Life Weighs Heavy like a Mount

30. 삶은 산처럼 무겁다.

30. Life Weighs Heavy like a Mountain

It was 4:30 in the morning. I opened my eyes before the second ring of the alarm. In the room, there were four of us pre-ministers sleeping side-by-side. I quietly got up and folded up my bedding.

I washed up, put on some comfortable clothes, and headed to the meditation room.

In the distance, I heard the gentle tolling of the Gaebyeokdae bell clearing the darkness from Woneumgak Belfry.

After the morning meditation, we all stood to do some yoga and loosen up. Some of the male practitioners were careless with their postures. Their pants were loose, and they had visible erections. When you do Sŏn meditation, life energy rises up into your body.

Like a drooping flower that stands straight after taking in water, there is nothing strange about post-meditation erections. But there were female practitioners present, which made things awkward.

When you feel stimulated and energized through cultivation, you must use this energy as the power of exertion rather than allowing it to dissipate. But this was by no means easy for these young and high-spirited practitioners.

They were no less prone to lust than other young men. If anything, they were more liable to cause problems since they had been keeping their desires pent up for so long.

I was the most recent arrival in my room, but because I was a late bloomer, the others treated me as their elder. When I spoke to the younger practitioners, I refrained from generally denouncing sex and told them that they needed to be very careful about using protection if they found themselves in an unavoidable situation.

Rev. Hong, the minister in charge of guidance for pre-ministers at the dormitory, upbraided me quite harshly for my ideas. Such is the conservatism of monks when it comes to sexual acts.

Pre-ministers were required to return to the dormitory before seven o’clock, when the evening routine began. One night, as we sat in a circle reading the scriptures, one of our group, Ho, just stared blankly toward the window. I approached him and saw that he was in tears.

“I have committed a terrible transgression,” he said. I was unable to ask any further questions.

That winter, Ho became a father. The order would not tolerate a pre-minister conceiving a daughter before marriage.

Ho ended up leaving the dormitory. On the last day, he sat down with me on the basketball court and told me the whole story. I felt so sad about his leaving that I finally said what I had been unable to before.

“Couldn’t you have aborted it?”

In Buddhism, life is seen as beginning with the meeting of numinous consciousness, a sperm, and an egg. The complete union of the three occurs as early as the moment of fertilization, or as late as four to six weeks after the implantation of an embryo in the uterus. This means that in Buddhism, abortion is seen as murder. I had not been unaware of this when I asked the question.

Ho was a university dropout while the young mother had only just begun her career as a nurse. How had they planned to survive when they decided to have a child? Neither of them came from a wealthy home. It all seemed so reckless.

Had they made their mind up to terminate the pregnancy, he could have gone ahead with becoming a minister until the time that karma would eventually bring the truth to light. He could have covered up the whole thing as though it had never happened. Korea has one of the highest abortion rates in the OECD, after all.

“My girlfriend wanted to have the baby.” Ho was committedly serene. I sensed the anguish the young student couple must have gone through over the pregnancy, having chosen to have the child knowing that it meant giving up many things and enduring many difficulties.

Sometime later, I saw Ho again. He explained that he had been living with his in-laws. He had a bandage on his hand and said that he had been working at a chicken processing plant and cut his hand with a knife.

I felt quite upset. But then he told me that he had just recently moved out of his in-laws’ house and that his family’s situation had improved. His daughter was growing up nicely. I was relieved.

But I also know that not everyone’s experience is like Ho and his wife’s. That we live in a world of unimaginable outcomes, of situations in which I would not dare to assert what is right and what is wrong. This is why I do not presume to judge those who have felt compelled to cut loose the afflictions that arrive upon their bodies.

I can only do my part as a student of the Buddha. I can guide people—men and women who struggle with regret over a past abortion or the doctors who perform abortions—and lead them to rituals of repentance so that they can reflect on what they have done and refrain from creating such karma in the future.

I can perform a Buddhist ritual for the dead to help exorcise the bitterness that forms between such a person and the aborted fetus’s spirit. What a blessed thing it is when this ceremony leads to the fetus’s spirit receiving a new body and a new life through reliance on the Buddha’s dharma.

And if I happen to be visited by a weakened woman who aborted a child from her womb, I will prepare a tonic for her rather than scaring her with horror stories from the Buddhist scriptures. If I am visited by a poor woman who wishes to abort her child due to unavoidable circumstances—and if this is surely the decision that she has made—then I would be willing to reach into my own pockets to ensure that she is not injured at the hands of some charlatan doctor for lack of money.

Obviously, I would not be able to avoid the karma that would await me for abetting murder. But it would be the best that I could do, and my own fear is a different matter. In the complex skein of life and death, none of us can be uniquely right.

I simply hope that as we each choose our own best path, we do not forget the principle of reaping what we sow.

Life weighs heavy like a mountain.

Abortion ends the life of a fetus that instinctively seeks to depend on us, and so it is essentially murder. In such cases as when the mother’s life is jeopardized by the fetus, one may deal with it unavoidably, offering silent declaration and formal prayer and following in accordance with family meetings and legal procedures. But that is only when it is unavoidable, and it is not a rule. To end a life that grows through the will of heaven in our womb is an even graver transgression than other forms of murder.

—Dharma Instructions by Prime Dharma Master Daesan, 12:24