Ecological Nirvana and the Agency of the Non-Human: A Material Ecocritical Reading of Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s Zen Sijo

Abstract

In the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis necessitates a radical repositioning of the human-nature relationship. This paper examines the sijo poetry in Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s For Nirvana through an interdisciplinary framework bridging Zen philosophy with material ecocriticism. The study elucidates how Musan deconstructs anthropocentric exceptionalism by restoring agency to the non-human world. Textual analysis reveals three arguments. First, elemental forces like wind and waves are subjectified as primordial teachers through mujō-seppō (non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma), dismantling sovereign human scriptural authority. Second, visceral encounters with animals and insects critique logocentric domination, proposing “epistemological silence” and “radical humility” as alternative eco-politics. Finally, bodily decay and trans-corporeal porosity are reframed as generative pathways toward a radical “ecological Nirvana”—a physical matrix of cyclical renewal. By synthesizing Jane Bennett’s vital materialism with Dōgen’s Zen vision of “walking mountains”, this study deploys a Zen materialism lens that enriches Western theory with the Buddhist soteriology of compassion (karuna). Ultimately, Musan reconfigures Nirvana not as an escapist transcendence, but as a profound somatic descent into the material mesh, where ultimate spiritual realization lies in the ego’s total dissolution into the “walking, talking minerals” of a sacred, suffering ecosystem.

1. Introduction

The twenty-first century is confronted with a haunting geo-spiritual paradox known as the Anthropocene. This era is defined not only by human activity becoming a dominant geological force—permanently altering global ecological and climatic systems (Crutzen 2002)—but also by a profound ontological rupture between humanity and the non-human world. At the root of this crisis lies more than just the over-exploitation of physical resources; it is deeply embedded in the structures of anthropocentrism and the hegemony of logocentrism. In the paradigm of logocentrism, Western rationalist culture has established a monopoly on language and intellect for humanity, effectively “silencing” nature and stripping natural entities of their subjective agency (Manes 1996, pp. 15–16). Consequently, modern humans are besieged within a world of signs and texts, losing the capacity to listen to “non-verbal voices”—the vibrant currents of truth flowing from the wilderness. It is within this context of attempting to subjugate nature through both technology and discourse that the poetry collection For Nirvana by Zen Master Musan Cho Oh-hyun emerges as a profound religious-ecological reflection. Through the metaphor of “watching the moon in the water” rather than “scooping it out” (Cho 2016, p. xi), Musan declares the futility of possessive ambition while affirming the absolute autonomy of the natural world against any human effort of definition.

Born in 1932 in Miryang, Zen Master Musan Cho Oh-hyun (1932–2018) entered the Buddhist monastic life as a novice at the tender age of seven, spending over seven decades in mountain retreats and eventually serving as the josil (祖室, spiritual master) of Shinheungsa and Baekdamsa temples at Mt. Seoraksan. Rooted in the lineage of the Mt. Gaji school of Korean Zen, Musan’s life was a testament to radical immanence, keeping vigil over the sacred valleys that once inspired the legendary poet-monk Manhae Han Yongun. His entry into the Korean literary scene marked a revolutionary departure from monastic traditions; while historical Joseon monks wrote Zen verses exclusively in classical Chinese, Musan fatefully adopted the vernacular sijo form, treating this strict syllabic structure as a medium for Zen hwadu1 (話頭) practice. He pioneered a dynamic narrative form—often characterized by a storytelling tone (iagijo)—that interweaves the raw, living speech of everyday blacksmiths and woodcutters with the deep structures of Buddhist ontology (Kwon 2016, p. xvi). Furthermore, as presented at the International Buddhist Conference on United Nations Day of Vesak, domestic Korean scholarship underscores the engaged nature of Musan’s poetic architecture; notably, Lee (2014) argues that Musan’s contemporary re-interpretation of the traditional Ten Ox-Herding Pictures functions as a vehicle for “social awakening”, steering Zen practice away from isolated asceticism toward an active, collective healing of the world. This poetic mastery and socio-spiritual engagement gained national reverence when his collection Distant Holy Man won the prestigious Jeong Jiyong Literature Prize in 2007. This domestic acclaim expanded internationally with the publication of For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems by Columbia University Press in 2016. Notably, this collection incorporates Musan’s contemporary re-interpretation of the traditional Ten Ox-Herding Gathas, a foundational Zen allegorical sequence mapping the stages of enlightenment and subsequent social return. Crucially, the final stage (the 10th poem) is explicitly translated in the collection as “Return to Society”, establishing a textually grounded framework for active worldly engagement. Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl through a methodology akin to meditative scanning, the collection successfully projected Musan’s eco-philosophy—characterized by muae (non-obstruction) and tongdal (interpenetration)—onto the global academic stage, inspiring symposia at major institutions like Harvard and UC Berkeley. Through For Nirvana, Musan’s verse proved that a deeply localized Korean poetic form could serve as a universal vehicle for eco-ontological reclamation.

While previous scholarship has focused primarily on the polyphony and the structure of “story sijo” (saseol sijo) as a means of democratizing social voices, this study proposes a further step. We argue that this structure serves as an expanded ecological dialogic space where the power of speech is granted to “non-human” entities. This is not merely a literary innovation but a practical application of the Zen philosophy of “non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma” (無情說法, mujō-seppō)2—an epistemological shift affirming that all inanimate things, from wind and waves to pebbles, possess the inherent capacity to articulate the truth. By elevating the landscape to a dharmic interlocutor, Musan’s sijo transcends mere representation, suggesting that enlightenment is found not in transcendence, but in a localized, ecological Nirvana.

The central premise of this paper is that Musan’s poetry executes a “double deconstruction” of the anthropocentric paradigm. First, in its negative dimension, Musan deconstructs the authority of textual knowledge by exposing the impotence of language in the face of living reality. By allowing the “silence” of all things to invalidate sacred scriptures—a manifestation of mujō-seppō (non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma)—he directly critiques logocentrism and establishes a new ecological politics of silence. Second, in its constructive dimension, the collection re-establishes the subjectivity of nature through the lens of interbeing3. Nature is no longer an aesthetic backdrop but a suite of subjects possessing material agency4. Notably, by sanctifying decay as an integral part of the cycle of existence, Musan transforms the concept of liberation: it is no longer a transcendent escape into an abstract void, but a profound material descent—a radical dissolution of the arrogant ego into the fertile soil of the global ecosystem. This study defines this state as “ecological Nirvana”, where spiritual awakening is inextricably bound to material interconnectedness.

This article is structured as follows: Section 2 establishes a multi-layered theoretical framework, proposing a Zen materialism lens that synthesizes the Zen doctrine of “non-reliance on words” (不立文字, bul-lip-mun-ja) with Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” and Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality”. Section 3 performs a textual analysis of Musan’s sijo, focusing on the material agency of elemental forces and animals as autonomous subjects. Section 4 discusses the synthesis of ecological Nirvana, where the aesthetics of decay and trans-corporeality lead to a biocentric redefinition of enlightenment as an immersion into the “mesh”. This section further explores the ethical implications of radical humility in the Anthropocene. Finally, Section 5 offers concluding remarks on how Musan’s “Zen materialism” provides a transformative manifesto for contemporary spiritual ecology.

2. Theoretical Framework: Zen Epistemology, Material Ecocriticism, and Sijo Poetics

To examine the ecological depth of Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s sijo, this study establishes a tripartite theoretical framework that synthesizes ancient East Asian wisdom with contemporary Western environmental philosophy. Through the convergence of these traditions, we introduce a Zen materialism lens—a synthetic approach designed to decode the path toward what this paper identifies as ecological Nirvana.

