REQUIEM FOR A DOG
ALM No.91, July 2026
SHORT STORIES
Chung Woon (meaning “Green Clouds” in Korean) explained to me why he had been taken from home to be raised at a Buddhist temple when he was barely two months old.
“A roe deer got chased into my parents’ house by a hunter,” he said, “and my parents gave him away to the hunter instead of hiding him to save his life. To curse them forever, the animal came back as a spirit and murdered every child they had, all five of them, until I was born.” As I turned wide-eyed, he continued, “My parents expected me to die, too, but they thought the roe deer’s spirit might forgive them if they tried to make an atonement for him. They isolated me from the world and let me become a child monk at a Buddhist temple.”
“How old were your siblings when they died?” I asked.
“They were less than three months old,” he answered.
I thought I could tell what had killed the babies. It was probably a combination of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, genetic abnormalities, or environmental factors, none of which had ever been explained to the parents. Chung Woon was born in rural Korea in the 1930s, when there was no modern medicine that could identify the causes of the infants’ sudden deaths. Trying to find an answer for the tragedy within the karma they had built in the past, they became convinced that it was the roe deer’s revenge. The answer they “invented” was better than no answer. They believed it, and Chung Woon also believed it. I, too, believed it because I wanted to be wiser than be scientific. In Buddhism, relationships between animals and human beings were just as important as relationships between human beings. I gladly chose to attribute the children’s deaths to what their parents had done to the desperate animal.
“My mother told me a story,” I remembered. “When she was a small child living in a village, there was a hunter. He was incredibly healthy, but he suddenly died after he came back from roe-deer hunting. Roe deer are mysterious animals.”
“Animals have souls,” he said. “That’s why Buddhist monks don’t eat meat, as you know.”
“Is it true that when animals are in danger, they run into a Buddhist temple nearby?”
“That’s true. When I was a child, my mentor at the temple and I treated a bear with a broken leg. The bear had come to ask for help and we knew it.”
“You don’t kick out anyone or any animal that seeks shelter at a Buddhist temple.”
“No, we don’t.” He said, pointing at a dog on top of the stone wall of his temple.
“Look at that dog. He has only three legs and he showed up here one day, chased in by some nasty boys. He somehow knew this is a Buddhist temple. He knew I wouldn’t turn him away. I’ve been raising him ever since.”
I glanced at the dog. He was sitting under the shade from a tall tree on top of the thick stone wall. “I saw the name of your temple, Namunsa, that’s hung high above your rooftop. I just walked in to see what kind of Buddhist temple I would see in a crowded suburb of Seoul. The dog was probably smart enough to read the name and curious enough to see if you’d take him in like a true Buddhist. He thought he’d find a home in the temple called, “Southern Hermit.”
“Probably!”
He and I roared into laughter. Then, without asking me, he made two cups of coffee and handed me one. Koreans don’t ask if their guest wants coffee or not. They just make it for them and put sugar in it. I never put sugar in my coffee, but I drank it.
“Will you please wash your cup?” He asked, dropping my empty cup gently into the small sink in the living room.
“Let me wash yours, too,” I said. I could tell he was testing me. He wanted to see if I had a Buddha mind in me. Monks at Buddhist temples washed their own bowls after finishing a meal, and he wanted to see if I was willing to do the same.
When he turned thirteen, Chung Woon was moved into another Buddhist temple, a much bigger one with more monks. As a child graduating from elementary school goes to junior high, he finished his training at a small temple to do higher-level studies at a more advanced temple. Then, as a high-school graduate goes to college, he went to join monks in their final years of schooling. For twenty-two long years until he graduated from the highest grade, he never went back to his home, the place that he and his parents believed was still cursed. Instead, his parents came to the temples to visit him, relieved each time to see their only surviving child living safely under Buddha’s protection. Listening to his life story, I again could tell that his survival had nothing to do with living at a Buddhist temple. I was certain that unlike his older siblings, he didn’t have in his gene the abnormalities that had killed them. It was pure luck that had saved him. But again, I chose to agree with him. I wanted myth over science. I believed it was wiser.
“Upon finishing college,” he said, laughing, “I went to graduate school like you. I never got a degree, but I enjoyed being a graduate student. I enjoyed learning.”
