[Buddha-l] Perhaps the Buddhists in Korea have

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 15:53 +0900, Lidewij Niezink wrote:

> Then again, i am amazed by the warmth and friendliness of the Korean
> people in general.

I share your enthusiasm for Korean generals. In the interest of full
disclosure I have to add that I have never yet met a people I did not
really like. (Hell, I even like Americans in general.)

Along with all other people on the planet Earth (I have not visited
other planets so far as I know, although I'm 95% certain I was not born
on Earth) Koreans are delightfully enigmatic in general. Their way of
being religious is part of the enigma.

Many years ago I was involved in interfaith work in Toronto (a wonderful
city in which it is still possible to encounter some Canadians). Having
heard a great deal about how Korean Christians were desecrating Buddhist
temples---in the 1980s a favorite Christian gesture was to place a bowl
of fresh shit on the altar as an offering to the Buddha---I asked a
Canadian Presbyterian missionary about the truth of these reports. This
missionary had spent a couple of decades in Korea and spoke the language
well. (I don't know how much he knew about auto mechanics.) He laughed
in a way that I interpreted as mild embarrassment and said that foreign
(that is, non-Korean) Christian missionaries were frequently shocked at
the behavior of Korean converts to Christianity. He reported that he had
remonstrated with many Korean Christians (most of whom are
Presbyterians) about their enthusiasm for desecrating Buddhist sacred
spaces, and the reply he heard most often was something to the effect
"That's just the way we Koreans are. We are passionate people who love a
good fight." 

Generalizations tend to have exceptions. One wonderful exception to the
feisty sectarianism that can be observed among Koreans was David Chung,
who taught in the religious studies department at Carleton University in
Ottawa before he went back to Korea to be principal of a Christian
college. Professor Chung was one of the people who strongly encouraged
me to go into Buddhist studies. His lectures on East Asian Buddhism
invariably showed a deep love and profound knowledge of the Buddhist
tradition. His lectures on Confucianism and Daoism also showed his deep
respect for those traditions. In the callowness of youth I idolized him.
In the crankiness of old age, I am still deeply grateful for all that he
taught me through his lectures and his example. He was what Koreans call
a real Mensch.

Another exception to feisty sectarianism was my Korean Zen master, Samu
Sunim. When I was training with him, he routinely built his dharma talks
around Christian, Jewish and Muslim stories, although of course he knew
Korean and Japanese Buddhism best. Being a sucker for ecumenism and the
pie-in-the-sky notion that human beings can live together in peace and
harmony, I loved Sunim's respectful explorations of other traditions and
his insistence that going for refuge to the Buddha, done properly, was
going for refuge to everything wise from every tradition. That, I think,
is an example of what it means to live in the realization that there are
no intrinsic natures.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico