How Old Is Heaven?
28. 하늘이 몇살이나 되겠느냐
28. How Old Is Heaven?
Yu Hui Jung“Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
Gi had stopped by Sungkyunkwan University. The front gate was on situated on level ground but the campus itself was all uphill. Students in the dance department often traveled by taxi for fear that their calves would grow too thick.
Now, at the top of a hill looking out toward Jongno Tower in the distance, he was catching his breath. It was a campus made up of various small buildings, and I enjoyed being able to travel quickly from one classroom to the next. But I also enjoyed fantasies of zipping about on a bicycle through a flat campus strewn with flower petals.
Seven years later, I returned to university as a third-year student at the Wonkwang University Department of Won-Buddhism. It was a large, flat campus without hills; it had a lake and lovely cherry trees.
I hummed a tune to myself as I walked around campus, wearing a backpack that my younger brother’s wife had bought for me to congratulate her late bloomer brother-in-law on his enrollment. As I entered the classroom building, some students greeted me more curiously than I had anticipated. “All this for me?” I wondered.
Somewhat stunned, I entered the classroom and sat down at one of the tables, where I struck up a conversation with a graceful young woman with long, straight hair across from me.
“How old are you?” I stammered.
“I was born in 1992. What about you, sir?”
“Sir?”
I know I was a bit older than her, but I was surprised to be referred to as “sir” as though I were some middle-aged man.
After the class finished, I looked at myself in a mirror on the right side of the building’s lobby. I had the suitably aging face of a man in his mid-30s, and the suit of a prospective minister. I felt like I looked like someone who had come to deliver a lecture. It struck me that one would be hard pressed to find a “sir” like me.
The children born around the 1988 Seoul Olympics were now the graduating class. As I left the building, laughing half-heartedly to myself, I saw that I was the only one who wasn’t receiving the leaflets that the student council was passing out. I felt bashful reaching out my hand.
I returned to the dormitory and washed up. The lukewarm spray of water embraced me and I rinsed away the day’s grime with bubbles of soap. As I was wiping beads of water off with a towel, I saw a wisp of gray hair on my body. “I guess I am getting older,” I thought.
With my brown eyes, my crooked teeth, and my scrawny body that was so susceptible to the cold, each day made me recognize all the traits that had been passed down from my father to me. The years had left their imprint on my mind, too;
it viewed the world from the well of a “me” the size of a small hand, the product of all my honing and learning over time, the creation of my body and thoughts and words. The time etched on my body and mind formed a thorough record of my life.
When I was studying gem appraisal at the Korea Gem Institute at Namdaemun Market, I learned that the jewelry engineering scholar Bae Sangdeok particularly prized the opal, which he called the “gem of life.” The reason, he said, was because of the water it held inside of it; over time, it would lose its luster and end up aging alongside its owner.
Now I understand that our bodies are like those opals and that it is mere jest of the mind to feel sad about aging.
At this very moment, as we stand opening and closing our eyes, we are all one year old. The mind that emulates heaven does not age.
“How old is heaven?”
“It has no beginning and no end, so it has no age.”
“Anyone else?”
“It’s one year old.”
“Correct.”
“Then how old are we?”
“One year old.”
“So we’re the same age as heaven. Heaven and earth are one year old, we’re all one year old, and the myriad things and fellow creatures are all one year old. Because of this, we are all one household. We must understand that before we can be called ‘wise.’ Someone just now said that heaven has no beginning or end. That is half-true, so that’s 50 points. Anyone else?”
“It has both a beginning and end.”
“Correct.”
“If you are wondering when the beginning and end are, it starts when a thought arises and ends when the thought ends. We must understand this and convert it into an Il-Won seed. So the realm of neither arising nor perishing to which the Buddha was awakened is the realm without a beginning or end. The retribution and response of cause and effect has a beginning and end. We must understand these two things.”
—Dharma Instructions by Prime Dharma Master Daesan Vol. 3, 1:67