“Was your graduate school the biggest temple in Korea?” I asked, “Was it Haeinsa?” I knew it was Haeinsa because it was the temple that gathered monks on the highest level of training. Its name meant a “Calm, Clear Ocean,” and it was the national Buddhist temple of Korea.
“Yes, it was,” he said. “There, I studied under Jung Hoon, the famous monk who set a new record in Zen.” He laughed at his own phrase, “set a new record.” He was talking secular language to me. Because, I thought, I had washed the coffee cups to show him the Buddha mind in me, he now wanted to show me the secular mind in him. Meeting in the middle was one of the cardinal concepts of Buddhism.
“I heard about Jung Hoon. Isn’t he the one who could sit on the same spot for a dozen hours or so without stirring, the one who occasionally practiced what was called ‘long sit no move?’” Jung Hoon was a name for “Righteous Learning.”
“Yes, he was. I have the clothes he wore when he did his ‘long sit no move.’ He gave them to me before he passed away. It’s the greatest gift a monk could ever receive from another monk.”
Zen in the original sense was a state of mind in which there was zero conceptual thought, and Jung Hoon was the first and only one in the history of Korean Buddhism who was ever known to have stayed in such a state for such a long time. He “set a new record” as an athlete would. There is no way one can prove that Jung Hoon actually remained without conceptual thoughts for twelve hours in a row, no way for anyone to verify that he actually sat without stirring on the same spot for what seemed to be an eternity. But one can make a conclusion from the facts one can gather. It seems clear to me that if he had even an infinitesimal amount of conceptual thoughts while sitting, he would have needed to stir or move his body more than slightly. Only when one is completely without conceptual thoughts, it seems to me, one can stay unmoving for a very long time because one would be in a condition like sleeping. I do believe that Jung Hoon entered a sleep-like state, awake but without conceptual thinking—without thinking altogether. Being awake, but asleep, he didn’t move as one would move one’s body while asleep. Unlike the roe deer’s curse, Jung Hoon’s “long sit no move” was real, scientifically possible. Just because it hasn’t been explained yet, lying beyond a provable range, I don’t think it’s unscientific. It is far from a mere mystery that people often associate with Buddhism.
“You’d better hang his clothes on the wall of your living room, right across the door, so that people can see it when they enter your temple,” I said.
“Do you hang your diploma on the wall of your living room to show it off?” he asked, smiling.
“No, I don’t,” I said, smiling back.
“You toiled for almost a decade, but in the end, it’s a piece of paper.”
“Yes, it is!” I agreed emphatically. “I devoted my youth to get the damned PhD, but it’s nothing more than a piece of paper!”
“I devoted my youth to be trained as a monk, to be able to study under Jung Hoon, but in the end, I realized everything I got was a piece of cloth.” He paused. “I keep his clothes in the corner of my bedroom closet, where it belongs.”
“I keep my diploma behind my bookstack, where it belongs,” I said. “From what I heard, Jung Hoon was a hermit. He had few friends and made even fewer friends because he believed being alone was the best way of being with himself.”
“That’s true. He declined several celebrities who wanted to meet him. He even declined President Park Chung Hee, who went out of his way to drop by Haeinsa during his industrial tour of the country.”
“Do you think that was his way of rejecting Park’s dictatorship?”
“I don’t know,” Chung Woon said. “He never explained why he said no to him or to anyone. To him, silence was better than words.”
“In Buddhism, silence is better than words.”
“Yes, it is. Silence speaks volumes more than words.”
In the 1970s, Park’s dictatorship was at its peak. His power was so absolute that people said he could make a flying bird fall from the sky with just one glance. Nobody dared to say no to him, but Jung Hoon said no to him. Park probably forgave him, I thought, because he knew a Buddhist monk who placed silence in a higher place than words wasn’t likely to challenge him in an open manner. Unlike some Christian leaders, who vocally fought him and waged organized movements against his iron-handed regime, renowned Buddhist monks rarely expressed an overt opposition. Quietly, they spoke amongst themselves about the lethal karma created by the dictator’s bayonet, about the fateful consequences of using guns and torture instruments on people. They suggested that people develop strong minds to cope with the brutalities aimed at them and build emotional fortresses against the outside forces threatening to engulf them. “A succession of internal resistance eventually builds a dam to break external waves” was the line they secretly promoted. “When a thousand boil, ten thousand melt” was the sentence they covertly spread. “When a thousand people are internally united against external weapons, the weapons will melt away” was the ultimatum they covertly whispered.
