Journal of Korean Religions

In the latest contribution to the Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion series, Jin Y. Park provides an English translation of the writings of Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971), a prominent, twentieth-century Korean Buddhist nun. Better known as a literary figure during the Japanese colonial period and as an advocate for the New Woman’s movement in Korea during the 1920s, Iryŏp was ordained in the early 1930s, effectively giving up her career as a writer to pursue her spiritual vocation. She returned to writing only later in life, and Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun is largely a translation of Iryŏp’s book Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang, which was published in 1960, nearly three decades after she first became a Buddhist nun.

Reflections is actually a collection of diverse essays, most of which were written in the 1950s, that were compiled by the author and published as a book. The material ranges from philosophical ruminations to autobiographical and sometimes intimate discussions of different events or people in Iryŏp’s life, including personal letters written to and received from a former lover who had abandoned her before she took her vows. Park has chosen to leave out two of the fifteen chapters from the original text and added four additional essays that originally appeared after the book was published. She also made careful editorial decisions by comparing this text with Iryŏp’s 1962 book, Having Burned Away My Youth, which contained many of the same essays, but she makes these and other editorial moves transparent to the reader in her endnotes, including occasional elisions for the sake of clarity.

Drawing on her previously published work on Kim Iryŏp (née Kim Wŏnju), Park provides a succinct introduction to the translation that does an excellent job of acquainting the reader with the author’s life and thought. She also [End Page 257] situates Iryŏp and this book within the scholarship not only on modern Korean Buddhism, but also Korean literature and gender studies. In this regard, she mentions the prevailing view among many who have written about Iryŏp as a colonial-era writer that her life appears to have two distinct halves separated by her ordination. As Park’s introduction and the translation that follows make clear, however, there are some common threads running through her life both as an accomplished writer and as a Buddhist nun.

One of these threads is Iryŏp’s emphasis on creativity as the ground of existence and freedom, which for her is the very essence of what it means to become fully human. Though she asserts that “attaining buddhahood means attaining humanhood” (42), she views creativity as the basis of all religious practice. Her thoughts on Christianity, the religion in which she was raised, are an interesting aspect of this book, and two chapters are devoted to this topic. Both God and the Buddha, Iryŏp claims, “are the ones who were aware of their own creativity and utilized it; they are the great people of culture (taemunhwain) capable of creating a work of art out of their bodies and minds as well as of others” (37). Park accurately notes that the words creativity, freedom, Buddha, and culture “most aptly characterize Iryŏp’s Buddhist thought” (22), but we could add human beings and the self to this list as frequent topics of discussion.

A proper understanding and mastery of the self is an issue that reappears throughout Reflections. Iryŏp talks at great length about the self, often contrasting people’s fragmented sense of self or partial self (small-self life) with the great self (the self before a thought arises), the latter of which is equated with the entire universe. Because people do not understand the unity of self and all things, Iryŏp says that “humans have become betrayers of the universe” and that “the earth is a ghetto of lost selves” (92). As Park explains in her notes, “To discover and learn the true nature of oneself, or of ‘I’, is the beginning and end of Iryŏp’s Buddhist philosophy” (261).

Park is equally adept at translating what she calls Iryŏp’s “confessional style”—that is, the more personal and autobiographical parts of the book—as she is at capturing the nuances of the philosophical and abstract discussions. This is especially true of the letters exchanged between Iryŏp and Paek Sŏnguk (1897–1981), with whom she had a brief but intense romantic relationship in [End Page 258] the years leading up to her decision to join the monastery. At nearly sixty pages, her letter to Paek (Chapter 11) is by far the longest chapter in the book. A letter that he wrote to Iryŏp upon learning that she had returned a sizable donation he made to the Zen center where she was practicing is also reproduced in the book. Her translation of Paek’s remarks in this letter exemplifies her ability to convey the sarcasm and tone of the original into English, which is not an easy feat:

I wish more than ever that you would return to that woman, your former self, the woman who felt such pain at losing me that she would forever hold a grudge. I wouldn’t mind if you thought me a hopeless jerk. I would willingly take the role of an unforgivable sinner if it meant that I would be tied up and taken to the court of your highness, where I could kneel before you and ask for forgiveness.

(203)

Although I found myself wanting more parenthetical insertions of Korean words and terms into the translation, this may reflect my own priorities as a scholar of modern Korean Buddhism. A proliferation of Korean words inserted into the text can easily become distracting or unnecessarily obtrusive for some, and she does offer more of the transliterated Korean terms in the endnotes. The expository notes she provides are neither excessive nor overly technical, and some selected citations to both English and Korean secondary source materials can also be found here. It seems clear that Park has chosen to make her translation as straightforward and accessible as possible for nonspecialists, while still providing some of the annotations that a specialist would want, and the result is a very smooth and highly readable translation of a fascinating book. [End Page 259]