Dae Haeng
Sunim, zen master, began thinking about life's important questions
at a very early age. The instant reversal of her family's fortunes
from prosperity to poverty during the Japanese occupation of her
native Korea in 1930 left an indelible impression on the 5-year-old.
"We were forced to flee to Seoul with only the clothes we
were wearing. We lived in a mud hut, eating only what we received
by begging," she remembers. "I began asking myself,
Who created us so that some are poor, some are rich, some are
sick and some are healthy? and, Who put me in this predicament?"
The family's poverty took a tool on Haeng's father, a former military
officer of high rank. He turned his wrath on his oldest daughter,
Dae.
"Nothing I did was right in his sight," she remembers.
"I ran away to the mountains to escape his beatings and also
to protect my mother who always tried to protect me," she
says.
By the time she was 6 years old, Haeng says, she began sleeping
in the mountains at night.
"When I turned 10, I was thinking deeply about the meaning
of things, I wanted to know, Where did I come from and where am
I going?" she says.
At the age of 20, Haeng left home and fled to the mountains for
the last time.
"I did not carry any supply of food or any other need, as
I wished to abandon myself to nature," she recalls. "I
wanted to surrender my whole self to nature and have it support
me or not."
Her retreat to the mountains began with a deliberate effort to
detach herself from all things.
"I was able to let go of everything, including life and all
the attachments to life," she says. "The mountain was
my pillow, and the sky was my blanket, I ate the roots and fruits
of plants to live.
"Everything that I knew, all the programming and conditioning
that I had received in my previous life disappeared. I was able
to go beyond everything I had ever known, and my consciousness
began to vanish.
"I began to live my life with complete natural spontaneity,
in complete emptiness. I was free from attachments with any objects."
Her inward journey included a period of extreme asceticism. She
slept in ditches filled with leaves and ate unknown plants and
fruits.
"I spent my days in comtemplation and did not concern myself
with the conditions of my body," she remembers.
During an especially harsh winter, after spending a few days in
a sand ditch near a frozen river, she climbed up to the ridge
of a mountain.
"I saw myself, the sky, the land, and the trees all filled
with a very serene and tranquil light," she says. "I
knew at theat moment the essential oneness of all being. "
When I attained this state of freedom, there was a point of complete
oneness with the universe. I understood this freedom from attachments
to be the foundation of the universe, the original state of all
living beings. Making this connection was the most important event
of my life."
Haeng began to explore more deeply into life's eternal questions.
"From the realization about the source of the universe, I
was brought to the knowledge that the whole of the universe is
of one body and one mind," she says.
Haeng spent 12 years alone on the mountains.
"I stayed for a long time because I wanted to thoroughly
confirm and reaffirm my new knowledge, to test it at all levels
of existence in the world," she says.
An untutored mystic, Haeng entered a Buddhist monastery to be
ordained as a Zen nun. At the age of 32 she left her mountain
isolation to initiate her ministry.
"By then, I felt that I had discovered something that might
help others," she says.
She believes that everyone should examine his or her own life
and reflect on the human condition.
"You have to ask yourself the important questions, about
hwo you are and why you are here," she says, "because
you cannot live without knowing who you are."
The simplicity of her message--that deep witin oneself, each person
can touch a center of awareness and vitality: one's true self,
and what she would later call the "genuine self" --
struck a chord among those who heard it.
She founded a center, the HanMaUm (One Mind) Zen Center, near
her mountain retreat, at Anyang, Korea. In the next decade she
opened 13 branch centers throughout Korea. Beginning in the 1980s,
she established Zen centers in Canada, Argentina, Germany and
five in the United States, including one at 7852 N. Lincoln Ave.,
Skokie. An estimated 500,000 people attend the centers and follow
her teachings. Her organization also funds projects for the poor
and for youth. In addition, her philosophy of the "genuine
self" is disseminated through newsletters, seminars and the
Internet.
The people she gravitates to repeatedly are prisoners.
In 1990, Haeng met with prisoners on Death Row in San Francisco.
Even there, her outlook was one of hope. "It is never too
late to change. it is through your mind that all things in the
world occur," she remembers telling the prisoners. "Through
using this mind, everyone can live freely."
In July, she visited young inmates at the Joliet Juvenile Detention
Center. The center's caplain, Joseph O'Connor, said the rambunctious
teenagers grew quiet and listened intently as the gentle Zen master
told them about the power they hold within themselves.
"It is all mind. It is all eternal energy. There is no evil
or good. It is all within you. You are responsible for everything
that you do. You kill, you maim, you hurt, you love. It is all
you, nothing outside of you. There is no separate evil, no separate
good; it is all you," she told them. At the end of her speech,
the teenagers pressed their palms together in the traditional
Buddhist manner and bowed. She gave them gifts of T-shirts with
the legend "In Search of the Genuine I" on the front.
To solve the problems America still faces as we race to the new
millennium, Haeng urges a truen to the self.
"Rather than just focusing on the material world and looking
for more and more, we ned to also look at the spiritual, unseen
world," she says, "The universal condition of unhappiness
afflicts the affluent as well as the disavantaged. Everything
is located inside of us, and finding that source will help everyone
toward living peacefully with themselves and with others."
On race relations and violence on our streets, Haeng says: "If
we go to the source, to the genuine self, we will understand that
we are all connected. Then it would be impossible to hurt someone
else because to hurt someone else would be to hurt yourself."
Perhaps because of her own painful childhood, she has a special
affinity with children. With children, she says, there is the
opportunity to begin fresh.
"Children should be taught that they are like flowers, that
just like flowers they have roots that nourish them, roots that
go deep and connect to the source," she says.
Though one of a only handful of female zen masters and probably
the most prominent Zen master in prison imnistry in the United
States, haeng dismisses her accomplishements.
"I never practiced to become something or somebody,"
she says. "I never knew if my path was the genuine way.
"I was only concerned with getting to know who I was. I only
wanted to know who was behind my thoughts and my actions and who
made me the way I am."
Copyright(c) Gail Vida Hamburg