SPACE OF FLOWS BEHIND A BUDDHIST TEMPLE IN THE WOODS....

I love the temple paintings in bright colors on the sides and the backs of the temple. These portray stories of the Buddha and particularly the Korean Buddhist saints who had to go through some sort of travail. I had a small book of Taoist saying and platitudes in my pocket as I overshot this quite destination inside of a Seoul mountain on my way to uejonbu. Ujeonbu is on the edge of the DMZ area. I past big military camps and tank traps. I overshot this famous temple where the famous American monk bases himself out of here and I had seen him at many social gatherings with more beautiful women accompanying him every time I would meet up with him. …Here he is a celebrity for writing his book on Buddhism in the modern world. Modern world. The world. The world is something to be feared. This is the world that we tiptoe around the DMZ zones and the mosquito infested woods and the high altitudes full away and removed from the rest of the population. The other. I encounter much family with cheap aluminum blankets spread under them along the stream up to the next high temple. They are sleeping or reading, or, as in the case of just down stream of me they are beautiful girls frolicking in the water splashing each other to peals of laughter. The world is a type of behemoth mother to which we cling and hope…if it is doom…that she is merciful. We hope…if it is laughter…that we will remember what we had on that very short Sunday in a lifetime of infinite Sundays.

The world. With my tiny western mind I hope that I can figure out the world to extract something from it. I drink my dollar bottle of Makelee beside the stream and have a smoke of a cigar. The large animals of Korea such as the tiger are long from this terrain by hundreds of years. The world of large dangerous animals is the first thing that the self feels complete to attack. There are those worlds within such as cancer and illness that would attack us and make us surprised that we are being eaten from or self’s with an affliction within. We are surprised when this world moves to annihilate ourselves from within. Within. This was beneath and in control. We think. We think this a lot. ON MY WAY TO THE NEXT BUDDHIST TEMPLE THE CHANCE OF A LARGE MAMMAL POUNCING DOWN ON ME IS NEXT TO ZERO. The chance that I might be attacked through time by an affliction within where my body decays or is attack is more so but through time I have appreciated that I have atoned with the fear of my world. I have a measure of youth with knowledge that balances me between. For all of the Asian fatalism and determinism found in the gigantic high-rises that ring this city there is that quality of knowing the value of life that I admire and love in the Koreans. They know…like the middle aged adjuma hiking her way up the mountain …how and by what extreme chances we came to be here. They know what it would be like to go away to oblivion and oblivion before your time. If the new epistolary self is one that shits out a trail of narrative…it is the Korean Taoist who is there ready to greet you after years with a surprise and a gladness that you are still alive and you have come back to this place and time.

I have come to this temple many times now with many people. This is a Sunday where the Koreans on their blankets resemble a Monet with lunch and makelee on the side or on the top of the stream. The city of Seoul stands in sharp contrast to the nature of the woods in the mountings that is right there at the end of a subway line. Yet, for the rest, are the stern algorithms of modernity that realigns the individuals fear of the world and compels them to lunge to take care of the swift algorithms that makes the modern living in the self surveying heights of the mega housing so inhumane. It is here in the wilderness that the individual fully appreciates the encounter with nature.

Yet the other. Who are they? Who is she? What type of encounter would one have with them and what is possible. Right now a type of park ranger past me and gave me the thumbs up. He is passing from one group to the other and has one pant leg rolled up. Inside each Korean there is a beatnik porn-star and this park ranger…taken outside of that context…world be one of those. Nature. Natural. But what is so natural with the encounter with the other? He passed by the screaming girls and they acted as if he wasn’t there. The other is the most troublesome because…like the fear we have with the world…we have a disappointment with the other…even the enemy. It is the world that ushers in fear and it is disappointment that ushers in our approximation of the other.

The other can bring bliss but most of the time we are attempting to hide within the other. We attempt to hide within the beneficent nature but a Sunday in the park behind a Buddhist temple acquaints us with the benign mother aspect of nature. I had a rigorous Ciap massage last night by a middle-aged guy that was one of the best of my life and I still feel it today. At the end of the massage he walked on my back and moved my spine and muscles in a way that haven’t been moved in months if now years. This was my nominal encounter with the other. It was tremendous.

So is the other or possible others merely back boxes to be viewed and examined what goes in one way and out the other? The young girls have stopped their screaming play now and I hear the stream beside me. A plump young woman comes up beside me to dip her handkerchief in water. On this Sunday there is a rebalancing with the Tao of the original schism. The fall from an Eden was a fall from doubting the other and trusting nature. Now we attack the rest of nature (even the cancers within) and find disappointment in our relationships with the other. Pathological collectivism and conformity can sometimes rule this society (but not here in the woods) as well l as pathological individuality break down the capacity for listening and empathy in ours (America). What are the ways back to the difficult other and the impossible self through time? I have been here in this wilderness a few times to great the Buddha of the woods but I am amazed by the neurons left to fire surrounding the place were I lay down by the stream with a past lover…how long will the stream of neurons fire? Who am I essentially? The play with plastic time is my fight to retain the beautiful memories of a Sunday.