1.

When I was young, I often followed my mother to her temple, and monks often told me to enter monkhood later, half joking and half serious.
My cheeks were rosy like most children, so I must have looked innocent to them, but even then, I wasn’t all that nice.
I thought those bald people were talking nonsense.
When I grew up a little, even my mother told me I should become a monk.
If she had joked around a little like those monks, I would have just laughed at her, like I did the monks, but she sounded completely serious.
That’s why I hated her words even more.
One day, my mother told me she only wanted for me to be truly free, no matter where I was or what I did.
Hearing that, I couldn’t bring myself to get angry at her.
Freedom was what I wanted too, and I was hungry for it.

2.

The car enters a residential area. A hill. Telephone poles. Low-rise apartment buildings and old Western-style houses.
Flower pots frozen by the cold. The smell of a wet alley wafts from where a black cat is crouching like a plastic bag.
Why do all alleys smell the same, whether in the country or in Seoul? Houses lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. The smell of life.
The One Pillar Gate is visible at the end of the alley. The car drops me and my 45-liter backpack in the temple courtyard and goes back down the hill.
There is a slender magnolia tree on one side of the courtyard. The flower buds on the magnolia remind me of the tip of a brush.
The sky here in Seoul is cloudy and gray, like the water in which a writing brush is rinsed to remove the ink.
An urban Seon center somehow evokes the atmosphere of a boarding house. This is where I will stay this spring.
“Unsu haenggak” refers to a monk’s journey “to wander like clouds and water.” This describes monks who wander from place to place at every meditation retreat season (angeo).
One summer, I went to Incheon to spend my first retreat at a Seon monastery after receiving my full precepts.
The thirst and sweat I experienced on my way to the monastery—in a taxi after getting off at the inter-city bus terminal—was probably due to the weather.
When I arrived at the monastery, I wandered around to find the entrance, the hallway was dark.
I threw my backpack into the room I was assigned and stood there blankly, thinking, “I’ve become someone who knows nothing again.”
It was the same feeling I had when as an aspiring monk I first entered the room assigned to postulants.
I didn’t know anything then except the fact that I knew nothing about monastery life; I knew even less than the spoons piled up in the kitchen.
The fact that I knew nothing made the arrogant me fall silent. One might say that it helped me acquire virtue as a postulant, but overall, I felt lonely.
They say it’s good for a postulant to be sparing with words, but I had no words to be sparing with.
I learned little by little. Spoonful by spoonful. It took about a season for me, an inexperienced outsider, to get to know and get used to the words and ideas, actions and attitudes, relationships and standards that everyone else inevitably shared, to seep into my chaotic mind so I could naturally blend in and shake off my indolence.
I became a new me. Did I find myself?
However, when the season finally ripened and felt cozy and beautiful like home, the season did not deepen, but collapsed.
Familiar things were scattered and fell like pollen, monsoon rain, fallen leaves, and snowflakes. They disappeared as if washed away.
And then it began again.
Time ruthlessly sweeps away that which came before, and obstinately brings about a new environment.
Then you have to walk a set path as before without knowing anything.
Since becoming a monk, I have had to confront the unknown, again and again. It wasn’t just a matter of location.
The unknown was in all directions, including people, situations, and Seon dialogues, and I could not avoid it.
When I thought I knew or realized it, I faced unconditional denial again.
I thought I would eventually reach the next stage if I continued on, but I was returned to the first stage.
Another starting point, the empty ground that spreads outward from the starting point.
Was this endless unknown freedom or loneliness?
I will just walk on.
Suddenly, it occurred to me that perhaps my mother’s wish was not that I become a monk, per se.
If there had been other ways to prevent me from going through the inevitable pain of life, or if there was a way for me to escape it, my mother would have tried to tell me somehow. She would have done anything.
Ironically, becoming a monk did not guarantee freedom, and the smell of secular life never faded.
Even if I got my head shaved, woke up at dawn, sounded the bell and drum, and ate all of the vegetarian side dishes served at meal time, the smell of life never dissipated. Rather, it became more vivid.
Every day, not moving away from life at all, but pushing further into it, I had to confront the tedious manifestations of life all day long without being able to escape them.
I stayed completely immersed in the day-to-day moments of life, but was still able to face them squarely.
With each season, I was born again and died again. I grabbed and let go of experiences without clinging to any of them.
My mother may have known this would happen. In order to escape the pains of life, I had to face them.
Perhaps that is why she suggested I become a monk, hoping that I would escape the pains of life.
At the same time, she must have cried through many sleepless nights after I left, worrying about the pain I might face.
I have already unpacked my backpack.
Am I getting used to monastic life? No, I still feel lost.
I too wanted to live in a nice house, a place from which I don’t have to leave.
But I have accepted to some extent that this is my life.
I accept that there is no house I don’t have to leave, and there is no life that I can’t leave behind.
I accept that wandering “like clouds and water” is not a lifestyle exclusive to monks who live in temples.
Perhaps this is how it is for all forms of life, a cycle without exception.
Feeling that my life of wandering like clouds and water is my life’s destiny, I clean every corner of this unfamiliar room.

 Hyehae Seunim received the novice precepts in 2018 and the full precepts in 2023 under the tutelage of Jinhwa Seunim. He graduated from Songgwangsa Monastic College. There is nothing easy in this world, but there is nothing that cannot be done, he thinks. Still, self-introduction is too difficult and embarrassing. Did the things I have met become me? Can I call the things I have met me? Can I introduce myself in the end?

Bonghyeon As an illustrator, Bonghyeon has published books in Korean, including I Don't Need a Pillow, Because I Have You, and Still, I Smiled Very Beautifully.