does it mean to be in love and what are its different dimensions? How do we philosophize that experience and how do we do so in the context of Buddhist teachings? What is the meaning of religion? How do we live as religious practitioners? How do we understand God and the relationship between good and evil? What and how does Buddhism teach us about all of these issues? What is the ultimate meaning of Buddhist practice? Iryŏp shares these and other concerns with her readers as she reflects on her life experiences. All of these questions coalesce for her around one issue: How to be a real human being. Her creative activities as a writer, social rebellion as a new woman, and religious practice as a Zen Buddhist nun were paths toward the single goal of how to be fully human and thus to live as an absolutely free being with unlimited capacity.

A Pastor’s Daughter Grows Up to Be a New Woman

Kim Wŏnju, as she was known before she took the pen name Iryŏp, was born in the northern part of Korea, the first child of a Christian pastor and his wife. According to her book, her father was from a learned family and her grandfather, the headmaster of a public school, was well respected by the people of his village.10 Her mother was the second wife of her father, whose first wife had died. Iryŏp’s mother was not a traditional woman by Korean standards of the time and was not interested in traditional women’s work. Iryŏp remembers that her mother wanted to educate her

daughter just as boys were educated so that Iryŏp would have the same opportunities as men and not be destined to live the life of a traditional woman.11 Her parents had an unusual zeal for the education of their first child. Bhikṣuṇī (Buddhist nun) Wŏlsong, a disciple of Kim Iryŏp who

served her during the last years of Iryŏp’s life until her death in 1971, mentioned that Iryŏp’s mother’s non-traditional concept of gender must have been a significant influence on Iryŏp’s worldview.12 However, Iryŏp rarely discusses in her own writings her relationship with her mother or her mother’s influence on her. By contrast, Iryŏp had an unusually close relationship with her father, and in several of her later works she reflects on the influence of her father’s Christian beliefs on the formation of her own thought.

Iryŏp describes her father as “the most devoted Christian” in Korea.13 Her father’s religious devotion inspired young Iryŏp to envision her future as a Christian missionary spreading the word of God.14 Iryŏp’s faith in Christianity, however, slowly declined as she went through adolescence and began questioning certain aspects of life, including some Christian doctrines. By the year 1918 she had almost completely lost her faith. Even so, she did not publically discuss her relationship to Christianity at that time or for many years thereafter. Her thoughts about Christianity appear only in her later works, and Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun was the first venue in which she seriously engaged with the subject. One of the reasons for her delayed reflection on Christianity seems to be her relationship with her father. It would have been difficult for her to challenge her father’s deeply held religious beliefs and his life as a Christian minister.

Iryŏp credits Christianity for her parents’ ideas about educating female children. She was allowed, after completing her education in her hometown, to move to Seoul to attend Ewha15 Hakdang (1913–1915), where she received today’s equivalent of a high school education, and continued on at Ewha Chŏnmun (1915–1918), an institution of women’s higher education. In 1918 Iryŏp married Yi Noik, a biology professor at Yŏnhui Chŏnmun (today’s Yonsei University). Iryŏp has little to say about him, but we know that she met him through the owner of the rooming house where Yi was staying at the time. Yi, who was almost forty years old when they met,16 offered Iryŏp both financial security and support for her aspirations to become a writer. In 1919 Iryŏp expressed her desire to go to Japan for further studies, which her husband also supported. During her stay in Japan from 1919 to 1920, she met Korean intellectuals in Tokyo, including Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950) and Na Hyesŏk (1896–1948). Yi Kwangsu was a well-known writer, poet, literary critic, and intellectual who left a visible mark on the history of modern Korean literature. Yi gave the pen name “Iryŏp” to Kim Wŏnju, encouraging her to become the Higuchi Ichiyō of Korea.17 The name “Iryŏp” is the Korean pronunciation of the same Chinese characters that are read as “Ichiyō” in Japanese. Na Hyesŏk is known as the first female to paint in the Western style in Korea. Na went to Japan in 1913 to study painting. In her essay “Ideal Women” (Isangjŏk puin), published in 1914, Na mentions Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), a leading Japanese writer and activist of women’s issues at the time, as someone whose life and thought were close to what she considered those of an ideal woman. This indicates that Na must have been familiar with the women’s movement in Japan. This suggests as well that, in addition to Iryŏp’s own exposure to women’s movements in Japan, Na influenced Iryŏp’s ideas about the women’s movement. Iryŏp and Na would share their intellectual lives for years to come through their activities as writers and new women.

Iryŏp returned to Korea in 1920 and launched a journal titled New Women (Sinyŏja). The journal was credited as the first to be published in Korea by a woman for the promotion of women’s issues.18 During this period, Iryŏp also organized a forum called the Blue Tower Society (Ch’ŏng-t’aphoe), providing further evidence that she was aware of and influenced by the Japanese women’s journal Bluestockings (Seitō), published by the Seitōsha (Association for Bluestockings), which was run by Hiratsuka Raichō and other female intellectuals in Japan.19 New Women had a short life. Its inaugural issue was published in March 1920 and the fourth and last issue was published in June of the same year.20 Iryŏp nowhere explicitly mentions the financing of the journal, but it has been proposed that the cost of its publication was exclusively borne by her husband; the short life of the journal was therefore likely due to financial difficulties.21

The publication of New Women marked one of the turning points in Kim Iryŏp’s life because it was the first venue in which her writings became known to the public. As the journal’s editor-in-chief, Iryŏp found her own voice and began to secure her position within Korea’s intellectual circle. For about a decade following the publication of the journal, Iryŏp demonstrated her talent as a writer and proved herself a passionate public speaker on behalf of women’s issues and social change. The publication of New Women was an essential factor in the formation of the identity of the new women as a group in Korea. It has been noted that the emergence of this group was visible by 1920, but it had not developed a clear group identity until the publication of New Women.22

Closely related to the emergence of the new women is the introduction of a public education system for women in Korea. Ewha Hakdang, the first modern women’s educational institution in Korea, was established in 1886, but it took time for the idea of educating women to catch on. In Confucian Korean society, a woman’s role was limited to working in the home, and the idea of allowing a female child to receive a public education was new. Only one student enrolled at Ewha Hakdang in its first year.23 The trend gradually changed, and the number of students attending the school grew from a single individual in 1886 to 47 in 1899, and 174 within the next ten years.24 By the 1920s it was not unusual to see female students on the streets of Seoul.25 This new generation of women, with their formal, modern-style education, more often than not was awakened to gender issues and demanded changes to the traditional roles and positions of women in their society. In contrast to the traditional image of women, the new women envisioned life above and beyond traditional domestic roles. Yi Paeyong proposed the following five traits as characteristics of the new women: “first, economic independence; second, rationalization and simplification of the family system; third, rejection of male-dominated traditional thought; fourth, a call for a stronger awareness of women’s responsibilities and duties; fifth, campaigns by women’s organizations and female students for ‘old women’ so that they can become aware of various women’s issues including health and child education.”26

Despite these general commonalities, the new women were not an entirely homogeneous group, and all kinds of ideas shaped the evolving concept of the new women.27 Kim Iryŏp and Na Hyesŏk were often categorized as “liberal new women” who emphasized sexual freedom as a ground for women’s liberation.28

Iryŏp’s writings during the 1920s and early 1930s can be grouped into three types: writings on women’s issues, autobiographical essays,and religious essays. Over this ten-year period, Iryŏp’s perspective and major concerns about women’s issues changed. From 1920, when she first published in New Women, until around 1924, her approach to women’s issues was modest, focusing on education and emphasizing the importance of women’s self-awakening. In the inaugural issue of New Women, Iryŏp urged her fellow new women to be discreet in action and cautioned that any individual inappropriate displays would lead to a negative judgment of the entire group.29 Iryŏp also emphasized the importance of new women’s responsibility in bringing about changes to their society.30

In July 1924 Iryŏp published an essay entitled “Our Ideals” (Uri ŭiisang) in which she proposed three new ideals for women: 1) a new theory of chastity (sin chŏngjo ron), 2) a new individualism (sin kaein juŭi), and 3) the exercise of discretion in choosing a spouse. This is the first time Iryŏp spells out what is known as her “new theory of chastity.”

