Episode 2
Saturday April 19th, 2014.
The sun rose. He stepped outside and looked for a quiet corner to pee. Ammonia steam came up from the concrete. Two bald monks dressed in mouse-gray robes, one tall and heavy, the other short and much leaner, stood at the edge of the port and stared at the horizon.
He took the boiled egg from his pocket and peeled it while he studied how the light reflected on the waters. A seagull eating what seemed to be the excrement of a large creature. He paid attention to the colors in the sky, the changes. One side bright and orange. The other, dark and somewhat stormy. Another world. Another time. Today he’d find and bring back at least another body. He watched as four marine cranes, a hundred and fifty tons each and mounted on barges, moved slowly towards the site. Their white and red legs brought to mind a giant, monstrous crab about to eat everyone in town.
It would rain that day.
We were a family of merchants in Busan, said the short monk, for six generations. We lost it all during the war. We lost everything. Everything was burnt. My father left the city and moved up north and settled with my mother in the countryside around Yangsan. That’s where I was born. But they had too many children, all of whom survived, and he had to go back into the city to find work and provide for mother and us. He worked for a small company for the rest of his life. He died of old age with a heart full of regrets.
I wonder what those kids’ hearts were full of, said the tall monk.
Dreams. Dreams of freedom. Because we lost our wealth, my father said one day, and you have nothing to take care of, you are free to go and walk your way. It was the best present someone has ever given me.
You’re the oldest son.
I am. A lack of wealth became for me a synonym of freedom. We were thin and some days really hungry, but, oh my, was I a happy child. My siblings and I swam in the river, walked in the woods, and played in the rice fields. Every day was Sunday. Everyone around us, and especially my father, worked so hard to make a little money. The Japanese were busy hosting the first Olympic games in Asia and building the world’s first bullet train while we were busy starving. But then came President Park and a thousand industrial and chemical plants started popping up here and there like mushrooms. Swimming in the river was no more and the rice fields were off limits.
Progress.
Yes. That’s what the fools call it. Study hard. Go to a good school. Find a good job in Hyundai or Samsung. Society is a busy, noisy money making machine. School a factory to produce the parts of that machine. The kids. Mass consumption, economy, and politics. Why? That was a constant in my head, and it was driving me crazy. Why shall I work so hard, why shall I live this way and not another. I started to read books about philosophy, novels, history, and science, anything I could lay my hands on. The more I read books and the more I thought thoughts, the deeper my questions. Unless I found it, unless I found the meaning of all this we call life, I couldn’t move ahead and make any decision.
I hated school.
You too?
Memorize, get high marks, graduate, and go to college. A hamster wheel for humans.
I escaped from class and went to read books in the library. And there, after days and days of reading and thinking I found there isn’t any meaning.
Besides the one that we create.
Correct. Just our reaction to the world. The reaction of a small organism that inhabits a larger one.
Commensalism.
Not exactly. More like parasitism or even parasitoidism. Instead of just harming the world we might end up killing it. Before we showed up in the world there was no harm and there was no meaning. Any meaning we decide on is fiction, and I long to live free from the lie of culture and civilization. It was around that time when my friend brought to my home this book a monk gave him before leaving a temple. That was the first time I encountered Buddhist teachings and the Buddhist way of life.
Master So Sahn’s.
When I read his book my heart’s only desire was to become his disciple. But of course, he had been dead for a while. Like the kids over there under the sea. Actual life and death in front of us. There was no reason for them to die. There was a cause of course, the sinking of the boat, but no reason for them to die. It may happen anytime, that’s it. Our life may end today, he said, there’s no time to waste. You should go straight towards whatever it is you’re looking for instead of doing something meaningless. My heart rejoices at your choice of becoming a monk.
I won’t disappoint you.
You can disappoint no one besides yourself. This decade won’t be easy, and the next one will be worse. People need to hear the message. Free from greed, free from desire, walk the path, my friend, just walk it.
Enraged chants and screaming came from outside the fence granting access to the port. The temporary settlement for the mourning parents confronting impotent coast guard and police officers. The cries brought to his mind the sound of pigs when they are slaughtered. A volatile crowd of middle-aged men and women lashed out at members of the rescue teams, at reporters. Bring them back, Bring them back, they sang in unison.
He walked back to the tent and had some rice and pickled cabbage that he washed down with hot tea and grabbed the bag with his equipment and headed towards one of the zodiacs. He longed to be submerged. Underwater, surrounded by the dead, he was alive. Diving was his thing, he thought, finding bodies his vocation.
