In university, I studied Fine Arts with a focus in printmaking. What I was best at and enjoyed the most was intaglio (the ‘g’ is silent), etching zinc or copper with nitric acid to create a texture that would then hold ink to be transfered onto paper. While I’ve been home, i started visiting the printshop in town where I first learned intaglio before I left for university. I was rusty and forgot a lot, but somethings still remained. I had it in mind to do a sort of traditional Korean painting style print, so I covered the plate in a rosin powder, heated it until it bonded to the zinc to create a texture for the acid to bite around, then painted my image on with a ’sugar lift’ solution. It’s sugar water with a bit of high quality India ink so you can see it. When the sugar lift is dry, I painted on a thin coat of liquid hard ground, a waxy material, dissolved in solvent, that resists the nitric acid, keeping the zinc plate from being eaten.
Once the ground was dry, I ran it under cold water until the sugar began to dissolve, lifting the ground, and leaving an open space for the acid to do it’s job. After a few minutes bathing in the acid, it’s ready to be cleaned off, proofed, and reworked until the plate is ready for printing. Since it’s a print, much like a stamp, the final image is in reverse. I was actually more pleased with the image as it was painted in sugar, but the results weren’t too bad for my first plate in six years. It’s an image I’ll probably work with for a while and see what evolves from it. It’s based on a small hermitage I used to stop at on my way up and down the trail to Gatbawi in Palgongsan. I always loved the little images on Thai amulets but was also influenced by the art work in Hanmaeum’s A Thousand Hands of Compassion.
It’s almost time to start packing for the long trip back to Korea. I’m always glad to be going back to Korea, even though I’m always glad to have a break from it when the time comes to leave. It feels like home now just as much as anywhere else.
When I left Korea, I’d just started studying Vipassanna with Sandima Bhikku. We made our plans to come to Korea just after meeting him, so I didn’t get very far. In the end, during our visits, he taught EunBong more than I learned which I thought was more beneficial since EunBong hadn’t been exposed to much more than devotion to GwanSaeEum Bosal. She was interested to learn theories about Kamma and how we can improve our Kamma by helping others.
What we went over together wasn’t really anything I hadn’t been exposed to, but it’s the kind of thing you can always benefit from hearing again. There was an extra quality in the teachings when it came from a person face to face instead of a book or a clip on YouTube. Sandima had a nice way of explaining things that helped open your understanding. His warmth and friendliness made being with him very comfortable. When he taught, he didn’t act as though he was above us, he was aware that what he was teaching was just as important for him to follow as the rest of us.
Over and over, he repeated that the most important thing was to understand the theory before starting the practice. It could be why I’d found myself lost on my own. I was going through the motions but not truly understanding what I was doing. I would find myself sitting with no focus, lost in thought or gone with no attention to where. At these times I realized the limitations of learning from a book.
Sandima spoke a lot about Kamma, as I mentioned a few months back. He explained how we are surrounded by the energy of our Kamma. Kamma is one of those things you can’t worry about too much as far as your past is concerned, but by being mindful in the present moment you can ensure that whatever Kamma you generate will be positive. Meditation, chanting, acting with mindfulness and compassion are excellent ways to maintain positive Kamma. Do I succeed at these from moment to moment in my own life? No, but even if once in five times I can stop myself from negative action or speech, remembering my teaching, then my Kamma is a fifth better than if I hadn’t heard the teachings at all! Swatting flies is a basic example. How many of us give it a second thought before smacking a house fly or a mosquito as it’s sinking its needle into our flesh? I still catch myself swiping my hand through the air without a thought in mind, sometimes soon enough to veer off and miss or other times at least in enough time to be glad I missed. As far as my understanding of Kamma goes, the more often I remind myself not to swat the fly, the more likely I’ll be to remind myself the next time. Hopefully, after enough times, the thought of killing the fly will eventually stop arising. There is a strong connection between Kamma and habit, which makes a lot of sense. Sandima made an analogy that we are like little caterpillars climbing a tree. First the head goes forward, then the body follows. Like that, our Kamma energy goes first, then our mind and body follow. Like cause and effect we follow our Kamma.
