Some thoughts after the Itaewon Halloween’s Day tragedy

The alleywaynext to the Hamilton Hotel, Itaewon, Seoul, photographed after the tragedy.

Two events happened to me in 1966 that now, in retrospect, I can see have helped shape my life.

I was eight years old.

The first event took place on 21 October. The Aberfan disaster. A colliery spoil tip above the south Wales’ village collapsed after heavy rain and  engulfed part of it, including a school. 109 children of more or less my age and 5 adults were killed in the school. In all, 116 children and 28 adults died in Aberfan.

I vividly remember learning about  the tragedy on the evening BBC television news. For some reason, I was at home all alone, which exacerbated the impact of the disaster. The room was dark, the only light was that coming from the black-and-white tv screen. Suddenly, as I took in the awful news, my bubble of childhood innocence burst.  I learned that life is tragic.

In fact, you could say that Aberfan was important because, for me, it was a small version of the primal scene that is especially central to Buddhism: Prince Siddhartha’s awakening to the reality of suffering. In the story, his father had sought to protect him from the awful truth,  and the prince was already in his late twenties when he is finally exposed to the reality of suffering for the first time. He witnesses three instances: someone very old, someone stricken with illness, and a corpse. Siddhartha was so deeply disturbed by what he saw that he realized he could not go back to his old coddled life. But he’d also been exposed to a fourth  sight: a wandering monk seeking spiritual freedom. It was this exemplary figure that helped him see what path he must follow.

I guess you could say that without being conscious of it, of course,  the discovery that late October day in 1966 that life included seemingly random and meaningless tragedies, and to people just like me, signalled the moment that I too out on my own ad hoc and decidedly less world-historically significant life journey in search of answers to why there is suffering. I seemed to be immediately aware that the answer was not  to simply ignore such awful events and carry on, which is another version of Siddhartha’s father’s goal, and one that society colludes in encouraging. The Aberfan disaster was clearly part of the totality of human existence, and needed to be included somehow in life’s meaning. At first, it seemed the Christianity in which I was brought up had the answers, but I eventually got disillusioned and began looking for alternatives, and I’m still looking.

But there was another momentous event for me in 1966, and this was also brought to me via television.  This life-changing event happened  about three month earlier, on 30 July. This was the day when England’s soccer team won the World Cup, beating West Germany 4-2 after extra time. It was a truly ecstatic moment!

Again, I remember it well. Immediately afterwards, I ran out into the garden, where all was sunlight, warm and bright, and started to kick around a football. In fact, I was so inspired that, there and then, I decided to take the game seriously, and soon was very good at it,  or at least, good enough to play right-wing for my schools’ teams up to the age of 18.  

Now, England winning the world cup was obviously a very very different kind of decisive moment to the one triggered by the Aberfan tragedy. This event, which seems in my memory to be wonderfully illuminated, awoke me to joy.

When I look back over my life I see it is arraigned along a dark line of tragic events unfolding relentlessly one after another - from Aberfan to, now the latest, Itaewon. But I also see a luminous line of glory and joy. It seems to me obvious that for a philosophy of life to be complete it needs to somehow incorporate both these responses to the world. You can’t have one without the other.  In fact, they define each other, are co-dependent, as exemplified by the Taoist symbol:  

Eventually, Siddhartha answered his question about why there is suffering and how to overcome it by discovering what in Buddhism are known as the Four Noble Truths. Here they are, as listed on the ‘Theravada’ website:

1. All beings experience pain and misery (dukkha) during their lifetime:
   “Birth is pain, old age is pain, sickness is pain, death is pain; sorrow, grief, sorrow, grief, and anxiety is pain. Contact with the unpleasant is pain. Separating from the pleasant is pain. Not getting what one wants is pain. In short, the five assemblies of mind and matter that are subject to attachment are pain“.

2. The origin (samudaya) of pain and misery is due to a specific cause:
   “It is the desire that leads to rebirth, accompanied by pleasure and passion, seeking pleasure here and there; that is, the desire for pleasures, the desire for existence, the desire for non-existence“.

3. The cessation (nirodha) of pain and misery can be achieved as follows:
   “With the complete non-passion and cessation of this very desire, with its abandonment and renunciation, with its liberation and detachment from it“.

4. The method we must follow to stop pain and misery is that of the Noble Eightfold Path (Right View. Right Thought. Right Speech. Right Action. Right Livelihood. Right Effort. Right Mindfulness. Right Concentration).

The problem I have with at least some versions of Buddhism is that they can suggest that to transcend suffering you also have to transcend joy.  Isn’t this what “complete non-passion” implies? 

