Master Woo Myung Meditation Poem – From a Temple in the Mountains
Where there is Truth, there is the Way.
What does this mean?
It means for one to be able to find one’s self.
In this mountain temple,
the stupa is what remains of
those who pursued ‘dō (the Way or Truth, Tao)’
but died without a word.
I can see how hard a time they had
as well as their diligence
in their search for Truth.
How unattainable was this Truth
that it devoured their hearts?
The water that flowed in the mountains
sounds exactly the same as ever.
Piteous are those human beings,
who have come and gone like a dream.
But the traces of them –
those traces that are thousands of years old –
remain as they are,
standing still and without a word.
Only the one who is standing still has changed.
The only thing they have futilely left behind is
the sound of wind chimes.
I do not know where
people’s fervor in seeking out Truth has gone.
Amidst this, I place my faith in the fact that
the sound of the wooden fish is no different
than that of the past;
I think about that time long ago.
The people who had sought out Truth
but who silently left for some other places
do not speak a word.
Furthermore, they do not speak of their practices.
They have simply passed on.
They hang on to the sermons of the high priests
that have been passed down to them,
and they continue their search for Truth
at this temple in the mountain
even at this very moment.
Truth is the absence of self.
But man searches for it in his self,
which is why he does not realize that I am Truth.
I already exist but do not exist.
I do not exist, and yet all creations are me.
Rumor has it that
a ‘dae-dō-in’ –
the great one who walks the Way,
the one who is Truth –
will come,
but that no one knows him.
When man is absent of self,
he is a ‘dō-in (one who walks the Way).’
Heaven is with the dae-dō-in.
This dae-dō-in is one who can only be seen by man
when he no longer has karma.
Thus man must wake up from
the molds of his fixed conceptions.
-Woo Myung-
https://santaclarameditation.blogspot.com/2023/09/master-woo-myung-meditation-poem-from.html
