I Just Breathed That Air

The story of women in Buddhism begins with a struggle. When Mahaprajapati Gautami asked the Buddha to admit women to the sangha, he refused—three times! She persisted, and he eventually gave in, but not without conditions: the eight chief rules, which placed nuns institutionally below monks, a hierarchy that continues. Yet through that gendered struggle, something remarkable has often emerged. Women have been among the most devoted and clear-eyed practitioners in their communities, their insights hard-won precisely because nothing came easily. But those insights rarely made it into the record.

Kim Iryeop (b. Kim Wonju, 1896–1971) was determined to be heard. Korea in her time was deeply Confucian, actively hostile to Buddhism, and rapidly moving toward a colonial modernity that promised liberation while delivering new forms of constraint. In this world, Iryeop made her name alongside the sinyoseong—the “new women,” a generation of educated women who challenged Confucian gender norms and claimed the right to lives of their own making. She became one of the most radical among them, a writer and activist who publicly argued for sexual freedom, the right to divorce, and women’s independence at a time when such claims were genuinely dangerous. In 1933, she entered the monastery. Her life and writings helped shape what is today one of the strongest fully ordained female Buddhist monastic communities in the world.

Jin Y. Park, a professor of philosophy and religion at American University in Washington, D.C., has spent more than two decades recovering Iryeop’s legacy, working as a translator, biographer, and philosophical interpreter of her life and thought. In this conversation, she reflects on what Iryeop’s life reveals about women, Buddhism, and the one thing that never changed across Iryeop’s many lives: “She was looking for absolute freedom.”

What first drew you to studying women monastics in Korea, and how did that interest take shape academically and personally? My parents went to Buddhist temples when I was growing up, but in Korea, that didn’t necessarily mean they were Buddhist in a doctrinal sense—it was more of a cultural religion. They went on specific days, like Buddha’s birthday. On Sundays, they would often take our family hiking, and on the way down, we would stop by Buddhist temples in the mountains and say hello to the Buddha. That became a background understanding. Not really an interest—I just breathed that air.

I read a lot on my own, mostly Western philosophy, but something was always missing. Modern Western philosophy puts you at the center and assumes you already know things. For me, all I know is that I cannot figure out what life is about. Buddhism was different. It was less arrogant. I did my graduate studies in philosophy and Buddhism at Stony Brook University, and my dissertation compared 13th-century Korean Buddhist teachings with 20th-century French philosophy. 

After completing my dissertation, I became curious about Korean Buddhism in the 20th century, a topic few were studying at the time. As I researched, I began to wonder, Where are the women? Whether monastics or laywomen, there were none in the records. I dug into various sources, found a compilation of short articles about Korean Buddhist nuns, and came across Iryeop. Her story was only five pages, but she was so interesting! I started collecting everything she published. She was a phenomenon in her early life—and largely unknown later. I presented my findings at a conference on Korean nuns and spent the next fifteen years translating and writing a monograph about her.

What was so compelling about Iryeop? It’s a combination of factors. She was an intellectual and writer, and my undergraduate studies were in English literature and creative writing. She was a new woman activist, so there’s the feminist dimension. And she was a nun, and I was looking for women in Korean Buddhism. All these things together are interesting. But when I read her life stories, with their detailed descriptions, they felt more like my own story than other materials I had worked on. When I work on the 12th-century Korean monk Jinul, I’m philosophizing. When I work on Iryeop, I’m also philosophizing, but at the same time, it feels like part of my own experience. Iryeop struggled desperately in a patriarchal society, trying to find freedom and the value of her existence, and her struggle parallels my career-long struggle as an Asian woman in philosophy, which is very male-dominated.