Well, yes and no. There are certainly tendencies within Buddhism that push a rigid asceticism in the name of overcoming desire, and so seem to throw the baby of joy out with the bathwater of suffering. But other tendencies within Buddhism seem to be able to strive to accommodate both. For example, take these words of the Korean Seon  (Zen) Buddhist SongChol, who died in  1993, from the wonderful collection of his Dharma messages, ‘Opening the Eyes’:  

Everyplace we sit or stand is a golden cushion or a jade stool and we all dance to lively tunes amidst the beauty of nature. Lift up your eyes and look at the infinite great light that always pervades the universes. In fact, the universes themselves are this great light. So let’s join hands and move forward in this eternal light, for there is nothing but peace and freedom and joy and glory right before our very eyes.  

*

It is striking that my two ‘epiphanies’ in 1966 came courtesy of television. Interestingly, the transfer of the information via technological mediation did not significantly diminish the emotional and personal impact on me of the events taking place far away. Of course, I was less affected than I would have been if I’d actually been present at the events that moved me. But I was still powerfully impacted.

Perhaps nowadays it’s different. Are people so thoroughly inundated with information or immured in ‘hyperreality’ that events communicated via the mass media no longer have such a visceral impact? The fact that the daily news programs continuously transmits bad news suggests otherwise. It also suggests that they are responding to a very directly emotional proclivity. Psychologists talk of a ‘negativity bias’ which makes us tend to see things in a detrimental light, while evolutionary psychologists suggest that this tendency derives from the time long ago when it was safer to expect a cave bear is lurking in the darkness of a cave rather than rush on in out of the cold.

We are the ancestors of people who erred on the negative appraisal of situations and thereby survived. But what thinking about my dual ‘epiphanies’ leads me to conclude is that we also have a ‘positivity bias’; we are also hardwired for the experience of emotional elevation, ecstasy and joy. And this means we are the descendants of humans with a pronounced capacity for such positive emotions, too. This is quite an emotional payload!

Image and Text Sources:

Itaewon photo: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/11/281_339362.html

https://www.theravada.gr/en/about-buddhism/the-four-noble-truths/

SongChol, Opening the Eyes, translated by Brian Barry, Seoul: Gimm-Young International, 2004, pp.122-123

Vagueness

“Cloud, banks of clouds hide something: but what?”

Hubert Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/ 

“Let go of ‘I am’

Let go of ‘I am not’”

Nagarjuna, Verses from the Center, as translated by Stephen Batchelor

I’m interested in vagueness. In art - in a painting, say. By ‘vagueness’ I mean the undifferentiated, shapeless, blurred, and things without clear boundaries.  We sense we are in the presence of something obscure; a twilight atmosphere, a dim, vague, impalpable ambience that occludes our view, both perceptual and cognitive. Something suggestive and mysterious. Such vagueness implies an undecidability that effects and also infects what we see and think, forcing us to recognize the limits of our knowledge and to explore what we don’t know – and perhaps what we are afraid of. For vagueness undermines  our quest for mastery, testing but not entirely negating the familia, and often provokes  confusion and perturbation. as a result, it can be construed as an affliction, a blindness, a source of meaninglessness.  Within the evanescence of the vague, things cease to signify monolithically, and we encounter an openness of gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, where there are lapses and perturbations of meaning, but also a realm of possibility. The vague reminds us that we are constantly being confronted by new experiences that are too vertiginously complex for us to ever fully encompass them in our mind: they overwhelm us.  

We cope with this uncertainty by  retreating into a space of reflection in which we can have some kind of control, where we can understand what it  is we experience and so make distinctions and decisions. We are very good at identifying our consciousness with such mastery, and structures and boundaries  are the foundations of the ‘ego’. We reduce all that our mind contains -  memories and perceptions - to the psychologically shaped space of a particular subjectivity: the self-mastering ‘I’. We control experience through a process of demarcation, fixation, organization, delineation, separation, formation, definition and rationalization. By establishing clear boundaries, we come to believe that the distinct nature of identities is the precondition for true knowledge. 

This how the former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor (Tibetan and Seon, or thev Korean  from of Chan or Zen)  puts it in the introduction to his translation of the the teachings of the second century Indian Buddhist monk Nagarjuna,  Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime :

 All that is certain in this world is that at some unspecified time one will die. As a means of coping with the anxiety generated by awareness of this fate, human beings elaborate a picture of life in which the self appears to be intrinsically separate from the multitude of other people and things that surround, attract and threaten it. In assuming a safe distance between “me” and “you”, and between “me” and “mine”, one feels able to manage whatever is boring, desirable or terrifying situations face one.

