| [Seeker's Journal] Returning to
My Origin
Jeff Kraus, London, Canada, Jeung San
Do International Dept.  Originally printed in the Korea Times newspaper on November
30th, 2004
My spiritual journey of returning to the origin brought me to the grave뾞
grave I had never seen, outside a village I had never been, in a country I had
never visited; but the country was my ancestral homeland, the village my
family's home village, and the grave the grave of my grandfather. As I stood
over his grave, I found myself confronting the question that I had not been able
to answer my entire trip: What if a person returns to their origins, only to
find themselves not at home?
This journey to the grave had its own origin in my studies of spirituality,
for I had often encountered the idea that a man must eventually return to his
origins, an idea embraced by many religions in many forms: pilgrimages to holy
sites such as Jerusalem and Mecca; an embracing of fundamental faiths and
creeds; a reversion to simpler lifestyles; even a return to the womb in the
ritual form of a grave. Some would even say that achieving Nirvana is as much a
return to an original state as an ascension to a new one.
The Korea-based spirituality that I have studied teaches that a person can
never reach spiritual maturity without having returned to his origins, and this
idea reverberated in me because I have always felt disassociated from my
family's roots in Europe. My father had moved from Germany to Canada as a young
man, having become estranged from my grandfather, so I had never known any of my
German relatives save in pictures and in vague memories of their single visit to
Canada when I was a toddler. I worried that if this core part of my identity
remained alien to me, my life as a seeker would be like the journey of a
traveler across an endless prairie: it would not matter how fine the compass in
my hand or how hale my legs if I did not know from where I had started. So I
undertook a pilgrimage to my family's ancestral homeland, hoping to connect with
my origins.
My first days in Germany seemed a triumph: everything felt poignantly
familiar, from the faces of my relatives and the architecture of the buildings,
to the sound of the cars and the soul of the cooking. On my third day 'back,'I
was sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Frankfurt, eating handkasse mit music
(marinated cheese and bread) and thinking to myself: this is all so familiar, I
bet I could learn German in a week. As I ate, I noticed at the next table two
young backpackers with a Japanese-language guidebook to Germany, and I reflected
on the many times I had felt like a baffled foreigner during my years in
Korea뾞t that moment, I suddenly experienced misgivings about my sense of
homecoming. Perhaps, I felt at home in Germany only as a Canadian returning to
the West after so many years in the Hermit Kingdom. As a child, I had mistakenly
believed that my family had originated from Yugoslavia, and now I wondered: if I
were still suffering under that misapprehension, would I be drinking coffee at a
Sarajevo sidewalk cafe, feeling just as at home뾖uddenly, I felt uncertain of
the authenticity of my return to my origin.
 Both Eastern and Western spirituality believe that a person's ties to their
place of origin are intrinsically ties to nature, and I decided that the true
sense of 'home'. I sought might be awaiting me in the German countryside. So I
rented a motorcycle and began touring. (For my fellow riders: driving a 998cc
BMW GS100 through the Alps in autumn is not quite Nirvana, but it's something
holy.) The Germans have an admirable tradition of maintaining large swathes of
countryside in a natural state, so I was able to find forests to wander, fields
to walk, and even a misty mountainside to explore.
I stood alone on that wild mountainside at dawn, listening to the natural
world's most hallowed hiss: the hiss a cloud makes as its mists slip through an
alpine forest. Everything was profoundly familiar to me, from the lung-greening
scent of the dripping woods to the indefinable sensation of the mountain's
terrestrial qi. I was home. But I also recognized that when nature stands
raw in such majesty, no human with any ear to hear his own soul could help but
hear the echoes of our origins. German, Canadian, Korean, Saudi Arabian뾞nybody
would have recognized that forested mountainside as home. I had not returned to
my origin; I had returned to our origin.
On the last day of my trip, I came to the grave of my grandfather feeling
as though I had reached my last chance to find myself. This visit to the grave
conflicted me in another way too, for my path as a Westerner studying Eastern
spirituality presented me with a conundrum. The Korean teachings that I study
venerate the traditions of ancestor worship, asserting that a person must honour
their ancestors with rites and offerings to support these ancestors in the
spiritual world, and in return, the ancestral spirits guard and support the
descendant. These rites are solemn and complex, entailing offerings of incense,
candles, food, drink, gifts, and invocations in elaborate ceremonies of many
steps arranged in several movements. My deceased grandfather, however, had
possessed traditional Catholic beliefs, so the idea of conducting Eastern
ancestral rites at his grave seemed, at the least, discourteous. As I stood in
the Weissenhorn countryside graveyard, surrounded by distinctly German graves
(each of them a miniature garden bordered by cobblestones), I worried that
conducting the exotic rites of my personal spirituality might be an act of
spiritual greed on my part.
So I decided to offer only those rites common to both the East and the
West. I lit a votive candle and placed it in the ornamental lantern set into the
grave's garden, then I bowed my head and prayed. (I believe that such
cross-cultural commonalities of ritual hint at a common origin in the human
experience, though I do not know if this origin lies in Eden, Atlantis, the
collective unconscious, etc.) Then I offered the most important, most universal
rite of all: I talked with the spirit of my grandfather. I shall not tell you
the words that were spoken, but I will say that I have a conviction that the
words were not the words of a monologue: they were a conversation. A person can
feel a sense of home in the city and a different sense of home in nature; but
for me, speaking with my grandfather's spirit was a return to an origin that was
truly, consummately mine. I expect that I shall think upon that conversation
often as I continue my journey through life, now knowing from where I
started.
-http://www.jeungsando.org-
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