“But sometimes, don’t we have to use words? Look at the Christians who fought Park’s dictatorship. They used words, not silence.” I spoke with passion, struggling to maintain a calm voice. I knew I wasn’t a Buddhist, preferring words over silence. “Not everyone involved in the movement for democracy was Christian, of course, but it was the Christian spirit that provided the theoretical backbone for the movement. Christian institutions were the champions who supported and sheltered the protestors. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it was the Christian revolutionary zeal that brought democracy for our country.”
I remembered a conversation I had had with a Buddhist monk by the name of Sun Myong (“Celestial Light” in Korean) several years before. Sun Myong said he could understand why Christians were so motivated to change the world. Looking at their Lord suffering on the cross with his wrists under nails, they couldn’t help feeling his pain. They had to fight for what he had died for, and the Christians in the movement for democracy in South Korea fought for what he had died for. The ones on the front risked their physical safety and even their lives sometimes, and watching the Christians braving the dictators’ arms, non-Christians joined. Christianity was like the strong wind that led the people, Christian or not, into unceasing efforts for a revolution. But of course, Sun Myong and I recognized that Jesus on the cross could be interpreted in another way altogether. Because he died out of love for God’s children, the sight of his crucifixion inspired many Christians to spread love and forgiveness, to promote compassion and reconciliation far removed from a will for combat. It was Korean Christians, we agreed, who saw war in Jesus on the cross. Being converts who were resolute to plant their religion into a land that was alien to it, they identified their Lord as the fighting one. Hence, Jesus became to them a revolutionary leader. Telling Chung Woon about my conversation with Sun Myong about Korean Christians, I suggested that we limit the phrase, “fighting Christians” to Korean Christians, and Chung Woon nodded.
Maybe, I thought that Buddhists don’t feel inclined to fight as Christians do, spared from the painful sight of their role model nailed on the cross. Buddha is sitting comfortably in a lotus position, smiling with contentment. His believers don’t have to feel driven to fight for what he fought for. They don’t feel the need to die for what he died for. All they have to do is to try to reach the state of mind in which Buddha’s smile lives. Their goal is to help everyone to achieve the inner peace embodied in his face.
“As much as I admire the Christians and those who practice the Christian spirit,” Chung Woon returned, with an equal passion. “Buddhist way of fighting is just as valid, I believe.”
“Tell me what it is,” I said.
“Let me ask you a question first,” he said. “You’re going back to America to start teaching at a university, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“If I ask, even beg, if you could stay in Korea and live with me instead of going back to America, will you?”
“No, I won’t. I will go back.”
“Nothing can make you stop going back to America. Nothing could have made Park stop the military coup detat.” He drew in a deep breath. “He didn’t do it alone. He had followers, and nothing, not even God, could have stopped what they were doing.”
“I don’t have followers, but I’m in Korea only for the summer. I’ll find myself back in America before the fall semester begins, to use my damned PhD, the damned piece of paper.” I let out a loud guffaw.
“But if I say I hope you use your PhD kindly for your students and do your best to help them to be enlightened, you’ll listen, won’t you?”
“I most certainly would.”
‘I know the Buddhist monk who told Park the same thing I’m telling you. His name was Mi Dang, a “beautiful hall,” and he passed away recently. Mi Dang pleaded with the absolute ruler. He asked him to treat his people as decently as he could, to shorten the rod and use kid gloves.”
“He advised him to use soft power.”
“Yes, he did.”
“But he didn’t use soft power. He used brute force.”
“Unfortunately, yes, he did use brute force,” Chung Woon echoed, nodding vigorously. “But,” he emphasized, “if you know how many students protesting against him were spared from torture, you may approve Mi Dang’s way. Whenever Park confessed to him that he wanted to catch all the students in the movement in a giant fishnet and throw them into the middle of an ocean, Mi Dang talked him out of it. He gently warned him what bad karma he’d create by doing it, by even thinking about doing it, and persuaded him to let them go after keeping them in jail for a few months. He couldn’t keep Park from capturing the core-leaders and torturing them, but he succeeded in reducing the scope of his violence—quite a lot.”
