INTRODUCTION
✨ In this reflective piece, Master Woo Myung walks through a stark winter landscape to reveal the fleeting nature of human life. 🌌
🌿 Amid frozen grass, graveyards, and howling winds, he contrasts the noise of human struggle with the silent endurance of great nature. The realization is clear: people live and die within dreams, while nature simply remains.
This passage points to the only way beyond futility—being reborn as great nature itself. 🌠
ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
Vanity of Life
On the way to the neighboring village beyond the hills,
the winter snow lies frozen on the grass.
A bitter wind blows through the big pines in the graveyard;
as it whooshes by, it cuts into my very bones.
I have traveled far but have yet to reach the village.
Here the owls cry and the wolves howl at night.
For countless years,
many people have lived here
without leaving these mountains and rivers;
the proof of their life here
is the people of today.
The people of old had many stories and happenings,
just as people do today.
Now that I know Truth, I realize that
everyone lived in a dream
and died.
Bound to their meaningless lives,
they insisted on possessing what they had;
however, nothing is left,
nothing is theirs.
Only nature is free from all thoughts.
Only great nature stays silent
and stays alive;
but, people all passed away without a trace
after living noisily in agony and stubbornness;
they were unable to just live and die.
Everybody died and disappeared in their delusions.
The place that the enlightened one sees
is the place without any trace of anything.
People who feel the futility of humans and life
will know there is no way to live
unless they become great nature.
Only when you return to great nature,
only when you are reborn
as the body and mind of great nature,
will you live eternally like nature.
— Woo Myung
🌿 REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION
At Santa Clara Meditation, this passage is contemplated as a reminder of how human life passes within mental stories, while nature remains. By cleansing the mind and returning to the origin, practitioners begin to live with the quiet presence described by Master Woo Myung. 🌠