“Our Ideals” begins by declaring that if women wish to lead a new life, they should rigorously challenge traditional morality regarding female sexuality. In this context Iryŏp singles out the issue of chastity. As traditionally conceived, chastity was exclusively a woman’s virtue, a moral principle that dictated that a woman should be faithful to one man. Challenging this definition, Iryŏp claims that chastity is not a moral concept but should be understood as a measure of one’s affection for one’s lover.31 Her purpose here is twofold: She first reveals the traditional concept to be a moralistic mechanism for controlling women and, second, claims equal acknowledgment of women’s sexuality with that of men in Korean society. Iryŏp supports her point by arguing that controlling women by making their chastity into a moral principle negates their individual identity. In the 1927 essay “My View on Chastity” (Na ŭi chŏngjokwan), Iryŏp repeats this argument and reinforces her philosophical reasoning on the relationship between the new concept of chastity and the recognition of individual identity, in this case with the individual meant to include both sexes. In asserting chastity as the highest expression of one’s love and thereby of one’s individual being, she hoped to connect it as intrinsic to the creation of a new world and new values.32

Iryŏp was not alone in challenging the traditional conceptions of female sexuality and chastity as the ground for gender suppression and thereby establishing their reconceptualization as a first step for women’s liberation. Writings by Japanese new women foreshadowed Iryŏp’s, as can be seen in Raichō’s 1915 essay “The Value of Virginity” (J. Shojo no shinka) in which she criticizes the traditional morality related to women’s virginity in a way similar to Iryŏp’s.33 Raichō was preceded by a Swedish thinker, Ellen Key (1849–1926), who published extensively on the issue of

women’s liberation in connection with love, marriage, and sexuality. Key is not widely familiar to feminists today, but she had a strong influence on the new women in the beginning of the twentieth century in America and Japan as well as Korea.34

Iryŏp’s view on chastity might have been the most well-known aspect of her thought as a new woman, but it was not the only theme that occupied her during this period. Iryŏp’s other publications deserve equal attention because, unlike the subject of chastity, which faded from her writings after 1927, the issues dealt with in other of her works during this time appear repeatedly with some variation in her later works. One such theme is Iryŏp’s reflection on religion and religious practice, which is a major theme of the short story “Revelation” (Kyesi), published in the inaugural issue of New Women. Iryŏp here reflects on the function of religion through the story of a mother who blindly attaches herself first to shamanism and then Christianity to save her dying sons, all to no avail. The story begins three days after the protagonist’s second son suddenly falls ill. The protagonist, Mrs. Kim, is in despair, having lost her eldest son three years earlier when he was only seven years old. Despite her extreme distress, Mrs. Kim does not go to a shaman this time, as she had when her eldest son was dying; she is by now a faithful Christian. But, despite her desperate prayers and those of other church members, the son dies. The boy’s last wish was to have a Bible with gold-embossed letters on the cover like that of a classmate. The story ends with an allusion to the indifference of the environment surrounding this tragedy, the continuation of everyday routine even as the mother drowns in her sorrow. It is easy to comprehend in this story Iryŏp’s struggle to understand the meaning of religion and the individual’s relationship to faith. The gloomy conclusion is no doubt suggestive of her attitude toward these matters at the time. Thirty years later, in the essays contained in Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, Iryŏp will offer, among other things, full-fledged reflections on the meaning of faith, religion, and religious education, as well as her relationship to and understanding of Christianity and Buddhism.

In another of her short stories, “Awakening” (Chagak, 1926), Iryŏp tells of a young wife named Sunsil whose husband cheated on her while in Japan for his studies. Unlike the traditional woman, who would be a steadfast wife despite her husband’s unfaithfulness, Iryŏp’s heroine boldly leaves his family, with whom she had been living, even giving up her newborn child to pursue an education and become independent. The story ends with Sunsil’s self-affirmation: “Now that I have escaped a life of cruel slavery, I have the choice to be a full human being, leading a worthy

and meaningful life. And I am going to look for a person who will take me as such.”35 In this story, published a year before the publication of “My View on Chastity,” Iryŏp portrays Sunsil as a new woman who bravely faces the perennial issue of the unfaithful husband, not by subjecting her-

self to the fate of the traditional woman but by turning the situation into an occasion for self-development.

Iryŏp’s autobiographical essays frequently express her loneliness at being the only surviving member of her family. The death of her sister in 1907 is the occasion of the poem “Death of a Sister” (Tongsaeng ŭichugŏm). Her mother died in 1909 in childbirth, with the newborn baby, a boy, succumbing several days later. In her essay “Mother’s Graveyard” (Ŏmŏni ŭi mudŏm, 1920), she remembers how her mother desperately prayed for Iryŏp when she was sick as a child. In 1915 her father died; she was nineteen.36 Her half-sister, Iryŏp’s only immediate family member

left after the death of her father, died in 1919. The occasion is described in her essay “Death of a Sister” (Tongsaeng ŭi chugŏm, 1920). In “Before My Father’s Soul” (Abŏnim yŏngjŏn e, 1925), Iryŏp asks her dead father for advice about how to get through the difficulties she was facing at

the time. “Hometown Hill Where My Siblings Were Buried” (Tonsaeng mudŭn twit tongsan, 1933) contains Iryŏp’s recollection of playing with her sisters as a child and her mourning that they are all gone. Her autobiographical essays during this period are charged with dialogues with her

dead family members, reflecting her sense of loss and loneliness. In the background of Iryŏp’s solitude we find existential questions that will soon be expressed more explicitly in her writings and her life. From 1930, when she published her first essay about Buddhism, “The Second Anniversary of Being a Buddhist” (Pulmun t’ujok i chunyŏn e), until the publication of “Practicing Buddhism” (Puldo rŭl taggŭmyŏ) in 1935, Buddhism became one of the major themes of Iryŏp’s writings.

