Chapter 31: At Guinsa Temple

31
At Guinsa Temple, Danyang, 1992



It was not just the problem of speed but that of absolute quantity. Stepping out of the exam room of Dongguk University and walking down the slopy road toward the Changchung-dong Street, winding up the four-day war with incompetence and inefficiency, I felt sorry for her and missing Tschai at the same time. He walked with a hasty pace toward the taxi stand.

Tschai had no expectations from husband Dano's belated obsession with a judicial post. That might be a reckless challenge toward the impossible. And that might be greed. She didn't have any idea about her becoming a judge's, or prosecutor's, or lawyer's wife. She was street smart. She was reputed to be tough, so much so that she would be able to plant her own tree roots even in the harsh climate of a desert. She only hoped that her husband would get started as the responsible man and father with a stable job.

Regrettably, I as a household owner, did not get settled in a safe place with a stable job, so the household troops could not stop getting mobile. Tschai planned, organized and materialized the movement to Mokdong Apartment complex. The apartment was the first of their own house in the true sense of the word, in 1989, 15 years since they lived in Seoul. All the resources originated from Tschai which financed the move, supported the household, and financed the education of three son children who had gone to higher and lower-tier schools.

Tschai got troubled by public transit transfers. She could not help but make transit transfers from bus to subway (Mokdong to Mullaedong), from one subway to another subway (transferring from Seoul College of Education Station to Daechi Station of Subway Line No.3). She spent almost four hours on her commuting transits to and from her accessory store at Daechi-dong.

My father got a cancer onslaught. Father's odd and fearful disease, initially begun with minor ailments, considered as stomach ulcer which had been treated with alternative medicines, developed into cancerous tumors. I was standing absentmindedly when my father was being diagnosed as stomach cancer by Dr. somebody at Hanyang University Hospital, in Seoul, looking, as if they were somebody else's, at the malignant tumors which had been clinging to my father's inner organ like leeches.

I vaguely presumed then and later more assuredly from time to time that the tumors might have initially been stained by coal dust in the deep pit of a Nagasaki coal mine, later adulterated by sweaty knobs of the hard labor during the drought and famine years before the 1950s and then warped into gnarled stressful knots caused by the disobedient son and touched eventually by toxic farming chemicals inhaled in the course of apple farming, that is, all the crystalization of the toils, frustrations and stresses.

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Then and there at Hanyang University Hospital, reclining on the hospital couch, Don had his body roughly handled by a resident, an intern and two other young nurses. They might have not noticed the presence of a strange man in his forties because the doctors and nurses had been engrossed in exchanging their own pleasantries about the joyful experiences during the last summer vacation, and they might not have realized that the elderly patient in his seventies lying before their eyes powerless came from the country. They virtually fiddled with the instruments--a computer monitor and a naessikyong, a gastrointestinal endoscopy,-- with a nurse or something fiddling with the monitor and with an intern fiddling with the long horrible hose.

Then and there at Hanyang University Hospital, Don was wiggling like a desperate worm, nauseating and shrieking with pain. "Do then like this," the superior doctor or something directed to his inferior to do otherwise. After a fuss of trials and errors, they were able to show to me, an ugly conglomeration of tumors, with a look of perplexion on his face and with an awkward remark of "Oh, we didn't realize his son was here!"

Rising from his couch Don had said "I almost died!" He should have angered at what he had been treated just a while ago. He did not deserve the clumsy rough treatment. I should have collared the doctors and yelled to the goddamned nurses. But the one was powerless and the other fought the urge to yell. The chief doctor of the Internal Medicine Section said with haughty disaffection to me Dano who called at his office, "The patient, who is 78 years old, that is, relatively old age for cancer treatment, and whose tumors are in a final stage, that is, so widely spread, is judged to be inoperable."

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I could not accept the fact that my father, who had been as stout as a bull and as green as a pine, would be soon to fall. How could it be possible that the huge pine that had been Don should be felled to the ground by the abominable disease of cancer. Don himself might have been self-conceited in his inviolability because he had never been bedridden in his whole life.

The chief doctor's pronouncement of my father's having fallen ill with the terminal cancer struck me as if I had been battered, all of a sudden, by a blunt weapon and by a murky consciousness that I would be parting with my father sooner or later.

