LIVING AND DYING IN
BUDDHIST CULTURES University of Hawaii
Summer SessionMay 20 - June 24,
1995"Aboji........aboji," she cried, "Father.......Father...."
breaking from her mother's grasp and throwing herself onto her
father's body as it was dropped into its narrow grave.
"Aboji...aboji," she cried, with heartbreaking tears as she tore at
the muslin wrappings and ties which confined his limbs and kept her
from touching his putrefying flesh...This was her last chance to see
her father from whom she had been estranged since birth. Mr. Kim was
a victim of Hansen's disease or what is better known
as leprosy. He was discovered to have contracted the disease
soon after his first marriage and before the birth of his daughter
who was now clinging to him in his grave. She had not cast
eyes on him when he was alive and she had insisted, despite her
mother's grieving reluctance, to see him as least once now
that he was dead, and perhaps a lesser object of dread and
contagion.
No great surprise to many
Koreans, Mr. Kim had remarried after having been thrown out by his
first wife who was now clutching the hysterical daughter at
the grave site. He began a new family and a new business in exile in
a leprosy resettlementvillage not far outside of Seoul. He had done
modestly well as a merchant and was a generous member of the sternly
sober Presbyterian community who now participated in his
funeral. Mr. Kim's love of drinking continued, however, despite
the warnings of the nursing staff and doctors who monitored
the villagers' health. His excesses eventually led to liver failure,
I was told. Hansen's disease hadn't killed him but his love of
soju and good times. Although he had spent much time in local
clinics, the stigma of leprosy prevented him from receiving
the best treatment for other medical problems at that time. Friends
and family in the village remained supportive to the end,
however. The village minister and deacon made frequent visits to his
home as he slowly succumbed.
The villagers had set up a
ceremonial awning and straw mats outside Mr. Kim's home for formal
condolence visits and mournful wailing to occur in traditional
Confucian fashion. Visitors bowed twice in a formalized way to a
funeral tablet bearing the deceased's name on an altar table
of offerings.His second family had washed his body in hyangsu (water
scented with incense) , groomed his hair and nails very
properly and tied up his limbs in white cotton muslin two days
before. The summer was very hot and they wanted to get on with
burying the body before it began to putrefy.
There was plenty of smoked
pork and rice cake to be eaten by the guests and soft drinks, too,
but no alcohol unlike funerals in other locales in Korea. This
was a proper Christian village...Catholics could drink at funerals,
and even the Buddhists, and those with no religion, too, so
they say... sharing drink made grieving so much sweeter but no one
here would drink within the village. But at the burial site
outside the town, that was a different matter.
Father's first wife and
daughter should not have joined the funeral procession up the
slippery hillside to the grave site. They were vehemently
scolded and almost physically restrained from following the bier by
the men of the village who resented these strange women who
suddenly intruded into the ceremony. The men and women of the
deceased's second family were perplexed. They were stunned by
the sudden arrival of living reminders of Father's pre-leprosy past,
but they could not deny the pathos that these distraught
ladies bore.
The daughter insisted on
following the coffin to the grave and her mother could do little to
prevent her. Little boys could follow and play on the grassy,
slope with impunity as they mimicked their elders carrying the
paper-flower decorated bier, but the women were scolded again
and again for accompanying them. A photo of the deceased was carried
at the head of the funeral procession as if the departed was
still with us leading the way to the grave.
Once daughter Kim was
lifted from the grave, her white mourning gown all soiled with mud,
the minister read a short passage from his Bible; family
members quickly threw dirt onto the body to cover it and lingered at
a distance as friends and workers in the village completed the
burial and built a hemisherical mound over the grave in a
traditional manner.
As the work of piling soil
continued, many bottles of soju (rice liquor) appeared and mats were
stretched on the ground under the trees near the work. The
friends and workers took turns laying sod on the mound to finish it
and they sang songs about the deceased to release their grief.
A red paisley kerchief tied around his head like a pirate to absorb
his sweat and his face flushed with alcohol, a close friend of
Mr. Kim scaled the funerary mound and related the tragic life tale
of his leper friend beneath him with great humor reminiscent
of a narrative, folk operatic style. What could Kim's daughter be
feeling as she wept in the shadow of the trees which also
embraced his drunken friends?
