Looking Back On My Life

In the year Mujin (1988), when I was eighty-nine years old, I spent the last night quietly in front of the portrait of the Great Ancestor, and in that very place, I greeted the first day of the year Gisa (1989) while listening to the crowing of a rooster.

Throughout my ninety-odd years of life, it has always been the same, without any significant events. I am already ninety years old. It truly feels like it happened in an instant.

Sitting alone in quiet contemplation, I reflect on my past life, and it remains unchanged, just as it always has been. Even if I wanted to change, there is nothing to change, and yet, even if I don't want to change, life still changes so easily—is that the nature of life? So, in my youth, I deeply contemplated life and wrote that "life is like a fleeting cloud, and we just busily wander around for no reason."

However, that was a thought from my youth. Now, on the verge of ninety, my perspective is different. The universe didn't give humanity life, death, sickness, and old age, nor did it grant us such boundless abilities, simply for us to come and go "without a sound or a trace."

There is a profound meaning behind the universe bringing a person into existence in a particular era, nation, and country, and nurturing them. It doesn't bestow this incredibly vast life upon us merely for us to come and go like a fleeting cloud.

But when I suddenly reflect, how many lives have passed through this universe since its creation, failing to fulfill their purpose and only accumulating debt? When I think about this, an indescribable sense of dread overwhelms me.

I, too, have lived for eighty-nine long years, but no matter how I look back, I am undoubtedly a person living on borrowed time. I, too, have lived a life of debt, failing to understand the profound meaning behind the universe granting me life.

There's an old saying, "If one hears the Tao (Enlightenment) in the morning, one can die without regret in the evening." This also makes me think deeply. And I think of another old saying, "At fifty, one realizes the mistakes of the past forty-nine years." I, too, feel that "at ninety, I have finally realized the mistakes of the past eighty-nine years." Although I don't have much time left in my life, I have published this book with the hope of diligently striving to repay at least a small portion of the debt I owe to this universe before my eyes are covered with earth.

January, 1989 (Dahn year 4322)

<Annoucement to the Baekdoosan Mountain tribe> Wrriten by Master Bongwoo Taehoon Kwon