“Sink Swim”  |  The Story of Dae Soeng Sunim  
by David Berthy & Vincent Haycock (photo)

I was with my folks in Catalina on a vacation. We stayed in cabins at night. Days, my mom, Mark, Laurie, and I watched my father take pictures. Every time my dad snapped a picture, he said, “It’s just like a postcard.” We groaned, but he was right. Catalina was magic. I was just a kid, and California seemed better than real to me then.  

One day we went to the beach. It was sunny and the water was calm, so the bay was full of yachts. At some point, we noticed Mark was missing. He was climbing a cliff and he was way up there.

My dad pointed him out to me and told me to go get him. Dad thought Mark was scared and he couldn’t get down. I thought it was just Mark being Mark, making a spectacle of himself. You could never leave him alone. 

I climbed up to Mark.

“What are you doing here»” he asked me. 

I told him dad thought he wanted to come down. 

He said if he wanted to come down he’d come down, but he looked scared. I told him to do whatever he wanted to do. He decided to climb down. 

It wasn’t that steep, and he didn’t need help, so I stayed where I was and looked out into the bay.  People dove from their yachts into the ocean, pulling themselves through the water with clipped, perfect strokes, then climbed ladders back into the boats. A feeling came over me, like a thrum, and I stayed where I was. The feeling expanded in my chest, growing and growing. Mark was making his way down and my dad was waving for me to follow him, but I saw a trail leading up, and I followed that instead. 

The trail was well-worn, and it was easy going. It led to a platform that jutted out over the cliff. When I stood on the platform, I could feel my balls shriveling up into my stomach. I saw Mark making his way toward my parents. The fifty-foot yachts bobbing in the bay suddenly looked about a quarter of an inch long. The people on the boats were looking up, pointing me out. A few started clapping. They thought I was one of the divers who dove for money, then swam out to the boats and collected tips. 

I should have turned around right then, but I couldn’t. It was the mix of terror and excitement, the needles of fear stabbing me from the inside out, the hot sun on my skin, and the pinpricks of light on the dark blue water below me that kept me where I was. I loved it. I hated it. I couldn’t move.  

Later, they would tell me that if was ninety feet from where I stood to the water. 

Thirty years later, before a hundred and thirty foot dive, a guy in Belize told me that the best way to kill yourself was to swim down for two hundred feet. “Just keep swimming down, man. You’ll get the narcs and drift off like nothing. No one’s going to come for you either.” 

I was spending three thousand dollars a week then. Money for lobster, for hotel rooms with wicker papasan chairs where you could hear surf crashing in the distance, for liquor and boats and dive coaches and gear and Heather and drugs. I had a hundred and thirty foot dive coming up at Jacques Cousteu’s Blue Hole. 

Before the dive, the dive coach warned us again about the dangers of drifting 

down too far. The pressure down there would kill you, so if you went down that way, no one would come and get you. It was such an easy way to go. I couldn’t get it out of my head. The thought was like a drum beat that started soft and got louder as I swam down. 

At a hundred and thirty feet, as low as we were supposed to go, the beat thundered. It was that same feeling. The needles pushing from inside out, the mixture of terror and fear. Everything in the ocean is always moving. It never stops. But looking up from the dark at the sun-saturated surface, it all felt still. There was this voice in my head telling me to do it. It’s just another hundred feet…it said, over and over. It’s just another hundred feet. 

Instead of going down, I went up. Swimming toward the boat, I realized I wanted to go home, that I was done with this money medication thing, done with girls like Heather.

The realization didn’t seem that profound. It could have gone either way. Things pull you in one direction or another, and you go the way you go. The trick is to realize what’s doing the pulling. Up there on the cliff in Catalina as I kid, I had no idea what was what. I don’t remember a voice at all, only the applause, the light, the water, and the boats in the distance as I stepped off the cliff. I don’t know why I did what I did. I just stepped off.  

On the way down, the sky rushed up blue around me. I remembered a guy had told me that if you didn’t cover your eyes, the water would rip them out of your sockets when you landed. I put my hands over my face. Next thing I knew, I found myself fifty feet below the surface, flailing and out of breath. I swam as fast as I could toward the surface, toward the light at the top of this blue and black hole that I was in.  

“Gradual Enlightenment”  |  The Story of Dae Soeng Sunim  
by David Berthy & Vincent Haycock (photo)

I was at Meg’s, doing eight milligrams of methadone a day. No one who does eight mills a day expects to live, and on top of it I was shooting two hundred dollars a day of smack and doing coke and valium and whatever else I could find to feel unsick. I had systems and routines. I had a dealer, Ralph, who complained if I showed up at his house looking like junkie. The best painting I ever did, a mural of the Spanish-American Civil War, hung in his dining room. I stole rakes from garages and sold them to Ralph for heroine. Ralph liked to go to swap meets, and no one ever noticed their rakes were missing until they needed them. Things, I told myself, have a way of sorting themselves out. 