I witnessed Mr. Kim's
burial in the summer of 1980 during my stint as a U.S. Peace Corps
leprosy control volunteer. Mr. Kim was not Buddhist but
memories of his funeral ceremony and the extremes of pathos which it
evoked returned to me as I attended a public hearing on the
revision of national legislation concerning burial and grave sites
last year. The event was held in the main hall of the Buddhist
Broadcasting System (BBS) building in Seoul and was sponsored by the
Korean Buddhist Promotion Institute.
According to a senior
researcher of National Land Development Board of Korea, there are
about 19 million graves throughout the country which occupy
about 1,000 sq.km. (This is about 1% of all the land of South
Korea.) The average grave plot is 50 sq.m. Living space per
person is 44.5 sq.m. The dead occupy more space than the living
already! Every year about 200,000 additional people are buried
- over 80% of those who die in the nation and their grave sites
occupy about 9 sq.km more land per year. If this pattern
continues, there will be no appropriate sites available in the Seoul
metropolitan area in two to three years. And none will be
available nationwide in ten years.
When the Ministry of Health
and Social Affairs in 1993 proposed changes in regulations to halve
the size of grave sites (from 20 sq.m to 10 sq.m.) and to
limit their term to a maximum of 60 years with compulsory
disinterment, the move was opposed as 'untimely" by a meeting
of high ranking state ministers. Supposedly the public (public =
elders soon-to-be ancestors!) was not ready to discuss the
dead and the sanctity of the ancestors at that time... but more and
more citizens are speaking out about death and death education
today in order to create better conditions for the living
tomorrow.
Attitudes are slowly but
steadily changing. According to the latest available national
statistics, 19.1% of those who died in 1993 were cremated;
only 7% were cremated in 1971. The majority of those disposed of in
public crematoria are those without families, children,
suicides, unmarried men and women, unidentified bodies, stillborn
babies, disinterred remains and victims of infectious diseases
and disfiguring accidents.
Figures on the cremation of
Buddhists, both sangha and lay, are difficult to come by. Monastic
residents are customarily cremated at prescribed sites in the
mountains (sanjung tabi) on wooden funeral pyres. The general Korean
public of all religious persuasions is well aware of this
custom because of extraordinary media coverage given the cremation
of the monk Songch'ol, a recent supreme patriarch of the
Chogye Order. His long, austere life at Haeinsa, the Dharma Jewel
monastery of Korea, his nirvana (yolban) in meditation
posture, the huge crowds at his funeral pyre (t'abi sik) and the
110+ relics (sari) found among his ashes were the focus of
national attention. Urban sangha members of the more ordinary sort
and those with no money for fuel are brought to public
crematoria like Pyokje which services the Seoul area. Perhaps about
10% of all lay Buddhists are cremated, too. An recent informal
poll of attitudes among Buddhist volunteers by Bhiksuni Haedo
indicates that cremation is becoming an acceptable alternative
to burial for laypeople.
Accurate numbers which
correlate religious affiliation with cremation in Korea are hard to
come by but a visit to a crematorium (hwajangt'o - literally
"fire-funeral place") is an eye opener. While a deceased, elderly
bosallim waits in line to be pushed quickly into the furnace,
a monk may beat a steady, mournful rhythm on a wooden gourd (moktak)
surrounded by family members and friends who chant "namu
amit'a pul"- "praise to Amitabha Buddha." To one side of them, a
Protestant group may be singing hymns to a young church member
killed in a traffic accident. On the other side, a Catholic nun may
be reading a rosary for an old bachelor ...
Another sign that the
Korean public is becoming more sensitive to issues regarding death
is the growth of the hospice movement. While the topic of
dying is an almost unspeakable taboo to many older
and more traditional folk and a
wet blanket on the hopes and ambitions of the nouveau riche
entrepreneurs who have made Korea the economic miracle it is
today, other serious people have picked up on the need to improve
the quality, and not only the quantity, of life in the
country. And they agree with many in the West who assert that the
quality of living is orrelated with the acceptance of
dying.
Compassionate care for the
terminally ill in the form of modern hospice care as we are familiar
with it in the West was introduced by foreign missionaries to
Korea about twenty five years ago. Australian Catholic sisters began
an in-patient and outreach program from a clinic in rural
Kangnung in 1981 and it soon led to the inception of both hospital
and home hospice care in Seoul and other urban areas. A
Presbyterian hospital began a hospice home care service in 1988.