 But one way of characterising the last two centuries of Western thought is to see it as being engaged in the slow but sure erosion of the confidence once built on a  fixed, bounded and boundaried  ‘I’.  When we read modern philosophy, poetry and novels, or look at the visual arts and listen to music,  we often sense that we are being shown that  the ways we seek to represent the world through symbols and signs, and through languages, are miserably inadequate tools for framing our experience.  We are remined of the failure to make sense,  of indeterminacies of meaning,  and  fluid, boundary-free experiences of fusion and loss of istable dentity.  

The  concept of sublime, for example, which  became an important aspect of thinking about the arts in the eighteenth century, explored the limits of  consciousness  in situations in which the experience of reality is registered as excessive and overwhelming.  But awe and wonder can quickly blur into terror, giving rise to a darker aspect of the sublime experience that has always been part of its allure, where the exhilarating feeling of delight metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution, the ‘daemonic’ and death.Initially, the sublime was associated with aspects of nature that instill awe and wonder, such as mountains, avalanches, waterfalls, mists and fogs, stormy seas, or the infinite vault of the starry sky. Today,    rather than nature it is likely to be the incredible power of technology that   supplies the raw material for a characteristically contemporary sublime.  

It is no coincidence that the concept of the sublime, and the willingness of Western thinkers and artists to explore what lies on the other side of the borderline dividing reflective consciousness from ecstatic experience coincided with the period during which Eastern ideas began to become better known in the West and influenced its thinking. But the manner in which East and West understand the fundamentally indescribable totality of reality, and the wayward and uncontrollable emotions that are entailed, diverge fundamentally. This difference lies in what  is judged to be the ultimate value and meaning of the realization that we are not separate, bounded identities. In Eastern thought there developed quite early on the idea that truth is not a matter of empirical observation. Much was made of the need to abandon belief in language’s ability to reveal anything approaching the ‘real’. Oriental thinking steadfastly focused awareness on ontological lack or deficiency – on how we will inevitably fail to comprehend reality through thinking. 

In the Buddhist concept of non-duality it is argued that only silence is an adequate response to  ultimate reality.  Chan Buddhism, which drew heavily on Chinese Taoist ideas, teaches that understanding is wordless and can be transmitted only from mind to mind.  The experience of reality is therefore understood to be something that cannot be caught within the nets of the sign-systems or  languages deployed by human minds. Instead, we are invited to open ourselves up to a sense of absolute  contingency, unpredictability, impermanence, emptiness and otherness.  As a result, the fundamental insight of Oriental thought is that the human subject – the ‘I’ - is neither limited nor distinguished by an inviolable and bounded individuality. Here is the  thirteenth century Japanese  Zen (Chan) Buddhist monk Dogen:

To study the Way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be awakened by all things. To be awakened by all things is to let body and mind of self and others fall away. Even the traces of awakening come to an end, and this traceless awakening is continued endlessly.

Sigmund Freud called the desire to  abandon the illusion of the identity-based  ego n favour of immersion in the non-self  the ‘Nirvana’ complex, and saw it as concealing an unhealthy yearning for the oblivion of death. From the point of view of Western ego-focused thinking and its psychology,  Freud  is  correct. But he misunderstood the fundamental insight of Oriental thinking, which is that the self exists in a state of becoming that knits together both the experience of the bounded and the unbounded. The self unfolds in  a relational state whose identity is connective, contingent, dependent, and in process.   In this way, Eastern thought outlines a theory of consciousness that proposes a middle way between difference and fusion, between bounded, separate individuality, on one hand, and the boundary-less non-self  immersed in the void, on the other. 

As  Nagarjuna put it, we are torn between two impulses: “I am me, I will never not be” –/ The longing for eternity,” on the one hand, and,   “I used to be, I am not any more” –/ The cut of annihilation.” But as he goes on: “The sage avoids being and nothingness”, because reality unfolds as the dynamic interplay between these two impulses, and the goal of life is to site one’s consciousness on the threshold between being and nothingness, rather than to embrace either one at the expense of the other. The Taoist concept of ying and yang – the intertwining of opposites that constitutes the tao –  exemplifies this, and was absorbed into Chinese Buddhism in Chan teachings, and then into Korean Seon and Japanese Zen.

The End of a Buddhist Temple

The Gwan-eun statue at Mutongsa near my house, photographed last year.

