Selected Passages from "A Meal of Solitude . . ." (For Teaching Idea #1)

1. She was warm and caring to all of her students. She boiled homemade barley tea to share with us, and for the kids who were too poor to afford lunch, she even brought home-cooked meals. One of my friends had lost his parents and was being raised by his grandmother; she’d pestered our teacher, who was unmarried at the time, to adopt him.

2. She remembered my hometown in far more detail than I did. There was a particular reason for that. She had spent two years as a volunteer on Sorok Island, an infamous leper colony, before getting her first full-time teaching post nearby, at my school. In all, she spent a good ten years in Goheung County. The physical passage of time hadn’t dulled or numbed her memories of those years one bit. I couldn’t help wondering what sort of things had happened on Sorok Island.

3. She told me how lost she’d felt all through her twenties. Of course, some afflictions of the heart are rooted in historical wounds. Before volunteering on Sorok Island and becoming a schoolteacher, she’d been a college student in Gwangju—right when the Gwangju Massacre took place. As she told me about her experiences, I recalled the way she used to stand sometimes with her back turned to us, as if we’d best not approach her.

4. But then, doesn’t a certain devotedness sometimes come from the shadows? I realized anew that her passion for teaching bore the mark of an ascetic pushing him- or herself to greater feats of discipline. Back then I was too young to understand that kind of sorrow.

5. Back when she was first posted to our school, she went out wandering near the campus to try to ease her weary, gloomy heart; her steps led her to the [Deoksansa] temple, where a young nun was living. My teacher said she always felt better after visiting the temple and bowing before the altar. Seasons passed, and yet she and the nun never once spoke. The nun seemed as deeply withdrawn as she was.

6. Between feeling lost as a teenager and suffocating under the pressure of preparing for the college entrance exam, I opted to board at Deoksan Temple instead of going back home or staying behind at the school to take supplemental classes. . . .

7. My days in the mountain temple started out dull and uncomfortable. It was hard to wake in time for breakfast, which was ready at exactly six in the morning every day, and I couldn’t get used to the temple food. The rice smelled strongly of incense, and the greens were bland. Besides, back home I was more used to eating seaweeds—fried miyeokgwi, seasoned parae, and totnamul, to name a few—than mountain greens. I asked the kitchen helper to go easy on my servings. . . .

8. The days grew even more monotonous, but to my surprise, each time I sat in front of the furnace, my heart grew calm. The temple food grew on me, and at last I was asking the kitchen helper to heap my bowl higher. The nun was busy performing a hundred-day prayer ritual, so I mainly saw her at meals. I’d been expecting to receive some words of wisdom or comfort from her, but she had nothing to say to me.

9. On sunny days, the three of us ate lunch side by side at three small portable tables set up on a narrow side porch. Meals in the temple were quiet. It felt less like eating with others and more like confronting the act of eating itself. It gave me a taste of a solitude that was lonesome and yet fulfilling. I had never before paid so much attention to the act of eating. But I guess that’s what temples are about. Maybe they’re not where you go to listen to lofty thoughts, but rather where you go to face your own soul, which stands taller, grows more distinct, amid the stillness. There, my mind kept returning to the question of the essence of all phenomena.