Past Life Story

The year after the Imjin War ended, you were born into a yangban family. The clan had lost half its members to the war, and your mother grew frail with that sorrow. When you turned seven, your mother left your side. That night, you saw death for the first time, and you felt impermanence for the first time. Around your tenth year, you often climbed the mountain. Behind the village, atop a small peak, lived an old monk in his hermitage. You loved going there. The old monk spoke little, but when you sat beside him, he would offer a single cup of tea. In that silence, you felt something dissolve within you. There were things that human words could not unravel—this you knew at a young age. At fifteen, your father took a new wife. The new mother was a kind person, but your heart had already gone to the mountain. In the spring of your seventeenth year, you bowed deeply to your father and left home. You shaved your head and donned the monk's robe. The old monk became your teacher. Before you turned twenty, you had read a thousand scriptures. The Avatamsaka, the Lotus, the Diamond Sutras—within them you sought the meaning of your mother's death. Yet the answer was not in books. The answer was in seated meditation. You began daily seated meditation at dawn. At first your mind was loud, but as time passed, a deep stillness like a well formed within you. Around thirty, your teacher entered nirvana. On the final night, your teacher called you and offered a single cup of tea. "The mountain is the mountain, and water is water." Those were your teacher's final words. You did not fully grasp their meaning that day, but you contemplated them for a lifetime in the place your teacher had left. Around forty, you became the abbot of a small temple. The temple lay deep in the mountains; few came. Yet each dawn you held the morning rites. When the bell rang and spread through the mountain, the mountain itself answered. There you realized: the Buddha was not far away. He was in the mountain, in the bell's sound, in your breath. In your fiftieth year, a young man came to your temple. He had lost his parents and lost his way. You took him in and taught him. In the young man's eyes, you saw your own childhood self. Time flows like a river—this you felt deeply, only then. In a dawn of your sixty-sixth year, you began seated meditation as always. In that very posture, you departed. When your disciples found you, your face was at peace. As if asleep, as if smiling. To enter nirvana in seated posture was called jwatal-ipmang. It was a state attainable only by those who had practiced deeply. On the day of cremation, your sarira were found. Small, hard pearls. Your disciples enshrined them and built a small pagoda. That pagoda still stands quietly in some mountain even now. You spent your life in the mountains. Yet you were not confined by mountains—through mountains you touched the cosmos. Your soul, like the bell's sound, like the wind, is everywhere and nowhere. That was what you sought all your life, and what you finally reached.