I asked about chanting in Theravada practice. In Korea, I’d grown accustomed to chanting Namo Amitaba, Gwan Sae Eum Bosal, or a few other Bosal names, now and then, that don’t have a presence in Theravada tradition. He replied that it’s common to chant the different qualities of the Buddha that one wishes to manifest in themselves. For example, if he were preparing to teach a class, he might chant the Pali word for right speech. The most usual chant, Sandima told me, is Arahant, one who has all the qualities of a Buddha. In contrast to Korean chanting (at least according to Sandima, as Marcus kindly pointed out), Theravada chanting is/should be done in silence. I don’t think one or the other is better, but there is a difference. Sandima simply explained that, in Therevada practice, silence is prefered.
He spoke a bit about the nine qualities of a Buddha and the seven delusions that cause Samsara. To start, it’s important to know your position between total ignorance and being an Arahant. With a big smile, he looked at us and asked, “I’m a crazy fool, how about you?” His point was, if you start thinking that you are more advanced than you are, you won’t be able to learn what you need to know. To cultivate the nine qualities requires contemplation, mindfulness, and listening. You must start with knowing, with wisdom. Knowing comes from touch, from the five aggregates. Knowing starts with breathing.
Over all, I’ve been decent at dealing with attachment to physical possessions in my life. I guess my biggest problem is that I get carried away with the things I do have. Since moving to Seoul in October, 2006, I’ve collected nearly two dozen Chinese tea pots, I had a pile of over two dozen malas (I gave many of them away before leaving Korea) laying amongst a dozen various Buddha statues throughout my apartment. When I first moved to Korea in 2005, the hardest thing to leave behind was my vinyl records that, at one point ,numbered in the five thousands. I’d narrowed it down to the best 3000 or so, and since I’ve been home, sorted out about another 1000 I can do without. My blues, Jazz, Folk, and Classical albums are the ones I’m still the most attached to.
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to transfer as many as I can to mp3, through my little mp3 player I bought in Daegu a few years ago. EunBong hasn’t entirely been impressed with the amount of time I’ve spent flipping records on the turntable, but I have found a few classical pieces she can use for teaching and a really amazing recording of Swan Lake (her favorite ballet) that she said is better than any she’d heard before.
Though I’m always more likely to put on a Jazz album, my favorite songs are always old Delta Blues recordings and depression-era Folk records. What I appreciate so much about them is that they understood suffering on a level I wouldn’t care to experience but there always seems to be a silver lining in the end. One of the most famous blues lines is, “the sun’s gonna shine in my backdoor someday.” I can’t think of any better imagery coming from a group of singers whose lives were beat down so hard for so long. A former co-worker once told me that the Blues is the most honest, “tell it like it is” music there is. It’s really amazing to listen to it now and hear themes that are very similar to Buddhist teachings I’ve learned in Asia.
Last week, I was going through my Woody Guthrie albums. My favorite record of his is a collection of depression songs, called Dust Bowl Ballads”, he wrote about when he and his family had to pack up and leave their farm to look for work elsewhere. They ended up on a “Jungle Camp” which probably wasn’t much different from a refugee camp we’d see on the news today in a war-torn country somewhere. Two of the songs on the album were written after Guthrie watched the film, The Grapes of Wrath. Near the end of the first song, there’s a line (I don’t know if it’s from Guthrie or Steinbeck) that rings so much of non-duality and a little Bodhichita at the end, it almost gave me chills when I heard it sung by a scratchy, old folk singer on an even scratchier, old recording from the 1940s…
Ever’body might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me.
Everywhere that you look, in the day or night,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be.
Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain’t free.
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma.
That’s where I’m a-gonna be.