One afternoon I shot up just off the highway in Salinas. There were lettuce fields on either side of me. Not a car in sight. My veins had gone limp and I couldn’t find one that worked. I kept stabbing myself. The effort of it was making me sweat. At some point, I heard a siren. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a patrol car pulling up behind me. When the cop was three feet away from my car, I finally found a vein.    

“Put your hands up and get out of the car!”

“Don’t put your hands in my pocket or you’ll get stabbed,” I said. 

The cop thanked me. Then he took me in. 

It was my second offense and I had outstanding charges in Santa Cruz, so after the arraignment, that was where I went. The judge had a face like a rock someone had been working at with a pick axe. He told me I’d have to go to treatment. 

I told him I didn’t want to go to treatment, that I’d rather quit. 

He laughed. He’d been on the bench for thirty years and never seen someone like me quit cold turkey. 

He didn’t know he was dealing with the zen god of drug takers.

He told me that if I came back in thirty days with a clean blood test or a completion of treatment slip, he’d let me off. 

Meg was on the phone with Betty Ford before the trial ended, but I told her I didn’t want anything to do with it. I’d gone that route. I knew I was done. I’d quit before, and I knew what I was in for.   

For thirty days, I sweated it out in her basement. I nearly died twice. They wanted to give me something at the hospital, but I didn’t care. I was going to show that condescending son of a bitch of a judge or I was going to die trying. I was so out of it I was drinking my own piss, and this wasn’t the kind of piss you wanted to drink. Meg said I was talking to angels and telling them to tell my son I loved him. I remember Nancy pouring cold water on me. I don’t remember much of the shitting or the vomiting. I remember waking up and Nancy was crying, nodding her head, telling me I’d made it.  

“What’s that smell?” I asked 

She smiled like you don’t know?

I went to the doctor and got a clean blood test. 

I showed up in court and the judge asked me for my sheet of paper, the one saying I’d been in treatment. I told him I didn’t have it. 

He was about to give me six months in Salinas County when I showed him the blood test. The judge was full of congratulations. I made it a few days before I shot up again. 

“Dying Laughing”  |  The Story of Dae Soeng Sunim 
by David Berthy & Vincent Haycock  (photo)

I wanted to help people, so I got a gig working the midnight shift in the terminal ward of Cedars Sinai hospital. If you’re rich or famous, or just think of yourself that way,  Cedars Sinai is the place you go to die.

I was twenty-three, I think. In love. Doing yoga and playing music. Completely clean. If you watch enough people die, it loses a lot of its sense of TV drama. It’s no thing at all. But you learn a lot. No matter what people do in their lives, they all die in one of a few ways. Maybe they’re too drugged to know and they drift off, either floating or falling, depending on the sort of trip they’re on. Maybe they fight the whole way, hanging on to the last second. 

We admire people like that. We say, “He died fighting,” as if it were a good thing. We respect people who die worried about how much money you were leaving the wife and kids or whether or not you ever got around to fixing the foundation of the house. 

Greedy people have the most trouble dying, because they die pissed off. Even though they’re in hell, hooked up to machines, struggling for breath, rolling in their own piss, watching daytime television, they want to keep fighting. They crave more nurses and doctors. They fly in specialists. The more money they have, the worse is. They’ll do anything they can to squeeze out a few more years of existence. I’d watch them demand more drugs. Watch them lay there in all of their solemn martyrdom while family and friends passed through the room and told them everything was going to be okay. Bullshit. Everything wasn’t going to be okay until they finally let go, and they weren’t about to do that. 

Loving people just die sad. 

But for most, dying without a fight was out of a question. Walking through the midnight halls, my footsteps echoing over the beeps of machines and the groans of the dying, I’d try to find someone I could comfort. But the fighters don’t die easy, and they always had someone with them. I’d hear them gasping as I moved past. Get me a doctor! Change the channel. Dying people wanted to watch shows about the dying. They wanted to watch E.R., where people also died fighting.  

If I found a person all curled up with no one around, I’d read them the Diamond Sutra of the Tibetan Book of the Dead’s instruction on what is believed to be happening. Sometimes, the family of the dying one would rush in and interrupt me. Sometimes no one came at all. I remember one old Jew who had spent his whole life in the Fairfax garment district. He’d worked hard his whole life, but he’d still ended up at Cedars Sinai in a private room, listening to me. His body was frail, but his eyes were still sharp, penetrating. I couldn’t get him to listen. 

“No one’s minding the store,” he’d tell me. “It’s going to be a disaster. I should have gotten it all in order before this happened. I should have taken care of my family.”