For readers unfamiliar with Korean women monastics, how would you describe their historical position in society? Korean nuns have existed since at least the 6th century, possibly earlier. Nuns were active throughout, and Buddhist nunneries played various roles. Even during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), when Confucian literati suppressed Buddhism, women from royal and aristocratic families continued to support Buddhist temples. But Buddhism itself, from the beginning, has had built-in gender discrimination—the eight chief rules, which are still in effect today. Even now, there are more nuns than monks in Korea, yet monks hold all the major administrative positions in Jogye, the largest and oldest Korean order.

Traditionally, women were mostly excluded from practicing meditation: It was considered too difficult. Women usually engaged in devotional practices like chanting and prayer. Even so, there are records of meditation masters who encouraged nuns to attain enlightenment. The modern period changed things. The encounter with modernity transformed Korean Buddhism institutionally and intellectually—what scholars now call Buddhist modernism—and it changed things for women too. A nun named Suok (1902–1966), who traveled to Japan in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of Korea, was struck by how educated Japanese nuns were and how far Korean nuns lagged behind. Korean nuns were almost illiterate, unable to read or write, let alone receive any formal education. She said, “Whose fault is this? It’s yours, monks—you are supposed to guide nuns, but you have ignored them. And nuns, you need to get educated.” After returning from Japan, she spent the rest of her life building a Buddhist educational community for nuns.

Women’s lives are absent from the records because no one thought to keep them.

Modern Korean Buddhism is often discussed in terms of reform, nationalism, and colonial pressure. How does paying attention to gender and women’s religious experience change that narrative? When you include gender in the discussion, things shift. Those big narratives—colonialism and nationalism—are dominated by male voices because men kept the records. When you bring a marginalized group into the story, you see something different, what I call the small discourse, the individual discourse, of people who lived through these historical forces. When only the big story is told, you hear only so much.

If you look at the history of religion, women are the grassroots—the ones who donate to temples and sustain the religious tradition. But they are always the nameless multitude. Someone like Iryeop, who stands apart from the nameless multitude but remains invisible to history, offers a useful perspective. Women’s lives are always narrated in relation to men. It’s the same in philosophy: When you think about Sartre, you don’t have to mention Beauvoir, but when you talk about Beauvoir, you always have to mention Sartre. By engaging with a marginalized voice, you begin to encounter an embodied version of religion and Buddhism rather than just an idea like dependent arising. How Buddhist ideas manifest in an individual’s life is entirely different.

Before becoming a nun, Iryeop was a prominent writer on love, chastity, freedom, and women’s identity. How radical was her public role at the time? It was very radical. The new women’s movement was not only a Korean phenomenon—it was international. In Japan, it began around 1910. It also emerged in China. In the US, it began around the 1880s. Most of these new women read the work of Ellen Key (1849–1926), a Swedish writer. Interestingly, if you ask feminist philosophers today, many do not know Key, but she was enormously popular at the time. She wrote extensively about love, marriage, and sexuality, and was, in some ways, radical about all of it.

Iryeop is most associated with what became known as sinjeongjoron, the new theory of chastity. She argued that what we would now call body politics is the most visible form of gender discrimination: Women are forced to maintain chastity, while men are free to have wives, concubines, and girlfriends. She thought this was the most visible form of gender discrimination and that we had to change this convention. What she proposed was not that we get rid of chastity but that chastity is not something society should control. If a person loves their partner, they will maintain chastity naturally. Chastity, she said, is the ultimate stage of love. And if you can truly clear away a previous relationship, you can start over; you can have a new chastity. She wrote about this only twice in publications, in 1924 and 1927. But people really tried to destroy her over this. Imagine a 1920s ultraconservative Confucian Korea that never talks about sex—she was talking and writing publicly about sexual freedom. This was very bold.

All these new women who claimed sexual liberation paid a price. Even into the 1990s, academic discourse labeled Iryeop and other new women as “high-class fallen women.” Iryeop also went through a period of social disillusionment. Male intellectuals at the time publicly welcomed modern ideas of freedom and gender equality, but behind women’s backs, they criticized and made fun of the new women. They even published short stories that used these same ideas to mock them. On the surface, they claimed to accept gender equality because that was the modern position to take. This was very damaging to these women, not only in the 1920s but for a long time after. Even when I was translating Iryeop’s book—around the late 2000s—Koreans would say Iryeop was a woman who just talked about sex. Why translate her? They didn’t even consider her a Buddhist.