In the World of the Buddha Kim

Iryŏp’s introduction to Buddhism took place around 1927, when she became involved with the journal Buddhism (Pulgyo).37 She began contributing to the journal in 1927 and continued until 1932, just before she joined a monastery in 1933. According to one source, Iryŏp was deeply impressed by a dharma talk given by Zen Master Man’gong as early as 1923.38 Nevertheless, she did not seem familiar with Buddhism when her first writings appeared in Buddhism. Recalling those days, Iryŏp confessed that at that time she was not interested in Buddhism and did not bother to read those sections of the journal that covered Buddhist doctrine.39 In other words, Kim Iryŏp’s involvement with the journal Buddhism was not initiated by her interest in Buddhism. It was rather through the offices of Pang In’gŭn (1899–1975), a Korean writer and the husband of a friend from Ewha Hakdang, that Iryŏp was introduced to the journal as an outlet for her literary works. As has been pointed out by Pang Minho, a scholar of Korean literature, the fact that a Buddhist journal welcomed contributions from a non-Buddhist writer like Iryŏp demonstrates the efforts that modern Korean Buddhism made to connect with the general public.40 Not only was Iryŏp not familiar with Buddhism around 1927, her upbringing as a Christian gave her the impression that Buddhism was a superstition and Buddhists immoral people. But when Iryŏp actually met the Buddhists involved with the journal, she realized that Buddhism was far different from what she had been led to believe. She found Buddhist ceremonies solemn, sacred, and peaceful. She also noticed that, contrary to what she had heard about Buddhist monks being wanton, the people working for the journal Buddhism were modest and reasonable. Her understanding of Buddhist doctrine probably began through her efforts to improve her knowledge of literary Chinese (hanmun). It was in that context that she began reading Buddhist scriptures with a Buddhist scholar, Kwŏn Sangno (1879–1965).

Kwŏn Sangno was the editor of Buddhism from its inaugural issue, published on July 15, 1924, until October 1931, after which Manhae Han Yongun (1879–1944) was the editor until February 1937. Since Iryŏp was a regular contributor until 1932, she must have been in frequent contact with Kwŏn, even though no reference to him appears in her writings. However, she does not even mention him in her essay describing her initial encounter with Buddhist thought, other than to say that she studied scriptures with him. She does not tell which scriptures she studied. What we do know is that from her first exposure to Buddhism, Iryŏp had a favorable impression of the religion.

I cannot say that at that time I understood Buddhist teachings, which are both ordinary and profound, but I could at least feel clearly that it was definitely good. I also believed Buddhist teaching to be something big that could save not only me as an individual but the entire world, and

the entire universe as well. My heart was filled with a desire to learn, but I was not even sure what I should know or what I wanted to know. I did not know whom I should ask or even what to ask regarding Buddhism, yet the idea that I should let other people learn about Buddhism became urgent.41

Iryŏp seems not to have known much about the situation of Korean Buddhism at the time other than what she describes above through her experience with the people associated with the journal. Like other East Asian countries, Korea opened its door to foreign powers at the end of the nineteenth century, a situation that presented Buddhism with new and challenging social influences. Korean Buddhist efforts to meet the challenges of the changing environment appeared in two major forms. The first was Buddhism’s attempts at renovation to prove its relevance to modern society; the second involved the resurgence of Zen (Sŏn) Buddhism through the revival of the monastic tradition and meditation training.42 By the 1920s, Korean Buddhist reformists were aware of the importance of bringing Buddhism down to the public from the secluded mountainside. They emphasized popularization as one of the most urgent tasks for the survival of Buddhism in the changing environment of the time. A series of essays demanding the reformation and revitalization of Korean Buddhism appeared from the 1910s to the 1930s. Kwŏn Sangno’s “Treatise on the Reformation of Korean Buddhism” (Chosŏn Pulgyo kaehyŏngnon,1912–1913) was the first to appear in this context. Kwŏn here emphasizes the importance of education for the reform of Buddhism. Following Kwŏn’s treatise was Han Yongun’s “Treatise on the Revitalization of Korean Buddhism” (Chosŏn Pulgyo yusillon, 1913), which became the most well known of this group of writings. There is no indication in Iryŏp’s writings of whether she had read any of these treatises,43 and her analysis of Buddhism at the time seems to be based more on her own experience as a Christian. She, for example, wondered why Buddhists were not actively involved with proselytizing, whereas the voice of Christianity was growing louder and its zeal for proselytizing stronger. Iryŏp worried about low attendance at Buddhist temples and questioned whether the women who did go to temples actually knew anything about Buddhism. She was also concerned about the lack of networking among Buddhists and expressed the need for a sense of engagement among members of the Buddhist tradition. Iryŏp wanted to improve this situation and wrote of her intention to propose a scripture reading group as well as a Buddhist study group to several other people in a youth committee with which she seems to have gotten involved. She also expressed her wish to spread Buddhism to those with no opportunity to encounter this teaching.44 Whether she actually submitted such a proposal and, if so, whether the study group achieved the goal she had set, is not known. Regardless, her observations about Buddhism during her two years of exposure to the religion were quite accurate and address issues with which Korean Buddhism would long struggle.

From her initial encounter with Buddhism around 1927 until 1933, when she joined the monastery,Iryŏp continued her diverse ways of studying and practicing Buddhism. She divorced in 1921 and in 1929 remarried a non-celibate Buddhist monk named Ha Yunsil, who was also involved with the journal Buddhism.45 During this period Iryŏp apparently followed the path of a lay Buddhist practitioner and, together with her non-celibate monk-husband, led a secular life. In her essay “Buddhist Practice and My Family” (Sin Pul kwa na ŭi kajŏng) published in 1931, Iryŏp describes her life with Ha Yunsil as an acceptable way to practice Buddhism. She regrets the waste of the ten-something years before she became a Buddhist when she was ignorant of the Buddha’s teaching. She notes that she had considered joining the monastery when she first became a Buddhist but realized that she would not be able to completely extinguish desires and feelings of affection and thus decided to remain a lay practitioner. She married a non-celibate monk, she explains, in order to secure her Buddhist practice far into the future.46 Although she does not perform Buddhist rituals, she claims that, whenever she has time, she practices chanting to develop concentration (yŏmbul sammae); she also reads introductory books on Buddhism.47 She ends the essay by expressing her wish that, later in life, she will be able to practice meditation.48

Her commitment to the life of a lay practitioner eventually changed, and in 1933 she joined the monastery. She was thirty-eight years old. After this point her activities as a writer diminished, and in 1935 she completely stopped publishing her writings.49 “Practicing Buddhism” (Puldo rŭl taggŭmyŏ), which appeared in the journal Three Thousand Li (Samch’ŏlli) in January 1935, was almost her last publication until other of her works appeared in the late 1950s. In “Practicing Buddhism,” Iryŏp tells how her teacher, Zen Master Man’gong, advised her not to write poems or fiction,50 and she declares that she would faithfully follow that dictum for the next two decades. In an essay written on the anniversary of Man’gong’s death that appears in Reflections, Iryŏp reminds herself of her teacher’s comment on her literary activities. When he admonished her that a bowl that is full cannot be refilled, Iryŏp responded that she had already emptied her bowl, meaning that she had left behind her practice of writing and reading.51 Since then, she avows, she has devoted herself only to practice, never going to bed before ten o’clock in the evening and never failing to rise before two o’clock in the morning. In the 1960 edition of her essay “In Memory of Great Master Man’gong” (Man’gong taehwasang ŭl ch’ŭmo hayŏ), Iryŏp records that she had stopped reading and writing “for more than ten years” after the master advised her to do so.52 In the 1962 version of the same essay, which appeared in Having Burned Away My Youth (Ch’ŏngch’un ŭl pulsarŭgo), she is more specific about the dates, stating that “for eighteen years,” she stopped reading and writing.53 During the 1950s she gradually resumed publishing her writings. In 1960 her first book, Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, came out.

