Conversing with humanity
While searching for herbs I suddenly lost my way,
Surrounded by one thousand peaks and the autumn leaves.
Then I spied a monk returning from fetching water;
At the edge of the woods, smoke for boiling tea rises.
—yi yulkok, chinese poet
Not long ago at Korea's Oksan Confucian Academy, I sat on the wooden floor, which has been planed smooth by four centuries of students' comings and goings. There I listened as associate professor Mark Peterson, who teaches Korean at Brigham Young University, recited the above 17th-century Chinese poem by Yi Yulkok.
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