SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz, a beat the prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I am absolutely delighted to have today's guest. I am going to botch out his last name. I'm going to try not to. His name is Maddie Vegahood. He wrote this book. Well, he translated this book, May All Beings Be Happy by a very popular Korean monk named Bopjong Sunim. Sunim, I think, means monastic. My wife and I and our son over 10 or 15 years ago were at this Korean bookstore in Annadale, Virginia, about five miles from my office. My uh wife grew up in Korea, and I said to the person at the bookstore, Do you have any books in English that relate to Buddhism? And they found this one book for me, and it's it's famous. It's uh it's a famous writer. And uh I ask you, Maddie, please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Hi there, my name's Maddie Vegahaupt. I'm 54 years old. I was born and raised in uh Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, and uh I've lived most of my life here for 10 years. Uh I moved away for graduate school training at Michigan and also the University of California, Berkeley. Um, but I got into Buddhism after my uh first two years as an undergraduate student, where I went to the United States Air Force Academy. And uh it was my first two years there and quitting there uh because it was 1991, the first American war in uh Iraq broke out at that time, and I had a very stark conversion experience realizing that I didn't want to be a soldier in an Imperial Army and that I was not uh defending a republic, uh, but I was gonna be do doing something very different. So I imagined myself dropping bombs over Baghdad and realized that that was not the job for me. So I left the Air Force Academy after two years, and that kind of put me into a bit of an existential crisis. I'd been a high performer, never really quit anything. Uh, so I found myself back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is an absolutely great place to have an existential crisis because you're surrounded by wonderful thinkers and culture and everything. It was a wonderful place. And I came upon Buddhism at that time uh through kind of the way that Siddhartha came to it, through forests and sitting under trees and trying to figure out what the purpose of life was and why not to kill myself, why go on living? And I came to some very basic ideas about suffering and moving on, and then a friend said you should read a book about Buddhism. And then I did, and I realized I was Buddhist, and it was it was really amazing. But that's exactly what Siddhartha said. If you do these things, you'll come to these realizations. I'm I'm just another person who is also coming to these realizations. So that was the start of it all back at Madison. When I graduated from undergraduate school, I wanted to go somewhere in Asia where I could see living Buddhism, practiced Buddhism. And um, Japan was too secular, Chinese was too, you know, kind of a dictatorship. I couldn't really go to Tibet. Uh, Thailand was too hot. Uh so Korea was just right. It was it was a lot like Wisconsin. So I decided to go to Korea after I graduated from undergraduate school, and I just started uh I could teach English at the time, you could make decent money, uh, enough to pay off debt and have money to travel every weekend to visit temples. And that's when I started getting acquainted with Korean Buddhism. I used all my free time to visit various temples, doing informal temple stays back in that day, 1994. They didn't have the official temple stay program, and it was like really old-fashioned. You'd you'd have to ask, and sometimes they'd say no, so you'd have to ask like three times, and then they'd say yes. And uh you could you could just uh stay overnight at the temples and practice along and and just be a kind of a pilgrim or a student there. And I had quite a few experiences like that that just got me deeper and deeper into a personal Korean Buddhist practice. I came back to the United States, decided to go into teaching full-time, and I studied as an educator at University of Wisconsin. And at that time, I was also I had met a girlfriend who was Korean. And uh so the two the two Korean connections there made me realize I was pretty much married to the culture from from here on out. And uh my own personal practice with Buddhism, I was able to study with um a great Tibetan lama at the University of Wisconsin named Geishe Sopa. And so I started to get some personal treat uh uh Buddhist practice with a master and with a community. There's Deer Park uh Buddhist uh temple outside of Madison where the Dalai Lama visits, has his own apartment there for him to use. And so that just got me more deeply um trained in Buddhism and in forever interested and connected to Buddhism and Korea. Over many years of graduate training, uh getting trying to get my PhD, uh, I've been going back and forth to Korea numerous times. Uh I went on a Fulbright year, but also on my own, just for many different times. And each time I would spend as much time as I could at temples um and trying to learn the language as best I could, mostly on my own. This was before there was Duolingo or LLMs to help us along. So it was it was pretty hard learning Korean back then. I I had to do a lot of it by myself, but met some great people. Uh, and as I learned, I realized that um something I really enjoyed was translating. And there were very few resources in English on Korean Buddhism at that time. So I took whatever I could get online, and I also got a few jobs for the Chogey order, which is the major order of Korean Buddhism. They were trying to put English language content on their first website. So I translated many um Sunmaster biographies, and they're still online now, so that's that's kind of cool. But that's where I really got my foot in the door. And then I wanted to do, I I knew, I learned about from just living in Korea my friends. They had asked, they said, Oh, you're a Korean Buddhist, do you know you know Muso Yu? And I was like, What? What's Musoyu? They said, You don't know Bopjong Sanim? And I said, No. And they just looked at me like I was an idiot because he's so famous in Korea, but there's nothing in English about him. And so I realized, oh, this is somebody I need to know. I really need to know Bopjung Sanim. So I started, I got a hold of a gift of one of his books from a dear friend, Ichun. If you're out there, Ichun Ni, I'm trying to find you. I missed you. It was many years ago. But she gave me this book and I started translating it on my own. I got some of these translations on the Chogey Order website again because they were looking for content back in the day, there wasn't much. And that was that. Until one day I got like maybe the best email of my life. It was from a publisher who was passing on an email from Bopjunks and him who said, Wow, I read these essays. I like your voice. You know, I I you know, I I want you to do more. And I have this book, uh Sarainungasun Tahenbokara, that's may all beings be happy. And so I got to translate that book. And it was, yeah, the best, probably one of the best uh career experiences of my life. I really enjoy teaching, but to be the translator for a man of his stature, um, both spiritually, intellectually, literarily speaking, uh, yeah, I'm amazingly blessed. And I got to do one more book. Actually, I published a couple years ago, called Pure and Fragrant. Um, and it's a collection curated by Bob Jungs himself of his essays. This book, May All Beings Be Happy, called his Dharma Sayings. They're more poetic, kind of prose poetry. But uh Pure and Fragrant are his full essays. So um, and they he chose them, he curated them from his whole 50-year writing tradition. And so that's also that's online, actually. It's free. It's put out by the Chogay Order. It's a really lovely, lovely uh book. So I can give you a link later for that.