Iryŏp entered the monastery of Sŏbongam on Mount Kŭmgang in June 1933. Zen Master Man’gong was her dharma teacher. In 1934 she received a dharma teaching from Man’gong that states, “Only after the nature [of your mind] becomes pure like a lotus flower should you go out from this mountain.”54 She also received from Master Man’gong her dharma name, Hayŏp, meaning Lotus Petal. From the time when she first joined the monastery until she settled down in Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage (Kyŏnsŏngam) in 1936,55 Iryŏp practiced in several different places. She began practicing at Chikchi Monastery (Chikchisa) in Kimch’ŏn, Kyŏngbuk Province, and then at Sŏbongam and Mahayŏn on Mount Kŭmgang; she then moved to Sŏnhakwŏn in Seoul. She practiced in each place for about three months before moving on to the next.56 She did a winter retreat at Sudŏk Monastery (Sudŏksa) in 193657 and remained there for the rest of her life.

Generally speaking, Buddhist nuns in contemporary Korea are trained in two ways. Basic doctrinal education is received in a seminary (kangwŏn), and meditation is practiced in a meditation hall (sŏnwŏn). This tradition had not, however, been fully established at the time Iryŏp joined the monastery. The first meditation hall for nuns opened at Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage at Sudŏk Monastery at the beginning of the twentieth century.58 Immediately after its opening Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage became a major force in revitalizing the Zen tradition for Korean nuns, and today it continues to play a central role as a place for nuns’ practice in Korea. Iryŏp was one of the first generation of nuns in modern Korean Buddhism to pursue their practice at Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage, where she stayed until her death in 1971 except for a short period when she stayed at Hwanhŭidae for health reasons. Iryŏp’s teacher, Zen Master Man’gong, is one of the most well-known Zen masters in modern Korean Buddhism. He is also known for his dedication to the training of nuns. Myori Pŏphui (1887–1975), who is considered the revitalizer of Zen meditation practice for nuns in modern Korea, also practiced under Master Man’gong and eventually earned recognition for her awakening from him.

Around 1966, due to age-related health problems, Iryŏp moved to a structure called Hwanhŭidae (Delightful Terrace). At that time, Hwanhŭidae was a small house, which had been renovated into a place of practice by Wŏlsong, one of Iryŏp’s disciples. Daily life at Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage and Hwanhŭidae during Iryŏp’s time there was undoubtedly not exactly the same as now, but the daily routine of these places today gives us a sense of Iryŏp’s life.59 Practitioners get up at 3:00 a.m.; morning prayers and meditation follow. Breakfast is served at 6:00 a.m. After the morning meal, practitioners do cleaning and have free time for about an hour. At Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage, practitioners meditate between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. At 10:00 a.m., morning offerings to the Buddha (sasi maji) are performed, a ritual that includes about an hour of prayer. Lunch is served at 11:00 a.m. and dinner at 5:00 p.m. In between, practitioners are free to devote time to study, practice, or doing chores around the temple. At 6:30 p.m., the evening service is performed for about half an hour. After the service, some might continue prayers to the Buddha until about 7:30 p.m. During the evening study time, practitioners are on their own either to meditate, study Buddhist texts, or engage in other practices. Bedtime is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. The time between waking and retiring at Kyŏnsong Hermitage is devoted to meditation, whereas at Hwanhŭidae the time is divided among meditation, sūtra studying, and various chores and errands for the management of the place. Iryŏp moved back to Kyŏnsŏng Hermitage from Hwanhŭidae in 1970, expressing her wish to spend her final days with other practitioners.

Iryŏp’s Buddhist practice was mainly focused on meditation, and the form of meditation she practiced is known as hwadu (Ch. huatou, or “critical phrase”) meditation. In November 1934 Iryŏp was interviewed by the literary journal Opening of the World (Kaebyŏk). Her first interview after her tonsure in June 1933, it appeared in the January 1935 issue. The reporter who conducted the interview asked Iryŏp whether Iryŏp was studying Buddhist scriptures, to which Iryŏp responded in the negative. Iryŏp confirmed that she exclusively practiced hwadu and described hwadu practice as being like “resolving one big doubt.” She added, “This is a practice of focusing one’s mind on a single thought.”60

Hwadu meditation is a Zen Buddhist practice originally developed by the twelfth-century Chinese Chan master Dahui Zhonggao (1089–1163).61 Pojo Chinul (1158–1210)62 first introduced this style of meditation in the thirteenth century; it was fully integrated into Zen practice by his successor Hyesim (1178–1234).63 Since then, hwadu meditation has been the dominant form of Zen Buddhist practice in Korea. Hwadu meditation developed out of gongan (better known in the English-speaking world by its Japanese pronunciation kōan) tradition. A gongan (or a kōan) in general refers to a dialogue between a Zen master and a student. Hwadu meditation takes a “critical phrase” (hwadu) from a gongan dialogue and utilizes that phrase in meditation. In the case of Iryŏp, Master Man’gong gave her the well-known hwadu “Ten thousand things return to one; to where does the one return?”64 The fundamental idea of hwadu meditation is to liberate oneself from a habitual mode of thinking. The Buddhist worldview is known as “dependent co-arising” (yŏn’gi). It teaches that nothing exists as an unchanging, independent essence; instead Buddhism claims that things exist through the cooperative functioning of different constituents, which are subject to interactive movements of causes and conditions. This idea applied to the individual self is the Buddhist theory of non-self (mua). The self is non-self in the sense that what we think of as self is contingent and provisional. What we call self is constituted through the combination and co-working of different factors and nobody possesses an unchanging and permanent essence that could be called one’s core self.

Iryŏp understood these Buddhist ideas as a fundamental source of freedom and equality. Reflecting on the time when she joined the monastery, she states that she felt a sense of urgency, describing this urgency as a “need to survive.” This was the topic of the dharma talk Man’gong gave to her when she became his disciple: “When one leaves the secular world and joins a monastery, the study for the person is ‘to survive.’”65 The existential urgency expressed by Man’gong as grounds for Buddhist practice becomes a major theme of Iryŏp’s Buddhism. Iryŏp explains this awareness of existential reality as a desperate desire to become a “human being.”66 To become a human being, to her, is to find the real self, the real “I.”

In the preface to Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, Iryŏp diagnoses the period in which she was living as a time of the lost self. Individuals in her time, she proposes, have lost themselves but are unaware of that fact. The time of the lost self, from Iryŏp’s perspective, is characterized by life lived in a bound state, a constrained life that inevitably results in dissatisfaction and discontent. The purpose of Buddhist practice for Iryŏp is to enable the self to realize its true nature and thus liberate itself from its bound state. Iryŏp asserts that this realization is absolutely necessary for at least two reasons. First, without this realization of the Buddhist teachings, we believe that our being is limited to the boundary of our physical reality when in truth we are unbound beings with limitless capacity. Our existence is constrained by the limits created not only by our physical reality but also by our limited mental capacity. Second, without this realization, we cannot recognize the source of our suffering. Iryŏp tells us that suffering in this life is caused by a failure to see the reality of one’s self, which then becomes the cause for further suffering in future lives in the cycle of transmigration. With the realization of the limitless capacity of oneself comes the freedom of an open self. Iryŏp calls this self the “great self” (taea).

