Reconciliation with Father

30
"Forgive Me, Father!" 1993


Someone or something is oriented toward someone or something. Just like bees are guided by airstream, just like salmon are guided by sea stream, just like ocean cruising needs a compass and a navigator, and just like foreign travellers need maps and tourist guides, do those, who go the faraway place of death, need guides of some sort? Since Dano missed one day of such ritual session the previous day, he prepared himself to take part in that day's morning ritual for the terminally ill parents.

He kept awake through the night for the event. When on daybreak he went up to the ritual building, he found that several applicants for the event had already been there. Dano filled in the application form with Toung Doung's name, age, sex, relation, and address. The presiding monk of the ritual stood six feet with stout build, brilliant eyes and resonant voice.

He later introduced himself as Monk Yonghwa, Dragon Fire. His ritual proceedings took on the mode of a premature report with the King of the Netherworld (the Paradise after death). With all the ritual proceedings of the offerings, bows, mantra chanting done, Monk Dragon Fire gathered Dano and others around and gave some pieces of advice.

The few minutes before and after one's death were very important in that the surviving people would have to take some special heed so that the deceased would not be ambushed in the traps of diversion. Yonghwa said that a person who just died had to go a long hard travel to the Nether World. He compared the journey of a deceased to a climbing, that is, a climbing up a steep hill. He looked at Dano and said, "The bereaving people will have to stop crying for a few minutes and to cheer him up, instead, by whispering to his dying ears, 'Don't be distracted, Father. Go straight, Father!'"



Exiting the portal of Guinsa Temple, Dano was lighthearted. Like a boy on a picnic, Dano was thrilled at his reunion with his father in half a month. The intercity traffic transfers were irritating, and his feet were fidgety on the snail buses. After a five-hour bus ride, he was virtually racing the stairs to the sunny sick room his father had been using. When he got into the room, his father was sitting up, with Illczin and his wife before him, surprised by Dano's sudden appearance.

With an elliptical greeting with only knelt postures and no bows, which meant that one's offspring was not supposed to give deep bows to the gravely ill elderly, Dano threw himself before his father and burst out crying, "It was all my fault, Father!" He kept on crying. He was wrong. He did wrong. He pained him. He hurt him. He begged him to forgive him. Perplexed were all of them present in the room. Toung Doung said weakly with sunken eyes, "Stop crying, son. I was not always right. Don't blame yourself so bitterly!"

How sad it would be that he was forced to decide on a place at which he would be buried. Toung Doung had his intention conveyed to his sons, Dano and Illczin that his burial place should be prepared in a hurry. He had made sure that he would not be buried at a certain hilly site of Sun Valley, Andong-gun, because it was so far away that he wouldn't be able to "see" his children and grandchildren, and even if they could come from time to time, they wouldn't get to the resting house of his.

When mentioning this, Toung Doung indicated his oldest son Dano offhandedly. He said that "a certain fella with a problem of weight" would balk at the idea of the call at his father's place, because it would be a hard job to do, so he would try to greet from far down at the foot of the mountain hill, instead, excusing himself, "You can see me from here, can't you? Please think that your son's showup here at this spot will suffice." So with the aid of a jiguan, a geomancer, who had been arranged by Dano's best friend Mr. Paragon at Euiseong, Dano and Illczin took a sunny low-lying place at a stone's throw from the orchard as his father's resting place.

"This place is better than all the other places," the jiguan had said at the time, "in terms of the peace of the deceased and the prosperity for his descendants, protected by the power of hills surrounding it." The comments of "the judge of the earth" were hollow and useless though, because the place was not his private property on which to lie down and rest but belonged to the county property, so in a considerable time the leaser would have to move to another place or something.

Like an elementary school boy, who dawdles on his vacation homework, Toung Doung appeared to be under pressure. He had his "parting plan" with his family suspended by his wife Boolim's sincere request that he put off the occasion in consideration of his sons' inconveniences. Now his grand reconciliation with the oldest son, who had sought forgiveness over wails, was made. And as if driven by a premonition, his first daughter who, born during Sun Valley days, had turned a Buddhist nun as a young maid by the Buddhist name of Awakening, returned a few days ago to observe and consecrate her secular father's final days on earth.

The date was set for the sad occasion. On the morning of the 15th of March, 1993, by the lunar calendar, Toung Doung said weakly, "It is time to go!" He was as light as a bird. Deprived of nutrition and hydration, he might have weighed less than 40 kilograms. He had emptied every bit of nutritional residue from his system. His eyes were sunken deeper than ever. He looked to be a skeletal type of a body. Some secular provisions had been made. Boolim had made him a clean new clothes. Toung Doung had made no wills except that he had handed down the apple farm of 6,000 pyong which equals about 20,000 square meters to his second son Illczin who had been supporting his parents and doing farm works, with the consent of the other two sons and the approval of inheritor Illczin himself.

Toung Doung climbed into bed which had been elevated on the head. Like almost all the ordinary seculars, he did not grandsit nor grandspeak at his dying moment. He was not a Buddhist believer, either. He was just calmly waiting for the moment. He had been endowed with an extraordinary encounter, a few years ago, with the Grand Buddha, though, which had been made in the middle of the East Sea, of all the places, in front of Naksansa Temple, Gangneung.

The cerebral fantastic scene, which had been developed on a grand scale, had been conveyed later to his immediate brother under him, Toung Young, who had framed it up with its saga: The Grand Buddha, materializing himself in the middle of the East Sea, had opened its grand mouth and solemnly pronounced a wise phrase consisting of seven Chinese words meaning in effect, that "After all the concerted efforts of yours with one clear and clean mind, you can rest assured."

A man was dying and the other surviving families were watching him die. For a long, long time he had been a strong supporter of a small decent family with his steely legs and arms. Now he was lying powerless, left alone with all the others waiting to part with him. He was taking last breath very heavily as Awakening kept reciting the mantra for the dead, pounding the moktagg, a wooden vase sounder. At one moment Awakening pronounced him dead. Dano, who kept standing with the others, felt an awakening chill running his spine. It was around 11 o'clock in the morning, with the April sun racing toward the middle of the sky. The sky fell down.