The primary material for this analysis is the poetry collection For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems by Musan Cho Oh-hyun, specifically the English edition translated by Fenkl (2016). This collection, comprising 108 sijo poems, functions as a sophisticated “textual ecosystem” where each verse corresponds to the traditional Buddhist 108 defilements (kleshas), reinterpreting them as sites of material and spiritual immersion. By treating this collection as a primary ecological dataset, this study investigates how Musan’s work serves as a seminal synthesis of Seon (Zen) insight and radical environmental consciousness, providing a unique site for investigating the intersection of Eastern spirituality and contemporary environmental humanities.

2.1. Zen Epistemology: From Interbeing to the Preaching of the Non-Sentient

While conventional ecocriticism often relies on secular ethics, this study argues that Musan’s work necessitates a spiritual-ecological framework that transcends the human-nature binary through the specific relational insight of East Asian Zen. To decode the profound ontological layers governing the relationship between humanity and the cosmos in Cho Oh-hyun’s poetics, this study employs three core theoretical pillars: the principle of interbeing, the doctrine of inanimate Buddha-nature (mujo-busshō), and the aesthetics of sacred decay.

First, the paradigm of interbeing and Indra’s net. The foundational premise of this study rests on the principle of interbeing—a term popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh to modernize the doctrines of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and Emptiness (śūnyatā). This principle asserts that no entity possesses an independent, isolated self; rather, “this is because that is”. As Thich Nhat Hanh elucidates, the human body is a “formation” composed entirely of non-human elements—from the minerals forged in far-off supernovas to the sunlight and soil (Nhat Hanh 2013, p. 13). This perspective suggests that humanity is not merely a resident of the Earth but is fundamentally constituted by it, echoing the materialist view that our very cells are “a living, breathing manifestation of this beautiful and generous planet”. This perspective finds a profound metaphysical parallel in the metaphor of Indra’s net—prominent in the Avatamsaka Sutra—where the universe is envisioned as an infinite cosmic web of jewels, each reflecting the light of all others. By applying this metaphor to environmental philosophy, we can move beyond mere interaction to recognize a decentralized non-human agency: “the wild” is not a separate place for humans to visit but “home”—the primordial state of reality in which humanity is an inseparable link (Snyder 1990, pp. 8, 13). As Snyder defines it, wild entities are “free agents” living within their own natural systems (Snyder 1990, p. 10). Snyder further argues that “our bodies are wild”, functioning as self-regulating systems that do not require the intercession of conscious intellect (Snyder 1990, p. 16). This materialist view aligns with Musan’s Zen sijo, where the human subject is often reduced to its biological essence—breathing, decaying, and interacting with the environment. Moreover, Snyder suggests that language itself is not a human invention but an extension of natural processes, emerging from “the wind in the pine needles” and the movement of clouds (Snyder 1990, p. 17). By integrating these insights, we can see Musan’s critique of logocentrism not as a rejection of meaning, but as a return to the ‘wild power’ of unmediated reality. This paradigm of total interconnectedness provides the essential basis for analyzing the ecological Nirvana in Musan’s poetry, where the “I” is not lost, but rightfully dissolved into the vibrant agency of the wind and waves.

Second, the spiritual agency of inanimate entities and “total existence”. Building upon this inter-relational web, the second pillar grants specific spiritual agency to non-human nodes through the radical non-duality of Zen Master Dōgen. Departing from the traditional Buddhist view that enlightenment is reserved for sentient beings, Dōgen established an ontological breakthrough by equating Buddha-nature with “total existence” (Shitsuyū/悉有). In his fascicle “Buddha-nature” (Busshō), by critiquing the Senika view—which dualistically separates an eternal soul from a decaying body—Dōgen asserts that “the buddha-nature is always total existence, for total existence is the buddha-nature“ (Dōgen 2008, vol. 2, p. 6). This “total existence” (shitsuyū) is not an abstract spiritual essence but is manifested in the concrete, material world: in seeds, flowers, and fruits, which “all be the buddha-nature that is born with them [and] dies with them” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 2, p. 6). In this light, the “inanimate” nodes in Indra’s net are not passive matter but vibrant participants in the sacred totality of the Dharma. This vibrant materiality leads to the radical notion of “the non-sentient preach the dharma” (mujō-seppō/無情說法). Dōgen argues that the preaching of the Dharma is neither limited to the sentient nor confined to human vocalizations; rather, “grass, trees, tiles, and pebbles” are constantly preaching “ardently” and “without interval” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 3, pp. 156–57). He introduces the evocative concept of “hearing sound through the eyes” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 3, pp. 164–65), suggesting that the truth of the non-sentient world is perceived not through intellectual ears but through a holistic, physical engagement with reality. Cho Oh-hyun’s poetry fully inherits this lineage by repositioning the wind and waves as ancestral teachers engaged in this “non-human sermon”. In the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” (Sansuikyō), Dōgen’s famous declaration that “blue mountains are constantly walking” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217) historically provoked intense philosophical debates, with critics frequently dismissing it as either a radical rhetorical eccentricity or a problematic, anthropomorphic distortion of landscape. However, through the lens of Zen materialism, this study reclaims Dōgen’s premise not as a literary metaphor, but as a profound formulation of kinetic materiality and “existence-time” (uji). The walking of the mountain is not a human-like locomotion; rather, it is the active, perpetual performance of geological shifts, ecological succession, and the flow of cosmic energy that constitutes the mountain’s being. Musan’s sijo fully inherits and operationalizes this controversial lineage. By repositioning the wind, waves, and stones as ancestral teachers engaged in a “non-human sermon”, Musan’s poetry transcends mere representation, validating Dōgen’s ontological breakthrough. The landscape in For Nirvana is recognized as an active, moving preacher rather than a static, silent backdrop. By aligning the Dharma with the kinetic energy of the physical landscape, Musan effectively resolves the Dōgenian controversy: he proves that nature’s speech and movement do not require human validation, but are the self-evident expressions of a vibrant, non-human world. Consequently, by acknowledging nature as a subject with its own agency, Musan provides a direct philosophical critique of logocentrism: when the myriad things are preaching the truth through their own self-presence, human scriptures and rational discourse become redundant and impotent.

Third, impermanence and the aesthetics of sacred decay. This spiritual agency is further realized through the temporal flow of existence, leading to the third pillar: Impermanence (Anitya), viewed as a generative force. Through the lens of Prajna thought and Dōgen’s concept of “existence-time” (uji), impermanence is reframed as the prerequisite for all transformation. Dōgen radically collapses the distinction between the subject, the object, and time, asserting that “the truth that self is time” is the foundation of reality (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 144). In this vision of being-time, time is not an external container but the very “vigorous activity” of being itself: “The mountains are time, and the seas are time. Without time, the mountains and the seas could not exist” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 148). Consequently, the decay of matter or the aging of the physical body is not viewed as waste or a loss of being, but as the manifestation of “presence… laying bare the substance” of existence-time (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 149). A rotting tree trunk is not merely dying; it is the “passage” (kyōryaku) of spring through itself (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 147), acting as a generative “offering” back into the ecological cycle. The “stooped back” in Cho’s poetry does not evoke the tragedy of senescence but embodies an absolute “emptiness” where the boundaries of the self are dissolved into the temporal flow of the wilderness. The acceptance of dissolution is thus the highest expression of Zen wisdom—an ego-stripping return to the “total existence” that reconfigures the traditional soteriological goal of Buddhism into what we term an ecological Nirvana.