In contrast to this great self, people tend to prefer the boundaries inherent in the worldly idea of the self, which allows them to remain within their comfort zone. The self that insists on staying within its shell is what Iryŏp calls the “small self” (soa). One who has achieved the state of the

great self and is capable of generating the values of its own existence Iryŏp calls a “person of culture” (munhwain). In the chapter entitled “Buddhism and Culture” (Pulgyo wa munhwa) in Reflections, Iryŏp characterizes the Buddha as a great person of culture and professes that she joined the monastery because she recognized that to become such a person meant practicing Buddhism.

The capacity attained by liberating oneself from the boundaries of the small self and embracing the freedom of the great self is what Iryŏp calls “creativity” (ch’angjosŏng). This creativity is for Iryŏp each individual’s original mind (pon maŭm), a mind that is absolutely open and the source

of one’s existence. An individual who realizes original mind becomes a “complete being” (wanin), a being whose existence embraces the entire universe. Unlike the religious commonplace that confers on a religious leader entirely positive attributes, Iryŏp claims that the Buddha unifies

within himself the qualities of both a buddha and a demon. The world, then, is envisioned as being inclusive by virtue of the existential reality of Buddhism, which is that no being exists as an independent entity. The idea that the Buddha encompasses both positive and negative qualities

is not an endorsement of evil but an understanding that any binary construction, including that of good and evil, is mutually indebted for its existence. This world of mutually indebted genesis is one of absolute equality wherein a broken piece of a tile and the Buddha share the same logic of existence.

In her later life, Iryŏp’s ideas of the great self, creativity, and original mind evolve into a philosophy of “life” or of “life force” (saengmyŏng). She briefly discusses this concept at the beginning of Reflections, and the idea constitutes a major theme of her last book, In Between Happiness and Misfortune (Haengbok kwa pulhaeng ŭi kalp’i esŏ), published in 1964. She submits in this book that the state of life is a state of oneness and this oneness is the source of all existence. This oneness is not “the one” in the sense of being the first or the most precious; it is the one in the sense that there are no other numbers, nothing is outside of this one; it is the all-inclusive one.

The sensory world is the material world, and for Iryŏp, the ground of this visible and tangible world is life or life energy. Life energy itself is one, it being a state before division. Since it is one without division, it is absolute. The goal of Buddhist practice for Iryŏp is to realize this one and absolute

state of existence. It is this realization that allows us to begin to take down the boundaries of the small self and attain freedom.

With her philosophy of life, Iryŏp’s journey had taken her to the most fundamental ground of existence. It began when she challenged the socially constructed identity of a woman. She rebelled against this externally imposed identity and value system by critically evaluating women’s role in society and society’s concept of the female virtue of chastity. After joining the monastery, her search for identity extended to the terrain of the nature of freedom and equality. As a new woman, her challenge was directed outward to identifying the source of constraints imposed by society on her as a female. As a Buddhist practitioner, Iryŏp examined the nature of the self; the direction of her search for freedom and the meaning of existence turned inward. The social criticism of her early period gave way to the spiritual and religious search for the fundamental nature of existence itself. It was Buddhism that offered the foundational teaching for Iryŏp’s journey into her self.

Kim Iryŏp and Her Readers

Kim Iryŏp led a multifaceted life that sometimes embraced conflicting ideas and ideals. She was a born Christian who became a Buddhist nun; known for her demand for sexual liberalism, she came to live as a celibate nun; she was a writer who intentionally and willingly suspended writing (or suspended the publication of her writing) for nearly two decades.

These different aspects of Iryŏp’s life raise questions about her life story. Among the most frequently asked are: Why did Iryŏp give up Christianity and become a Buddhist nun? Why did she decide to publish her writings after twenty years of silence? And what happened to her feminist ideas after she joined the monastery?

Iryŏp was a Christian from birth. At the young age of eight, she imagined her future as a Christian missionary delivering God’s word to non-believers. She remembered her father as the most devout Christian in Korea, someone whose faith never faltered. He taught his daughter in exactly the same way he taught his other fellow Christians, which meant that he did not allow any questions or misgivings about God’s message and intentions. When Iryŏp expressed faint doubts about God and wanted to ask questions about the meaning of certain Christian doctrines, her father admonished her that prayer and faith alone provided the answers. In the essay “Having Burned Away My Youth: A Letter to Mr. B.,” Iryŏp describes how her father responded with “let’s pray and repent” whenever she voiced doubts about her beliefs.

The strict evangelicalism of Iryŏp’s father took a toll on his daughter during her young adulthood, as she seriously questioned diverse aspects of life, including certain Christian doctrines. Iryŏp’s father died in 1915 when Iryŏp was nineteen years of age and before he could know the course his daughter’s religious life would take. Iryŏp herself would not address her questions about Christianity until later in life, as we read in several chapters of Reflections. Published when she was in her sixties, this work is the first in which Iryŏp publicly discusses her relationship with Christianity. Iryŏp expresses in some of her essays that she was exceptionally close to her father, which must have added to the difficulty of looking back at her relationship with Christianity and openly discussing Christian doctrine. Iryŏp asserts that her father’s strict Christianity and discouragement of religious doubt backfired, eventually causing her to lose her faith. It was not against Christianity itself that Iryŏp rebelled but rather a certain way that Christianity was taught and that Christian doctrines were interpreted. It is not entirely clear when she turned her back on Christianity, but by the time she completed her studies at Ewha Hakdang in 1918, she already considered herself a non-believer.

Recollecting the time when her belief in Christianity was shaken, Iryŏp points to the issue of good and evil as one of the questions that disturbed her in her relationship with Christianity. If God were the creator of all beings, Iryŏp reasons, God must be the source of both good and evil and should thus be held responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve. It was God who created Adam and Eve, Iryŏp argues, and it was God who gave them the freedom to violate His laws. The ultimate responsibility for their transgression should then lie with God, not with humankind. Behind this reasoning lay her doubts about the binary structure that Iryŏp understood to undergird the Christian worldview as well as secular logic. Iryŏp argues that the binary logic that makes a clear distinction between God and humans, the creator and the created, together with the binary value system of good and evil, has limitations that ultimately render it untenable. The dividing line between good and evil, she came to see, is not as solid as binary logic assumes it to be. For Iryŏp, all of life is ultimately one, and binary logic fails to recognize this fundamental nature of existence. The Buddha, as the representative of the Buddhist worldview, is the source of both good and evil, humans and devils, medicine and poison. The binary opposites and the accompanying value judgments arise, from Iryŏp’s perspective, when the oneness of life is misunderstood as consisting of fragments. A being understood through binary logic is an isolated entity whose capacity is limited. Iryŏp regards this misapprehension as the fundamental source of constraints on individuals’ freedom.