“He cut down the excesses of his power.”
“Yes!”
“Mi Dang was able to help Park to diffuse his rage at the students in the movement,” I said. “But in the end, it was Kim Jae Kyu’s action that ended his bloody rule.”
Kim Jae Kyu was Park’s chief of intelligence who shot Park to death during his dinner party with his staff. Relieved, most Koreans whispered to each other, “Kim saved the country. Had it not been for his brave action, Park would’ve stayed in the President’s House until he died. There would’ve been an incredible amount of blood in the country.” The 2020 South Korean movie, Man Standing Next, shows the pressure and threats Kim received from the high-ranking staff at the American embassy in South Korea as well as the scene of the actual shooting during the dinner party. But most people guessed that a covert agent hidden behind the scene, most likely the American CIA, was the plotter of the assassination and that Kim was only their errand boy. The embassy staff couldn’t have planned for an event of that magnitude alone. It was probably, most South Koreans still believe, invisible faces that don’t show up in the movie that secretly orchestrated the assassination.
“That’s true,” Chung Woon agreed. “But Park’s death ushered Chun Doo Hwan in, the one worse than Park. If Park was a lion, Chun was a wolf.”
“Blood calls for more blood.” I nodded. “Kim’s action terminated one tyrant, but it brought forth another tyrant, one of the most heinous. The revolutionary spirit that was spread among the people by Christianity caused only more violence. But,” I added in haste, “does that mean the Buddhist way, the internal resistance that enables us to wait until a thousand boil to make ten thousand melt, is the only way?”
“It may not be the only way,” he returned. Gazing at me intently, he said, “You can do something else. You can do what I did.”
After several years at Haeinsa, Chung Woon was transferred to Younghosa (the “Clear Lake Temple” near a local city in a Southern district of Korea), where he took care of a man by the name of Yu Min Young, a renowned human rights lawyer during Chun’s regime. From the beginning of Chun’s rule, he bravely fought the dictator and defended citizens in the movement, leading in 1986 a legal team supporting a woman who was sexually tortured by Chun’s secret police. At the peak of his career, however, he was suddenly diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, facing an imminent death. With one voice, everyone who knew him attributed the cancer to the stress he had been forced to endure. Chun’s henchmen had threatened to kill him and his family, storming into his office and private home, ransacking all the furniture and appliances to seek so-to-speak proof of his seditious activities.
“Mr. Yu didn’t want to be hospitalized,” Chung Woon said. “Even with surgery, he knew he was going to die soon. He wanted to live the rest of his life peacefully in a Buddhist temple.”
“Was it your choice to nurse him?” I asked.
“Yes, I volunteered. It was an honor for me to see him enter the final world, where he’ll be forever saved from the cycle of reincarnation. It’s the place where human beings disappear forever and never return to this world. Only the greatest souls go there.”
“You prayed he’ll go there,” I said.
Ironically, in November 1988, Chun himself came to take refuge in Younghosa. Following an unstoppable nationwide protest against him, he fled his private home to hide at a Buddhist temple, where he knew none of the monks would give him up to those chasing him. Traditionally in Korea, Buddhist temples were sanctuaries where one could enter and stay, however long, until one volunteered to leave. Once in a temple, even a serial killer could stay, however long, until he could be persuaded by the monks to turn himself in to the police. The monks didn’t tell on him to the authorities until it became his choice. As Buddhist monks didn’t tell the hunter where his animal was hiding in the temple, they didn’t tell anyone where the sinner was hiding until the sinner volunteered to come forward. The law of the nation didn’t grant them the right, but the culture gave it to them. It was a tacit, but powerful privilege.
“I was the one appointed to play the chief assistant to Chun at the temple,” Chung Woon said.
“You?” I exclaimed, wide-eyed. “You were the one who took care of Yu, Chun’s arch enemy!”
“That’s why the chief monk of the temple let me be the one staying by Chun’s side.” Chung Woon smiled.
“Why didn’t you say no?” I cried.
“The chief monk pleaded with me,” he explained. “I was the one who saw Yu’s pain right beside him, and he wanted me to tell Chun about what I saw.”