2.2. Material Ecocriticism: Re-Conceptualizing Non-Human Agency

To fully grasp the intervention of this study, it is necessary to position its guiding framework within the broader landscape of ecological theory. Unlike cultural ecocriticism, which primarily interrogates how nature is discursively constructed, represented, and mediated through human language and texts, and deep ecology, which focuses on a spiritual, biocentric equality that still implicitly relies on a preserved, pristine wilderness “out there”, material ecocriticism shifts the analytical focus to the recalcitrant, agentic reality of matter itself. Spearheaded by theorists like Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Timothy Morton, this framework rejects the traditional nature/culture and mind/matter dualisms. Instead, it conceptualizes the world as a dense, non-anthropocentric “mesh” of intra-acting physical bodies, where human flesh, industrial waste, flora, and lithic elements are inextricably entangled. In this view, matter is not a passive canvas for human meaning, but an active participant endowed with “thing-power” and narrative agency.

By adopting this materialist perspective, this paper moves beyond mere thematic readings of nature-as-backdrop. While Buddhist ecocriticism provides the philosophical foundation for the sacredness of all things, Material Ecocriticism offers a contemporary theoretical vocabulary to analyze the active power of these entities within the crisis of the Anthropocene. This approach directly contests what Bennett (Bennett 2010, p. vii) calls the “partition of the sensible”—the long-standing habit of parsing the world into “dull matter” (it, things) and “vibrant life” (us, beings). By dissolving the Cartesian quarantine between the “conscious human subject” and “inert material objects”, Bennett repositions matter as “vibrant matter”—a vital entity that possesses its own efficacy and ontological weight (Bennett 2010, p. viii).

The theoretical cornerstone of this study is the concept of “Thing-power” and “Distributive Agency”. Resonating with Dōgen’s doctrine of “the preaching of the non-sentient” Bennett argues that matter is by no means “passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert” (Bennett 2010, p. vii). On the contrary, it possesses an intrinsic “vibrancy” and functions as an “actant”5—a source of action that has the “efficacy to make a difference, produce effects, [and] alter the course of events” (Bennett 2010, p. ix). Crucially, Bennett (Bennett 2010, pp. 23–24) shifts the focus from individual objects to the “agency of assemblages”6—living, throbbing confederations of diverse elements where power is an “emergent property” rather than a capacity localized in any single human or non-human member. In this light, things—whether Dōgen’s “tiles and pebbles” or Bennett’s “debris”—are seen as “vivid entities” that shimmer between junk and live presence, issuing a “call” that exceeds human linguistic representation (Bennett 2010, pp. 4–5). This shift necessitates a critical mode that moves beyond human-centered discourse to recognize what Bennett terms an “onto-story” (Bennett 2010, p. 4): a narrative that acknowledges humans themselves as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11). This strikingly parallels Dōgen’s Zen philosophy in the Sansuikyō, where he asserts that ‘blue mountains are constantly walking’ (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). This study identifies this conceptual resonance as Zen materialism—an analytical lens that does not merely juxtapose Eastern spirituality and Western materialism, but mutually rectifies their respective theoretical limitations. While Bennett’s vital materialism successfully dismantles Cartesian dualism by granting agency to the non-human, it operates within a largely secular, flattened ontology that often struggles to generate a compelling ethical or ultimate commitment. Conversely, Dōgen’s radical immanence provides the missing metaphysical grounding: it re-envisions Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ not simply as autonomous physical forces, but as the active, sacred performance of Buddha-nature itself. By synthesizing these traditions, Zen materialism offers a framework where the non-human is granted not only material efficacy but also spiritual authority, transforming the ecological crisis from a technical-discursive problem into an ontological reclamation of existence. By erasing the hierarchical apex of humanity, this framework allows us to see Musan’s poetry not as a mere human reflection on nature, but as an engagement with a world where every node in the “agentic assemblage” is a vital participant.

Complementing Bennett’s framework is Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality”, which she elaborates through the lens of “material memoirs”. Alaimo posits that the human self is not a closed vessel but an entity woven into a larger fabric of material history and power (Alaimo 2010, p. 86). The boundary between the human body and the natural environment is a “porous membrane” that facilitates a constant exchange between inside and outside through various “fluxes and flows” (Alaimo 2010, pp. 2, 90). This concept provides a modern biological parallel to the Buddhist principle of interbeing and the doctrine of non-self (anātman7): humans exist in a state where “the wild” is not an external place but a flow of atoms and energies through our very cells.

In the material memoir, the question is no longer about the psychological self, but about “the very substance of the self” as a trans-corporeal and always emergent entity (Alaimo 2010, p. 4). Within this framework, the human is no longer an exceptional observer but a material component circulating within a vast “mesh” of existence, where the “environment” is fundamentally “the very substance of ourselves” (Morton 2010, p. 28; Alaimo 2010, p. 4). Expanding on this decentralized topology, the human functions as a node within what Timothy Morton calls “the mesh”—a vast, interconnected web where there is “no absolute center or edge” (Morton 2010, p. 29). Morton’s framework directly aligns with the Buddhist principle of interbeing, explicitly invoking the metaphor of Indra’s net to describe a “totality” of interconnectedness that is not closed or fixed, but an infinite reflection of all entities within each other (Morton 2010, p. 40). The integration of trans-corporeality with anātman (non-self) conceptualizes a radical ecological ethics: if the human body is a porous membrane in constant material exchange with the environment, the Cartesian illusion of a sovereign, isolated human ego is physically and ontologically untenable. The human is deconstructed not as an independent entity interacting with nature, but as a temporary, localized crystallization of the global ecosystem itself. This “ecological thought” requires a radical shift in perspective: recognizing that because the mesh has no center, the human subject must relinquish its sovereign status and embrace a state of profound interdependence, a biological and soteriological manifestation of anātman.

Applying this integrated lens to For Nirvana allows for a radical re-decoding of Cho Oh-hyun’s imagery. When the poet depicts the wind as “thieves” or the sea as a repository of truth, he is not merely employing anthropomorphism as a decorative literary device, but rather exercising what Jane Bennett describes as the valuable risk of “anthropomorphizing” to “work against anthropocentrism” (Bennett 2010, p. 120). This strategic move serves to counteract human narcissism by striking a chord “between person and thing”, ensuring that the human is “no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment’” (Bennett 2010, p. 120). This poetic strategy aligns Zen wisdom with contemporary materiality, where the wind in Cho’s poetry manifests precisely as a Bennettian actant: a vibrant materiality that, alongside other elements, forms an “agency of the assemblage” (Bennett 2010, p. 24). This force is not a singular, isolated power, but an “emergent property” (Bennett 2010, p. 24) capable of making things happen—a process the collection depicts as a form of world-purification. Furthermore, by viewing Cho’s poetic subjects through Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality”, the distinction between the monk’s body and the mountain air dissolves into a “porous membrane” (Alaimo 2010, p. 2) of shared materiality. Here, the “human” is no longer an exceptional observer but a literal “transit between body and environment” (Alaimo 2010, p. 15). Ultimately, Cho’s verse locates the self within Morton’s “mesh”—an interconnected web with “no absolute center or edge” (Morton 2010, p. 29). By synthesizing these perspectives, the collection forces a retreat from human exceptionalism, inviting us to recognize our existence as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11) and to accept a humble position within the vast, sacred “Indra’s net” of material interactions (Morton 2010, p. 40). This Zen materialist shift is the necessary epistemological step toward experiencing ecological Nirvana.

2.3. Zen Sijo Poetics: From “Non-Reliance on Words” to the “Interpenetrating Moon”

The final pillar of this framework addresses the fundamental paradox of Zen (Seon) Buddhism: the principle of “non-reliance on words and scriptures” (bul-lip-mun-ja/不立文字). How can poetry, an art form constructed of words, convey a truth that resides beyond linguistic signs? In the case of Musan Cho Oh-hyun, literary critic Kwon Youngmin argues that Musan fatefully embraced the sijo form to confront the “hwadu”—the koan-like spiritual problems—of Korean Zen (Kwon 2016, p. xvi). Rather than viewing poetic form as a formal necessity, Musan utilizes sijo as a spiritual technology to deconstruct language, creating a Zen sijo that parallels the speechless speech of enlightenment (Kwon 2016, p. xvi).