Although Iryŏp had doubts about certain Christian doctrines, she did not consider religious practice objectionable in and of itself. In Reflections, she suggests that had she understood the concept of God as a vehicle of skillful means to uplift people, she would not have lost what she referred to as the jewel of faith.67 Iryŏp emphasizes the importance of religious education, which she distinguishes from the mere accumulation of knowledge, because religious education teaches people how to live. Through her reflections on the meaning of religion, religious practice, and God, Iryŏp eventually concludes that “the Buddha and God at their origin are from the same seed.”68 Iryŏp reasons that the Buddha reached the realization that the bound state is not permanent, that one’s capacity is limitless and thus we are capable of embodying freedom. The same holds true for God, Iryŏp believes. God is a being capable of fully utilizing the unlimited capacity with which each being is endowed. The idea that God is a creator means, for Iryŏp, that God embodies the creativity inborn in each of us. To claim that God created the world is not only wrong but actually diminishes God, since in that case God would be responsible for all of the evil that exists in the world.69 In this way Iryŏp reconciled with Christianity instead of completely disavowing it in favor of Buddhism. The concept of God she proposes here is obviously different from the God she learned from her father when she was a child. Whether or not Christians would agree with Iryŏp’s understanding of God is a different issue. It can at least be assumed that Iryŏp herself believed that she was not completely denouncing Christian teachings; she simply disapproved of and challenged certain ways that Christianity was understood, interpreted, and practiced.

Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun is Iryŏp’s first book and her first major publication after she suspended publishing in 1935. In 1962 her second book, Having Burned Away My Youth, was published; two years later, her last book, In Between Happiness and Misfortune, appeared. Why had she decided to break her silence and return to writing? In the introduction to Reflections, Iryŏp makes clear that the book is written for the purpose of proselytization. She regretted the general lack of concern among her contemporaries about serious questions such as the meaning of existence. Her response to that situation was to adopt a method that combined philosophical issues with stories from her own life, thereby making accessible a serious examination of the meaning of existence and the practice of Buddhism. In Reflections Iryŏp characterizes her writings as like “sugar-coated medicine for little children,” in which she mixes Buddhist teachings with“the dreams of my old days.” She thus declares the goal of her book as being to “help readers come to the realization that, as we all have lost ourselves, we need to find our true selves if we are to become real human beings.”70 Iryŏp rarely adopted the Zen style of writing that uses cryptic expressions. According to Bhikṣuṇī Kyŏngwan, a second-generation disciple of Kim Iryŏp, this is because Iryŏp wanted to communicate with ordinary people. Kyŏngwan writes, “In the Zen writings of Zen Master Iryŏp, there is minimal discussion of Kanhua Zen [hwadu meditation], and most writings focus on Buddhist doctrine. That is because the purpose of her writings was to spread Buddhist teachings to the general public.”71

If the desire to proselytize was the immediate inspiration for Iryŏp taking up writing again, behind that can be seen a deeper relationship between Iryŏp and her writing. Even though Iryŏp stopped writing for almost two decades, it does not seem that this suspension was ever meant to be a permanent and complete abandonment of the act of writing. In the aforementioned interview with the journal Opening of the World, the reporter asked Iryŏp whether she would resume her writing at some point in the future and Iryŏp responded positively. She proposed that for writing to have meaning the one writing must be a fully functioning human being, by which Iryŏp implied something far deeper than the common-sense understanding of what it meant to be a human being. In an essay published in January 1935, she reaffirms this idea when she writes, “If I wish to be a great writer, I believe that I should learn all about the life and the universe and only then should I begin to write again. Looking back, I am ashamed of all the writings I have done in the past.”72 Writing for Iryŏp is not at bottom something that contradicts Buddhist practice. Zen tradition frequently characterizes itself as “a special transmission outside scriptures/ Without relying on words or letters/ Directly pointing at the mind/ Looking at the nature [of the human mind] and attaining buddhahood.”73 This definition of Zen does not mean that Zen does not rely on words or that it rejects the use of language. It is rather a warning against being enslaved by stock expressions and stagnant modes of thinking. When Master Man’gong told Iryŏp not to read or write, he could not have intended that she should stay away from the literary world entirely; abstaining from writing or reading is only a temporary measure in the process of practice, which facilitates a state in which the practitioner experiences self-transformation.

At a deeper level, resuming writing for Iryŏp was a way to reconcile herself with various stages of her life and to give herself an opportunity to reinterpret her life stories. All three books published in the 1960s take the form of autobiographical essays in which some of the major events in her life are interpreted from a Buddhist perspective. This reconciliation takes various forms: reconciliation with Christianity, reconciliation with her parents and family members who all died when she was still young, reconciliations with her ex-lovers, and eventually reconciliation with life itself.

Finally, but not least importantly, we have to ask what happened to her feminist ideals after she joined the monastery. After becoming a nun, Iryŏp did not explicitly engage in activities related to women’s movements. Nor do her writings deal with the issues of gender discrimination or women’s liberation. When the interviewer from the journal Opening of the World asked Iryŏp what would happen to her involvement with women’s movements now that she had entered the monastery, she responded, “They are nothing but temporary emergency measures. They cannot be eternal and unchanging truth.”74 Neither the reporter nor Iryŏp further elaborated on the issue, but Iryŏp’s response was apparently sufficient to draw criticism, some quite severe, from the later generation of feminists.75 As a new woman, she challenged the socially constructed forms of suppression. When she became a Buddhist practitioner and then a Buddhist nun, Iryŏp’s attention gradually shifted from social conditions to existential reality. Her focus changed to religious and spiritual concerns, where it remained until her death. One might approach the issue of Iryŏp’s involvement in women’s movements from two different but related perspectives. The first is to understand her feminism in the context of her life; the second is to consider the issue in the broader context of religion’s social engagement.

As I have discussed elsewhere,76 Iryŏp’s lives as a new woman and as a Buddhist nun are both based on the same value: to live as a being who is free and who is creative. The former is the condition for the latter. A being that is bound cannot be creative, and a being whose creative power is suppressed by externally imposed norms cannot be a fully functioning human being. As a new woman, Iryŏp pursued this value at a societal level; as a Buddhist nun, her focus was changed to the existential level. Her discussion of love, which appears in her last book, In Between Happiness and Misfortune, well demonstrates this evolution in Iryŏp’s thought. In it, she

examines love as a fundamental capacity that both sentient and insentient beings possess. This is unlike her outlook during her pre-monastic period, when love was understood in the context of female sexuality, in regard to heterosexual love, and also for the purpose of women’s liberation. After she joined the monastery, heterosexual love was no longer her major concern. Does this indicate that consideration of one’s existential reality necessarily excludes a social consciousness? This need not be the case; there are instances in Western intellectual history where the opposite was actually true, times, for example, when intellectuals espousing existentialism were among the most socially engaged. This leads to a broader question that Iryŏp’s life raises with regard to her position on gender: That is, is religious practice in general and Zen practice in particular compatible with social activism? Recent Western-language Buddhist scholarship has generally been critical of Zen Buddhism’s failure to translate individual practice into social engagement.77 In her silence on gender issues, Iryŏp might be subject to the same type of criticism. Iryŏp, however, did not retreat into a solipsistic world after she entered the monastery. During her time as a monastic, she remained engaged, but the form of engagement changed. She held the position of head nun of the meditation hall (ipsŭng) for almost thirty years. In other words, she played a role in the monastic community of which she was a part. She reached outside the monastic community to engage with the general public by publishing her writings. This time, however, the scope of her writings was not limited to gender issues. It could be argued that in order for her to be faithful to her stance on gender equality, which she had advocated as an activist for women’s liberation, her engagement as a Buddhist nun would have had to include a more active promotion of gender issues. In that case, her Buddhism could have taken a form similar to the various types of socially engaged Buddhism, such as Minjung Buddhism, that were current in the 1970s and 1980s in Korea.78 Iryŏp chose otherwise and cannot justly be blamed for changing her priorities from that of social engagement to dedication to the religious life.