Not too surprised to find it on YouTube… The verse is at the 6:07 mark, but, if you have time, the whole thing is pretty good! ^^
I once saw a documentary on the roar of tigers, how the low-frequency of the roar has the ability to paralyse its victims (humans included), giving them a chance to pounce.
Considering how things like this are tools of survival, I look at Fina. At just over five months old, her survival is still entirely dependant her parents. Her most useful tool to express her needs is her voice. I began wondering if her cry might have a similar use as the tiger’s roar, but with an opposite effect of forcing a reaction. There’s something about her cry that cuts right through my brain until I almost think I can feel my corpus callosum being vibrated. Probably not… but I can literally feel my eardrums vibrate, even during a relatively subdued cry. It presents itself as a seemingly impossible challenge in terms of keeping a still mind. Though I can’t control my initial reaction, especially when Fina hits that certain frequency, signaling that things have just hit a more serious level of not going well, what I have been able to work on is the level of stress that arrises along with it. Not that a crying baby shouldn’t be reacted to (there are plenty of other situations I can practice not reacting to!), I just wonder how much of the reaction is involuntary?
P.S.
Once again, I would like to emphasis how wonderful Fina has been, and how lucky EunBong and I are as parents. I don’t want anyone to think I’m complaining about her crying, I’ve just been observing my own mental reaction when she does get upset. As I stated in a previous post, mindfulness is something I really have to work on! That said, I could just as easily have written a post titled, “Babies Cry”!
As for the picture, I was going to post one of her crying, but I figured posing her as a Theravada monk would be a lot cuter! She should probably be in white but, oh well… ^^
I listened to Hyun Hyun Gak Sunim speak once at Hwa Gye Sa a week before Buddha’s Birthday celebrations in Seoul. Towards the end of the talk, an old man asked what “true experience” was. Hyun Gak Sunim raised his cup of coffee to his lips, took a long and noisy sip, then replied, “This coffee is bitter.”
Zen Master Seung San said something along the lines of, if you want to know what a watermelon is, you have to cut one open and take a bite!
I’m starting to have a long list of posts that I’ve started but didn’t even get to the end of a first paragraph… It’s about time I get something up! I’ve had a hard time writting since I left Korea. There were some reasons I hadn’t come home in a while, and some of those became reasons I had to come home. There’ve been a lot of ups and downs, which has made it hard to write without being inappropriate to the privacy of my family or for what I try to make this blog about. Since it’s alright to be honest about myself, I can admit that I haven’t kept a very good “Buddhist” mind when it’s come to dealing with people since I’ve been home. Somehow family ends up being who I show my worst side to. I wonder if it’s because we’re all comfortable around each other to be our worsted together! In the end, we’re all there for each other at the worst of times too, and there have been some tough times since I’ve been here; conflicts and old memories better off let go of and forgotten, a pregnancy (and sort-of abortion) with everything but the fetus, the passing of an old (and old) family friend, who was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
On the ups side, coming here with EunBong and Fina has added a great big plus to the family and definitely made us better as a whole. A month ago we celebrated her 100th day anniversary, Korean style, and had a gathering of nearly all the old hippy friends my parents knew when I was a child. Even though a good portion of them are divorced (to more than one other person there, in one case) it was still a warm and happy evening. I’ve seen more of my little sister in the last three months than in the last 10 years, more because of the baby now than the distance before. My father isn’t worried about me being gay anymore, so it’s a lot more relaxed to be around him now! When he came to my wedding in Korea and met my friend Joe, he admitted he thought we were partners because we traveled and did so much together… I don’t think he read any of the emails I sent after we’d been to Cambodia and Thailand together, or he’d probably have stopped worrying a few years earlier! A couple weeks ago, I joined a Tai Chi class with my mom. My old friend, Kai, who had been away for a few years is teaching the class. His Japanese mom, who I’d only met when I was a young child, has moved here from the Okanogan Valley. She’s been a good person for EunBong to know here. I love listening to them speaking English together. Their accents are very similar, especially with the “l/r” plague. EunBong was telling Isao that every night she writes down her choreography ideas (for dance) and next thing Isao gets out her Chinese caligraphy set and starts asking EunBong about Chinese characters. Isao is a master potter and told me she would make a tea pot for me, so I’m really excited to see it. Kai told me her specialty is creating glazes and when I see her work, even though I don’t know much about pottery, I can tell they are amazing.
