Publication Date: September 2005 | Series: Green Integer (Book 123)
Ko Un grew up in a formerly Japanese-controlled territory that was very much the center of the Korean War. Ten Thousand Lives is his major, ongoing work, which began during his imprisonment, when he determined to describe every person he had ever met. The selection in this volume—from the first 10 volumes—represents one of the major classics of twentieth-century Korean literature, published for the first time in English.
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... masterwork ... recording the life of every person Korean writer and activist Ko Un has ever known or known of. -- Buddhadharma, Fall 2005
... one of the most extraordinary projects in world literature in this part of the century. The poems are exquisite. -- Robert Hass, Korean Culture, Spring 1999
The unique space where anti-traditional Modernism and anti-western Traditionalism meet is where the poetry of Ko Un originates -- Choi Wan-Shik, Conference on
From the Author
In May 1980 I was arrested and going to be court-martialed by the emerging dictatorship, accused of "rebellion." The people arrested with me were the now-deceased priest, Moon Ik-hwan, and the now-former president, Kim Dae-jung. We didn’t know where anyone was, whether alive or dead. If the single weak electric bulb went out, it was a black room, so we were full of fear, for we felt we might be killed at any moment -- and the thought that really sustained my life at that moment was that if I were to get out of here I would have to write these poems. I thought that even if I didn’t do it, that thought in itself would be a source of strength.
These poems represent my other-centered poems. So much modern Korean poetry is centered on the *self*; even if it is love poetry, the other person, the one I love has to come to me -- or else it is the I who is there walking, it is I who is smelling the flowers.
This "I-centered way" of experiencing life distorts -- the others are there and they become the object of my poem. I have many other kinds of works, but if this were not in my body of work, somehow I would have failed in my task, not only in the matter of depicting others, but also in the way of somehow transcending "self."
It is the obligation of the poet to celebrate each person.
Gary Gregory Gach (born November 30, 1947) is an American author, translator, and editor living on Russian Hill, San Francisco. He's produced nine books, and his work has appeared in dozens of anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. A dynamic speaker and teacher, he facilitates two weekly mindfulness practice groups in San Francisco, in the tradition of Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh.
In his life roles, he's designed books, bought and sold books in a 2nd-hand shop, and edited books for authors and publishers. He's also been a stevedore, hospital administrator, editor in chief, web weaver, and actor on stage, screen, tv and radio.
On a lazy day, you can find him reading a book, taking a walk, having tea with a friend, or swimming the San Francisco Bay.
As Allen Ginsberg has remarked of this singular quasi-beat poetic mingling of cosmic perception and the ordinary life, Ko Un's Son poems are as "hard nuts to crack--yet many seem immediately nutty and empty at the same time." While in prison and thinking of the lives of all the people he knew, Ko Un decided he would write a poem about every person he had ever met. He would call this work Ten Thousand Lives: I agree with Robert Hass's suggestion that "This project itself, just the idea of it, should be enough to put him on the short list for the Nobel Prize."
By way of some context, Ko Un was born the son of a farmer in 1933 in Southwestern Korea, Cholla Province (a region that prides itself on its relentless antagonism to the party politics of Seoul). A precocious scholar from the start, he studied Chinese classics as a youth and learned to read and write Korean from a neighbor's servant (when Korean was prohibited as a public school language by colonial Japanese). In his late teens, marked by his experience during the Korean War, he became a Buddhist monk. After 10 years and after becoming an abbot at Haeinsa Temple, he quit the monastic life and returned to the worldly world, but with a deeply nihilistic attitude that culminated in a suicide attempt in 1970.
On the relationship between Son (zen meditation) and poetry, Ko Un has written: "Before I became a disciple...I was very knowledgeable about western philosophy, sutra study, and the teachings of the old Son Patriarchs. In fact, I was pedantic and loved showing off; seeing this, my master said, "Be patient in everything. Let go of everything and only meditate on "mu" (emptiness). Mu is your breath, your farts, and your father. Let go even of emptiness. Flee from words....' I began to fly, and from this freedom I met with language again. Like some crazed Wallace Stevens, his poetry does seem to come out the other side of ordinary language and habitual perception.
On the other side of being a zen monk., Ko Un also met with political activism and the will to resist government domination in Seoul. During the 1970s and 1980s, he became a leading spokesman for the artists and students opposed to military dictatorships and was among the people arrested when Chun doo Won took over and suppressed the Kwangju Democratic uprising. Since that time he has married, and published prolifically; his interests and reputation continue to mount and he has been translated into many languages. Indeed, he has written over 100 volumes in Korean poetry, several novels and short stories as well as essays.
His works in English translation include Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems (Parallax Press, 1997) and The Sound of My Waves (Cornell East Asia Series, 1993), both collections I commend to your attention. For the political and the natural orders often collide in his earthy poetry, come wryly together, mingling wit and compassion. As he wrote in a poem set in the DMZ from Ten Thousand Lives , called "Kin Shim Muk" ,"The road between Tongduchon and Uijonbu/ stretches glorious, not a yank in sight!"
Ko Un is still writing this one long poem and turning his own one life into an exemplary planetary life of action and meditation, poetry and compassion, deeply expressive of Korea and the global soul of the world.Read more ›
Inhabited descriptions of individual lives, with little direct comment, going far beyond the immediate subject. Sometimes harsh, always complex. Unexpected sensitivity without self reference. There is tragedy, there is violence. Something Shakespearean, with a touch of Emily Dickinson's practice of poetry.
