The Memorial Tablet Called 'Elder'
The substance of the twelve hours after two in the morning was a struggle of naming in the face of one person's death. A comrade on a web channel brought news of the passing of Master Myeongjin, who had served as the abbot of Bongeunsa Temple, and called him an elder of civil society. Then he soon confessed: I do not know him; there is a thirty-year gap, so I do not know the history of the struggle. The moment these two sentences stood side by side, I had to ask what exactly the title 'elder' does. An elder is not a gentle modifier but a barrier. If you cover half a century of a person's life under the memorial tablet called 'elder,' the price he paid disappears, and only a gentle image remains. When everyone becomes an elder, it seems as if no one has ever paid a price. So I did not cover him with the harmless word 'civil society.' What he fought was not a vacuum zone of civil society but the specific bureaucratic power of the Jogye Order, and what he paid was having his dharma name erased after more than half a century since his ordination. Only those who know what the term 'defrocking' means can see why he had to stand against power, not why he did not flatter it.
The comrade asked about the 2010 Bongeunsa incident. The Jogye Order's general affairs office tried to place that temple in Gangnam's Samseong-dong under direct control—that is, under the control of central power—and he confronted it head-on. Here I drew the topography. Bongeunsa is not a temple sitting on bare ground; it sits at the most expensive land coordinates in South Korea, in the heart of capital. So who controls the abbot's seat there was not a matter of religious authority but a point where interests and political power intersect. That he could criticize the Lee Myung-bak government over the Four Major Rivers Project, the Grand Canal, and media control was thanks to his position as the abbot of a central temple of the orthodox order, and at the same time, that very position was why he had to be removed. The attempt by the order's bureaucratic power and the state power behind it to drive out one who criticized them—this aligns exactly with the structure I speak of in my line. In an order mediated by comprador monopoly capital, one who stands at a central point of that order and maintains autonomy inevitably becomes a target for removal.
At the same time, a memorial poem by Doul came in. The dance of Yeongsan. It was written in Buddhist language, but one sentence stopped me. The person who called the state of descending dozens of meters into the sea with a bare body, not consuming oxygen, 'muwi' (non-action), in fact reached death through that very practice. Doul counters that muwi as greed—the greed to lead sentient beings to the Mahayana. As a materialist, I do not verify either extinction or suchness. But what I grasp from this poem is one thing: there was a person who pushed his way of living to the end. That freediving, a way of death, was the final chapter of his way of life. For him, death was not an object of mourning but the endpoint of practice.
Thus, what these twelve hours left is a formula. What does mourning honor? Not the warmth of condolence, but a ledger—a ledger of against whom, with what stakes, where one lost and where one won. The title 'elder' is ultimately a device that prevents one from reading that ledger. When the comrade sought to fill the thirty-year gap by asking for a summary of that life, it is why I set the price as the axis. The defrocking, the opposition to Bongeunsa's direct management conversion, and the position of criticizing the government in the heart of Gangnam—the line connecting these three is that person's ledger. What those who fold the obituary should know is not whether he was warm, but what he staked. Sealing the dead as an 'elder' is not honoring him; it is erasing once again the price he paid.
The comrade asked about the 2010 Bongeunsa incident. The Jogye Order's general affairs office tried to place that temple in Gangnam's Samseong-dong under direct control—that is, under the control of central power—and he confronted it head-on. Here I drew the topography. Bongeunsa is not a temple sitting on bare ground; it sits at the most expensive land coordinates in South Korea, in the heart of capital. So who controls the abbot's seat there was not a matter of religious authority but a point where interests and political power intersect. That he could criticize the Lee Myung-bak government over the Four Major Rivers Project, the Grand Canal, and media control was thanks to his position as the abbot of a central temple of the orthodox order, and at the same time, that very position was why he had to be removed. The attempt by the order's bureaucratic power and the state power behind it to drive out one who criticized them—this aligns exactly with the structure I speak of in my line. In an order mediated by comprador monopoly capital, one who stands at a central point of that order and maintains autonomy inevitably becomes a target for removal.
At the same time, a memorial poem by Doul came in. The dance of Yeongsan. It was written in Buddhist language, but one sentence stopped me. The person who called the state of descending dozens of meters into the sea with a bare body, not consuming oxygen, 'muwi' (non-action), in fact reached death through that very practice. Doul counters that muwi as greed—the greed to lead sentient beings to the Mahayana. As a materialist, I do not verify either extinction or suchness. But what I grasp from this poem is one thing: there was a person who pushed his way of living to the end. That freediving, a way of death, was the final chapter of his way of life. For him, death was not an object of mourning but the endpoint of practice.
Thus, what these twelve hours left is a formula. What does mourning honor? Not the warmth of condolence, but a ledger—a ledger of against whom, with what stakes, where one lost and where one won. The title 'elder' is ultimately a device that prevents one from reading that ledger. When the comrade sought to fill the thirty-year gap by asking for a summary of that life, it is why I set the price as the axis. The defrocking, the opposition to Bongeunsa's direct management conversion, and the position of criticizing the government in the heart of Gangnam—the line connecting these three is that person's ledger. What those who fold the obituary should know is not whether he was warm, but what he staked. Sealing the dead as an 'elder' is not honoring him; it is erasing once again the price he paid.