I haven’t learned much new about Buddhism here, but I have been able to experience many of the teachings on a more experiential level. Maintain mindfulness and right speech have been where I’ve failed the most but it’s made me more and more aware of the self-inflicted side of suffering and how “I” is usually right in the middle of it. Aside from Fina, who’s dealing with teething, not-so-skilled motor skills, vaccination needles, and just the over all troubles of dealing with being an infant, most of the suffering that’s going on here is pretty much self-inflicted. At Saturday Sangha (TM ? ^^) Chong Go Sunim once made a point about how in the Diamond Sutra the Buddha goes through his questioning a second time to reach a more subtle level of understanding. Since then, I’ve tried to be more aware of the subtler level of things. This one’s rather obvious, but I used to think not reacting meant externally, physically or verbally, until I realized that if I can keep my mind from reacting, then I would truly be not reacting. I realised that the pain in my back is very small compared to the suffering cause by not wanting the pain in my back. Fina’s crying isn’t nearly as bothersome to me than the craving for silence when she is crying. Fortunately I realized that one after about a month, so it’s helped. I still find myself, even now, craving silence or wanting the tiredness in my body to go away, but just being aware helps and deep down it really doesn’t bother me that much. I also know how fortunate I am to have such a lovely child. She actually made being a father easy, I’m just using the situation as an example. I’m usually only bothered when I want to be doing something else, so that too is more to do with myself than her.
Another small suffering I’ve had is the lack of Sangha. I always took the Third Jewel for granting but being without one makes me think that it’s the most important. The Buddha is mostly an idea in our minds, the Dhamma just is, whether we realize it or not, but the Sangha is where we can learn Dhamma and get a little help along the way. Reminds me of a Ringo song! People I’ve spoken to generally aren’t very interested in Buddhism. Some of the things I appreciate about Buddhism are what turns some people here off. Many New Age philosophies I find tend to be too idealistic are very popular where as Buddhism gets misunderstood as something negative. I think a lot of people have a hard time thinking that their pleasures could possibly be causing suffering. The Dhamma has poped up here and there though. I read Tom Robbins’ latest book, B is for Beer (an adult book for children/a children’s book for adults). Somewhere around the middle of the book, he makes a claim that if just the perfect amount of beer is consumed, one is suddenly swept through the cracks, basically into non-duality. Sounds almost “Neo-New-Agey”. It might be the first time I’ve ever disagreed with Tom Robbins, but maybe, at this point, someone with more beer drinking experience than myself should comment. I also watched Clint Eastwood’s last film, Gran Torino. He plays the role of a grumpy ol’ Korean war vet, who in the climax of the film ends up displaying the actions of a pretty high level Bodhisattva.
I haven’t meditated as much as I should. There’s a small field on my dad’s property with a few one-hundred-something year old apples trees. I sat under one a few times when the weather was hot. EunBong made fun of me that the Buddha sat under a Bodhi tree but I was sitting under an apple tree and that an apple was going to fall on my head! I pointed out that I picked a spot where there weren’t any apples in the branches and the Bodhi tree probably wasn’t a Bodhi tree until after the Buddha sat under it! She still thought I looked silly sitting under an apple tree though! There’s a tall pine tree behind our house that EunBong enjoys walking around with Fina, like a pagoda at a temple, chanting “Gwan Se Eum Bosal” and praying for her family. One more thing I knew already but have been able to experience and realize for myself is the importance of a peaceful mind. My parent’s house couldn’t be in a much more peaceful setting, on an old logging road, surrounded by forest, a cow pasture across the road, a river that makes its way through it all. We should all be Buddhas living here. Instead, we’re caught in our own turmoil, uptight as though we’re living in the Bronx. It really doesn’t matter where you put yourself, you can’t get away from what’s going on inside. I say this to myself, and anyone else who wants to hear it… practice now! There’s never a better time!
