Kusan Sunim

Kusan Sunim (1909 to 1983) was a Korean Seon (Zen) master of the Jogye Order. He was born in a village on Mount Jiri in Namwon, in Jeolla province. At 14, after his father’s sudden death, he took over the family barber shop. At 25 he fell ill, and the words of a wandering ascetic about the body and mind turned him toward practice. According to the biography circulated by the Jogye Order, he did a hundred-day devotion to Gwaneum (Avalokiteśvara) at Yeongwonsa on Mount Jiri and recovered. In 1937 he took novice precepts at Songgwangsa from Master Hyobong.

He spent the following years in meditation halls and hermitages. In the winter retreat of 1951, aged 42, he wrote a verse of enlightenment, which Hyobong accepted and endorsed. When Hyobong died in 1966, Kusan went back to Songgwangsa to carry out his teacher’s request to restore the monastery, which had been largely destroyed in the Korean War. In 1969 it was established as the Jogye Chongnim, the second Chongnim in Korea, and Kusan served as its first patriarch for fifteen years.

In 1973 he founded the Bulil International Seon Center at Songgwangsa, described as the first international Seon meditation centre in Korea. Monks and lay people from the United States and Europe trained there, and the centre led to temples abroad, including Los Angeles in 1980 and Geneva in 1982. Around fifty of his disciples now teach in Korea and elsewhere.

His practice centred on hwadu, which his publisher describes as the uniquely Korean practice of sitting with questioning; the Jogye biography says he worked first with “What is this?” and then with Zhaozhou’s “Mu”. His teachings reached English readers through The Way of Korean Zen, translated by Martine Batchelor, with an introduction by Stephen Batchelor that includes a biography and a short history of Korean Zen. He also published Seven Perfections (1975), aimed at bringing Buddhism into daily life, and Nine Mountains (1976), an English version of his talks for foreign disciples.

When his death neared in December 1983, the biography says, he asked that his body be cremated in the sitting posture and that his students keep living in harmony and devote themselves to awakening. He died in meditation posture at Songgwangsa, at the age of 74.