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229 CHAPTER 17 Path to Eternity A Message to Journalists The Real Meaning of Life Energy Before I joined the monastery I came to realize that people have difficulty in life because they fail to secure the “foundation” of life. This realization convinced me that I should find the very foundation of life for myself. It is the same as needing first to prepare fields in order to cultivate crops, to have rice to make cooked rice, or to build railroad tracks for the operation of a train. What I mean by “the foundation of life” is nothing special. It is also called the Dao (path), or life energy (saengmyŏng), or the mind, or thought. When we put them all together, we call it the “I.” This is the “I” of which one is completely in charge. If I am not the commander of this “I,” it cannot be called the “I.” This is the “I” Śakyamuni Buddha meant when, three thousand years ago, he declared, “In the entire world, only I am precious.” This “I” is not the relative “I” that assumes the existence of I and the existence of you; rather, it is the communal “I,” the absolute “I.” This “I” indicates all beings that have life energy. Even a worm can say “In the entire world, only I am precious.” That is because a worm and human beings share life energy that is the same in its original form. A worm, however, became a worm because it has just the smallest piece of life energy when life energy is divided into ten million or a hundred million pieces. Because a worm relies on the smallest and thus weakest piece of life energy, it becomes a worm. After the Buddha declared that “In the entire world, only I am precious,” he also mentioned that “I am the compassionate father of all beings born through four ways.” The four ways refer to creatures born from the womb, from eggs, from moisture, and through transformation. Humans are born out of their 230 Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun mothers’ wombs and thus are called “beings born from the womb.” A chicken is born from an egg, and thus is a “being born from an egg.” Creatures born from moisture include maggots and germs, both of which are generated through decomposition. An example of a creature born through transformation is a cicada. A nymph lives underground for about eight years and then sheds its skin to emerge as a cicada. This means that the Buddha is the father of maggots, which also means that we humans are siblings of maggots. This is because, be it the Buddha, God, humans, spirits , demons, serpents, or insects, all are the same when it comes to original life energy. This is why people talk about absolute equality with reference to life energy. But how can we say that a worm is equal to a human? A worm does not know how to exercise its rights for life and therefore becomes a worm. As I mentioned earlier, it has lost its self to such a degree and its sense of self is so vague that it remains a trivial being. We humans sometimes face a situation similar to that of the worm. The meaning of the life energy called “I” needs to be clearly established, but there are people who are not aware of this. To establish the meaning of life energy means having a life in which the “I” is commander of “I,” or a life in which the “I” fully utilizes its own life energy. Nature Is the Mind I mentioned earlier the “foundation” of life. To be a living organism means to have the right to live, and this right to live means the mind. Animals have only a vague sense of their mental life: They eat when they feel hungry ; when their stomach is full, everything is good. When male and female animals meet, they mate, which generates pleasure; they do not think about love or hatred or whether they share the same ideas. Humans, on the other hand, crave meaning. No matter how obscure an individual human’s mind may be, she or he still possesses more life energy than an insect or an animal. All humans do. That also makes them complain when their desires are not fulfilled. Complaints about unfulfilled desires arise because of the failure of humans to grasp their own minds, their life energy. Since a...

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