Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Alice Walker & Chung Hyun Kyung: "WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR"

A few years ago, African American writer, eco-feminist, and Engaged Buddhist, ALICE WALKER, and Korean theologian and eco-feminist, CHUNG HYUN KYUNG, toured Korea, where they spoke to sold-out crowds, after their book collaboration, Hyun Kyung and Alice’s Fabulous Love Affair with God, published in 2004, became a Korean best-seller.

Chung, a lay theologian of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, now lives in New York City where she is a professor of ecumenical theology at Union Theological Institute and is studying to be a dharma teacher at the Kwan Eum Zen School founded by Zen Master Seung Sahn, the first Korean Zen Master to live and teach outside of Asia. In 1999, she spent time as a wandering Buddhist monk in the Himalayan Mountains. She is a founding member and councilor of the International Committee for the Peace Council.

Her worldview is creative and vast, synthesizing legacies of multiple faith traditions, critical academic analysis, the arts and grassroots social movement principles in her theology. She describes herself as a "theological artist," and a "a Bridge Builder, a Boundary Crosser, and Cultural Translator," describing her work as "salimist" – a term coined from the Korean word "salim" which means "life-giving."

Chung's Ten Salimist principles, draw from Vandana Shiva's "Forest Principle," a concept that embraces diversity and sustainability based on the interconnectedness of all living things – the power of people's movements – the Native American concept of the "Seventh Generation" and compassion/ahimsa.

She has produced an award-winning, eight-part series, “The Power of Women in World Religions,” broadcast on Korean public television. Her 1991 Struggling to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology follows development of the spirituality of Asian women during the anti-colonial movements of Asia and begins with these powerful words: "Asian women's theology has been created out of the historical context of Asia's struggle for full humanity. The women of Asia awakened from their long silence and began to speak out of their own language about their experience with the divine."

Walker is perhaps best known for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, a story about the intersections of several women and men who struggle and help each other transcend severe physical and psychological oppression. The storyline vividly demonstrates that every oppressor ultimately oppresses himself or herself and, concomitantly, that those who seek to liberate others, liberate themselves. Awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Steven Spielberg made it into a popular film in 1985 and a Broadway adaptation opened in 2005.

A contributor to the Shambhala Sun, Walker has also collaborated with Sharon Salzberg, in dialogues on "Loving Kindness" <> and "Metta Practice."

On the American public television program, Book TV on C-Span2, Alice Walker read from her 2006 book of meditations, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, about her book tour in Korea with Chun Hyun Kyung. It's an unexpected story that offers a window into the breadth, depth, and resonance of intersections of humanity and our common wellsprings of yearnings for peace, justice, beauty, hope, and love:

"I have been cured of my dependence on a script, however. It happened in the following way: I was invited to visit South Korea by a Korean priestess who failed to inform me until we arrived in Seoul that I was expected to deliver nine lectures in two different cities in six days. They were each to be two hours long. This was of course humanly impossible, at least for this human. After explaining that I would never attempt to talk to any stranger for more than an hour, but that I would entertain questions from the audience after each talk, we set out on the most grueling tour of my life. In addition to the lectures, the Korean priestess and I had written a book together (about Women and God and Life) that became a bestseller in Seoul, and there were print and other media interviews practically non-stop. I returned from South Korea seriously depleted. But I gained important self-knowledge: when faced with thousands of people who spoke English, if at all, as a second language, I could talk for at least an hour, hopefully without repeating myself...

As Walker looked into the sea of "alert, curious, interested" faces, she recalled one of her brothers who had been sent, as a teenager, to fight in the Korean War, his resulting "lasting dislike of Asians," and pondered what he must have thought the fighting was all about.

"The ancient universities and temples still standing after years of bombing would have astonished him. It must have puzzled him endlessly that he was asked to kill people who were of color and that these people of color owned their country. He must have admired, even as he dreaded it, their ability to fight. I wonder if he ever understood, beyond the propaganda, what the Koreans, Northern Communist and Southern anti-Communist, were fighting about. Or who benefited, ultimately, from the war that lasted so long and caused so much harm. I wondered if he had killed some of the relatives of the people in the audience. Had he done terrible things to children or to women? When he returned, there was little he could tell us. And now I marveled at how difficult coming home must have been for him. Talking to his family about Korea would have been more challenging than telling us about the moon. We could see the moon.

"During the question-and-answer session the topic of a quota of young Koreans being sent to fight in Iraq came up. As a colony of the U.S., though a seemingly prosperous one, this is a requirement. Wars that the U.S. fights are considered South Korea's.

"Don't send your children anywhere, I said.

"It was only after I returned home and discussed this new awareness of my brother's life with an older sibling that I learned even more of what was 'under the sun.' her husband, she said, fought in Korea. His best friend was blown up right next to him. He couldn't talk about it, so he drank. He was also very violent, thought I did not mention this. And our older brother, she continued sadly, who so rarely says anything, was also a soldier there.

"This is what I mean about this time we are living in. Although only 7 percent of Americans have passports – a shocking realization since we seem to be everywhere – 99 percent of us have television or the Internet. There are still libraries, bookstores, and books. Documentaries. There are still teachers. To begin our long journey toward balance as a planet, we have only to study the world and its peoples, to see they are so like ourselves! To trust that this is so. That different clothes and religions do not create people who can escape from humanity. When we face the peoples of the world with open hands, and in honesty and fearlessness speak what is in our memories and our hearts, the dots connect themselves.

"You may say to me: But Alice, all these connecting dots connect disasters. True enough, but they also connect millions of people who worked hard and beautifully to prevent, defeat, or transform them...

"It is criminal and immoral, I believe, to send our children – and nineteen- and twenty-year-olds are still our children – to fight and kill people they've never seen, never met, often never heard of...Why should young Koreans die for an American empire that attacked Iraq in the first place not because Iraq had attacked the U.S.A. but because the U.S. intends to possess and control Iraq's oil?

"An enlightened rage is building in the peoples of the world and it is antiwar. Never before have seen war so clearly: its horror and stupidity and waste...

"We have slumbered a long time believing the lies of those in power. Sending our children to fight those who might have been their playmates. And we know that those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us. Take a moment to think how gullible, how innocent, we must seem to them. Moved about the world to do their bidding, like pieces on a chessboard. But in this time we are beginning to see and hear from mothers and fathers who assume the role of Those Who Also Know. The world is getting its Elders back...

"The world is as beautiful as it ever was. it is changing, but then it always has been. This is a good time to change, and remain beautiful, with it."

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