Hidden Treasure of Korean Buddhism

Posted by Chris Young on 06.26.06

Good morning everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend.

Zen Master Seung Sahn always asks people three questions. So I will ask them to you. The first question is, ‘Why do you eat everyday?’ That means ‘Why are you living in this world?’ What is the purpose of your life? For whom? There is a famous movie, which is, ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’. That is actually the line from a famous poem, written by an Englishman, John Donne, which starts out, ‘No man is an island onto himself’ And finally after many lines, it ends with, ‘Never ask for whom the bell tolls… it tolls for thee.’ It tolls for you. So why are we living in this world, for whom? Only for me? So ‘Why do we eat everyday?’ Somebody maybe says because I am hungry. Yeah, that is true. Dog is hungry, cat is hungry, snake is hungry, and pig is hungry. So they eat. But how are human beings different from animals? Is there not one thing which makes us different?

Still don’t understand? Good! Always keep this ‘don’t-know mind’ and soon you will attain your true purpose in life:

Finally I happened upon a Zen center in New Haven, and heard a dharma talk by this Korean Zen Master named Seung Sahn. He said in his dharma talk, “Human beings have no meaning, no reason, and no choice.” I felt, that’s right, exactly! Then he said, “But if you throw away, ‘I’, ‘my’, and ‘me’, then you will get great meaning, great reason, and great choice.” Then I said, “That’s what I want! But how? How do I do that?” Then he said, “When you are doing something, just do it. When you eat, just eat. When you are talking, just talk. When you are walking, just walk. When you are driving, just drive. When you play golf, just play golf. When you are working, just work. Inside and outside become one. Then just do it.” That dharma talk really hit my mind. So I became his student. Shortly after that I moved into the Zen Center.

Read this teaching by Mu Ryang Sunim, a student of Seung Sahn’s

2 Comments

  1. Trav/s said,

    06.26.06 at 10:55 am

    good little story. I was surprised by the political overtones of the talk though…..

  2. beesucker said,

    06.26.06 at 11:45 am

    Don’t make ‘political overtones’. If there are 5 people and 5 apples and 1 person takes 4 apples, then the others will suffer. We like to think ‘it will work itself out, maybe the scientists will save us, they know what they are doing’. But really, they don’t, because we only have 5 apples. Our governments use ‘politics’ to trick us, so when someone says there is too much smog, population, and poverty, they can say, ‘you are being political, you are a bad liberal’, that way they can just keep making monies and power, keep up their demigod routine. I don’t complain much about this. The monk wasn’t complaining either. He said if we keep living this way, in the end it will balance out:

    When I was growing up on the east coast of America, there was an outbreak of gypsy moths. Gypsy moths are a kind of caterpillar. They descend from the trees on a little string, and then they go into other trees and eat the leaves. That year there were so many caterpillars that all the trees lost their leaves. Scientists said, “Next year if the trees lose their all their leaves again, the trees will all die.” So people were very afraid. Then the following year, there were no more caterpillars, no more gypsy moths. They had eaten all the leaves the previous year and they all suddenly starved because there was no more food. So nature always returns to a state of balance by itself.

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