“That’s what some prison programs do. They let rapists listen to the screams coming out of rape victims’ mouths.”
“I was the prison programmer. Christians say, ‘Love your enemy,’ but Buddhists say, ‘There’s no enemy to love.’ Once your enemy learns how he destroyed his enemy and regrets it, then your enemy disappears and so does your friend. Only human beings with the same feelings exist.”
“When we can make victimizers identify with victims, distinction between friends and enemies goes away.”
“That’s what I tried to do for Chun.”
“Did he identify with Yu?”
“Yes, he finally did, but he wasn’t certain his followers would.”
“That’s the problem. You can’t convert everyone the same way.”
“I know,” Chung Woon agreed. “Chun didn’t persecute Yu alone. He had followers who were as power-driven as they were, and there was no way to stop them, a whole bunch of them.”
Instead of nodding back, I said, “Chun’s dictatorship couldn’t be launched without his followers, without a whole bunch of them. Likewise, his dictatorship couldn’t be terminated without the people’s massive revolt, without a whole bunch of them. The protest itself wasn’t violent, but it was fierce enough to cause Chun’s police to torture and kill citizens fighting for democracy. It took violence to end him.”
“That’s why,” he said, sighing deeply, “the monks and I at Younghosa decided to take Chun in. We knew that if we turned him away, his followers, who still had a lot of lingering power even after his demise, would come to threaten us to take him back. Or, we knew, they’d blackmail another temple to accept him. We wanted to keep the blood away.”
“If you accept Yu and reject Chun, that would violate the core principle of Buddhism. You’d turn selective and you’re not supposed to be selective. You’re not supposed to discriminate.”
“We don’t make distinctions between enemy and friend.”
“I’ll never be a Buddhist.” I offered my self-analysis. “I wouldn’t hide Chun in my house. I’d use an excuse and turn him away nicely to avoid being beat up by his guys.” Then, I made a conclusion. “Massive action that inevitably calls for blood, as bad as it may be, might be just as necessary as your Buddhist way of handling evil.” Making such a cliché statement, I smiled bitterly. Chung Woon, too, smiled, but it was a broad, unhesitating smile. As a human being, if not as a Buddhist, he agreed with me, I wanted to think. Staying half a step removed from Christianity, I knew I would remain as distant from Buddhism as well, and he understood it.
Standing up to say goodbye to each other, we saw a young man appear in the front yard. Holding a small cardboard box, he was fighting to hold back tears. “My dog died last night,” he pleaded. “Please sing a requiem for her and send her to heaven.” In the box lay a Pekinese with her eyes open. “With your words of farewell, she’ll be able to close her eyes,” he said, knowing that a dog’s eyes don’t close when it dies. He wished his Pekinese would die with her eyes closed, so that she would die like a human being and find her way back into the living to be reborn as a human being.
I couldn’t understand the words Chung Woon recited because they were Korean translations of Chinese words. They were phonetically Korean, but the meanings were Chinese. The tunes, however, were familiar to me, with slight, barely audible variations within a generally flat monotone. They were the sounds I heard at a Buddhist temple during an afternoon ceremony, the pacifying, yet sonorous sounds that came from the monk’s low voice and the small, wooden chanting instruments in his hands.
“I’d like to pay a fee for your service.” The young man offered, pointing at the three-legged dog sitting on top of the thick stonewall. “I’d like to take your dog to a vet and have an artificial leg made for him.”
“That’s going to cost you,” Chung Woon said. “He’s not even your dog.”
“My dog will be happy to see him getting a normal walk. Someday, they’ll meet in a dog heaven and will sing a song for all of us together.”
“At a Buddhist temple, we don’t refuse to accept a person’s good will. If you really want to do it, please do.”
Watching the young man leave with the dog in his cardboard box, I asked Chung Woon. “You don’t know him. Will you be ok if he doesn’t come back with your dog?”
“He’ll come back,” he said. “Karma brought his Pekinese and my three-legged dog together. Karma will bring back the young man and the dog.”
Jid Lee: I have an MA in English from SUNY at Albany and a PhD in English from Kansas University. I've published two volumes of memoir, To Kill a Tiger: A Memoir of Korea and In Search of My America.
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