SPEAKER_02 9:03

Everything that you just said has lent itself to hours and hours of things I'd love to discuss with you, but I'm now gonna tell my staff, we're gonna get to your uh uh URL first. Uh you're at uh you're a professor at Lawrence University in uh Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Yes, correct. Appleton, Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

And you started there in 2008? Yes. And where were you when uh when uh May All Beings Be Happy uh got translated into English uh format?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

That's when I was still at Michigan, University of Michigan, trying to get my PhD.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Um the relevance, everybody, of this to my criminal defense practice, let alone how relevant it is to me personally. If you watch several of these podcasts, you know that mindfulness is very important to me. Uh there is a big mindfulness aspect in uh plenty of areas of Buddhism. My my my teacher Junya Suda, who's a uh with with the small nipponsan myhoji, uh Nichiren Buddhist order, she's more on action versus necessarily mindfulness, but it gets to that too. And uh consider this passage uh right and oh, furthermore, uh Babjong Sunim. I'm trying to think of a nice G-rated word to use for it. He was one uh tough person in terms of uh just really applying himself to the Dharma. Uh so in this one, I'll just read from the uh two paragraphs a life intended for existence uh in um uh Maddie's translation, may all beings be happy. Being frightened and afraid of death comes from clinging to life and thinking of it as a possession. If you can release yourself from the attachment to life and the idea that it is a possession, even in the face of the undeniable universal order, you have not even the slightest fear. I should have probably asked you to read this, but I would have had that as you have the book with you. The way to start fresh is to cast off your old ways of being. Draw your ear to the murmuring water, it is the sound of the pulsation of the universe, of the flowing of time and tide, it is the soundless sound that awakens us to the place we are going when we have lived all that we are going to live. My wife told me she has read uh May All Things Be Happy in Korean. She has read your translation. She says not only how excellent it is, but because it is so excellent, she has recommended it on social media. Uh now I want to talk to you about uh translating because I know you're not an interpreter, but you have this gift of translation, and so many of the interpreters are schlock in the courthouse. Either they are not uh uh aggressive enough to speak up to the witness or the judge to say, what was that you said to make sure that there is true interpreting that's going on? There are too many prosecutors and judges who think that just because you're fully bilingual, uh that's enough. It's gotta be more than that, at least for translation, right, Maddie? And definitely for interpreting, therefore.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah, uh maybe uh it's drawing deep analogies, which is kind of a mathematical, deeply mathematical thing. Uh I'm able, I think, to reduce meaning to it to its core and then try to draw the analogy into my language. Ah, this is what they're trying to say on a deep level. This is what they're not trying to say. And I'm I have the gift of gab in my own native tongue. Uh my my last name is German, but I'm mostly I'm more Irish. And like uh I've been a teacher for a long time, so I have to articulate a core meaning as concisely and clearly as I can. And so when I hear, when I started reading Korean, I would have an intuition. Oh, I think it means like this. This is what he's getting at. And especially good literary writing is not, doesn't say things explicitly, it does it in a certain way that tries to convey what's not said in a mood, etc. And I I just had a good intuition for it. I I started getting it right. I tell other people, isn't it insane like this, right? And they say, Yeah, that's right, that's right. And so I was blessed with a gift to see what exactly is trying to be said, and then knowing there's an audience over here, where is their mind at? Where are they easily going to be distracted? What are they possibly gonna think? So, how can I say as quickly as possible, a way that won't be misunderstood, that gets through the core meaning of what's being said? And I think what's great about Sun Buddhism and the passage you just read is uh being constantly tuned in to that cosmic order and the murmuring resonance. Uh it it's it's able, I think for a translator, it's especially an interpreter, in something like a court case, they're able to cut through and pierce through to the essential meaning. And that's exactly what Sun Buddhism is always about getting to the essential meaning.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