“Take it easy,” I told him. “Your body is sick.” What I meant was that your body is dying, but you don’t talk like that because it’s a shame to die and the dying find it shameful. I learned that much. 

Tubes were everywhere and you could feel every breath he took. Nurses floated in and out of the room like ghosts, stopping long enough to check his vitals and roll their eyes at his pointless fight. He had a heart condition. His blood pressure was dropping. His face shriveled away as the death mask started to calcify. I sat there waiting for the fight.

But the fight never came. His face broke into a smile. The death mask dropped away completely and I saw all of these lines on his face came from a lifetime of smiling.   

“They’ll only wipe my ass one more time,” he said. He was laughing. His laugh like a little boy’s. 

Then he died. 

How the hell did he do that?  I wondered. Die laughing?

I didn’t read him the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He wrote it. 

“SU-JA”  |  The Story of Dae Soeng Sunim  |  PART 1  |   Haeng-Ja Training
by Dae Soeng Sunim & Vincent Haycock (photo)

Day 1. Arriving at Haeinsa is like stepping back in time.  The temple is over a thousand years old, its beautifully carved, and the hand-painted buildings have such exquisite detail that the effect is almost hypnotic. The entire building is representative of life itself, layer upon layer of meaning in the symbolism. Fish and sea creatures in the lower areas, animals and plants in the middle, and birds, dragons and celestial beings circling the rim of the roof, creating the effect that the building is in complete harmony with its environment. Every entrance also has meaning; the center doors for the older, more respected monks, the side doors for the monks in training, and the doors on the opposing sides of the building for the laity. 

I stepped off the bus and followed the other monks past endless corridors separating the different buildings with walls and gates.  The smell of clay and earth being emitted from the crumbling, earthen walls was having an otherworldly effect on my mind; a fresh, exciting adventure was unfolding.  We all had to pass through these gates that gradually became smaller and smaller; once I cracked my head on the door-head because it was so low. A monk started laughing and explained they are designed that way, so that you must lower your head and humble yourself before entering the temple. What a difference from the West, where doors and gates are made in grand architectural styles, to enhance ones ego and pride.  

Water was everywhere; small canals made of stone, bamboo pipes, stone carved turtles, all directing water through an elaborate system, to deliver drinking water stored in massive stone cauldrons.  Wooden ladles were available to sip the water; drinking out of a large pool of water was even more refreshing than drinking from a typical water fountain.  Drinking from public fountains felt extravagant; but this massive temple was not designed for material profit, but instead for human growth. For over a thousand years this temple had survived through wars, foreign occupation, and governmental changes.

This temple was built for living together, I had never seen such efficiency; completely empty rooms, in a few minutes the closets would open, and a hundred and thirty men would be ready for bed, study, exercise, or meals. As we filed into the registration room, there were older monks watching the novices line up to be signed in.  A swift kick in the butt was my welcome, as if to say “This is the only life to lead,” and “Where have you been,” the warmest kick in the ass I ever had.  I felt at home, at last a training program with a sense of humor. We sat in line for what seemed like hours, as one by one we were interviewed by the Haeng-Ja training teachers.  We were all dressed in our dirt brown clothes, the same clothes we had worn for the past six months to a year during the trial period at our respective temples, working long hours in the kitchen and never saying “No” to anyone.  Head bowed, never looking anyone in the eye, except when all the Haeng-Jas were together, alone in their rooms. 

When it was my turn, I made my way up to the training teachers desk; he took all my papers from my shaking hands, smiled and asked me in Korean where I was from.  I told him “America,” and he smiled again noting that my Korean was obviously very poor.  He slowly asked again where I was from.  I paid careful attention to the sentence, and realized shamefully he had been asking about where I was from in Korea.   “Hwagyesa, Suyuri , Seoul,”  I proclaimed with my best pronunciation, eyes forward, back straight,  “Sir, yes sir!” in Korean.  He couldn’t hold back his laughter.  Looking at me, like a father looks at his son he asked me my name.  “Dae Soeng, my name is Dae Soeng (Dae Soeng jay irumun Dae Soeng),” I said.  Nodding, he asked which “Soeng” it was.  I felt as if he was asking the answer to a quantum physics question.  My facial expression must have said it all, he pushed a piece of paper towards me and asked me to write my name.  I started to write it in Korean, but he stopped me.  “Chinese characters, write it in Chinese characters,” he said.  It wasn’t enough that I had practiced writing my name in Korean for a week, now he wanted it in Chinese.  I felt the snickering from behind me, Korean high school students know about 3000 Chinese characters by the time they graduate.  He wrote down four characters, apparently all pronounced “Soeng,” all with completely different meanings. 