Hospice volunteers are continuously being trained by major
Catholic and Protestant hospice associations including the Korean
Association for Death Education (Salmgwa juggeum-eul
saenggakhaneun hoe)
Buddhists have just begun
to realize that they must organize to make their efforts more
effective in society. As part of the spirit of reform and
social commitment which now is changing the image and activities of
the Chogye Order and it lay supporters, The Buddhist Care
Givers' Association (Pulgyo kanbyongin hyop-hoe) and now the
Buddhist Volunteer Service Association (Pulgyo chawon pongsa
yonhap-hoe) are focussing on directly helping the chronically ill
and dying.
The first group of 51
Buddhist hospice volunteers completed their "vihara education"
course, a three month weekly lecture series, in December of
1994. The group was composed mostly of middle-aged and older ladies
sprinkled with a few male retirees, two monks who came
sporadically and one American. This program was initiated and put
into effect by the pioneer efforts of Bhiksuni Haedo and her
supporters who are trying to stimulate greater concern for the needs
of the dying and the bereaved in Korea. Venerable Haedo has
spent a number of years studying social welfare and the vihara
movement in Japan.
The Buddhist vihara
volunteers work mainly in hospitals which recognize the possible
contributions of hospice volunteers. They work in any medical
facility which will receive them. Unfortunately, administrators of a
number of hospitals in Korea do not see the need for special
hospice care at all yet, and they do not treat the terminally ill
any differently than other patients. They do not recognize
their special psychological concerns or pain and do not allow
volunteers near terminally ill patients. Hospice-trained
volunteers of whatever religious orientation often find themselves
placed far from the dying. Vihara volunteers are further
disadvantaged because the Buddhist presence in the administration of
modern medical care in Korea is minimal. There are no major
Buddhist hospitals in Seoul. Nor are there many Buddhist physicians
or nurses;or many, at least, who will assert their affiliation
and risk opprobrium from their superiors and peers. Buddhists
patients have made some headway, however, with the first
hospital Buddhist chapel or Dharma hall (poptang) established in
1985 at Seoul National University Hospital followed by two
more in 1989 and another four in the 90s.
The second vihara education
program sponsored by the Buddhist Volunteer Service Association in
Seoul begins in March. The network of Buddhist hospice
volunteers is continuing to expand. It has borrowed much from the
American and European version of care for the dying; it is too
soon to tell what its own distinctive character will be Venerable
Haedo and her supporters are working to establish a home for
the indigent dying. It will be a place where Buddhists can die as
Buddhists in an atmosphere of acceptance. One thing is
certain: It is an innovative and creative time for the Korean
Buddhist tradition.
* How do modern Buddhists
respond to the spectrum of Confucian and shamanist traditions of the
spirits and the afterlife which permeate sectors of Korean
society? How much of it is part of them?
* How will our Buddhist
volunteers meet the strongly organized and very articulate Catholic
and Protestant movement for the dying which has preceded
them?
* How are the two
approaches to death in Korean Buddhist practice- the meditative Zen
and the devotional Pure Land- being presented to modern
Koreans, almost half (46%)of whom claim to profess "no religion?"
(Only about 28% of the ROK population identify themselves as
Buddhist as of 1991, according to the National Statistics
Office.)
Background Reading
There are no books in
English specifically on death and dying in Korea. The following are
for background reading about traditional Korean religion in
general.
Ancestor Worship and Korean
Society, R. L. and D.Y. Janelli, Stanford, 1982.
Religion and Ritual in
Korean Society, edited by L.Kendall and G. Dix, Institute for East
Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 1987.
Religions of Old Korea,
C.A. Clark, The Christian Literature Society of Korea, Seoul,
1961.
Shamans, Housewives, and
Other Restless Spirits, L.Kendall, Hawaii, 1985.
The Zen Monastic
Experience, R. Buswell, Princeton, 1992.
Vitality in Korean Buddhist
Tradition, edited by F. Tedesco, Korea Journal, Vol.33 No.3., Korean
National Commission for Unesco, Seoul, Autumn 1993.
We want to hear what you think of our
advertisers. For Information about our advertising policies and rates
or to offer feedback about one of our sponsors, please visit our Sponsorship
Page