“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity which comes alive to dirty heaven and earth [by] thinking of only myself.”
This is #48 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
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46. 세상의 공기를 더럽히며 살아 온 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity which comes alive to dirty the world’s air.”
47. 세상의 물을 더럽히며 살아 온 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity which comes alive to dirty the world’s water.”
48. 나만을 생각하여 하늘과 땅을 더럽히며 살아 온 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this forty-eighth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of all the stupidity which comes alive to dirty heaven and earth [by] thinking of only myself.”
I’m not sure about the “[by] thinking of” in the above. The ending -여 is most likely a simple finite verb ending – normally 하여 is contracted to the extremely common 해, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that in formal discourse (such as Buddhist affirmations?) it stays uncontracted. The real question is, how does such a simple serial verb, tacked onto the front, function semantically? – at the very least, I didn’t really see how it fit in with what follows, syntactically. But the “[by]” is the only interpretation that broadly makes sense, philosophically, to me. So I made it a sort of “adverbial of manner” from a semantic standpoint.
Or maybe I’m thinking too much of only myself?
Lately, here, heaven and earth have seemed mostly dirtied by the vastly huge quantities of rain we’ve been receiving. Over the long, long winter, one always forgets how much rain falls in Korea during the non-winter parts of the year. I mostly associate the deluge-like rainfalls like we had yesterday with high summer – but I guess the monsoons are starting early this year.
