Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun by Kim Iryŏp (review)

As the title hints, in this work Iryŏp (1896–1971), one of the most prominent nuns of twentieth-century Korea, looks backs on her life. Or rather, she uses recollections of her youthful self as a teaching device to draw the reader into her Buddhist worldview. With unflinching honesty, she is not afraid of using stories from her youth, especially those involving affairs, to show the vanity of human affections. She contrasts these with the life of a Buddhist practitioner, which moves beyond selfish desires and conditioned actions to achieve what she calls the “great self,” an enlightened person who, in her words realizes her true self, and for such a person “…all the beings in the world become ‘my-self’; in such a state, one can, at will, access all the capacities of all beings at will” (p. 70).

Altogether, the volume contains seventeen essays, mostly taken from a work originally entitled Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang, first published in 1960, with a revised publication appearing two years later. Most are occasional pieces written for certain events or letters addressed to prominent people or acquaintances, while there are also a number of short essays, perhaps based on sermons, in which she sets forth her interpretation of Buddhism. By far the longest of these essays is entitled, “Having Burned Away my Youth” (Ch’ŏngch’un ŭl pulsarŭgo, chapter 11), which deals with her affair with the Buddhist scholar Paek Sŏng’uk. As the translator points out in the concise yet very helpful endnotes, unlike the other essays this one was not written towards the end of her life, but rather in the late 1920s, “four months and nine days” after her relationship ended. Here the author does not yet look at the world through a Buddhist lens, and laments her loneliness after being suddenly abandoned by Paek.

Perhaps because of such material, Iryŏp’s reputation has long suffered, since the seemingly abrupt shift in her life from a liberated woman with many affairs to a dedicated practitioner of a religion that many during her lifetime considered hidebound and regressive has baffled scholars. As a result, for a long time most scholars have focused more on the first part of her life, when Iryŏp (penname of Kim Wŏnju) was part of the “new woman” (sin yŏsŏng) movement in the cultural world of the 1920s. This was not helped by the fact that her master, Man’gong, asked her to put aside her writing until she had reached a certain level of insight (p. 72: “Only when you are confident that your nature will be free from contamination …should you consider going down this mountain”). Thus, when she did reprise publishing in the late 1950s, after a hiatus of nearly thirty years, her work pleased neither literature scholars nor Buddhists. The translator, Jin Y. Park, was among the first to draw attention to Iryŏp’s Buddhist writings for their own sake (see her article in the Korea Journal 45, no. 1 [2005]), and proves with this translation that Iryŏp’s work is worth taking note of.

The first impression one gets as one starts reading this work, however, is that it has not stood the test of time particularly well; this is further compounded by the fact that some passages are hard to make sense of, as the translator points out in some footnotes. Also, some theories now appear rather naïve or hard to defend (e.g., on Catholicism being derived from Buddhism, p. 49), while there is also a good deal of repetition. For example, a theme she repeats again and again is that one cannot really use the “I” and develop attachments to it when one is not capable of using this “I” to the full, because of the lack of knowledge of one’s mind (p. 90, 123). Yet this persistence pays...