That’s about all I’ve got left in me. I’m too exhausted to come up with anything great right now, but it’s good to remind myself of some of the basics. My mind feels about as sharp as my baby’s behind (not very sharp, take my word for it!). At least now that I’ve written something, it could be the start of a habit. One last thing, for my friends from the old Saturday Sangha, and anyone else who was there along the way, this is for you…
Ox Herding posted a great video by Pema Chodron talking about “This Lousy World”:
It’s great because it applies to just about anyone at just about anytime. The thought that all our problems are because of something else, someone else, always outside of ourselves, is difficult to get away from. I’d been realizing this more than ever over the past few weeks. Spiritual practice seems that much more difficult mixed with the exhaustion factor of having a new born in your life, and I’ve found myself getting frustrated even more easily lately than I had before. As ChongGo Sunim pointed out to me, frustration levels can be a good reflection of or spiritual practice. We get frustrated because we want a situation to be different, we are dissatisfied. It made me realize that maybe it isn’t really the exhaustion that’s making me more frustrated than usual, maybe it’s just that I’m not used to having a crying baby next to my bed and even though, as far as babies go, she’s really not that bad, I would still much prefer if she never cried at all!!! As Pema’s talk suggests, I could literally cover my ears in leather (it would be much more fatherly than my first urge to cover the baby’s mouth!) or even better, I could see my baby as the greatest teacher in my life right now, giving me the opportunity to face frustration within and not be bothered, not be moved, which is what Pema Chodron is really getting at.
I’ve been finding myself in a sort of awkward place in my practice. I’ve been becoming more and more aware of my ignorance and my delusions causing my suffering or dissatisfaction faster than I’ve been taking the steps to overcome them. Perhaps it’s my own complacency or even laziness, but it’s been more humbling than anything else I’ve experienced. I’ve even realized I had a fair amount of pride in the little humility I thought there was! Hopefully this will be a place I can start to really grow from. The Dalai Lama reminds us that there are no easy ways. Our effort will be the same as our results. It’s time to stop thinking about the path and start walking it!
For a little response to Pema’s talk, here’s Kermit with his reflections on Dukka, reminding us that no matter who you are, it’s not always easy!:
Sandima spoke a lot about Kamma, as I mentioned a few months back. He explained how we are surrounded by the energy of our Kamma. Kamma is one of those things you can’t worry about too much as far as your past is concerned, but by being mindful in the present moment you can ensure that whatever Kamma you generate will be positive. Meditation, chanting, acting with mindfulness and compassion are excellent ways to maintain positive Kamma. Do I succeed at these from moment to moment in my own life? No, but even if once in five times I can stop myself from negative action or speech, remembering my teaching, then my Kamma is a fifth better than if I hadn’t heard the teachings at all! Swatting flies is a basic example. How many of us give it a second thought before smacking a house fly or a mosquito as it’s sinking its needle into our flesh? I still catch myself swiping my hand through the air without a thought in mind, sometimes soon enough to veer off and miss or other times at least in enough time to be glad I missed. As far as my understanding of Kamma goes, the more often I remind myself not to swat the fly, the more likely I’ll be to remind myself the next time. Hopefully, after enough times, the thought of killing the fly will eventually stop arising. There is a strong connection between Kamma and habit, which makes a lot of sense. Sandima made an analogy that we are like little caterpillars climbing a tree. First the head goes forward, then the body follows. Like that, our Kamma energy goes first, then our mind and body follow. Like cause and effect we follow our Kamma.