Are her writings on love and sexuality part of a broader philosophical and ethical trajectory? In her literary works, she wrote a lot about life, death, and religion. Her sister died when she was young, and other family members followed. One of the last deaths was her father’s, who died while she was at Ewha Hakdang (now Ewha Womans University). She was very close to him. And in 1920, her 6-year-old stepsister died. This left her alone, and questions of life and death became an obsession that appeared in her short stories. She also questioned the role of religion and what it did for us.

Iryeop’s father was a first-generation Protestant pastor from Pyongyang, deeply faithful and evangelical. In her late teens, she had many doubts about God. She tried to ask her father, but he told her, “You don’t ask questions about God. You have questions because your faith is not strong enough. Pray—that is the answer.” Which backfired completely. She eventually gave up Christianity.

All her early writing dealt with existential questions. But women’s issues were also about freedom. If she were living in a patriarchal society where sexuality was the most tightly controlled aspect of her life, then writing about sexuality was an act of freedom. It was not about sex. Her premonastic writing and her women’s movement work were her way of defining her existence as a free individual. In 1925, she became disillusioned with a society that publicly welcomed gender equality while privately mocking it. Around this time, she began to practice Buddhism and eventually decided to ordain.

Most existing scholarship describes a rupture in Iryeop’s life, with her entry into the monastery as the breaking point. Before it, scholars see her as a socially engaged writer and activist speaking out about sexual freedom. After it, they see a Buddhist nun who withdrew from society into silence. But I don’t see that as what happened. Throughout her life, she was searching for a way to be a free individual who could control her own life. She pursued that through writing and the women’s movements, and later, she wanted something deeper. Social activism can change society, but she wanted freedom not only in the social context but also in the context of human existence, going beyond birth and death. For that, she had to turn to religion. The desire to be a free being was her lifelong search. She changed the method, the way she expressed and practiced it. But throughout her life, she was consistent.

If a failed love affair were reason enough to join a monastery, everyone should join the monastery.

If Iryeop’s decision to ordain isn’t a retreat from society, how do you interpret her turn to monastic life? If you are simply renouncing, you won’t go through that kind of difficulty. When she first joined the monastery, people said she was just escaping a failed love life: She’ll be back. I joke about this when I give talks. If a failed love affair were reason enough to join a monastery, everyone should join the monastery.

She began practicing meditation around 1928. In the beginning, I think she believed she could practice as a layperson. But at a certain point, she decided, no, this is not enough. You must be full-time. She knew what she was getting into.

When she joined, her teacher, Mangong (1871–1946)—a renowned Seon master during the Japanese occupation—told her: “I know you are a good writer and a public figure in the outside world. Once you join the monastery, you do not read, you do not write. Can you do that?” She said yes. She didn’t publish for the next twenty-five years, from 1933 to about 1958. If you are a writer, maintaining that is hell. Writers should write, should express themselves. If renunciation were your only goal, you wouldn’t go through that kind of ordeal. When she did return to writing, she said she had practiced Buddhism precisely to become a better writer—that unless you have truly become a full human being, you shouldn’t write, because what you write is nothing.

Some years after entering the monastery, she wrote, “I never cried this much in the secular world.” She never went to bed before midnight and was up again at two in the morning to meditate all day. Yet awakening seemed so far away. She cried and cried: “I thought when I joined the monastery, there would be no tears here.” After many years of practice, she honestly reflected on her stage of the path and wrote, “I cannot claim that I obtained enlightenment, but I think I reached a certain stage of mental and spiritual maturity.”

In Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun, Iryeop repeatedly returns to questions of selfhood, freedom, independence, and what it means to become “fully human.” How does her understanding of no-self differ from more familiar or abstract presentations of the doctrine? Interestingly, Iryeop rarely uses traditional vocabulary—Sanskrit terms like anatman, or mua in Korean, meaning no-self. She uses them occasionally, but instead of relying on Buddhist vocabulary, she creates her own expressions. The best known are the big self and the small self.

For me, this reflects her premonastic struggle. The small self is tied to life’s constraints—social norms, expectations, all the conditions that bind you. That self is like a small circle: It cannot go beyond its own boundary. But once you go beyond that boundary, you can become the entire universe—that is, dependent arising and no-self, in another register. In this way, the big self and the small self express Iryeop’s absolute desire for freedom. Instead of being restricted by women should do this and that—which is the small self, enclosed, unable to go anywhere—you should open yourself up, and then you will be like the entire universe. For a Buddhist scholar, this is a recognizable formulation of no-self. But using the great self and the small self is much easier to understand. 

She also interestingly says that the great self exercises creativity, which is a function of a free person. If you are not free, you cannot exercise creativity. This freedom isn’t only physical; even in a prison cell, if you are truly free, you can exercise creativity. Iryeop said the Buddha was a person who fully exercised the creativity that everyone is endowed with. Everyone is the Buddha, but you must use your creativity. To use your creativity, you need to be free.

You’ve argued that Iryeop’s feminism and Buddhism are not opposed but continuous. What does her life reveal about the relationship between gendered experience and Buddhist practice more broadly? One criticism she has received—not during her lifetime but later from scholars—is that she completely gave up on women’s issues after joining the monastery, because her writing from that period doesn’t address them directly. But she had her own way of supporting women’s issues. Not everyone needs to be in the streets protesting. When she returned to writing in the late 1950s, her books became best sellers, widely credited with bringing many women to Buddhism. Rather than addressing women’s issues directly, she wrote the stories of her female friends. They were highly intelligent women, but many of their lives ended tragically because of gendered social biases. Iryeop recorded their stories. Women’s lives are absent from the records because no one thought to keep them. Success is not the only thing worth recording—life has both success and failure. Writing about the failure of a person’s life also gives meaning to that failure.

In one example, Iryeop wrote that her close friend Na Hyeseok (1896–1948), a feminist writer and artist who died alone of malnutrition, should have forgotten her children after her divorce, joined the monastery, and found herself. That kind of evaluation of her friends’ lives through a Buddhist lens is not criticism. It’s a desperate effort to give visibility to their lives, even though they often met unfortunate ends.

You’ve lived with Iryeop’s writings for some time now. How has this sustained engagement shaped your understanding of what it means to be fully human? This is the story of a woman who tried so hard to find meaning in her existence. Because Iryeop was a woman, I resonated with it. But finding meaning in our existence should be an issue for everybody. I have struggled since I was a small child, trying to figure out what the heck this life is all about. I still don’t know. Iryeop is one example of someone who struggled desperately to find what life is about. I don’t know whether she found an answer, but this is what religion and philosophy need to address.

When my mother passed away last year, I thought that if she had been born in a later generation, she could have been an intellectual. She ended up raising six children as a housewife, as society expected. She must have had her own way of struggling with identity and finding meaning in it. That was not my life. I gave that up and chose my own path. But I have my own struggles, and all of them are tied to this desperate effort to find meaning in our lives and our existence.

I’ve been reading a lot about artificial intelligence, and serious philosophers working in this area are engaged in real soul-searching about what it means to be fully human. For Iryeop, being fully human means being a free individual, a free being who can control their own life. She said that after she joined the monastery, she was shocked because people there didn’t know how to control their own lives—and they thought they were free beings. They were not. They were constrained by the conditions and environments of their existence. She was looking for absolute freedom. 

Are you fully human? I’m trying. That’s why we keep asking the question.