In the context of Buddhist ecocriticism, this study argues that Musan’s poetics transforms the negation of scriptures into an affirmation of the language of nature. Kwon notes that for Musan, “human speech and the sounds of nature are precisely the marks that indicate that reality is alive” (Kwon 2016, p. xviii). As human discourse proves restrictive within the Anthropocene, the comingling of human speech with the “vitality” of natural sounds becomes the alternative source of Dharma. This is epitomized in the preface through the metaphor of “watching the moon in the water”. The stranger’s realization—”You can look at the moon in the water but you can never scoop it out”8 (Cho 2016, p. ix)—serves as a critique of the logocentric and anthropocentric impulse to capture and possess reality. The act of “scooping” represents the human desire to categorize, whereas “watching” signifies the Zen attitude of epistemological humility: witnessing nature’s vibrant integrity without the interference of a sovereign subject.

Furthermore, to access the ecological depths of For Nirvana, a mode of reception beyond mere semantics is required: “interpenetration” (tongdal/通達). Heinz Insu Fenkl offers a linguistic exegesis of tongdal as “whole moon” (tong as container, dal as moon), suggesting that the poem acts as a daltong9—a container for a reality where the observer and the observed are no longer separate (Fenkl 2016, p. 116). This poetic journey moves from the initial Zen negation of textual authority (non-reliance on words) toward a radical ecological intimacy. This is captured in the image of the “interpenetrating moon”: a reality that cannot be “scooped” or possessed by human logic, but must be experienced through Tongdal—where the moonlight of the material world and the porous mind of the practitioner become one non-dual fabric (the mesh).

Within the context of Material Ecocriticism, this study asserts that tongdal serves as the spiritual and existential equivalent of Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality”.10 Crucially, tongdal acts as the experiential mechanism that operationalizes Western eco-theory into a concrete spiritual practice. While trans-corporeality provides a spatial description of material flows, Musan’s Zen sijo utilizes the aesthetic technology of the gong’an (koan) to force the reader into an immediate, non-conceptual experience of this flow. Just as Alaimo envisions the body as a “porous membrane” in constant exchange with its environment (Alaimo 2010, p. 2), Musan’s poetics—grounded in the principles of tongdal and “non-obstruction” (muae/無礙) (Fenkl 2016, p. 116)—illustrates a state where the reader’s consciousness is literally penetrated by the “moonlight” of the material world. To read a poem about the wind is not to decode a linguistic sign, but to enter a trans-corporeal event where the “wind-ness” permeates the reader’s psyche, mirroring the flow of atoms and energies through the cells in Alaimo’s material self.

Ultimately, Musan’s Zen sijo constitutes a hybrid poetic space. It employs the Gong’an technique to dismantle human logocentrism while utilizing what Kwon calls “story sijo” (iagijo) to interweave the voices of monks, woodcutters, and the sounds of nature into a single, dynamic narrative (Kwon 2016, p. xvii). This tripartite theoretical framework—integrating Buddhist philosophy, material agency, and Zen poetics—provides the necessary tools to analyze how For Nirvana reclaims nature’s subjectivity. By employing the lens of Zen materialism, we can move beyond the limits of human-centered language to finally grasp Musan’s vision of ecological Nirvana: a state reached when human words halt at the water’s edge to yield to the silent, interpenetrated “mesh” of existence.11

3. Analysis: Material Agency and the Deconstruction of Anthropocentrism

Moving from the theoretical frameworks of Zen epistemology and Material Ecocriticism to the lived reality of Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s poetry requires a fundamental shift in literary reception. If, as established in the previous section, matter is “vibrant” and the non-sentient can “preach”, then the sijo in For Nirvana must be read not as a collection of decorative metaphors for human enlightenment, but as a site of direct ontological encounter. By employing the lens of Zen materialism, this section analyzes how Musan’s poetic language functions as a “spiritual technology” to dismantle the anthropocentric ego. By granting a “wilderness voice” to the elements and the non-human entities—reconceptualizing them as Bennettian actants rather than passive backdrops—Musan executes a radical deconstruction of logocentrism—the human obsession with capturing reality through rigid linguistic signs. The following analysis traces this process of de-centering the human, demonstrating how the collection systematically strips the human subject of its exceptionalism. This deconstructive journey ultimately reveals a world where the Dharma is written in the very materiality of the wind, the sea, and the non-human other, mapping the experiential path toward an ecological Nirvana within the interconnected mesh of existence.

3.1. The Subjectification of Elements: The Agency of Wind and Waves

The initial and most decisive step in deconstructing the “human-centered” paradigm within For Nirvana is the radical repositioning of material elements. Instead of treating nature as a static “background” for human emotion, Musan Cho Oh-hyun executes an ontological reversal: restoring material agency and subjectivity to the physical world. Through the lens of material ecocriticism, the wind and waves in this sijo collection are no longer inanimate meteorological phenomena; they are transformed into vibrant actants possessing the spiritual power of mujō-seppō (the preaching of the non-).

3.1.1. The Wind as a Purifying Actant: Kinetic mujō-seppō and Material Agency

In Musan’s poetic ecosystem, the wind is far from a romanticized object of aesthetic contemplation; instead, it functions as a forceful actant that epitomizes Jane Bennett’s concept of “material agency” (Bennett 2010, p. xiii). The agentic significance of the wind is established at the threshold of the text through Musan’s strategic use of the verb “said” in his titles. By titling his poems “What the Northeast Wind Said” or “What the Southeast Wind Said”, Musan performs an “ontological coup”: he elevates the wind from a mindless meteorological phenomenon to a Dharma-subject capable of articulation. This is a literal manifestation of mujō-seppō, where the speech of the wind is not uttered through human phonemes but through the kinetic efficacy of its movement.

In the poem “What the Northeast Wind Said 1”, Musan employs the striking imagery of “mounted bandits” to describe the wind’s arrival. This metaphor effectively shatters the conventional passivity attributed to nature, portraying the wind as a vibrant entity that possesses the efficacy and overwhelming force of a conquering army:

They’re hauling it away,

  they’re hauling it away

The ocean’s untimely red tide,

  it’s bubbling froth,

The mounted bandits of this winter night

  are hauling it all away

(Cho 2016, p. 12)

Crucially, Musan’s use of the “mounted bandits” imagery represents a strategic aesthetic deployment of what Bennett calls anthropomorphizing against anthropocentrism (Bennett 2010, p. 120). Rather than reducing the wind to a mere extension of human psychology or a passive literary device, this vivid trope emphasizes the wind’s radical exteriority and non-human alterity. The dominant action of “hauling it away”—specifically targeting ecological pollutants such as the “untimely red tide” and “bubbling froth”—affirms the autonomous self-regulation of the environment. Here, the wind’s sermon is a material one; it articulates the truth of purification without the intervention of human will, scientific technology, or textual scripture. As a vibrant matter, the wind reconstructs the ontological order, forcing humanity into a state of epistemological silence. By cleaning the “froth” of the world, the wind acts as a Bennettian actant that “alters the course of events” (Bennett 2010, p. ix), proving that the most profound Dharma is not found in human discourse, but in the non-linguistic, kinetic efficacy of the elements.

Furthermore, Musan blurs the traditional boundary between the sentient and the non-sentient by portraying the wind as a subject of profound affect. In “What the Southeast Wind Said”, the wind is depicted as crying out in pain against the “suffocation” caused by a “parched sky”.

Someone is keeping a cocky silence,

and this suffocation, shaking the parched sky, this whole body,

is disrupting the depth of my mid-day nap.