And and you said Sun Buddhism?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Sun, yeah, Sun.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Oh, oh, oh, I mean the same as Zen. S-C-L.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Yeah, yeah, it's not the same as Zen, though. That's why I say Sun. Yeah, because the Sun Buddhist tradition, it it deserves to be known as its own, just like Chan, the Chinese, Chinese Chan came first, and then was Sun, and then came Zen. But Americans only know Zen. But Sun is its own beautiful tradition. It's uh it did not, pardon my language, but it did not lead to a fascist empire. Unlike Zen tradition, which is uh sadly implicated. Uh, but the Sun Buddhist tradition, quite to the contrary, had great leaders like Kyojang, Master Sosan Desa, who led the Buddhist army against the Japanese to save Korea when all the Confucians ran. It's an amazing story.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Okay, I'll I'll take that tangent. So, how much of it was uh was was Buddhism versus uh um uh Shinto, or was it both that uh that helped feed into the uh the the Japanese dictatorship that led into World War II?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Everything, every resource that could be used was brought in, and it was difficult for them to say no, I imagine. So I'm not trying to be you know too unfair to the Japanese Zen tradition, and there's certainly a great, beautiful spiritual tradition, but um the militaristic culture of Japan was able to to implicate or uh intricate uh what's the word, yeah, to to implicate the the Zen tradition in its its own uh history.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

So but I can certainly say that so the first time I went to East Asia was in 1986, I was 23 years old, and this Wall Street Bank I was working with sent me and four other people over to audit their branches in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Osaka. So it wasn't lost on me as much as I once I landed in Hong Kong, especially then a few days later in Japan, I said, I am home, but it wasn't lost on me about all the uh you know atrocities that were caused by the Japanese military, including that when we walked into the office building uh each morning in Tokyo, uh, and were greeted by this man, I guess in his uh uh 60s or 70s. Uh, good morning. Oh, hi you got Zayamas. I I did the math. I said to myself, well, I mean, this man was probably in the military in uh uh in World War II, and uh and who knows if he was involved with the atrocities, but you know, we can do all sorts of guesswork there. Uh now getting back to the translations, so translators have the luxury of sitting down and mulling over what they're doing. Uh, but the benefit of being an interpreter, uh, am I correct, uh, is that if you're a good interpreter, you are in the moment and uh you are removing yourself as a shield uh shield and barrier as much as possible between let's say if uh there's an interpretation of Spanish between the English-speaking jury, for instance, and the Spanish-speaking uh witness. Voice has to be given to that witness. And likewise, when the uh lawyer is asking questions of of the uh Spanish-speaking witness, uh that interpreter has to uh be able to uh cut through everything so that the witness can uh honestly uh and correctly fulfill their oath to tell the truth.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Yes, yes, it's a huge responsibility. That's probably why I don't do it. Do you have any that said, that said the one the one benefit of being an interpreter is you can talk to the person and ask a follow-up question. Yes. I could never ask, I never had the opportunity to ask Bob Chung Hey, is this is this what you mean? Yeah, so that's uh so unfortunately no, I I haven't had that opportunity, and uh it it's it's still it would be very difficult.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Do you have any uh uh anything to say to uh judges and prosecutors, for instance, who might have the inclination to say, as long as they're uh bilingual, uh they're good enough as an interpreter in my book.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Oh, I would say to be suspicious of people who are too confident like that. Like what what'd you call them? Schlock.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

