By Sridhar Pappu
Sunim’s hammer has become an agent of his faith. He’s helped build three temples in three cities and turned a newsletter, begun with a $100 printing press, into a magazine–Buddhism at the Crossroads–published four times a year. In the process, he says, he’s built a happier and more productive life.
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His mother became a cook at the school, then borrowed money from her mother to buy a plot of land. It was there, Sunim says, that his mother, unaccustomed to the rigors of farm life and faced with the Korean war, finally came undone.
At the age of 11, Sunim possessed the kind of slouching loneliness some find only at the very end of their lives. But with it came self-rule. He decided to leave that plot of land for Pusan, where he begged in order to eat, then Seoul, where he found work as an aide at a school for shoe-shine boys, teaching them how to read and write. It was only after the school was forced to disband in 1956 that Sunim found Buddhism.
He might have thought this way forever had the impure world not intervened. When the South Korean government began drafting monks into the army, Sunim went into seclusion, then fled to Japan in 1966. That country was attracting the kind of Westerners–young men and women interested in Eastern religions–who would represent the future for Sunim. In an act of compassion, an American bought him a plane ticket to the United States.
“That completely changed my life,” he says. “We were working all the time. There was a great need. There was no heat in Toronto, so if you just sit and do nothing you get cold. You had to constantly move around to stay warm. But there was so much energy.”
It’s also for people who need to make a big decision in their lives. It takes a lot to decide whether to divorce somebody, your spouse. To contemplate, to make sure this is something you want to do, you need time.”