(Cho 2016, p. 33)

By granting the wind the need for a “mid-day nap” and the capacity to experience suffering (dukkha), Musan makes a powerful ontological assertion: the wind is no longer an object serving human comfort but a “being” that feels the ruptures of the ecosystem within its own “body”. This reversal compels the reader to practice epistemological humility, confronting the elements not as resources, but as equal, vibrant subjects.

The core of this ecological thought reaches its zenith in “The Wind that Once Wept in the Pine Grove”, where the dualistic separation between the preacher and the congregation is dissolved. Viewed through the lenses of Buddhist interbeing and Western trans-corporeality, the wind and the forest define one another as an “agentic assemblage”:

The wind that once wept in the pine grove

fell asleep—because it was a pine grove

and the wind that once rushed through the great forest

breathed softly—because it was the great forest

that moon, too, passing through the empty sky,

is honest—it cannot be anything but bright.

(Cho 2016, p. 89)

The poetic assertion that the wind wept “because it was a pine grove” suggests that the Wind’s states are not internal psychological whims, but an “emergent property” (Bennett 2010, p. 24) of the material space it inhabits. Within this framework, there is no abstract, essentialized “wind” independent of the pines; instead, they form an inseparable material coalition where the wind’s breath is a trans-corporeal exchange with the forest’s physical body. This fluid co-dependence directly instantiates the Buddhist doctrines of Emptiness (śūnyatā) and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), providing a profound metaphysical grounding that Western vital materialism often lacks. By demonstrating that the entity we call “wind” has no autonomous ego but is a temporary crystallization of its encounters with the grove, Musan maps Bennett’s political ecology onto the soteriological realization of non-self. Through this non-dual integration, Musan provides a radical critique of logocentrism: the truth of existence lies not in isolated human definitions or rigid taxonomic categories, but in the vibrant, interconnected materiality of the mesh (Morton 2010, p. 29). The wind’s “speech”, ultimately, is the sound of the wilderness preaching its own interdependent survival—a sacred sermon that functions entirely beyond the reach of human logocentric capture. In other words, for Musan, nature is never an inert passive object to be interpreted by human consciousness; rather, it is a dynamic, self-interpreting subject. The wind does not articulate through human phonemes, but its absolute presence, kinetic movement, and material interactions already constitute a radical form of sermon. At this juncture, Musan’s poetics deeply converges with Dōgen’s radical ontology: ultimate truth resides not in human words about the world, but in the world itself actively uttering its own presence.

3.1.2. The Ocean as a Living Sutra: The Displacement of the Logos

If the imagery of the wind represents the cleansing action of nature, the waves and the sea in For Nirvana serve as the most radical deconstructive agents against human linguistic and epistemic systems. Here, Musan executes an “ontological coup”, inverting the traditional hierarchy between culture (logos) and nature (physis), and asserting that in the face of the ocean’s primordial presence, the entirety of human textual heritage dissolves. To fully grasp this deconstructive power, one must analyze the poem “waves” through the formal constraints of the sijo—a tripartite rhythmic structure consisting of the cho-jang (opening), jung-jang (development), and jong-jang (conclusion). Musan utilizes this form not merely as a vessel for thought, but as an aesthetic and spiritual mechanism to perform a Zen “twist”—a sudden subversion of human reason:

Reading the sutras deep into the night,

I look up at the dark night sky, (cho-jang)

Listen, all alone, to the cry

of the distant sea—(jung-jang)

The 1000 sutras, the 10,000 treatises,

all just waves blown in the wind. (jong-jang)

(Cho 2016, p. 30)

In the cho-jang, the poet establishes a traditional scene of Buddhist cultivation. The act of “reading” represents the pinnacle of human intellectual and religious effort—an attempt to grasp ultimate reality through the mediation of the written word. However, this logocentric labor is interrupted in the jung-jang, as the focus shifts from the internal “text” to the external “texture” of the world: the “cry of the distant sea”. This line introduces a sensory tension, a competing authority to the silent scripture. The true epistemological shift occurs in the jong-jang, the final line reserved for an epiphany. Here, Musan delivers a “Zen shout” (katsu) that collapses the preceding hierarchy. The “ten thousand sutras”—the accumulated weight of human logos—are suddenly liquidated into “waves blown in the wind”.

From the perspective of material ecocriticism, this is not merely a metaphor; it is a recognition of the thing-power (Bennett 2010, p. 13) of the ocean. The material reality of the ocean does not merely supplement the text; it consumes it. This structural collapse in the jong-jang establishes a profound intertextual resonance with the “Sea Tide Sound” (海潮音, haichao-yin) described in the “Universal Gate” chapter of the Lotus Sutra: “Wonderful Voice, Perceiver of the World’s Sounds, / Brahma Voice, Sea Tide Voice, / Surpassing those sounds of the world, / Therefore one should constantly keep them in mind” (Watson 1993, p. 306). In the Buddhist tradition, the “Sea Tide Sound” symbolizes the perfect Dharma-voice: powerful, rhythmic, and unfailing—much like the physical tide—capable of overwhelming the cacophony of the mundane world.

However, Musan identifies a historical irony: practitioners have long confined the “Sea Tide Sound” to the printed word, intellectualizing the tide while remaining deaf to its physical efficacy. By equating scriptures to “waves blown in the wind”, Musan returns the Dharma to its material and ecological base. This echoes Zen Master Dōgen’s articulation in the Sansuikyō: “The mountains and water of the present are the realization of the words of eternal Buddhas” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). Musan demands a retreat from the arrogance of human-centered knowledge in favor of an embodied engagement with the “Great Sutra” of the ocean.

By “closing the book” to “listen to the sea”, the poem becomes an active performance of mujō-seppō. The formal collapse of the sijo mirrors the collapse of the reader’s attachment to anthropocentric textual authority, returning the Dharma to its primordial, vibrant source. Ultimate truth (Nirvana) is thus stripped of its abstract, metaphysical layers and repositioned within the visceral immediacy of the crashing waves. In this ontological return, the traditional semiotic hierarchy is dismantled: the human signifier (the written word) dissolves, yielding entirely to the unmediated presence of the non-human signified (the vibrant, ever-present ocean). This is the ultimate Zen materialist realization—where the wind and waves do not merely represent the Dharma, but are the Dharma in its most untamed, material form.

After negating the supremacy of the text, Musan guides the reader toward ontological reconstruction in the poem “The Sea”:

Clouds blaze open like peonies

   before the bright sun

Waves, time passing, undulate

   in the thunderous wind and rain

And my heart swells

   a wild goose spreads its wings.

(Cho 2016, p. 75)

Here, the dualistic separation between the human observer and the natural object is abolished through a trans-corporeal resonance. As “clouds blaze open like peonies” and waves undulate in “thunderous wind and rain”, the poet notes: “And my heart… a wild goose spreads its wings”. Viewed through Stacy Alaimo’s theory, the poet’s body exhibits what she terms “viscous porosity” (Alaimo 2010, p. 15)—a model of material interaction that emphasizes mediating membranes between the self and the environment. In “The Sea”, the verb “swells” signifies a rhythmic synchronization where the human heart becomes this very membrane, facilitating a “transit between body and environment” (Alaimo 2010, p. 15). This is not a vague fluidity, but a literal “contact zone” (Alaimo 2010, p. 2) where the monk’s somatic body and the “thunderous wind” are “intermeshed” (Alaimo 2010, p. 2).

