The Flowers Will Bloom

23. 꽃은 피겠지

23. The Flowers Will Bloom

My belongings were simple and few: a couple of items of clothing and an old, tattered copy of The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning.

I flowed from Mandeoksan Mountain to Guryong Village’s Yongeun Center like a dribble of coffee. I greeted Rev. Hong, with whom I would be sharing a room, and sat down in the corner to unpack my things. There was a guest at the time, a pre-minister who had left home and joined the department of Won-Buddhist studies.

Tired and sad, this person suffered from an exceptional envy. She felt a strong sense of disappointment in the younger practitioners who did not work hard. Anyone can accomplish anything through hard work, yet this person did not recognize her own laziness; all she knew was jealousy.

Every time she spoke about how the others could not accomplish anything because they were not diligent, I felt anger rising up within me.

“But you know . . .”

“Are you saying that a person who passes the judicial exam with the lowest possible score is diligent while a person who narrowly fails is lazy? How many people are there who fall around the cut line? How can you say that? Just because someone works hard doesn’t mean they can go to Seoul National University like you.”

Between my times in the Noryangjin and Sillim-dong neighborhoods, I had witnessed and experienced all sorts of failures that could not be attributed to laziness alone. With my anger, a scar that I had thought had healed opened up again.

I thought of my friend Lim, crouching underneath the awning of a barbecue restaurant and weeping over his studies going poorly after spending over a decade preparing for the civil service exam. I thought of Ahn, who was exceptionally thoughtful in caring for the stray cats that lived by the outer wall of the Yurim Study Room.

Before going to the US, I ran into Ahn in front of the neighborhood library. He was still giving breadcrumbs to the cats. He told me that he had given up on his ambitions of becoming a lawyer and was preparing to become a Level 9 government employee.

Every time the second round of announcements came for people passing the judicial exam, the streets of Seoul’s Sillim-dong neighborhood would empty, reduced to piles of trash and debris. Some of those people inevitably failed; a number of them took their own lives.

Some people left because they passed the exam, others died, others gave up—this neighborhood where examinees piled in on top of each other, spending their periods of study in tiny rented rooms (gosiwon), was not a place where one stayed forever.

Those who stayed behind to give the exam one more try hovered around the cram schools and off-campus dormitory buildings, pouring 20-cents-a-cup vending machine coffee into their veins. Their pockets emptying by the day, they staved off hunger with cheap meals and moved around between cheap rooms.

As the fear and anxiety deepen from one year to the next, even the best of us end up twisted. Envy for the students who pass soon turns to self-recrimination; “diligence” turns into a poison to those who once prided themselves for it. No matter how hard they work, they keep failing and so they seek to blame others for their lack of success.

Close family members are easy prey. I myself spent part of my adolescence the same way. So this sort of behavior—claiming that people were just jealous without actually knowing if their failures had come about because they “didn’t work hard” or “weren’t dedicated”—was a trigger that caused me to explode.

Sometimes, things don’t work out no matter how hard we try; sometimes, the road is simply blocked. In the Book of Changes, this is called the “great herd” or “great taming force.” This means that success or failure, ability or inability, are not simply matters of diligence.

For each of us, there is a “right moment.” Anyone who has ever fallen on their face knows the meaning of the words “Do what you can; the rest is destiny.” They know the phrase, “Seven parts luck, three parts skill.”

When we find ourselves faced with periods of unendurable loss, we must let go of what we had been doing and change the direction of our life. Even if it hurts to think of the time and effort we have wasted, we need to let go. Courage and wisdom lie in walking away when it is time to walk away.

It was early spring, and Hua had taken the music graduate school entrance exam while staying at the Won-Buddhism New York Temple. It was her third attempt. When she left, it was with the promise that she would return again in the fall as a student; I have not heard from her since.

If she were here with me now, I would like to say to her, “You’ve worked very hard. It’s all right if you stop now. This is your path in life. It happened to me too. When we meet again, I hope we are the kind of people who can accept success with humility and failure with serenity—the kind of people who do not reproach those who fail for their ‘laziness’ but have the generosity to warmly embrace them.”

Hua often spoke of how she loved sage flowers. Hearing that rain is coming, I plant some seeds. The flowers will bloom.

If you fail in what you are doing, say to yourself, “What good fortune,” let go of what you must let go of, accept the losses you must accept, and move on. Otherwise, you sink into an ever-deeper place, which forms double and triple layers until you cannot extricate yourself. So you must recognize the lows as lows and reckon with them as such. I too had lows when I was in Wonpyeong, in Yangju, and in Seoul. But those times were also highs.

—Dharma Instructions by Prime Dharma Master Daesan Vol 3, 7:288