Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master KimIryŏp. By JIN Y. PARK.
Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master KimIryŏp. By JIN Y. PARK.
Jin Park’s book Women and Buddhist Philosophy concerns the life and philosophy of Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971), a Buddhist nun who, prior to her taking tonsure, was considered a “New Woman” in terms of her marriages, love affairs, and work as an influential social critic and writer. It is based on Kim’s major life events and writings and divided into two parts that respectively deal with her pre- and post-monastic life. Part one comprises three chapters that examine her life from her birth in 1896 to 1927, when she first learned about Buddhism, while part two comprises four chapters that analyze her life from 1927 to her death in 1971.
This book attempts to render Kim’s seemingly divergent life into a congruous whole
by finding a thread that connects her monastic life with her previously active social life.
Park argues that the pursuit of freedom runs consistently through Kim’s life. Given that
previous studies have focused on her as either a New Woman or a nun, Park’s holistic
approach sheds more light on her life than have earlier studies.
Park contends that Kim’s writings as a nun, by reconnecting with her past, offer clues to her efforts to reconcile her pre-monastic with her monastic life. Kim’s conversion to Buddhism was a result of her meeting renowned Zen (Sŏn) master Man’gong, whose influence led her to not only adopt a monastic life in 1933 but also renounce her past life as a writer. After decades of practice, she emerged as a competent Zen master and resumed writing, becoming a best-selling author. Through the lens of her own
life as an established nun, Kim finally came to terms with her past struggles for
women’s freedom in Korea’s patriarchal society. Park notes that she consistently sought
freedom, whether it was freedom from social bonds as a New Woman or existential
freedom from her worldly suffering as a nun. These pursuits of different types
of freedom came to be harmonized through her writings. Park claims that Kim’s autobiographical
writings were her way of creating meaning, or philosophizing.
Although Park imparts order and meaning to a seemingly untidy life, she appears to
extrapolate beyond what Kim presents. Here we can see the author’s own philosophizing,
particularly when she discusses the limits of male-dominated and Western-centered philosophy,
which appears to resonate more with the perspectives of Park the author, also a
Buddhist philosopher, than of Kim. In other words, it does not appear that the domination
ofWestern philosophy over Asian philosophy, including Buddhism, wielded as much
of a negative influence over Kim as Park implies. Kim was a Zen practitioner, not an academic
philosopher. Kim would not have been concerned with the imbalance of power
among philosophical traditions.
Similarly, as a nun Kim was silent about her position on the women’s movement. Park
argues, however, that Kim would have developed and sustained strong views on women’s
issues, given that she had been awakened to the true nature of the self as a Zen practitioner.
Park also claims that Kim’s idea of the “great-I” had a communal dimension.
But it is unconvincing that better awareness of the self and of the universe after the
attainment of the “great-I” would automatically apply to the social dimension of life.
Park acknowledges that “social theory was not a strong point in Kim’s Buddhism”
(p. 173), and it is difficult to see how Kim’s existentialist Buddhism could have readily
extended to a more socially engaged Buddhism. Her focus as a nun would have been
on individual freedom from a death-bound existence rather than on improving the