The verb “swells” describes a material flow where the undulating waves permeate the human heart, mirroring the Zen concept of tongdal (interpenetration). Under this lens, spiritual interpenetration is reframed as a visceral, physical event: the boundaries of the skin soften to allow the kinetic energy of the storm to circulate through the subject’s cells—a somatic manifestation of the mesh (Morton 2010, p. 29). The poem concludes with a radical metamorphosis: the human “I” disappears, and “a wild goose spreads its wings”. Crucially, within a Zen materialist framework, this is not a mere literary simile or a shamanistic fantasy; rather, it represents the trans-corporeal dissolution of the ego into the biological non-human other. By shedding the illusions of anthropocentric sovereignty, the human body is recognized not as an isolated vessel, but as a temporary, porous site within global material flows, validating Alaimo’s assertion that the environment is fundamentally “the very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo 2010, p. 4).

Through the decoding of the wind and the waves, Section 3.1 has elucidated the foundational steps of Musan’s double deconstruction. The material elements in For Nirvana transcend the status of passive objects to emerge as powerful, affective actants: the wind possesses a purifying will and an ecological capacity for suffering (dukkha), while the ocean manifests as the primordial “Sea Tide Sound”—a living truth that human logocentric language fails to simulate. Parallel to this subjectification of nature is a radical de-consecration of textual knowledge. By weighing “ten thousand sutras and treatises” against the “cry of the sea”, Musan effectively dismantles the ivory tower of logocentrism, forcing humanity to acknowledge its existence as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11). This recognition brings the poet into direct alignment with Dōgen’s Zen philosophy in the Sansuikyō, where the ancient master asserts that “blue mountains are constantly walking” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). By synthesizing these two perspectives, Musan proves that the human subject is not an exceptional observer standing outside of nature, but an embodied participant in a world where everything—from the human bone to the distant peak—is in a state of vibrant, sacred movement. Through “The Sea”, Musan completes the return to nature: the human is no longer a detached master but a material component of the ecosystem, beating with the waves and soaring with the migratory birds. This cognitive shift—where the human retreats to listen to the voice of matter and join the walking landscape of the Dharma—prepares the ethical ground for the next stage of interaction. Having established respect for the invisible elements, the following section explores how the poet confronts the visible non-human others: the animal world, where the material agency of “thin bones” delivers the final lesson of awakening.

3.2. Beyond the Logos: The Non-Human Other and the Failure of Language

In the preface to For Nirvana, Musan Cho Oh-hyun delineates the ecological boundary between humanity and nature through a poignant metaphor: “You can look at the moon in the water, but you can never scoop it up”. The anthropocentric impulse to “scoop up” symbolizes the modern desire for possession, cognitive closure and the utilitarian commodification of the natural world. By declaring this act ontologically impossible, the poet establishes an ecological ethics of non-grasping. Nature, and specifically the animal kingdom, exists as an autonomous other—a vibrant reality that humanity can only witness with humility, yet never fully capture through rational intellect, logocentric scriptures or rigid linguistic categorization.

3.2.1. The Ethics of Encounter: Suffering as the Bridge to the Animal Other

Within the framework of anthropocentrism, animals are frequently reduced to mere resources or non-sentient objects, stripped of their subjective depth. However, Musan’s narrative prose, “The Otter and the Hunter”, delivers a devastating blow to this illusion, asserting the role of animals as active actants capable of awakening both Buddha-nature and ecological conscience. To fully grasp this ontological disruption, the narrative must be read in its entirety:

A young hunter caught an otter that had come out to the water’s edge in search of food and he skinned it and strutted home with its pelt, and the next day he noticed that the otter’s bones—which he had thrown away—had left bloody tracks walking off, and so he cautiously followed the trail of blood into a cave, and inside the dark cave he saw the heap of the thin bones that was the mother otter he had skinned and fleshed the day before still alive, and she was embracing her five tiny pups—which had not yet opened their eyes—and they couldn’t see their mother’s condition, and they were mewling for milk, and the hunter was as cruel as a man could be, but upon seeing the mother and her pups he could not help himself, and so he took the place of the mother otter till the pups were grown; he spent three years like that—which felt to him like three kalpas—entirely cutting off the paths of the world and the vagaries of the mind, and the only place someone like him could go after that was to a temple, and the temple refused him because of the gamey odor that exuded from his body, and so he stood in the yard with a brazier of burning charcoal on his head until the crown of his head exploded with a sound like a thunderclap, and only then did the head monk, whose name was Muwoe, heal his wounds with a special mantra, giving him a reason to live and—they say—bestowed upon him the name Hyetong. Of course, all this happened during the reign of King Munmu of Silla.

(Cho 2016, p. 56)

The narrative begins by exposing a typical display of human arrogance: a young hunter who “strutted” home after skinning an otter, a demeanor reflecting a worldview that perceives nature as a consumable trophy. This violent power structure, however, is abruptly dismantled by a profound ontological shock when the hunter witnesses the blood-soaked skeletal remains of the otter crawling back to its den to nurse its young. This haunting survival of the mother otter—reduced to a “heap of thin bones” yet still capable of movement and compassion—provides a literal, poetic incarnation of Jane Bennett’s provocative definition of sentient beings as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11). In the dualistic eyes of the hunter, the bones were initially dull matter to be discarded once the vibrant pelt had been commodified.

However, Musan’s poem reveals the thing-power inherent in these minerals: even as a decimated skeletal ruin, the otter continues to “walk” toward her cubs. This persistence demonstrates that agency is not dependent on the integrity of the flesh, but is an emergent property of the material itself. Much like Dōgen’s walking mountains in the Sansuikyo, the otter’s “walking bones” prove that the Dharma is preached through the relentless, kinetic movement of matter, even in its most shattered and suffering forms. Crucially, Musan expands Western eco-theory here by fusing material agency with the Buddhist concept of compassion (karuna). While Bennett’s vital materialism conceptualizes things as possessing physical power, it often lacks an ethical or affective vector. Musan’s walking bones do not merely exert physical force; they manifest a sacred, visceral sermon of mujō-seppō where the silence of the decimated body resonates more powerfully than any spoken scripture, forcing the human subject into a recognition of shared mineral kinship and ecological vulnerability.

This encounter triggers a radical reversal of positions: the hunter voluntarily relinquishes his status as dominator to become a servant, spending three years caring for the pups in the dark den. Musan notes that this duration “felt to him like three kalpas”12 —a strategic invocation of Buddhist cosmic time that collapses human social temporality in favor of a cosmic scale of suffering and atonement. This total immersion into the life of the animal is underscored by the institutional clergy rejecting the hunter due to the gamey odor emanating from his body. Viewed through the lens of Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010, p. 2), this odor is far more than physical uncleanness; it is material evidence that the ontological boundary between human and animal has been completely breached. The gamey odor proves that the hunter’s atonement is not a detached intellectual regret, but a biological trans-corporeal reality; he literally bears the substance of the slaughtered animal upon his own flesh.

Furthermore, Musan’s inclusion of the temple’s rejection of this gamey odor serves as a trenchant critique of logocentric institutional religion. By policing the boundary between the pure ritual space and the impure odor of the wilderness, the temple exposes its own anthropocentric blindness. Ultimate truth, Musan suggests, does not reside in pristine, text-bound spaces, but in the bleeding, emitting stench of suffering reality. The hunter’s final penance—standing with a brazier on his head until his crown explodes like a thunderclap—symbolizes the violent deconstruction of the ego (anātman). Only through this radical dissolution of the arrogant self can he be renamed Hyetong (慧通, Wisdom-Penetration), a designation that encapsulates the Zen ideal of tongdal (interpenetration). To attain ecological Nirvana, one must shed the artificial purity of civilization and accept a trans-corporeal, somatic integration within the infinite mesh of existence.

