The dying wishes of the Ven. Beopjang, the head of the Jogye (Chogye) Buddhist Order who died on September 11, provides a beautiful remembrance. According to his wishes, his body has been moved to the Dongguk University hospital in Ilsan. Not to be buried, mind you, but to be used in student research. Instead of an awe-inspiring cremation like would be appropriate for a Buddhist priest, he will be entrusted to the knives of medical students. It is the first time that has been done in the history of the order.
Buddhism calls life the formation, according to karma, of earth, water, fire, and wind, and the dispersion of those elements is death. For that reason a priest's body is cremated so as to return it to its original state, so it returns to being those four elements, and the cremation ceremony is his funeral. Cremation is not an act of sending off a priest, it is a process that makes one realize the principle of life and death, of going from nothing back to nothing.
Somewhere along the way, however, the cremation ceremony came to be understood as the process of recovering sarira. The amount of sarira has become the measuring stick by which a deceased priest's powers are judged. Students have concentrated on finding signs of a deceased priest's powers instead of on his teachings. The result has been that the cremation ceremony has lost its role as an event that reminds you of the original state of life.
Beopjang's decision to donate his body and organs at the time he organized the "Share Life Campaign Headquarters" in 1994 was a decision not unrelated to the situation in Korean Buddhism today. In giving his body he sought to remind us that life is born and maintained by dependence on each other, and that in the end all life is one. It has become the first example of where life is given to life.
In one of his final writings Beopjang reminded us that everyone has a "knapsack that gives and gives yet does not empty." The lesson is that one is richer when sharing. There are 103,000 people waiting for organ transplants in Korea yet only 1,600 receive them each year. Let's remember that.
The Hankyoreh, 14 September 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Ven. Beopjang, Who Shared Life |