Near our house there is, or there was, a small Buddhist temple called Mutongsa (‘sa’ means ‘temple) Only one monk lived there. I say ‘was’ because over the past month it has quietly stopped being a temple. The first thing I noticed was the absence of the imposing statue of  Gwan-eun, the boddhisatva of compassion (named Avalokiteśvara in Indian Buddhism, Guanyin in Chinese, and Kannon in Japanese). Gwan-eun is usually shown sitting or standing  holding a water bottle, which is how I recognised him the first time i visited the temple.[1] As you can see, the one at Mutongsa was standing, about twenty feet tall, and was sited to overlook the rice fields in the small valley on whose northern side it nestled against a wooded hill. About three weeks ago, when I went and looked closer, I saw that the two other statues of the Buddha within the temple grounds had also gone. Then, a week later, the swastika sign and name in Chinese for the temple disappeared from above the entrance, and  soon after that,  the two road signs indicating the temple’s presence. Only the huge temple bell remains, when I looked earlier today. This, and the humble prayer hall, the residence of the monk, and a couple of out-buildings.

I have no idea why they closed the temple. But it certainly wasn’t a very popular one. I never saw anyone visiting it. However, when I arrived in our village seven years ago, Mutongsa was a rather weird place. Unfortunately, I never took photos at the time, so you will have to imagine how it was from my description. A large area of the temple grounds was covered in brightly painted shrines made of large pebbles (this region is rich in such smooth rocks, deposited here millions of years ago as the glaciers melted and rivers shrank) piled up into cains and pagodas and painted crudely with traditional floral motifs and Buddhist symbols in bright green, red, yellow,  blue, and  golds. In fact, everything was brightly painted.

But a few years ago a new monk took up residence, and he obviously didn’t like the garishness of the temple, and so he systematically set about removing all the colourful shrines, using some of the stones from them as  ballast  under the construction of a new road traversing the rice fields and leading to the temple.  Eventually, about six months ago, the monk  had the paint removed from the statues. So, for a while Gwan-eun was a dull grey concrete colour. The sudden austerity  was rather saddening, and I didn’t think to take a photograph. But I had no idea this was just the prelude to the demise of the temple as a whole – and perhaps nor did the monk, for, if he did know, why did he bother to have the statues stripped?   

But you can see what Gwan-eun once looked like in the photograph at the beginning of this blog and below:

 And this is what remains today:

And here are some more images of the temple as it is today. Note the bell remains. And there are still vestiges of its former technicolor character.

I’m not sure that Mutongsa’s closure can be read as representative of the decline of Buddhism in Korea as a whole. However, it is clear that Christianity is  the main beneficiary of the Republic of Korea’s rapid modernization and urbanization. It’s a cliché to equate Protestantism with capitalism, but this does seem a relevant way of understanding religion here. In fact, only 44% of South Korean espouse religion of any kind,  but of these, 45% are Protestant (mostly American-style Pentecostalism, Methodism and Presbyterianism), 35% Buddhist, 18% Roman Catholic, and 2% ‘other.’ The largest mega-church in the world is the Pentecostal Yoido Full Gospel Church in Yoi Island, where there are seats for 15,000 worshippers, and the congregation numbers more than 250,000! Two more of the largest churches in the world are in Seoul. Crosses marking the location of churches are everywhere, and are especially evident at night because they are illuminated – usually in pink. Within a two-mile radius of me, there must be a least six churches – including Jehovah Witnesses and Roman Catholic’s. The nearby Catholic church, which is dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, merits a future post all to itself.  

But it would be wrong to assume that Korea is traditionally  a Buddhist country, which is what I thought before I moved here. Buddhism came to Korea from China in the fourth century, and  was officially adopted by the ruling elite as a way of strengthening royal authority. But over the five centuries of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1912), Buddhism lost much of its official patronage, and monks were forbidden to build temples in the capital.  Joseon was a Neo-Confucian state, and its scholar elite looked down on Buddhism and Buddhists.  But monks continued to practice and preach in temples and monasteries located in isolated mountain regions.

Gradually, the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea became Seon.  Essentially, this is Ch’an Buddhism, which is better known in the West as Zen, the Japanese pronunciation of Cha’n, just as Seon is the Korean pronunciation. Ch’an means ‘meditation’.  Ch’an was transmitted to Unified Silla  (668-935) and became dominant in the eleventh century under the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). It was during this period that the Jogye Order became the predominant form of Korean Buddhism, a status it still holds today. 

