'Taking photos is part of meditation'

Ven. Inkyung smiles in this photo taken in March 2013 at the Daegwallyeong Sheep Farm in the eastern mountainous county of PyeongChang. Courtesy of MPCA

Buddhist monk to hold photo-poem exhibit

By Park Jin-hai

Revered monk Inkyung, 61, is credited with being the trailblazer in integrating Buddhist meditation into Western psychotherapy. He has embarked on another meaningful experiment ― taking photos to heal wounded minds. He says meditation and taking photos are related as they are similar in many ways.

His decade of effort bore fruit.

The religious leader will hold a photography exhibition ahead of the publication of his latest photo-poetry book titled “Pilgrim’s Silver Tree (literally translated).”

Seventy of the 100 included in his upcoming book, which he took over the past ten years traveling around the country, will be exhibited along with meditative poems he wrote at Bulil Gallery within Beomnyeonsa Temple, located across from Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul, April 16-25.

The monk says taking photos is part of his meditation. “Taking photos involves picking up the subject, holding back one’s breath to focus on it, pressing the shutter and selecting images. Likewise, meditation is the process of noticing where one’s thoughts and feelings are heading, focusing on them and gaining insight,” said monk Inkyung during an interview with The Korea Times, Sunday. “The only difference is that taking pictures requires outward probing, while meditation requires inward looking.”

The former teacher who spent five years teaching elementary students, quit his stable job and despite his family’s fierce opposition, became a monk in 1988. He says he has always had an intense desire for inner growth. “My job was stable, but I felt that I had stopped growing. I felt out-of-place,” said the monk. “The unanswered question of who I really am put me at a loss and pained me. I felt I had no answer, anything else would be meaningless.”

He started studying Buddhism and, like many other Korean Buddhist scholars, he studied Buddhist philology. “I’ve studied scriptural materials of the Buddhist tradition in their original languages for over ten years. But, I couldn’t stop, because it felt empty without connections to what is happening in the real world,” he said. “The financial crisis of the late 90s that hit the country hit people hard. Faced with problems of the real world, I thought people should be mentally prepared to deal with those real problems.”

Since 2002, he has been interpreting Buddhism in the light of psychotherapy and has developed programs for counseling focused on Buddhist meditation.

Reverend Inkyung says religion as a subject of blind belief will wane and meditation will take its place. “With the economy in bad shape, youth unemployment running high and people worrying about getting older, more people tend to lean on religion to find solace and comfort. But many existing religions don’t suggest practical solutions that can give inner peace and help people cure their suffering. This is why the religious population is shrinking these days,” he said. “Meditation is what suggests practical cures and enables spiritual growth.”

In 2007, he established the Meditation-based Psychological Counseling Association (MPCA), devoting himself to research and training meditation counseling experts.

Ven. Inkyung’s photo “Who Are You” captures a dying lotus flower days after it bloomed. Just like the flower blooms and dies as time goes by, he said, life decays once it reaches the peak. Courtesy of MPCA

Meditative counseling psychology emerged in 2000, and in the wake of the healing trend, it has become hugely popular since 2010. Meditation is gaining more attention, he says. “In 2000, almost all academic papers on Buddism were about philology, but now some 30 to 40 percent of all papers published are about applied Buddhism,” said the monk.

The poems accompanying his photos in the upcoming exhibition are the subjects he met and experienced on his way to heal the stressed, anxiety-prone people of today.

“Today’s people are constantly threatened. They worry about war, their jobs and their futures. But the more people strive not to think about these issues and to eliminate them from their minds, the bigger their anxieties grow. People should learn the skills to stop their free-running thoughts and accept reality as it is. That is meditation,” he said.

He took the photo in “Pilgrim’s Silver Tree,” featuring snow-covered winter trees, in March 2013 at Daegwallyeong Sheep Farm in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province. With the silvery trees beaming under the sun he meant to convey the luminous mind which can be understood as either Buddhist spirituality or Christian spirituality. “I wanted to express the truth-seeker’s way to reach the pure mind, unchanging over the passage of time.”