Study on the Eco-Buddhism worldview in Kim, Si-Sup’s Chinese Poetry

The speed of development and change of modern scientific technology has taken over nature’s self-purification ability and it has caused ecological crisis. From Buddhist-ecological perspective, the ecological crisis is a kind of an offspring of ignorance. This means that human’s modern egoism, a contamination of heart, is the fundamental cause. Buddhist-ecology is connected to the understanding of ‘absence of self-nature impermanence →insubstantialityㆍemptiness’ through the insight of ‘dependent origination→inter-dependence,’ concluded to ‘compassionate action→inter-respectation’ of sharing, and it embraces nature and space. This is a core of Buddhist-ecology, and it shows a profound ecological wisdom for purification of the mind. Ecologism of Kim, Si-Seup(金時習, 1435-1493) started from the thought that human and all things operate according to nature’s circular universal truth. Kim, Si-Seup’s sense of all things and poetry of non-self that was drawn from Buddhist-ecological perspective can be summarized as the following. First, Kim, Si-Seup shows the practice of ecological ethics and compassionate mind of inter-respectation on worthless things on his poetries which the sense of love of all things and the thought of life were embodied. This provides a change of understanding on anthropocentricism and exterminism. Second, on poetries which display a sense of love of the people and ecological social ethics, Kim, Si-Seup praises farmers’ labor value and insists on executing ecological politics of ‘benevolent government,’ which is free from ruling over misery of people at that time. The base of his sense of love of people is acting up to one’s principles of ecological social ethics. And this is executed through acknowledging the ruling class and detailed labor. Third, it is an awakening of obscurity that living with nature through a life as an outsider can overcome sense of alienation, sense of loss, and even birth and death. Therefore, his sense of love of all things and people is a conquest of conflict between the ego and the world based on enlightenment on obscurity. What is flowing on his poetry is an agreement between natural affaires and human affaires. Ecological wisdom in Kim, Si-Seup’s poetry implies the fact that the equality between people should be expanded to the egalitarianism of all things of modern men today.