3.2.2. Wild Cries as Preaching: The Acoustic Materiality of the Non-Human Voice

If the narrative of the otter serves as a lesson in ecological ethics through the suffering body, Musan’s poetic imagery of birds in For Nirvana opens a different epistemological dimension, challenging human conceptualizations of time, permanence and existence. Musan utilizes animal sounds as a form of apophatic preaching—a non-linguistic language that the human intellect cannot grasp, forcing the logocentric ego to collapse in order to truly listen. In the prose sijo “The Cry of Wild Ducks”, Musan reconstructs a famous Zen kōan to dismantle the rigid boundaries of linear logic. When the disciple Baizhang answers that the ducks have “gone far off”, he represents the pragmatic, finite human gaze—a dualistic worldview that perceives life merely as a series of transient, disconnected phenomena that arise and then vanish into a void. However, Master Mazu’s violent twisting of Baizhang’s nose, followed by the radical question: “You said it’s flown away, but isn’t it still here?” (Cho 2016, p. 55), serves as an epistemological rupture of this narrow empiricism.

From Jane Bennett’s perspective of vital materialism, non-human sounds are not merely ephemeral, subjective events; rather, they are forms of acoustic materiality—material vibrations that possess their own physical efficacy and onto-story (Bennett 2010, p. xiii). Musan extends this materialist framework by invoking the modern oral history of Zen Master Kyongbong, who suggests that the cry of the ducks is “still in the water”. This strategic inclusion functions as a deep ecological manifesto against the reductionist empiricism of modern civilization. As Kyongbong remarks: “The world you see and hear is inexhaustible, but you’ll want to know that the world you can’t see or hear is infinite, too… Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.” (Cho 2016, p. 55). Under a Zen materialist lens, the cry of the duck operates as an actant that persists within the mesh of the environment; it is a material energy wave that continues to ripple through molecular structure of the water long after the biological source has departed. Ecological respect begins with acknowledging these invisible dimensions—where the non-human voice continues to preach within the physical memory of the landscape, directly challenging the arrogance of a human mind that only validates in what it can immediately measure and exploit.

This principle of ecological resonance is further deepened in “The Seagulls & The East Sea”, where Musan dissolves the boundary between subject and environment through the principle of interbeing. The poem concludes with a dialogue that subverts the linear, taxonomic expectation of the conventional observer:

The next day, he was at that same spot again, sitting in that same pose, so I asked him, “Did the two sea gulls return?”

He said, “The sea was crying yesterday, but today it’s not.

(Cho 2016, p. 53)

In this remarkable exchange, the seagulls are stripped of their status as isolated, external objects; they are fully integrated into a dynamic agentic assemblage. The old man’s radical refusal to answer using the human taxonomic vocabulary of “birds”—describing instead the affective state of the “crying sea”—reveals a non-linear logic where the seagull and the ocean are a single, throbbing confederation of vibrant forces. Viewed through Timothy Morton’s concept of the mesh, the seagulls and the waves permeate one another to the point of absolute somatic inseparability (Morton 2010, p. 28). There is no visual trophy for human consumption, but a material and affective state of the sea itself.

Musan instructs the reader to read nature not an anthropocentric framework of classification and division, but through physical resonance. To hear the sea is to listen to the kinetic rhythm of the gulls’ wings—a trans-corporeal exchange where the cry of one body becomes the breath and movement of another. This poetic performance mandates the practice of epistemological humility: the human subject retreats, abandoning the sovereign role of the definer to become a humble node within the great cosmic rhythm. This ontological blurring explicitly echoes Dōgen’s seminal assertion that “blue mountains are constantly walking” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). Just as Dōgen’s mountains move through geological existence-time, Musan’s sea cries through the kinetic medium of the seagulls; both frameworks project a decentered universe where agency is not localized within human consciousness, but distributed fluidly across the material landscape. Within this vast mesh of existence, the wild cries of the non-human world serve as the primordial language of co-arising reality. This ecological sermon recognizes humans and gulls alike as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11), circulating within the same sacred, material web of a walking and self-breathing world.

3.2.3. Epistemological Humility: The Defiance of Matter Limits of Anthropocentric Discourse

While the cries of wild ducks and seagulls challenge human perceptions of time and space, the presence of the green frog in the poem “The Green Frog” presents a direct confrontation with humanity’s most prized cognitive tool: language. Here, Musan utilizes the immediate reality of an animal encounter to expose the total impotence of human semiotic systems when faced with the vibrant materiality of a living entity. To fully grasp this linguistic defiance, the poem must be read in its structural immediacy:

One morning, after lazily washing my face, I went over to the wall to dump out the water basin. A green frog happened to be sitting in the grass on the other side at that moment and he got a terrible fright—eek! He leaped up—all the way up to the top of the wall—and alighted there as if he had slipped. As I saw him lying there panting, flat on his belly, I thought, This guy is really something, he really is something! I couldn’t get over my admiration for him. But when I tried to compose a sijo poem with that green frog as the subject, I struggled day after day, only to fail in the end. I came to a minor realization: Whatever words I could come up with—for however many kalpas—to describe that frog would never do him justice.

(Cho 2016, p. 57)

In the opening of the poem, the frog does not appear as a static, aesthetic symbol—such as the classical frog jumping into Basho’s ancient pond within traditional Zen aesthetics—but as a powerful biological actant brimming with existential agency. Faced with the sudden human intrusion of a dumped water basin, the frog reacts with visceral fear, a sharp affective response (“eek!”) and a spectacular, muscular leap for survival. Musan’s description of the frog lying there “panting, flat on his belly” is a poignant portrayal of what Bennett (2010, p. xiii) defines as vibrancy; the creature is actively breathing, feeling, and struggling. Its material efficacy to command the poet’s attention and disrupt his space far exceeds any indirect representation or human-centered taxonomic categorization.

The poet’s reaction marks a significant shift in ecological ethics. Rather than looking down upon the creature with pity or indifference, he exclaims with genuine admiration: “This guy is really something!” By referring to the frog as “this guy”, Musan performs a strategic anthropomorphism. Following Jane Bennett’s argument, this rhetorical move is not a projection of human narcissism, but a deliberate leveling of the ontological hierarchy—a way to “strike a chord between person and thing” (Bennett 2010, p. 120) and recognize the frog as an equal subject within the shared agentic assemblage. In that moment, the dualistic boundary between the high monk and the green frog dissolves, leaving only one vibrant life in complete awe of another.

However, the tragedy of logocentrism begins when the poet attempts to imprison this fierce vitality within the framework of art. He confesses his failure: “I struggled day after day, only to fail in the end”. The creative effort to compose a traditional sijo about the frog becomes an ironic self-parody, the static and finite structure of human language cannot keep pace with the dynamic, emergent movement of the frog’s leap. The poem concludes with a profound philosophical realization regarding the structural limits of expression: “Whatever words I could come up with—for however many kalpas—to describe that frog would never do him justice”. By placing the longest unit of time in Buddhist cosmology—the kalpa—against a small biological reality, Musan declares the absolute defeat of language. Even with infinite time to select the perfect words, humanity can never “do justice” to the thing-power of reality. Every linguistic description is a form of reduction that ignores the “excess” of matter—that which remains ungraspable by human concepts. Respecting nature, therefore, is not about speaking for it or about it, but about acknowledging its radical ungraspability and retreating into a state of respectful, meditative silence.

Ultimately, by portraying these vivid and haunting encounters with the non-human other—from the tragic sacrifice of the mother otter to the eternal cries of wild ducks and the linguistic defiance of the green frog—Musan Cho Oh-hyun reconfigures animals as the true Zen masters of the wild. In the spiritual landscape of For Nirvana, these non-human beings are no longer mute objects or passive resources for human consumption; instead, they emerge as “Bodhisattvas of reverse practice”, possessing a teaching power that formal human scriptures cannot simulate.