I said schlock.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Yes, definitely. And I I think there has to be, I don't, this is maybe going this is very difficult, but there has to be some emotional sensitivity to um the person that is emoting and speaking and being interpreted for. I mean we can imagine that that we can sense like that doesn't seem what they were trying to say. Or yeah, I think they should take extra care in situations like that.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Emotional sensitivity and cultural sensitivity as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely, to sense if if um the person uh feels like they're comfortable enough to be getting their truth across. And and and then I guess that would allow for the judge to directly say to to ask back to the witness, do you feel you are being conveyed correctly to become active in the translation process? I think that would be even without their you don't have to have language knowledge to do that. Yes. And I would also say that probably LLM should be used as soon as possible.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

LLM?

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Large language models, GPT, Gemini, Claude, these things can translate immediately and simultaneously. So even if you you could have your cell phone right there and have it on and be listening to make sure a judge can do that, you can do that. I would do that now if I were a lawyer and I didn't know the language, I would absolutely use a large language model and be doing automatic interpretation. It's so good.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Okay, so you so you're recommending to lawyers to get judicial permission to be uh running that software uh during the trial.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

That's excellent. Uh I want to talk a little bit about uh divine coincidences because this morning uh the first thing I opened up to in the book was that passage that I read. And uh that that reminds me, I think it's the perhaps the Haga Kori, one of the books of the samurai, where there's this uh uh samurai who goes to the uh uh or or a budding samurai who goes to a sword master and asks him to teach him uh how to use the sword. Well, therefore, I guess he's not a samurai. Um and the swordmaster asks him, What are you a master of? And uh the the man's uh going back and forth and he he he doesn't want to, he's being modest, so he's not saying what he's great in. And uh finally the swordmaster says, Look, I can't teach you if you don't tell me what you're a master of already. So the man, so the students said, or would be a student said, Okay, I have figured out a way to have a fearlessness of death. And the sword master said, Then I have nothing to teach you. And uh, you know, of course, you know, this is talking about uh fearlessness of death in that passage there. And and when I was sitting down with Jun Yasuda, who she she grew up in Tokyo, she was born in the late 40s, and now this is gonna loop into 1991 for you. And uh, she ended up uh um becoming a nun in the Niponzanyohoji uh Nichiren Buddhist Order. I was sitting down with her on my first visit with her in 1996 at her temple uh east of Albany in Grafton, New York. And uh I asked her uh if she had a fear of death, which of course she doesn't, and she said, Well, you know, death is not real. It's just another passage. So it was in 1991, Maddie, that I was with my first law firm during Gulf War I. And I felt uh I'm not a full pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt the war was uh commenced uh prematurely, that more efforts at diplomacy and and other efforts should have been made. So my law firm was just two and a half blocks from the White House at the time, and I would join the peace protesters during lunch sometimes in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. And that is where I met my Buddhist peace teacher, Junya Suda. She was on a 30-day water-only fast.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