Once the hope of a hospital treatment was dashed, Don became a guinea pig for an experimentation with the alternative medicine. Ilseo, my first younger brother, who had been living with the parents, made every effort to cure the disease. He made a mail order for an alternative medicine which had been advertised on a magazine from a medicine manufacturer whose name had been Isanghan somebody who had been living in Naju. Ilseo had not visited Isanghan, nor seen how the medicine had been manufactured, nor questioned, nor asked about the efficacy of the medicine. He believed in people and things in his own way.

Ilseo worked the hardest among the three son children whose filial concern and efforts were being made in four directions, whereas the last son Nara, who had been born at the water mill house listening to the sounds of the rolling mill, was the second most active in the filial efforts. He was in his thirties and worked at the Department of Commerce and Industry as a seventh-grade official. He met Dr. Sang Dong at East West Hospital in Seoul and arranged for him to write a letter of recommendation to Dr. Nugusira in Tokyo who prescribed anti-cancer drugs for Don, whose main function turned out to kill cancer pain. His first daughter and Buddhist nun was largely kept in the dark, and his second and last daughter Hee was getting her heart ached every minute because of her sick father.

Ilseo's filial efforts took his father to a bee farmer at Mushin-dong at the outer precinct of Daegu. Don got roughed up there for almost a month by apian attacks. He virtually was roughing up, with Boolim taking care of him by his side at a hut room of the bee farmer's. He had his body given up for apian stings. The owner of the house, Mr. Amuge, who had had a strong belief in the efficacy of bee venom, stepped across to the couple's hangout and administered the venom to Don's s body parts once or twice a day despite Don's grimaces and grievances. He picked out a bee from a small box of bees, held it in a pair of tweezers and put an end part of a sting on the desired body part. Don had had bulges and fluid scars as a result all over the body. When I visited the place to inquire after my father, Mr. Amuge rattled off case after case of the efficacies of bee sting treatment. He said he had once been a cancer victim but he had had his cancerous body stung by bees himself and cured of the disease.

Ilseo might have had a premonition that the rest of his father's life was numbered. I also had consulted a divinist, who had been practising, by the name of Odagada, his fortunetelling business at Naguon-dong, Chongno-gu, Seoul, who had told me some bad tidings about my father and some good tales about myself at the same time. The guru of the Iching said Don would pass away in two months and me would run into "a right man" in a week or so who would be willing to publish my manuscripts on the Conversion Approach, a theory on the correct interpretation, as a speaker of the second language, of the English writings. Mystery I intuited at the time was how the male oracle had predicted Don's date of demise through me, or a strange person who was sitting before him at the time.

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When the telephone rang, I got a fright as usual through the spine, with my right hand reaching for the receiver shaking and my heart beating faster. It was my brother's voice over the phone that carried not the news of the parental doom but asking a brotherly favor of me. It was a call to know whether I would be able to go down to Guinsa Temple in Danyang to hold prayers for our terminally ill father. Saying that, he informed me that he would wire the money for the expenses.

It was a rather chilly morning for February. I stepped onto the elevator at my apartment house on the 8th floor, went down to the ground floor, got out of it and started walking to the village bus station. I saw a hawk appearing from nowhere circling the sky over the Apartment Complex. What an omen.

During the inter-city bus tour and after the arrival at the destination terminal, I felt as if my feet were being carried. I was not moving my own system. I was not the master of my own motor reflex. I was standing awhile even after passengers had left the place.

It was around noon. Some modest rustic cafeterias around the bus terminal were in full swing. The travellers who had just gotten off the bus walked over to the roadside dining halls. The aromas of cooking foods pricked their nostrils. A woman at a cafeteria across the road was gazing at me Dano as if to invite me to her house.

I had a better idea. I stepped to a phone booth at the corner of the sidewalk, picked the receiver and slid coins into the slot of the booth and heard the phone buzzes going through. It seemed an age. They might have crossed the rivers and gotten over the hills. The coins were heard to drop with the clang. A familiar female voice returned with "Hello." "This is me Dano. How are things going, Miss Choi?" "Going well. Your book is to come out soon, with proof readings done," she said.

The joyful tidings of the impending publication of my book stimulated my hunger. I crossed the road and entered an eating place and ordered deoduckjjim, a stewed condonopsis lanceolata flavored with pungent sauce. It smelled and tasted good. I ate up a bowl of rice in a nano second when the realization struck me cold that I was engrossed in satiating my appetite while my father had a hard time gulping even a plate of soup. That was a shame on him.

