They say a journalist enjoys a license to be educated in public, and as a freelance correspondent in Russia I was soaking up a lot of learning. I wrote stories about underfunded Olympic athletes struggling to train, horse acrobats from Central Asia signing contracts to perform in the U.S., new diplomatic relations across the region, western companies investing in oil production, and religious freedom coming to Russia.
The last story bridged the personal and professional. I had spent 1988 working in South Korea at the Seoul Olympics for NBC TV. It was the first Olympics in a decade not marred by a boycott. With the Soviet Union and its allies from Eastern Europe participating after missing the 1984 Olympics, my Russian language ability was a plus. During my year living in Seoul, I frequented a Buddhist center set up to educate Westerners about Korean Zen Buddhism. At the Lotus Lantern International Buddhist Center, I learned about meditation, conversed with Buddhist monks and made lifelong friends.
Fast forward a couple of years. I am in St. Petersburg, Russia, visiting a Tibetan Buddhist temple which had reopened its doors in 1990 after having served in the previous decades as a gymnasium, radio station and scientific laboratory. During my visit I met a Russian man named Igor who spoke Korean and had worked as a translator at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Igor wanted to invite Korean Buddhists to Russia to introduce Zen Buddhism. When I asked him if he had any contacts in South Korea, he mentioned – guess what? — the Lotus Lantern Center. I connected Igor with my monk friends in Seoul, who over the next several years held retreats and set up Buddhist centers in Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia.
A pause here. I’ve heard Russians themselves call Russia a country of wonders, and that moment with Igor outside the Buddhist temple was a wonder. For if the Soviet Union hadn’t opened up, Igor wouldn’t have traveled to South Korea as an interpreter at the Olympic Games, nor would my Russian language skills have been as helpful to NBC. Neither of us would have encountered the Lotus Lantern, and South Korean Zen Buddhist monks would have been slower coming to Russia.
And I would have had far fewer friends. You see, Russians and Ukrainians who found a home in Korean Zen Buddhism became fellow spiritual travelers. Though from different cultures, we were all eager to learn about Buddhism and practice meditation. I remember a former schoolteacher from Tula, Russia, telling me that he practiced meditation because he wanted to get “behind words.” For me, observing firsthand the introduction of Buddhist philosophy was exhilarating to watch, as if oxygen were being pumped into Russia’s spiritually-starved lungs. Some Russian and Ukrainian men, including the former schoolteacher, even ordained as novice monks and lived in temples in South Korea.
The Venerable Won Myong Sunim, left, was one of the first Korean Buddhist monks to visit Russia in the early 1990s.
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In the midst of societal turmoil and economic decline, the spirit of rebirth – often a painful rebirth — was all around. A tenet of Buddhism is that hardship is our greatest teacher. It breaks down our ego and forces us to confront ourselves honestly. We have a choice: to stick to tired and broken ways or to change.
I understand now that during those years living in the former Soviet Union the human drama around me impelled me to absorb lessons about the inevitability of change and accepting new circumstances and humbling realities while trying to maintain self-respect and dignity.
I learned the most from observing Zhenya. In 1992, my one-room apartment in Moscow became his home base and my creaky couch his bed. I tasked him with odd jobs, like setting up my home office and buying newspapers from nearby kiosks. Through my contacts with groups of foreigners– including those monks visiting from South Korea – he got access to dollars. But it seemed Zhenya could never get ahead. Much of his profit had to be returned to creditors — the family members and friends who had loaned him rubles in the first place. The rest of the money went to support his family.
Zhenya putting together a shelf in my Moscow apartment, 1993.
Years later, it’s clear that Zhenya helped me to better understand a powerful lesson. And the lesson was not to cling to rigid conceptions of oneself. Survival dictated that Zhenya drop old ways of thinking and embrace opportunity wherever he could find it. Hadn’t he said to me: “From the threads of the rich, a poor man can make a shirt for himself.”?
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 