And her plan, her pre-planned date for the end of her fast was actually the date that George Burk Bush, uh George Herbert Walker Bush announced the end of the of Gulf War I. Wow. So another divine coincidence, and now a third and final divine coincidence. So I have been to uh Korea once, 2016 with my wife and son, who's now 19, so at the time he was 10. And we took this securitous route of I think a series of three subway trains to Gil Song Sa Temple, which was ironically, uh I guess Bobjong Sunim's final home temple. Although I think he complained that this is just too luxurious. It was uh the the land was given by uh, I guess, some wealthy uh person or family, and uh and and I guess what I what looked to me like the Beverly Hills of uh Seoul almost. And uh when we were waiting for the uh van to take us up to Gil Songsaw, we we found one of the only uh places that was open for breakfast, and then we got to the temple, and as we're walking around the grounds after we visited the main temple, my son kept I think it was a red-colored building, a red or brown-colored building, like a long uh cabin. And he kept saying, We have to go in here, we have to go in here. Neither of us could read Korean. I I have a module of how many dogs. Very little Korean do I know even to this day. Uh oops, I'm supposed to learn more. Uh and I said to my son, I think the way this is written looks like it almost says stay out, keep out. He said, We have to go in. So we we opened the gate, we went to the door, and of course, it was Bob Johnson's home. And and of course, on display it had his razor for for shaving his head and uh his head and face and his his ID card. And it's intuition that my son has, I don't know where it comes from. He kept saying we have to go in there. He knew he went there because I wanted to go. Uh it was a few years after I had read your uh your translation of May All Things Be Happy. And uh a year or two before we were on um uh our first full uh uh full hike of um the Billy Go Trail in Potomac, Maryland, and it was full. And my son very intently walked right up to this big pile of leaves. He had never been to this stretch of the trail before, and he very intently cleared off all the leaves off there, and what was revealed was this huge stone in the shape of a heart, not possibly in the shape of a heart, in the shape of a heart. Now, I don't know if you have any insight on that, but I wanted to share that with you uh because that was such a defining moment for me to have gone to Gil Sangsa uh temple. And I very much would like to know about uh uh how well you got to know or didn't get to know uh Bob Jong Sunin. Because uh my understanding is for a lot of his life he was up there in the mountains not wanting people to find him and hoping that his writings would would help people not look for him, but they looked for him anyway, I understand.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Yeah, he had he had quite a career. Uh I'll start really quickly. In the 1970s, he was uh he was a pretty radical activist. He was one of the few in the Buddhist community to take a voice against the Korean government's participation in the Vietnam War and also against the dictatorship. He worked with uh other leaders, both secular and religious, to help push back against the dictatorship. But in uh about 1976, there was a case called the Inyukdong incident where uh members of like a maybe a proto-communist party, a very radical group, but they were executed overnight. They were declared like anti-state elements and executed overnight. And Bob Jong-Sunim had a conversion experience and realized that he can't lead a revolutionary movement if he can't protect his troops. So he had lost these young people and he felt very responsible for creating an impetus for this kind of activism when they didn't really have protection against the dictatorship. And that's when he went back down to Song Guangsa. He created a hermitage there called Bulil Am, and that's when he started living his more like Mu Soyu life, like very little food, less interaction with people, um, trying to have you know a more aesthetic uh Buddhist life, but different than like Song Chou Sunim. Do you know Song Chou Sun-Nim?

SPEAKER_02 27:09

I think the name, but I'm not sure if I know much about him.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Yeah, Song Chou and Bopjong are the two towering figures of Korean Buddhism from like the 1950s, the second half of the 20th century. Song Chou was a great sun master, deep in the mountains, incredible meditator, and speaking on mind and meditation on the deepest levels. But Bopjong Sunim, as much as he was an aesthetic and he moved to this hermitage and then later to Kongwond, even deeper into the mountains, he was always interacting with people on their level of daily life. What's it about? So he was see, Korean Sun. I said the reason I wanted to say sun and not zen. Korean sun, Korean Buddhism is very much a good mix between what's called doctrine and practice. Practice is sun, meditation, deeply thinking about the mind. But doctrine is what's called the Huam Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, and it's a very deep and philosophical understanding of the nature of reality and how completely interconnected all things are. It's a deep teaching, deeply philosophical teaching of interdependence on a almost like a quantum level. Very, very uh at a very early age in human history, like the year 600, 700, there is this development of a deep theory of radical interconnectedness between both principle and phenomenon. And it sounds very complex, but it translates into daily life of seeing everyone around us as a Buddha, as a potential bodhisattva, as a master. And whereas Song Cho was deep in the mountains all of his life, uh, Bopjong was constantly, constantly coming back to the people, either through his writings or through lectures, monthly lectures. And uh, it's that that constant love for interacting with the people that you talked about, you know, Buddhism definitely, definitely creates um an antidote to the fear of death, but it's more important to not fear life. Yes, and uh and his not fearing even some element like he he would talk about how he'd get annoyed visiting his family sometimes and getting into small talk. And for like an advanced master to confess that a little bit, give that little morsel to the audience to know, you know, I'm I'm pretty advanced in this craft, but I too still, you know, when you when you live life amongst people, it's hard, it's annoying, it's difficult. And it's more difficult to be annoyed by other people than maybe to like give up your life in death for for a noble cause. So it, you know, to say, oh, I don't fear death anymore, that is great. It's a monumental achievement. But to try and live daily with the lives of others who are all were also very flawed and trying hard, that is um that's I think why he is also seen, maybe not as a great son master, but I see him as a great Hua master in that he was able to constantly help people interact in daily life to deal with the quotidian battles that are the struggle of Samsara. That's how we get to nirvana, not by completely checking out, but by completely checking in.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Was that samsarang you were saying? Maybe the maybe I just pronounced it differently, or is it a different word?