The inaugural issue of New Women contains an essay titled “On the New Women’s Social Responsibilities” (Sinyŏsŏng ŭi sahoe e taehan ch’agim ŭl nonham) in which Iryŏp explains that the name of the journal was chosen in order to emphasize the new women’s responsibilities for

social change and women’s liberation.79 That was in May of 1920. Later in her life, as a Buddhist nun, Iryŏp points to a different type of responsibility. In her Buddhist writings she repeatedly emphasizes that it is each person’s responsibility to find him- or herself, and for her that meant to realize that we are beings with infinite capacity. The question that she does not address in her writings in this context is whether it is possible to carry out that responsibility without actually changing social structures, or whether an individual’s mental transformation through religious practice is sufficient.

The Text

What follows is a translation of Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang, or as I have titled it Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, which was published in 1960. The complete Korean original consists of fifteen chapters. With the exception of two chapters, omitted because the ideas presented there are found elsewhere in Reflections, the complete work is included here in Part One. Part Two contains translations of four essays by Iryŏp on Buddhism that were published in other venues.

The combination of Buddhist teachings with Iryŏp’s life story in the essays in Reflections offers the reader the core of her understanding of Buddhism and as well as its personal meaning to her. The autobiographical style of the book is uniquely her own. The internal structure itself speaks to the meaning of the work to Iryŏp at this time of her life. In “Preface” (Chapter 1) Iryŏp declares the goal of the book as being to proselytize. The next two chapters, “Life” (Chapter 2) and “Buddhism and Culture” (Chapter 3), consist exclusively of a highly philosophical and theoretical discussion of Buddhism. The style of these two chapters is unusual for Iryŏp’s writing, which typically employs a confessional style, in that they contain nothing of her life story.

In both “Life” and “Buddhism and Culture” Iryŏp writes about Buddhism in the context of the equality of all existence. All beings, she explains, are equal in the sense that they have an inborn spirit that is universal. This absolute equality anchored in a universal spirit applies not only to sentient beings but also to insentient beings such as sand and rocks. Iryŏp does not explicitly define her concept of “universal spirit,” that is, the spirit universally shared by all beings. Universal spirit is also characterized by Iryŏp as “creativity” and eventually the source of one’s freedom. The two expressions “creativity” and “freedom” are interchangeable in Iryŏp’s discussion of Buddhism with the expressions “Buddha” and “culture.” It is these four words—freedom, creativity, Buddha, and culture—that most aptly characterize Iryop’s Buddhist thought.

Iryŏp’s use of the expression “culture” is unique in her discussion of Buddhism. Culture to her is an expression of the totality of human beings’ creative activities. Totality indicates all-inclusiveness and absolute openness. Creativity is a function of human beings; it is expressed when a person is not attached to a phenomenon as a fragmented entity but rather understands it as a flexible reality with open-ended possibility. Iryŏp, for whom the Buddha is the “ultimate person of culture” (tae munhwain), defines people of culture as “those who have found the mind of human beings.”80 “Buddhism and Culture” talks about a person of culture as someone who has relieved herself or himself from the constraints of karma and who is thus the controller of her or his original mind.81

Following the two philosophical essays are two essays written in observation of anniversaries. “In Memory of Zen Master Man’gong” (Chapter 4) observes the fifteenth anniversary of Man’gong’s death;82 the essay “On New Year’s Day of the Twenty-Fifth Year after Joining the Monastery” (Chapter 5) marks her twenty-fifth year as a Buddhist nun. The former tells how she came to join the monastery and how she learned her practice from Master Man’gong. The latter recapitulates for both her reader and herself what she accomplished in her twenty-five years of practice. Iryŏp never openly claimed that she had attained enlightenment, but in this essay, she seems comfortable in saying that in that quarter century she had reached a certain level in her practice.

In Chapters 6 and 7, we read about Iryŏp’s position on social issues. In her letter to the organizer of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (Chapter 6), she insists on the necessity of Buddhist practice for the construction of a better world. In Chapter 7 she offers her reflection on the purification movement in Korean Buddhism that took place during the 1950s. Iryŏp rationalizes the necessity of the movement by pointing to the impure elements that existed in Korean Buddhism at the time. Dealing with social issues is not the strong suit of Iryŏp’s Buddhism, and in both essays, readers might find her discussion on the topic unsatisfactory. Her proposals for the construction of world peace lack concrete plans and her support for the purification movement contradicts the fundamental thesis of her Buddhist thought, which is non-dualism. If even the Buddha manifests both good and evil, in what sense would the purification movement, which tries to eliminate impure aspects of Buddhism, be justified? Iryŏp does not address this question.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with religion and faith in the form of responses to the conversion to Catholicism of a Mr. C. and to a letter from a childhood friend, respectively.

Mr. C. in Chapter 8 refers to the historian and writer Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–1957), who had been an acquaintance of Iryŏp’s for a long time before she joined the monastery. Ch’oe was one of the leading intellectuals in Korea during the first half of the twentieth century. His poem “From the Sea to a Boy” (Hae ege sŏ sonyŏn ege) is credited as the first modern-style poem in Korea. It appeared in November 1908 in the inaugural issue of the journal Youth (Sonyŏn), which is also considered Korea’s first modern-style literary journal. Ch’oe Namsŏn was the editor of another literary journal, Eastern Light (Tongmyŏng, 1922–1923), to which Iryŏp contributed her writings. On November 17, 1955, Ch’oe declared his conversion to Catholicism; on the occasion, he contributed a short piece, “Life and Religion: Why I Have Converted to Catholicism” (Insaeng kwa chonggyo: Na nŭn oe k’at’orik ero kaejong haennŭn’ga?), to the Korea Daily News (Han’guk ilbo) and, in addition, read his declaration on the radio.

Before his conversion, not only was Ch’oe a Buddhist, but he published essays on Buddhism that would later have a significant influence on modern Korean Buddhist scholarship. Ch’oe’s essay, “Korean Buddhism: Its Place in Oriental Cultural History” (Chosŏn Pulgyo: Tongbang munhwasa sang e innŭn kŭ chiwi), was published in 1930 in the journal Buddhism.83 In it, Ch’oe emphasized the superiority of Korean Buddhism. He identified Wŏnhyo’s (617–686) Buddhism as ecumenical Buddhism(t’ong Pulgyo) and promoted ecumenism as a characteristic feature of Korean Buddhism.