I just looked at him like I had no idea.  The supervisor monk came by to check on what was holding up the process.  After explaining the problem to the monk, he smiled and just pointed to one of the characters, and my name was decided.  Laughing and repeating, “Good name, good name,” I could hear snickering coming from the monks waiting in line behind me. I knew this was a big deal; this name was my new name, it will be my name until I die. The name that was given to me was “Great nature,” it can also mean “Great sex,” or “Great heart.” When I returned to see my teacher he was surprised at the name on my graduation certificate. Originally, it should have been “Great star” but in true monks fashion he shrugged his shoulders and said “Great nature is good.”  Just a footnote, my family name is Haycock, and I had to endure years of harassment, listening to calls of “Hay…….cock” from across the school playground. Now I will probably have to endure the same, with the “Great sex” jokes in a celibate monastic community.  

Registration lasted until late in the afternoon, an exhausting experience of sitting in lines on the floor, a prelude to what the next three weeks would be like.  We carried our traditional monks’ backpacks, laundry bags with extra long slings, which were inspected for any contraband. A mountain of candy and cookies where taken from the 150 bags.  I hadn’t even thought about food while packing my bag, the monks must have had information about the diet that was to come. We were served only two meals a day, nothing but rice and soup.  I had no idea how unsatisfying eating could be. 

Every temple in Korea sends its Haeng-Jas to the training course in order to become novice monks.  Like countries at the Olympics, I noticed how well equipped some of the group were, eating bowls made out of fine ceramics, perfect Haeng-Ja robes, clothes that were originally supposed to be taken from corpses. Some looked as if Armani had designed them, others were proud to be wearing carefully patched, tattered clothes. Upon closer inspection, it was clear they had been made to look that way.  The one thing we all had in common with all these different looks, was that none of them were our individual ideas.  The temple abbot chooses how his team looks; rich temples, poor temples, traditional temples, and famous temples, it’s really a show.  My temple had given little or no support, I had found my Haeng-Ja clothes in a closet, a mismatched pair of paints and top.  They bought me the cheapest possible set of novice monks clothes to wear after I graduated from the training program, a polyester long robe, nothing compared to the fine, hand-woven cotton robes some of the other temples had provided . 

There were three of us from Hwagyesa, two Hungarian monks and myself.  Because our Korean was poor, they put us at the end of they line, my number was 139 out of 151.  These numbers were written on our shoes, because when you have 151 monks living in the same room, all with the same rubber shoes, you’ve got to know which shoes are yours.  My shoes were the largest they had, but they were still about two sizes too small for my feet.  I tried to convince them that I should be allowed to wear the Nikes I had come with, but was told it was impossible.  It was like having to wear my sister’s shoes.

While listening to a two hour welcoming speech which I didn’t understand at all, I turned to my Korean monk friend sitting next to me, who spoke a little English.  And he summed it all up with “Do your best.”  We weren’t allowed to talk to each other during the lectures. By this time it was getting late, I really wanted to sleep- I had been up since three o’clock!   But the best was yet to come; we were spread out, to give a little space between us, the chukbi (a wooden stick that is split) was hit, and down everyone went, head to the floor, and up again in the fastest prostrations I had ever done.  All in unison, at the top of our lungs, we chanted the Buddha’s name “Sokamonibul!”, “Whack!” goes the chukpi, and down we all go again.  I’m thinking, “Three bows, 108 bows ,” but we stopped at 500.   During that time I seriously thought I wouldn’t make it, I was sweating until all my clothes were soaking wet, it soaked my cushion.  The teachers even opened up the doors near me, out of compassion.  When I heard last slap of the chukpi , I thought to myself “I made it, I didn’t give up, I did every bow.”  The head teacher came over smiling and gave me the “good job” nod.  The closets opened up, and out came the thin pads and blankets we would sleep on.  I tried to go to the bathroom for a piss, but with five urinals and 150 monks, I thought I’d just wait till tomorrow.   A fatal mistake during the night; with 150 monks in the same room, I could not move at all, being inches from the next monk, no doors seemed to be open, wall to wall bodies, and a bladder that was going to burst, I pissed in the towel that had been given to me, rolled it up, and used it for a pillow. The next morning when the lights came on I bolted to the bathroom, which was easy to do because I hadn’t slept a wink all night.  

DAY 2

While I was washing out my towel, I didn’t realize how useful a wet towel was going to be.  Coming back from the shower room everyone was brushing their teeth outside by the fountain, in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded on each side by buildings.  We were all staying in the middle building, which was about 100 feet long and 40 feet wide. The two side buildings where used as sleeping quarters for the teacher monks.  The cool fresh air, the freezing water in the stone basin, and the dozens of bald headed monks all dressed the same, silently getting ready for the day, was encouraging. 

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall… . This fall I think you’re riding for-it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started”

Quote: JD SALINGER
Photo: Vincent Haycock, Christmas in Paradise.