Two Minds Reflecting Each Othe
1. 두 마음 서로 비치매
1. Two Minds Reflecting Each Other
Yu Hui JungAs I walked into the university library, a card catalog, resembling the medicine chest of an Eastern medicine clinic, stood out to me immediately.
Its wooden drawers were divided by topic; I opened them up, looked at each card, and wrote down the location of certain books on a piece of paper. I followed the scent of ink as it wafted through the towering canyon of books.
Reaching out to pick up a book, I unexpectedly locked eyes with someone, and my heart trembled. It was a familiar face, someone I had often seen perusing the shelves around this time, but we had never exchanged words.
At the back of the book I had selected was a small pocket. I pulled out the catalog card, curious to know whose hands the book had passed through. There was one name listed several times. I wondered who the person might be; it seemed like we might be quite similar.
Many of the library patrons were preparing for service or employment examinations, sitting surrounded by piles of books on accounting, law, and the TOEIC and TOEFL examinations.
Pushing between them, I grabbed a novel with pastel-toned illustrations and sat by a large window with the sunlight pouring in. I was greeted by someone across from me who was reading Dostoyevsky with great interest.
I opened the cover of my novel, flipping the pages with my index finger so that they made a rustling sound against each other. The paper felt soft beneath my fingertips. From time to time, the ribbon bookmark brushed my wrist as it drifted between the pages. In the quiet of the reading room, my ears and tongue rested as my eyes busily followed the text.
As more and more humanities books have fallen apart from age or disappeared from the shelves, and as I became increasingly unable to find them at the library or bookstore, I made up my mind to start my own library at home. Every time I came into some money, I immediately acquired more books to add to my collection.
These included the eight great works of Chinese literature, Richard F. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights, Sōhachi Yamaoka’s Tokugawa Ieyasu, Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha series, Pak Kyongni’s Land, Hong Myonghui’s Im Kkokjong, Ri Kiyoung’s Tumen River, and Hwang Sokyong’s Jang Gilsan.
I also collected works of history by Eric Hobsbawn and Trotskyist writings; the collected letters of So Chunsik, André Gorz, Lee Jungseop, Lu Xun, Jeong Suil, Shin Youngbok, Vincent van Gogh, and Hwang Daekwon; various works of autobiography and biography; selections from the Confucian canon; and books about the economy.
As my pile grew taller, I visited my neighborhood furniture store to purchase a cheap bookcase, which I lugged up the hill to my house.
Eventually, three walls of my room became filled with books. Not long afterwards, I left my home for Mandeoksan Mountain. Distressed at the thought of my ownerless books gathering dust, I sorted them by category and gave them to friends. In the process, I cleared out my own mind, too.
I joined the Won-Buddhist order empty-handed, but my ingrained habits were difficult to break and I continued to fill and empty bookshelves over and over again. Somewhere along the way, I changed from a reader to a writer.
Of course, matching the classics in quality is still well beyond my reach. Every time I publish something new, I feel exposed and embarrassed. Even so, I wish to share my own simple tales.
In these pages, I share the ways in which the dharma of dependent arising and the principle of cause and effect manifest unnoticed in our precious day-to-day lives. I also humbly share stories of my past struggles with development and change while relying on the words of the Buddha. In the process, I seek to show the ways in which our minds reflect one another.
As snow falls on Ssanggye Temple, the monk sits in the snow and enters samādhi,
While his friend returns into the fog amid the five willows
Reflecting one another in the two minds’ dream
The crescent moon rises before the grass hut.
—Seoldam Jau