Seon, while possessing uniquely Korean characteristics, is, like Ch’an, a fusion of indigenous Chinese Taoism and Indian Mahayana Buddhism. An important teaching of Seon which is also central to Mahayana Buddhism as whole is that all humankind is already in possession of an ‘original self’, ‘Buddha-nature’ or ‘Buddha-mind’ – that is to say, everyone has innate knowledge of ultimate reality. Buddhism teaches that as long as one clings to the limited perspective provided by the identity-ego, achieving the absolute state of freedom that is ‘Buddha-mind’ is impossible.  But Ch’an  is unique in specifically teaching that release from the attachments that mask access to ‘Buddha-mind’ can only come through a moment of sudden insight. Brain-centred thinking involving, for example, the study of the Buddhist canon, is of little use.

One of the most important interpreters of Ch’an from the 1930s onwards in the West was the Japanese philosopher D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966). In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) Suzuki declared that Zen catches ‘life as it flows’. It promotes a fundamentally illogical, non-cognitive and irrational methodology, and is ‘primarily and ultimately a discipline and an experience, which is dependent on no explanation.’ Zen therefore gives great value to non-verbal understanding, feeling, emotion, intuition, sensation, affect, intimacy and immediate experience. 

Here are some quotations from one of the most important modern-day Seon monks, SongChol (1912-1993), taken from the wonderful collection translated by Brian Barry entitled Opening the Eye (Gimm-Young International, 2020). 

The common goals of all religions is to bring people from the world of the relative and finite into the realm of the absolute and infinite. This is because the world of the relative and finite is filled with suffering and anguish. Happiness in this world can be nothing more than fleeting; and in fact we spend more time being unhappy and dissatisfied than we do being happy. So the world of the absolute and infinite promises us eternal happiness and relief from earthly suffering. In this sense, Buddhism is not different from other religions. Eternal happiness is one of the basic desires of the human species. The eternal happiness can be achieved only by crossing over to the world of liberation, the absolute, the infinite; and each religion teaches its own methods for achieving this goal.

In Buddhism we often use the mirror as a metaphor for mind. A mirror in its natural state is perfectly clear. But it loses its ability to reflect as more and more dust gathers on it until finally it can no longer reflect a single thing properly. Our delusions are like dust on a mirror – our vision becomes blurred and we lose our ability to reflect that which is. But being free of delusions is like being the mirror itself without a speck of dust,. This original nature of the mirror is like the buddha nature, which we also call our original face.

 If there as a clump of gold buried in a yard, people would dig and dig until they found it, regardless of how deep it was. The original, infinite, absolute jewel buried within us is incomparably  more magnificent than the clump of gold in the yard. So we should try to find this incredible jewel within.

People usually say that the goal of Buddhism is to become enlightened, and to become awakened, to become a buddha. But that is in fact a misinterpretation, since all sentient beings are originally buddha. To ‘become enlightened’ really means to become enlightened to the fact that you’re already buddha.

Buddhism is the process of cleansing the heart and Zen (Seon) meditation with a koan is the best method to achieve this, “Who am I?” is one of the best known koans, and if you continue to work with this koan, you will come to see your original self and become enlightened. So whatever you do – listen to Dharma talks, read books, chant, prostrate – just continue to ask your self, “Who am I?”

If you can concentrate your mind and reach the state of total absorption, you can see all truths including the true nature of the world in which we live. Usually, because we can’t see present reality as it is, we refer to this world as samsara. But once you make the breakthrough, you will see that this world and this reality are in fact paradise. So Buddhism is not a process of becoming a buddha and turning samsara into paradise. What we call ‘samsara’ is originally the world of paradise.

[1] Or is Gwan-eun actually female? One of the striking features of Gwan-eun’s iconography is that he/she is depicted as transgender. Neither fully recognizable as male or female. Apparently, the Jesuits have something to do with this. When they encountered Guanyin in China during the Jesuit Mission they associated the bodhisattva of compassion with Our Lady. This, in its turn, had an impact of Buddhist perceptions of their bodhisattva, which gradually took on more female characteristics. I too, at first assimilated the Buddhist figure to the Virgin Mary, and then, anthropologically, to the Mother Goddess of paganism. But now I realize this is a fundamental Western bias. I don’t mean simply towards Christianising Gwan-eun, but something much deeper -  the bias of binary thinking in which the statue must be male or female. Actually, I have come to see that the real value of the bodhisattva of compassion’s  iconography is precisely its gender ambiguity which transcends the binary choice, placing us in a more fluid in-between.  The Chinese Ch’an Buddhist learnt from the Jesuits, but the Jesuits did not learn to overcome their dualism from the Chinese, no doubt because the Christian God is so inherently patriarchal - God the Father. But at least Catholicism has some infusion of the feminine in the form of the Virgin Mary. Protestantism, by contrast, is wholly patriarchal.