The Seon Master Hanam Sunim was one of several outstanding Seon Masters who appeared in Korea in the turbulent years that characterized the end of the Yi dynasty and the Japanese occupation of Korea. He was influential in encouraging people to develop...
The Seon Master Hanam Sunim was one of several outstanding Seon Masters who appeared in Korea in the turbulent years that characterized the end of the Yi dynasty and the Japanese occupation of Korea. He was influential in encouraging people to develop their spirituality and attain awakening. He encouraged both Seon and Pure Land practice, and taught Sutras as well as meditation. His own life was an example of upholding the precepts and diligent spiritual practice. Despite the role he played sustaining the Seon Buddhism of Korea, there has been very little research on his life or thought in any language. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine those aspects of Hanam Sunim's life and thought that appear in his letters. While his letters may not be able to provide a complete overview, they should be able to provide a reasonable sampling of his life and thought.
Any examination of Hanam Sunim's life would be incomplete unless it examined the ending of the Yi dynasty and the Japanese occupation of Korea. For in the space of one generation, Buddhism in Korea went from being officially persecuted by the Confucian government to being permitted by the Japanese, but at the cost of being forced to serve the Japanese occupation. The Japanese installed a hierarchal organization through which they could control or at least strongly influence the activities of the temples and sunims in Korea. With this organization, they also tried to change the precepts, the Vinaya, that governed the lives of monks, by allowing people who were married, ate meat, and drank alcohol to be ordained as monks.
Hanam Sunim's Dharma Teacher was the Seon Master Kyo˘ngho˘ Sunim. Kyo˘ngho˘ Sunim was perhaps single-handedly responsible for revitalizing Seon in Korea. Traveling throughout the country, he stressed the importance of awakening to one's inherent Buddha-nature. He had five main disciples who carried on his work and ensured that the seeds he had planted were to flourish in the years to come. One of these disciples was Hanam Sunim.
Hanam Sunim was born to an upper-class family in 1876 and received a traditional education in the Confucian classics, but at the age of 20, he left home and became a monk. After several years, he came across a passage by the Koryo Dynasty Seon Master, Bojo Jinul, which precipitated his first enlightenment experience. The essence of that passage, "don't search for the Buddha outside of yourself," stayed with Hanam Sunim throughout his life.
Hanam Sunim was famous for the diligence of his spiritual practice, and it is often said that during the last 25 years of his life he never once left his temple in the Odae Mountains. Many people, hearing of this, assume that it was because of his spiritual practice that he wouldn't leave. However, a close examination of Hanam Sunim's letters reveals that he actually did leave the Odae Mountains twice between 1926 and 1933. What kept him there in later years was his sense of responsibility for the sunims practicing in the Odae mountains, combined with his ill-health. Hanam Sunim repeatedly refused to go to Seoul, where he would have been at the bidding of the Japanese government, and it seems that people confused this as a desire to stay in the Odae Mountains. However, several times in his letters Hanam Sunim talks about moving to Tongdo Temple or to Haein Temple, both of which are in the deep mountains. It seems he just didn't want to go to Seoul.
The thread that runs through all of Hanam Sunim's thought about spiritual practice is his emphasis on the need for determination and putting one's understanding into practice. Hanam Sunim taught people to practice using reflective illumination, chanting, and also hwadu's. However, regardless of the method used, Hanam Sunim said that if they practiced diligently, then they would become like a burning flame, where was no place for discriminations or delusions to stick. He also emphasized that the Buddha-dharma exists everywhere, thus there is no need to seek it anyplace else.
In his letters can be seen examples of other attitudes and beliefs that Hanam Sunim held. He had great faith in the law of cause and effect and attributed whatever happened to him as the results of his own actions. He was very humble and accepted impermanence as the basic condition of the universe.
Hanam Sunim probably would have criticized modern scholars for engaging in the debate about sudden enlightenment versus gradual practice and then tried to harmonize their different perspectives. However, in his letters he did include several valuable cautions about the need for continued practice even after an enlightenment experience. Rather than saying that Hanam Sunim was influenced by the thought of Bojo Jinul on this issue, it may be more accurate to say Hanam Sunim's own experiences were consistent with what Jinul had written about sudden enlightenment and gradual practice.
Although Hanam Sunim was one of the foremost Seon Masters of his day, he was also known for teaching sutras to the monks during the meditation retreats. This is very unusual but Hanam Sunim felt that the proper time to study the sutras was precisely when one was practicing meditation in earnest. It was then that one would be most likely to perceive the deeper meanings of the sutras. He also viewed the sutras as useful tools to guide one's practice. In his first letter to Kyongbong Sunim, he says how careful study of the sutras can guide and prevent one from going astray in their practice.
This study has been confined to only the letters of Hanam Sunim, so it has not been possible to go into depth about many of the themes that appear in Hanam Sunim's thought. However, I hope it has been sufficient to provide an overview of the major areas of his thought, and hopefully this will help entice future scholars to more closely examine Hanam Sunim and the other great Korean monks and nuns of the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries.