경허말년 禪詩에서 드러나는 버림과 깨달음의 상징성

Abstract

Gyeongheo is famous for his Seon poetry as well as for his activities revitalizing Korean Seon. During the eight years since his sudden leave from monastery in 1904 till death in 1912, Gyeongheo left no writing other than poems. We may reasonably expect that those Seon poems of his last years provide us with access to his post-awakening spirituality and life. They are precious materials for our understanding of how Seon Buddhist ideals may be embodied by an awakened Seon master’s everyday life. The Seon poems Gyeongheo wrote in his last years express the spiritual horizon where no more discrimination, attachment, or karmic activity arises even in the midst of the life of saṃsāra, that is, arising and ceasing. We can see such Seon ideals as “everyday life in nirvāṇa and asaṃskṛta” and “renouncement beyond the dichotomy of monkhood and laity” are working as the very basis of those poems. ‘enlightenment is not simply a subject but the very essence of Seon poetry. A Seon poem, by definition, is a song of enlightenment―a lyric of the One Mind, i.e., a linguistic expression of the world of enlightenment. It is not that a particular kind of poetic form, subject, or rhetorical technique characterizes a lyric as a Seon poem. What makes a poem a song of Seon experience is the enlightenment the poet expresses by it. Gyeongheo lived a life of post-awakening during the last years. He lived in great freedom from all fetters of attachment including the dichotomous frame of the sacred and the profane. His Seon poems in that period express his spirituality of asaṃskṛta and renouncement transcending all conventional discriminating frameworks, which can be regarded as the very core characteristics of his poetic esthetics.