Beautiful Finish Is New Start

By Chung Ah-young

Staff Reporter

Leading a life of simplicity and austerity, Ven. Beopjeong has lived in a cabin in a moutain valley in Gangwon Province for the last 17 years, with his daily routine built around farming a patch of land and collecting firewood.

Ven. Beopjeong, one of the country's most famous and respected Buddhist monks, has released a new book ``Beautiful Finish,'' a collection of essays about his life on the mountain. The book comes four years after his previous best seller, ``Pleasure in Living Alone.''

The 76-year-old author is best known for ``Non-Possession,'' released in 1976, which has been a hot item on bookshelves for the past three decades. The book, a collection of 35 essays, continues to attract readers to day by preaching of a life without greed and attachment.

The new book is in line with the theme of ``Non-Possession,'' as the monk describes a life dedicated to prayer that consists of quietness, meditation and poverty. In a contemplative tone, Ven. Beopjeong invites the reader into his thoughts about life and death and his happiness of living a simple life in nature.

The monk urges modern people to stop and look back to where they are now and what paths they go through to beat fears about death through the ``beautiful finish.''

He says that the beautiful finish is going back to the state of the beginning. In the way of working or in the middle of the way, it's restoring the beginner's mind.

``It is asking ourselves fundamental questions ― `Who am I?' and `Where am I going?' Through the questions, we can finish every moment. The beautiful finish is not the end but the new start,'' he says.

He also tells his readers to shed their obsession with results and success and become true to one's self.

Throughout his writings, the monk meditates on exhaustiveness through silence and freedom from possessions by putting into practice honest poverty while living alone in the remote cabin.

He grows various plants near the cabin and lauds the small lives in the fields that comform to the laws of Mother Nature.

As the ecology advocate, the monk strongly criticized the Lee Myung-bak government's attempt to construct the inter-country carnal project as a ``horrible disaster.''

``Our land is our body, flesh and bones which have been handed down from our ancestors throughout our long history. The idea of constructing a canal in this land is a humiliation. For economic reasons such as distribution and tourism, trampling the land is a reckless and absurd idea,'' the monk says.

Ven. Beopjeong worries that man-made disasters caused by over-development would occur more often if the canal project is pushed ahead with.

In search of non-possession, he thinks his body also isn't his own. ``Usually, I thought of my body as my own. But when I get sick, I realize my body is not my own because I cannot control it. When I get sick, my relatives and friends share the pains according to the intensity of their intimacy to me. That's why the old saying goes that because neighbors are sick, thus I am sick too,'' he says.

He realizes on his sickbed that ``saengnobyeongsa,'' which means the four steps of human life ― birth, aging, illness and death ― can happen not step by step but at the same time.

``So that's why every moment is important. Although we die anytime and anywhere, we should not leave any regret,'' the monk says.

Fears of life don't lie in death but in ignorance of something dying inside ourselves while we are living, he says.

It means that becoming numb to the beauty of flowers and the moon and not looking back at our lives in front of the sunset is none other than a collapse of daily life losing ourselves in front of the television.

In the rustic cottage, one of the monk's daily duties is to get firewood, which was also his duty when he first became a monk in the Buddhist temple.

``What is the monk's job?'' he asks. He answers everything he does in 24 hours from cutting wood to making a fire in a fireplace everyday are part of the self-practices and austerity. Learning from working and laboring every moment makes him realize the truth about his life, he says.

``Three things which make my life happy are books, which are my friends and teachers; vegetable farms, which need my hands; and a cup of tea, made with water from the stream near the cottage,'' he says.

He warns of the greed of getting more and more in times of shortage is a mental death, saying that the pursuit of materialist wealth is going in the wrong direction.

``Last winter, I learned the importance of a drop of water through my body and mind because of the lack of rainfall in the deep mountain valley. People have their own capacity. When the well is full, it will run over,'' he says. If you are satisfied with what you have now, you are truly rich, he adds.

chungay@koreatimes.co.kr