Be Like the Sea
바다와 같아라
11. Be Like the Sea
Yu Hui Jung
You, my sea. I called the one I loved yeohae, meaning “like the sea.” Just as the vast sea never overflows no matter how much water it takes in, I wanted her to embrace even my foolishness. As the seasons passed, the chains of affinity that connected us finally wore down and broke.
Standing at a crossroads, the two of us unclasped our hands and went our separate ways. My heart aches now and then as the old emotions well up, but it is tolerable, the once-clear memories growing fainter by the day. Such is the fading of young love.
As the sun sets, the darkness comes. The moon waxes and wanes, the heat is followed by the cold, girls grow to become old women, meetings turn to parting, joy becomes sorrow, and the flowers blossom and fall. All things that surge forth eventually fall away. Beginnings always herald endings. Their starts and endings are connected in different forms, forever cycling.
Change: such is nature as it is. And so it is with the relationships between lovers. Yet we do not know how to let go of attachment. We wait endlessly, thinking that the old lover who left us may someday return; we console ourselves, viewing it as a beautiful form of resignation.
The now distant you and I of today are no longer the tender pair of the past. It is only for us that the wounds deepen, as we lack the courage to accept the cold reality. The Buddha named this “the pain of love’s parting.”
I hoped that she would see only me, that she would stay, unchanging, by my side, that she would accept all of me, that even if the world forsook me she would never lose her trust in me. But such selfish desires are possible only in the realm of dreams, and in the end, they elude our grasp. Suffering was the price I paid for seeking immortal love in the driving, surging waves of desire. The roots of that pain lie in our fixation with what we cannot have.
In the empty space left behind by my fleeting love shines the realization of the evanescence, the endless transformation of all things in the universe. This impermanence is paired with the selfless nature of all dharmas, the fact that there is no entity anywhere that is eternal and unchanging.
In Sanskrit, the work duḥkha describes the feeling when we defy this principle and succumb to a sea of suffering. Conversely, we reach the tranquility of nirvana when we let go of attachment in our mind and extinguish the flames of deluded thoughts.
Cultivation is the process through which we perceive the Buddha’s teachings (the Four Dharma Seals) in our daily lives and clear away the confusion in our minds. Only then will our past suffering and foolishness reveal their value. In that moment, our defilements will blossom into wisdom (bodhi).
The Buddha uplifts sickened sentient beings. The buddhadharma is a medicine that we swallow to clear away the three poisons that permeate our minds—greed, hatred, and delusion. He grants compassion on those sentient beings that are unable to clear away these poisons and thus cannot escape the wheel of suffering.
The Buddha warmly accepts all sentient beings into an embrace as vast as the sea, never giving up as he grants his loving-kindness through various expedient means until the day when sentient beings break free and emerge from their own frames (the sign of the self).
Now I call myself yeohae, saying: “Be like the sea. Accept the vow to not neglect even a single sentient being.”
The sea is like a house that props up all the sea creatures. Buddhas are the same, becoming props for all sentient beings and all wholesome dharmas.
—Ratnamegha Sutra