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Yeah, samsara, samsara. Oh, samsara, that's right. The cycle, the constant cycle. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

Okay, so you mentioned something I didn't know about. I didn't know about this execution. That was that when Park Chang he was the dictator.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

Yeah, Park Chung. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

And so what type of balance or not did Bob Chang Sunim uh take to stand up to the dictatorship versus just being silent?

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Well, he became an author. He wrote Mu Soyu, which Musoyu means no possession, no ownership. This was at the time when Pak Jung Yi was trying to implement the ideology of rapid industrialization. Consumerism became the ideology instead of Confucianism and Buddhism, it was more Christian consumerism, which in many ways is the dominant ideology of many Koreans to this day. And Bop Jung chose to write a complete opposite of that. His teachings were consumerism is empty and it will lead us into an abyss. And so uh rather than coming directly at Pak Chung hee, like in on the ground in activism or whatnot, he channeled his work into Buddhist popular theory essays, whatnot, to indirectly take on the dictatorship, but to fight it on a deep cultural and spiritual level. Because that it would be harder to be arrested by the government for writing religious essays, whatnot, kind of feel good in like the reader's digest of their day. But if if you could read between the lines, you could see that he was an enemy of their state. So it was just a very savvy uh kind of reorientation of his struggle after realizing that direct confrontation was not only futile, but he had added what he thought to his karmic debt. As a leader, by losing these young, young men in the struggle, he felt very responsible. And so he took his struggle to indirect cultural struggle via his best-selling uh books.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

To what extent did Bob Jong Sinem avoid being censored, and to what extent did his uh did his writings help uh comfort and empower uh the people who were the victims of the dictatorship?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

I think his his readings were extremely influential. He served um as his his hermitage at Songguangsa, Bulil Am. There were people from after the Quangdu massacre in 1980 uh specifically, they would come, they had post-traumatic stress, and they would come to his hermitage and seek comfort, and he would help them overcome their suffering and their trauma. And uh he was he he went on lecture tours that were they were packed with people. There's videos on YouTube you can see, and he would speak directly to their struggles. Um, so I think he was uh immensely influential uh at that time, and his name rings on even now. Um his his chair, he has this little chair that he made at his hermitage, it's being added to the the modern list of cultural tangible assets for the whole country, his little chair. And also there was another case recently when there is a monk who's also a best after Bop Jungsanim, the most best-selling Korean Buddhist author, um, there's there's a certain name, I won't mention him, but people can find him, but he got exposed as having a lot of money in a nice apartment.

SPEAKER_02 34:14

I know what you're talking about, and I won't say his name either. And I like the writings.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

Well, what's important is that when people wanted to make fun of him, instead of saying mu soyu, which is Bop Jung's code word for meaning no possession, they said full soyu, like absolute possession. Which to me, as a Scott, you know, as a student of Bop Jung's cinem, I was he is still the standard. Like his his words, Mu Soyu, uh a person like personal integrity, he's long gonna be the standard. So even though he passed away in 2010, um and his books are out of print, and he's much less visible now, obviously, than he was in the in the 80s and the 90s, he's still gonna be there a long time. And when any reference comes nearby, these issues, um, his name is gonna come back. And also his um Gil Sangsa is is the abbot of Gil Sangsa now is his main disciple, Doug Jose Nim, who is uh incredible man, and he will really help uh build the legacy of Bopjung Sunim. He just held the first like academic seminar on Bopjung studies at Gil Sangsa just this year. So I think um the past 10 years have been somewhat quiet for his legacy. I think a lot of people miss him, um and there's no voice like him. Um, but the current generation might not know how important he was to that generation during the dictatorship. But I think in the future, actually, his his name will grow again. Uh, with Gil Sang-sa's like continued prominence in Seoul and Doc Joe Sunim's work to diligently uh bring Bop Jung's story and um his readings keep them in the limelight uh because the message of Musoyu is not going away. The idea that we have to be fearless in death and life is not going away. And I mean, Korea, if you've been back, it's an incredibly advanced country now. Its infrastructure is amazing, it just gets cleaner and nicer every time I go back. But spiritually, there's so much suffering there. The problems of modernity, of constantly increasing prices, of corruption, of young people having no hope. These issues persist, and Bop Jung's teachings as an antidote also persist. And so uh Yeah, I'm actually excited to see how his renown blossoms in the future as well.