I got into a taxi which was waiting at the roadside stand. The driver, looking at me through a frontal mirror, said, "You're going to Guinsa, aren't you?" I took an issue with the mode of his greetings. Then the driver in hat in his middle forties said matter-of-factly that Seoul passengers' usual destination used to be Guinsa.

Moving along a while, the driver then switched to a mode of his vehicular transportation. His suggestion was that unless you were rushed you might as well go slow. He said, "How about going slow?" I took a look at the dashboard. The speedometer of the car directed at 80/km. I said yes. The taxi driver boasted of the landscapes unfolding in the winding four-lane local highway along the blue river with the beautiful mountain hills in the background. They were beautiful, indeed. I then blamed myself who was appreciating the rivers and hills. The mountain hills should have been crumbling and the rivers should have dried ugly.

All through the ride, the driver tortured his passenger with pumoeunjungkyong, the mantra for the filial piety. He switched on the tape and made his passenger hear it out. The recorded voice of the cassette-tape mantra inspired his captive audience during the taxi ride with the "immeasurable love" of the parents, recalled their toils and asked them to repay their debts. The cab driver was used to reading his passengers' mind heading for Guinsa, knew their vulnerabilities and also knew how to subjugate them to ingratiating customers. He might have gawked at me Dano who was lowering his head and spilling tears.

After 40 or so minutes' ride, the cab driver said, "You made it." It was a wide clearing which appeared to be used for a parking lot. I couldn't see Guinsa or something. "You can't get there by taxi," he announced. "Then?" I looked at him accusingly. "You have to walk from here."

Nothing was seen from there. It was a steep uphill. Turning a corner, pushing a flank of a hill aside, a portal was seen standing high up. Negotiating the uphill for a few minutes or so, he got there and stepping on to the entrance of the temple, he was overwhelmed by the huge complex of temple buildings. Really huge.

The first impression of Guinsa Temple was overwhelming. The impression was solidified as I stepped deeper into the precinct. The temple complex found itself hugely in the mountain valley tall and wide. The Buddhist buildings, whose height ranged from five stories to single, were arranged in orderly fashion, along both sides of the thoroughfare, by category of use.

The temple complex was built on the rock foundation with steep upper slope on top of which was located the huge dining hall and its adjacent facilities. I, after having registered under the category of one-week prayer for paternal health with the front office near the portal, was guided to the prayer room of a building on the fifth floor. The accommodation capacity of one room was fifty persons of the same sex but the room was not cramped but spacious enough to house four times as many prayers.

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"Don't get connected," the speaker system of the temple said in a low convincing male voice, not blaring, though. A while ago there had been a morning call and the whole crowds of the religious complex were busy preparing for the day's schedules. And the speaker systems installed indoors and the loud speakers of outdoors were reciting to the attentive ears some religious aphorisms, warning them not to get connected. "If you get connected, you'll pine over those with whom you've been disconnected. If you get connected, you'll get tormented by those with whom you've been connected."

What did they mean by "Dont get connected"? To paraphrase, the phrase might have meant that you should not or did not have to make a relationship or something. It was illogical after all that you could not make a human contact or something unless you get connected because the world consists of relationships, because you are the end result of relationships, because Guinsa Temple consists of relationships. and because the very reason for the existence of the temple is that there are many relationships to handle. Therefore, the context of the aphorism might have been: Don't make a new relationship except one you have sustained or you should have considered substantial. You should not start a superfluous relationship because basic, inevitable and commonsensical relationships would be put in danger.

Standing in a long line of the diverse dining population and stepping slowly along the slopy hillside road leading to the dining hall, getting near the meal distribution table holding the meal tray, sitting and eating among the large number of diners in the huge dining hall in which one thousand people were known to dine at a sitting, and looking at the busy dining room helpers, I had my throat choked with emotion. Meals were good, and side dishes of kimchi and others were good too. I consumed every bit of them. I felt I myself was brazen enough, thinking that my father was having a hard time eating gruels, much less eating solid meals.

Pray? How to begin it with? I was at wit's end as to the matter of the prayer. I didn't pray with sincerity ever, but I did assure to myself that I would take revenge on anything that was in my way. When I had been famished as a kid, I had not prayed to God for rich harvest but I'd decided myself to get rich. When I had been tormented by pranksters for long as a juvenile boy, I'd gritted myself and decided to get even. When my father had been hard at work, seeming to balking at the idea of allowing any person around him a minute's break to pee, I had avoided his contact, not praying for his health. When my grandma had been prowling in all directions for medicinal herbs for her fragile grandson, I had not said a prayer of thanks for my grandma's efforts.