Religion for Iryŏp is a way to find one’s original existential and ontological state, a state characterized by the wholeness of each individual being. Like the Huayan Buddhist vision in which a particle of dust contains the entire universe, Iryŏp believes that each being—both sentient and insentient—represents the entirety of the universe. Buddhist awakening is when the individual comes to realize the wholeness of his or her existence. This idea is clearly related to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising, although Iryŏp rarely uses this expression in her writings.

On the surface, religious practice encompasses two domains: one being the practitioner who has faith and the other being the object in which the practitioner believes. In the case of Buddhism there are practitioners and the Buddha; in Christianity there is God the creator and the believer in God. In some religious traditions the relationship between the two domains is dualistic (as in the case of Christianity); in others (as in some schools of Buddhism) they are non-dual. Because Iryŏp’s Buddhist philosophy is based on absolute non-duality between the two, she reinterprets the Christian God in this light in this and several other essays in this volume. For Iryŏp, God is not a supreme being completely separated from humans, those whom He has created. Rather, like the Buddha, God is one who has realized the wholeness of His being; thus Iryŏp’s God is not an object of worship but rather a model or evidence that a being is ultimately a whole and that religion is an education in that wholeness. Iryŏp in this essay reasons with Ch’oe that since the goal of religious practice is to become like the object of one’s faith (God or the Buddha), it makes little sense to change religions, since changing the object of one’s faith does not change the meaning of religious practice.

Chapters 10 and 11 are the most intimate in nature. They take the form of letters written to two men with whom Iryŏp had relationships before she entered the monastery. Chapter 10 is a letter to a writer named Im Nowŏl (Rim Nowŏl, act. 1920–1925), with whom she had an affair some-

time between the fall of 1920 and 1923.84 By the time she met Im in Japan, he was known as the “poet of the devil” because his writing style followed the literary tradition of art for art’s sake. Im had a short career as a writer and, forgotten by critics and readers for many years, but he has recently been rediscovered and re-evaluated, gaining recognition as a talented, original writer of modern Korean literature.85 In this period of Iryŏp’s life, exact knowledge of dates and her whereabouts have not been verified. What is known is that the relationship began during Iryŏp’s second trip to Japan and cost her her first marriage. As the relationship with Im became serious, Iryŏp demanded a divorce from her husband, Yi Noik. But the relationship with Im soon came to an end when Iryŏp found out that Im already had a wife and a child in his hometown in the northern part of Korea. Chapter 10 details Im’s dramatic suggestion that he and Iryŏp resolve the problem of his marital status by committing double suicide. As Iryŏp reflects back, she reinterprets their time together in the context of the Buddhist teachings.

Iryŏp spent an even shorter time with Paek Sŏnguk (1897–1981), the recipient of the letter in Chapter 11, and yet his influence on her cannot be overemphasized. Iryŏp met Paek in 1927 when she began to contribute to the journal Buddhism. Paek briefly served as president of the company that published the journal. In 1928, Paek resigned the position and went to Mount Kŭmgang to do Buddhist practice, thus ending their relationship of less than a year. Chapter 11 offers a detailed description of the relationship and the Buddhist philosophy that Iryŏp learned through Paek. Paek is a unique figure in Korean Buddhism of the colonial period. Unlike most major figures of the time, who studied Buddhism in Japan to learn how to reform Korean Buddhism, Paek studied philosophy in Germany, drawing on that education to try to create a new Buddhist philosophy. He wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Buddhistische Metaphysik” (Buddhist metaphysics). After returning to Korea, he translated it into Korean as “Buddhist Pure Philosophy” (Pulgyo sunjŏn ch’ŏrhak) and published it as a series in Buddhism. “Buddhist Pure Philosophy” offers a succinct discussion of Buddhist logic and epistemology by clarifying the similarities and differences between Buddhist philosophy and the major tenets of European philosophy.86 In the first half of Chapter 11 Iryŏp offers a detailed record of her relationship with Paek, looking back on it nearly twenty years after the affair ended. In the second half of the chapter, she reflects on the meaning of the affair from a Buddhist perspective.

Chapters 12 and 13 are letters written to or for Iryŏp. Chapter 12 is a letter by Paek, and Chapter 13 consists of a letter of appreciation from Bhikṣuṇī Wŏlsong, who tended Iryŏp during her last years until her death and helped Iryŏp prepare the manuscript of Reflections for publication.

The four essays selected for Part Two convey the various dimensions of Iryŏp’s Buddhist philosophy and practice as well as their social dimensions. “Return to Emptiness” (Chapter 14), which originally appeared in In Between Happiness and Misfortune, reveals the final evolution of Iryŏp’s Buddhist philosophy. Reflections on the meaning of “I,” the generation of the “lost self,” and other themes of her earlier Buddhist thought reappear in this essay. Here, though, Iryŏp stresses the importance of being aware of life (saengmaeng), or life force, which we can connect with her discussion of the universal spirit discussed in “Life” (Chapter 2). Chapters 15, 16, and 17 are selections from dharma talks posthumously published in Until the Future World Comes to an End and Even Afterward (Miraese ka tahago namdorok). In Chapters 15 and 16 Iryŏp discusses the importance of meditation, prayer, and chanting in Buddhist practice. Chapter 17 is a recorded dharma talk delivered on June 23, 1966 (May 5, 1966, according to the lunar calendar). This essay succinctly summarizes Iryŏp’s core Buddhist thought as conveyed to journalists, emphasizing their role in and responsibility to society.

The original Korean edition of Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun contains a number of typographical errors, likely due to the unsophisticated copyediting and printing skills in Korea at the time. Most of the essays in Reflections were reprinted in Iryŏp’s 1962 book, Having Burned Away My Youth. While translating the 1960 version of Reflections, I consulted the reprinted essays and sometimes followed this 1962 version, which reflects Iryŏp’s corrections of some of the typos in the 1960 version and some stylistic modifications. Still, as I point out in the endnotes, the meaning of some passages remains unclear in the original Korean. In those cases, I have provided literal translations, even though their meaning is obscure in English.

For some of the essays reprinted in 1962, Iryŏp changed the titles to better reflect the content. For example, the essay “Contemplation upon Reading a Letter from My Friend M.” in the 1960 version is entitled “What Is Faith? Contemplation upon Reading a Letter from My Friend M.” in Having Burned Away My Youth. The 1960 “To Mr. B.” essay appears as “Having Burned Away My Youth: To Mr. B.” in the 1962 publication. I have adopted the titles used in the 1962 publication when they better reflect the essays’ content.

Several essays in Reflections were written or appeared publicly, mostly during the 1950s, before they were collected into a single volume. “In Memory of Zen Master Man’gong” was dated October 20, 1956; “On New Year’s Day of the Twenty-Fifth Year after Joining the Monastery,” December 31, 1957; “To Mr. R.,” August 1958; and the letter to the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Bangkok was dated 1958, when the meeting was held. The opening essay, “Life,” was a revised version of an essay originally published in the Choson Daily News (Chosŏn ilbo) in the 1950s,

according to Until the Future World Comes to an End and Even Afterward.87

All endnotes are mine. (No notes appear in the original Korean text.) All parenthetical insertions in the main text are Iryŏp’s own, except where I have provided the corresponding Korean version of a word or phrase.