SPEAKER_02 36:49

Well, you said uh especially uh about uh modernity and the and the people feeling hopelessness, uh uh that that that's so important to underline. Now, my next question is gonna relate very well for any uh trial, which is to uh how to uh uh engage people well. My understanding a lot of people may not realize that uh Korea has such a high uh percentage of Buddhists, if if I'm not mistaken, I think at least 30% identify themselves as Buddhists, whereas I used to think that uh perhaps the over I'd assume before the overwhelming uh majority were Christians. So that's not so. So my understanding is that Bob Jung Sunim was very popular with plenty of non-Buddhists, and uh how did he achieve that uh stature and what did he do to integrate himself with the non-Buddhists?

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Oh, you know, just like I said, a translator is trying to find the core meaning and address it to another audience, and that's I think Bop Jung Sunim's Buddhism was finding the core meaning of Buddhism, which is not Buddhist, it's it's human, it's life, it's cosmic order. And so, therefore, he he felt no boundary to talk to another spiritually seeking audience. Like his he gave a speech at Myongdong Cathedral that was very famous uh because he was able to speak directly to Catholics without any difficulty, because relatively speaking, uh we can we can find the same words in other people's traditions. Uh he was a deep believer in that. And I think good translators are deep believers that, yeah, there's gonna be some problems, but more or less we're gonna be able to get the gist across. And he just had a miraculous gift for doing that, and the the wisdom to see how important building those bridges was, that if you could create long-lasting relationships with a Catholic nun or a Protestant minister, that would only be for the best for each of the traditions themselves, let alone the whole country together. And he was a deep patriot. He loved Korea very much. This is another thing he he admitted, like one of his confessions. He confessed his annoyances, he confessed that that he he would be reborn as a human being, and he wanted to be born as a Korean so he could speak the Korean language. This is so not what a master says. This is very human. He really loves it. He has just warm affection, deep affection and loyalty for Korea, even though he was born into miserable circumstances. Um and that love, that love for Korea, that love for understanding other people's minds. It's it's like the deepest Buddhism for him is to understand, put yourself in other people's shoes, understand where they're at, and bridge the gap between you.

SPEAKER_02 39:40

And uh now I get back to uh how much did you have a chance to actually meet with uh Bob Jong Sunim in person, and and who chose you to uh uh translate uh may all beings be happy into English and and why were you chosen?

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Yeah, he chose me indirectly. I think he just he liked my voice as an English writer. He thought I captured what he was trying, the sentiment he was trying to convey. Um he got in touch with a publishing house. They brought me over when the book was published, and that's where I met him at Gilsangsaw. I met him like for two days, a little bit in two different days, and and that was it. Um uh not long after that, actually a year or two after that, he passed away, unfortunately. But the time I spent with him was was really amazing. He was kind of just as I imagined. He was very um um folks-y, you know, everybody he could talk to anybody, he didn't put on airs. He's from Cholado, uh, you know, from southwestern Korea. I don't know if you've been down like Kwangju and down southwest.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

But people didn't get any further south than uh Sudoksa Temple, where my father-in-law uh lives nearby, and that was a fun visit, of course.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