I had been obdurate all along. I had not known as a kid as to how to say even commonplace thanks or regrets. I should have been trained to do that. I once had almost killed my father. My father had been at work 10-meter deep down the earth ground, digging and building an embankment of the family well at the corner of the orchard. Father Don had been digging the earth, with his son me Dano up on the ground bringing up soil and send the rocks down below with which my father would build an internal embankment in which a person only could move around. Don had not been satisfied with the way in which the work was being done. The water had been spilling from the tin box of soils coming up and replacement rocks coming down. In an instant, a rock had slipped off his hand and dropped onto the head of my father, with him screaming. Coming out, Don had had his bleeding scars dressed and bandaged. Though he had not scolded his son, his son should have sought forgiveness nevertheless for his lack of suitable heed. But he had not. He had been scared all over.

The prayer session was guided by a young priest. He had made his appearance from a corner room and introduced himself and Avalakitesvara at the same time. That is, he had introduced a way in which me Dano and others, the room prayers, who had numbered 38 at the time, had had to pray. He said you had to pray to and through the one effective personality--Gwansseumbossal, Avalakitesvara, the Buddha of Great Compassion. She, from the earliest times on, had been so compassionate and so effective that any prayer of yours would come true. So you had to virtually chant Gwansseumbossal with concentration, with the object of prayer in focal mind. You were not forced on any typical position as an ideal prayer position. But you were not supposed to lie on the room floor until midnight.

I was frustrated at first attempt and blushed with shame: I slept away while chanting the prayer word. I had dozed on and off whiling away three hours or so, and I had lain flat on the room floor. At midnight, I found to my amazement ten or so roomers still immersed in chanting the mantra. I went to the washing place and awoke myself by splashing my face with cold water. I sat down again with legs crossed and began the process afresh.

As I kept chanting the mantra, I found myself conversing with my father. As I darted my questions about my father's love toward me, they were returned with more questions about it. I did the late take, a real awakening that caresses, kisses and vocal expressions of love did not just constitute paternal love.

Although my father had not, all through his life, said a word of love to his sons, he had lived out his love with all his efforts. He had crawled on all fours in a hellish pit of a Nagasaki coal mine for his family: That was love. He had kept a vigil through the night, casting a concerned look at his feverish son: That was love. He had walked all the way to the town hospital, carrying on his back his son who had come down with pleurisy: That was love. He had built a nice wooden house of his own with his architectural skills: That was love. He had tilled the fields, toiled day and night through the year and planted apple trees: That was love. He had built a family well that was not dry: That was love. He had succumbed at last to cancerous tumors but he did not complain, nor whine nor accuse anyone about him: That was love.

I shifted gear and swerved off the designated route. Prayer changed to remorse and repentance. The agent appeared identical but the action changed. In fact, the doer changed, too. In the action of prayer, the doer hurted no one, but in the action of remorse and repentance, he hurted himself. He could not help hurting himself. He reflected on his past deeds; He regretted his mistakes; He blamed himself on his father's unhappiness and his pain of disease. Cries blurted out. He cried to his heart's content. Slumberers around him moved and the murmurers of prayer opened their eyes and complained: "What a noise."

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I throw a long glance at my babyhood boy: It'd been an ugly infant that'd bothered my mom and troubled a well-mannered rustic doc who'd been kind and warm to his young patient and his mother all along the way. There's my boyhood kid in the horizon of my memory to the extent of the murkiest and vaguest thread. Long wrapped in the cradle, carried in my grandma's back, and in the further years of boyhood in the back of my dad, the weakling had been to the countryside clinic and surrounded by the affectionate crowd in the ship or in the refuge tent.

"Talking about the troubles of your parents," the mantra praising the parental love mentioning its unfathomability and immeasurability of the deep love, says to its audience to the effect that "it would be far short of its measure even if you should carry your elderly parents in your back and climb Mount Sumi thousands of times..." Oh, Dad, you're here beside me no longer...Oh, Mom, you're far away from here. You should be so lonely in this long winter night, with your frail body in your small room, apart from your old son and your grandchildren.