Reflections of A Buddhist Nun: Kim Iryŏp. By Jin Y. Park. University of Hawaii Press, March 31, 2014. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 0824838785 ISBN-13: 978-0824838782
摘要
Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971) was a modern woman of Korea whose life “offers us a panorama of modern Korean society,” as her translator Jin Y. Park states. Kim was born to a pastor and “the most Christian man in Korea”; she lost her Christian faith and turned to the women's movement in the 1920s; finally, she joined a Buddhist monastery in 1933 and participated in the efforts to revive monasticism and meditation training. All three phases of her life reflect the currents of her day—the Christian presence in Korea, the turn to modern Western social thought, and the revitalization of Buddhism as a response to both. In her lucid introduction to Kim's essays, Park poses the question of continuity between the phases of Kim's life. Park asks in particular, “Is religious practice in general and Zen practice in particular compatible with social activism?” Kim evinces a rather traditionalist and purist form of Buddhist revival, unlike her contemporary Han Yong‐un (1879–1944) who fused Buddhism, political activism, and poetry. Kim proclaims that Christ and the Buddha arose from the same seed but also avers that Buddhism is the “comprehensive” and superior religion. Contrary to her valuation of female sexuality in earlier years, Kim the nun asserts that a young monk who falls for a woman's charms “faces graver danger than a child attracted to a leper offering candy.” Park's translations of Kim Iryŏp provide a valuable glimpse of the diversity of individuals that comprise Korean modernism and Buddhism in the early twentieth century.
