Conclusing Ideas on Korean Sŏn Poetry
III. Conclusion
When Sŏn masters really master the scriptural truth and their hermeneutic meanings in Buddhism, fully understand the causal efficacy of the real life, faithfully interpret the human desires and their ensuing pains, and responsively recognize the intentions of his Father masters and all the life wisdom, at last they can presumptively produce their poetic selves and narratives as a token of self-realization, which could be called Sŏn poetry, a literary outcome of spiritual supremacy. When they are poetically inspired on narrativize[y1] all the enlightening events, meaningful or sundry, of the secular and religious life, they can impose some insightful meanings on the factual or imagined things or ideas as truthfully as they can see.
As shown above, Korean Sŏn poetry displays many typical traits in its formally coherent four lines and five Chinese letters in a line, highly condensed poetic ideas, paradoxically more expressive by omission of sundry epithets. Its stylistic organization of ideation is so speedy and brief but powerful as to strike out sparkling imagery. Its aesthetic elegance is a little rough and tough, but it trills with its vast seismic after-tremors silently but powerfully. Its frequent use of the rhetorical condensation, conceit, disconnection, paradox, parallelism, physical figurizat[y2] ion makes Sŏn poetry strike down to the essence of the mind, usually called the Buddha’s Nature. Its concise-but-bullets-cocked style is all semantic-based, metaphor-centered, and new imagery prevalent. This linguistic formality represents the primary poetic features of Korean Sŏn poetry.
In contents, Sŏn poetry drives the masters to the high cliff edge, risky and shaky, but at the last imminent moment it bursts into an immediate poem to awaken us wide in the eye of the storm. It disarrays the traditional language system, almost urging them to forget its orders and conventions even for a moment, just to see a new dimension of perception. Its imminency in the sense of contents aspects is to immediately salvage out meaningful themes, compelling ideas, or a life-long pending project, i.e. enlightenment. Its poetic content usually hits headlong on the mental state of enlightenment, either full-fledged or by way of routines, everydayness. All the life constituents (eating, shitting, sleeping, drinking, etc) are subject to good enlightening process. Seeing the Nature is not away from the daily routines. The content of enlightenment is never metaphysical things, but everyday’s concrete realties.
In techniques, the prominent feature is to use many paradoxical usages. Sŏn poetry likes to unionize completely-opposite qualias (imagery, metaphors, symbol, etc), which conversely proves there is nothing opposite or conflicting in the universe. One is not different from many; many is zero away from one. Seeing is the same as emptiness, and void is color. To fuse them into a harmonious state, Sŏn poetry distorts reality purposefully, ab-normalizes the normalcy, breaks for a connection, split for a new uplifted oneness. This constructing technique is not to build up an arch gate, but to serendipitiously find “spandrels”[i] of emptiness, underneath which “The bridge flows and the water stays clean.” Such spandrel-like metaphors can be called transcendental figures of speech which combine two dissimilar things for better-convincing poetic power. It is a metaphoric expression to find sameness in dis-/un-sameness. This spandrel effect of metaphors brings indefinite reality, always lurking for a poet’s opportune literary stroke. Who can dare cut down or demarcate the boundary of emptiness in the spandrel void vastness? There is no dialectical stone mark, but only the looming smile of lotus in the stone.
[i] Spandrel is a kind of side-effects of dream, serendipitious product, not purposed from the architecting itself. See Owen Flanagan, Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press: NY, 2000,
, 2006( publishing house and page) For example: Sandy Cohen, Bernard Malamud and the Trial by Love (Amsterdam: Rodopi,1974)
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