You know, not to be too stereotypical, but definitely the people of the southwest are are the thought to be they have the most zhong, like the most affection, and and he had a lot of zhong, and you could tell, and everybody just adored him. And uh I had I had asked when I was doing the translation, I had an undergraduate friend uh who was actually my student back at Michigan, he's a Korean, and he helped me do some of this translation, and I asked Bob Jungsenim if he could give a little video to say congratulations to this friend back in Michigan. And he did it, no problem. This was back in the day before we had like cell phones and doing selfies, so it was still a little weird, but he did it right away. He said, Song Jon in Korean. Sang Yon, thank you very much. Congratulations on graduation. And giving that little video to my Korean Dong Singh, my student there, I mean, it was, you know, it was like he got something from a huge celebrity. And his so Bop Jong Sunim's like uh generosity, wisdom, intelligence, it was all just beaming from him constantly. His his uh disciple Dukjo Sunim said he's just ajumatike. I don't know if you've ever heard what mutt is, but mutt is like style, cool. Like he's just like he's super cool. That sounds like k-pop to me in some ways, but with some yes, no, no, don't dismiss it. There is deep Buddhist spirituality in much of K culture, the best of their dramas, and even like K-pop Demon Hunter, you can find in K-pop Demon Hunter, even though actually you talked about like how many people are Buddhist in Korea right now, the numbers of actually identifying adherents is going down. But if you look deeply in the fundamental aspects of what K culture is, there is a deep Buddhist element, a belief in karma, a belief in becoming a righteous person, becoming a bodhisattva who is wise and beautiful and cool and gets people to like them because they're wise and beautiful and cool. And that is at the heart of much of what I see in in K-drama or yes, K-pop, a lot of it is is really cheesy and uh empty. But overall, I'd say a lot of K-pop culture, if if it gets any deeper, it's touching into deep Korean Buddhist cultural wisdom. So I I don't dismiss it as much as I used to. Have you seen K-pop Demon Hunters?

SPEAKER_02 43:32

I have not, so that's one more thing for me to see.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Well, let me just say there's this part in the movie where they're singing and it's like a mantra, and they're singing no lies, no fear. No lies, no fear. And it might as well be the Heart Sutra. And if you get a bunch of kids around the world all singing along, which is what exactly what this movie is meant to do, I'm pretty happy that that's what the kids are singing.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

Wonderful. I think I'm only permitted one more question than to leave the. Floor open to uh finish on time at 8 a.m. Uh we are here in the early morning. Uh I thought that I had heard or read that Bafjong Sunim said that he did not want his uh uh writings to continue after he died. And that's something that Franz Kafka said. Uh that didn't happen. And and uh uh Roger Kaminitz actually wrote a book called Burnt Books about that, where the rabbi of Bratislav maybe said, burn my books after I die. And I don't know if that was because once they die, they can't fix the errors. So, how much truth is there that Bob Jong Sunim did not want his books published any further after he passed away? And if so, uh, why did you go ahead and uh translate uh the your your most recent uh volume of his uh after he passed away?

SPEAKER_01 44:46

We can't always get what we want. And that's what he taught us. He did the same thing to Song Cho-Sunim. Song Chosenim wrote a manuscript and said, Don't publish it. And Bob Chung Sinim, who is editing it, he said, Tough luck, this is awesome. I'm publishing it. Doc Chosenim said the same thing. Doc Jose Nim, his main disciple, he's published some of Bop Jung's works and he said, Well, okay, I'll have hell to pay. When I meet you in the afterlife, you can hit me a couple times. If you're mad, be mad. You know, I'm your student. I'm Bob Chung's student. He taught me to be tough. So I if I have that hell to pay, I do because in this case, I'm sorry, but I don't care what our teacher wants because the people need to read these. Our word, our world is devoid of beautiful letters. I'm a humanist, I believe in the liberal arts and the humanities, and our culture is dying, and we need bright, nutritious culture like Bop Jongsenim. So I'll take it upon myself this karmic debt to violate his last will. I know I have hell to pay, but I'll pay it. He taught he trained me to be tough enough to pay, so I'll do it.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Excellent. Uh, this has been a great talk, and uh, my wife doesn't watch all my um uh podcasts, but she said she's certainly gonna uh watch this one. She was so excited about me being able to talk to you today. Um, do you have any final words you wish to share with everybody? And please remind everybody where they can find you online.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

Oh I don't I don't have much online, but they could just search for Pure and Fragrant by Bob Jong Sunim. That's my latest book, and that's that's good. And the only other thing I could say is absolutely you can develop uh a great overcoming the fear of death, but overcome the fear of life is the much more difficult koan to deal with every single day. That's our do. A constant question. Who am I? How am I? Constantly ask yourself, and you'll find the answer.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

Thank you, Maddie. Uh, I I know I don't pronounce your last name well, but for those who want to find him online beyond uh what Maddie just said, his name our our guest is Maddie, M-A-T-T-Y, last name Vega Haupt, W-E-G-E, H A U P T, a professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Thank you so much. This is John Katz at Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 47:21

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beatheprosecution.com by calling our office at seven zero three three eight three one one zero zero or texting us at five seven one four zero six seven two six eight.