Everyone has weaknesses..
In the past, Venerable Beobjeong, after becoming a monk,
said that the first thing one must be wary of is family..that is, the affection between blood relatives..
Since he had given up all his possessions, all that remained was blood ties,
and if one is drawn in by that affection, one cannot abandon what we call weaknesses, or so it seems he thought..
For a wealthy person, their greatest weakness might be money itself..
I saw it in a news story before,
It seems he was a successful fund manager..
He was living in a luxury apartment in a thriving neighborhood in Seoul,
But it seems he failed at his investments somehow..
So..
He killed his wife and family and then committed suicide..
When I saw that news, I felt it was truly absurd..what I thought was,
Though he had failed at investing and lost money,
he still owned a reasonably nice apartment worth hundreds of millions of won,
and since he was in his 40s at the time..
I thought he had enough time to make a comeback..
But it seems his thinking was different..
It seems that to him, an apartment worth hundreds of millions of won was not a large sum..
Since he had lost far more money than that which he previously possessed,
it's said that he suffered from relative deprivation..
He had had an enormous amount of money..
Even now, in my view, he had enough money to live on,
but because he loved money too much, it seems to have become his greatest weakness..
As the greatest intellectual of the 20th century and with outstanding appearance..
even I, with athleticism that permits no competition,
have a weakness..
What is it..
My children..
If I didn't have that weakness,
I would probably be living a completely different life..
What kind of life would I have been living..?
Perhaps a life of service, or so I think..
There's nothing grand about service..
Just smiling at women..embracing them..
wiping away tears of emotion..
combing tangled, messy hair..
wandering through the world like that, wouldn't I have lived and died..