While the otter imparts a visceral lesson in compassion (karuna) and material atonement, the ducks and seagulls manifest a non-linear, acoustic presence, and the green frog demands an absolute epistemological humility before the ungraspable pulse of life. By exposing the cruelty of anthropocentric exceptionalism and the inherent failure of human language, Musan forces the arrogant ego to retreat (anātman). This withdrawal is by no means a defeat, but rather the birth of an authentic ecological ethics: a state where humans learn to relinquish their sovereignty, bow in respect and listen to the diverse voices of the sentient world. This radical humility serves as the essential prerequisite for the final stage of the spiritual journey examined in this study: the total dissolution of the human self into the primordial cycles of the ecosystem, a conceptual synthesis defined here as ecological Nirvana.

4. Discussion: Toward an Ecological Nirvana

The findings from Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s sijo suggest that his “immersion” into nature transcends a mere aesthetic appreciation of the landscape; instead, it represents a radical ontological commitment. This commitment entails an unreserved acceptance of the biological laws of decay, the metabolic transformation of the sentient body into a sanctuary for others, and the ultimate dissolution of the “self” into the earth’s primordial strata. Such a process culminates in what can be defined as ecological Nirvana. Within this conceptual framework, enlightenment is reconfigured: it is no longer a transcendent ascension away from the mundane, suffering world (samsara), but a profound, material descent into the interconnected “mesh” (Morton 2010, p. 28) of the ecosystem. In Musan’s vision, the “extinction” of the ego (anātman) does not lead to a metaphysical void, but to a state of total integration with the vibrant matter of the wilderness.

4.1. The Aesthetics of Decay and Trans-Corporeality: From Biological Fragility to Pedological Nirvana

To understand the mechanics of this ecological Nirvana, one must first confront Musan’s unique aesthetics of decay. In modern industrial and Western capitalist aesthetics, biological aging, rotting, and death are frequently treated as taboos or evolutionary failures to be technologically concealed. However, Musan Cho Oh-hyun reverses this paradigm to establish what can be termed an aesthetics of decay. For the poet, the fading of physical form is not a tragedy; rather, it is the absolute prerequisite for truth and the “ancient sound” of existence to be heard. Here, humans and flora meet in a shared ontological destiny: a serene, embodied acceptance of the natural laws of decomposition.

This ontological isomorphism between the human and the botanical is vividly captured in the poem “Days Living on the Mountain”. Musan describes his aging not through abstract metaphors, but through material, tactile imagery that blurs the line between flesh and wood:

Reached the age when I’m sick of it all.

My thoughts, too, knotty like the bones of my bent back,

Today I grabbed a stump about to fall over.

(Cho 2016, p. 103)

The strategic choice of the adjective “knotty” to describe both his internal thoughts and his physical vertebrae suggests a profound structural convergence with the “stump about to fall over”. This is not merely the physical leaning of an elderly monk; it is an ontological recognition of kinship. Musan recognizes that his body and the decaying stump belong to the exact same ecological cycle—both are knotty, both are aging, and both are tilting toward the earth. This resonance directly exemplifies Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, where the human body is revealed as a porous site inextricably linked to the material movements of the non-human world (Alaimo 2010, p. 2). Here, the poet acknowledges his own body as an aggregate of “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11), sharing the exact same biological fragility and material destiny as the decaying wood.

This realization strikingly bridges Bennett’s materiality with Dōgen’s Zen ontology in the Sansuikyō, where he famously declares that “blue mountains are constantly walking” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). By aligning his “knotty” bones with the tilting stump, Musan collapses the distance between the human subject and the lithic landscape. If the mountain “walks” through its perpetual geological transformations, then the aging monk “walks” as a mineral entity returning to the strata. In this convergence, the “knotty” spine of the poet becomes a miniature mountain range, composed of the same calcium and silicates that form the Earth’s crust. His thoughts become the rustling of the forest—a state where the walking mineral and the walking mountain dissolve into a single, vibrant process of planetary metabolism.

However, Musan radicalizes this acceptance in “The Sound of Ancient Wood”, where decay is elevated to a generative, illuminative quality. The poem sets a paradoxical condition for the emergence of the “sound”—a metaphor for Zen epiphany (kenshō)13 or the ultimate ecological truth:

One hears the sound of ancient wood

In the heart of an old tree

Only when the core is surely rotten

When all the straight limbs have snapped

And, naturally, some woody toxin

Remains in the crooked stump

(Cho 2016, p. 7)

Here, Musan executes a rigorous deconstruction of anthropocentric perfection. The “straight limbs”—symbols of the rigid, upward-striving standards of youth and human ego—are precisely what must snap. A healthy, solid tree remains “silent” in its self-sufficiency. Only when the inner core is “surely rotten”, creating a hollow space of Emptiness (śūnyatā), can the tree resonate with the “ancient sound”. This acoustic resonance is the ultimate manifestation of mujō-seppō: the preaching of the Dharma occurs not through pristine, divine forms, but through the vibrant materiality of decaying wood. Decay is thus reframed as the biological manifestation of anātman, where the rigid, isolated “I” is literally digested by the ecosystem to become part of the “All”.

From the perspective of material ecocriticism, Musan’s ecological view is revolutionary, offering a profound corrective to Western environmental theory. While Western vital materialism successfully conceptualizes things as possessing thing-power (Bennett 2010, p. 13), it often operates within a secular, flattened ontology that struggles to articulate the ultimate spiritual and existential purpose of material decomposition. Musan fills this theoretical void by transforming decay from a passive biological end into an active, vital stage of spiritual liberation. The “rotten core” and the snapped limbs are not dead objects; they are ecological actants that actively alter the forest floor, generating new life. Through this aesthetics of decay, Musan returns the human to the humblest position within the cosmic mesh. Enlightenment, in this context, is not the attainment of immortality, pure transcendence or eternal youth; it is the capacity to age, fracture and rot as honestly as an old tree. It is within the imperfection of the decaying body and the trans-corporeal dissolution of the ego that the subject finally finds its true “sound”—a resonance that harmonizes with the primordial vibrations of the wilderness.

It is crucial to note that the Emptiness (śūnyatā) manifested in Musan’s “rotten core” is not a metaphysical void—an abstract, sterile nothingness. Instead, it is physically manifested as the Soil. For Musan, śūnyatā is not the absence of existence, but the absolute potentiality and “allness” of life found within the process of decomposition and rebirth. The soil is “empty” only in the sense that it has relinquished its rigid, individualized human and botanical forms to become a fertile, dark, agentic assemblage that holds the potential for all future beings. In this “pedological Nirvana”, the void is thick with the scent of mulch and the metabolic pulse of microbes; it is a trans-corporeal silence that breathes, welcoming the human subject to joyfully dissolve back into the vibrating earth. This pedological Nirvana is the ultimate deconstruction of the “Pure Land”; it demonstrates that true purity is not the absence of dirt, but the vibrant, sacred fertility of the ecological mulch.

4.2. Re-Envisioning Nirvana in the Anthropocene: From Escapism to Radical Immersion

In traditional Buddhist metaphysics, Nirvana is frequently misinterpreted through a dualistic lens as an escapist state—a definitive exit from the cycle of samsara (the mundane, suffering world) and a complete transcendence of the physical body. However, in the context of the Anthropocene—an era defined by human ecological devastation driven by illusions of human exceptionalism—such escapist philosophy becomes environmentally problematic. Musan Cho Oh-hyun profoundly re-envisions Nirvana not as a departure from the Earth, but as a radical, somatic immersion into its material reality. For Musan, the ultimate enlightenment is the total dissolution of the anthropocentric ego to become a sustaining component of the ecosystem’s agentic assemblage (Bennett 2010, p. 21).

This conceptualization of an ecological Nirvana is deeply rooted in what can be defined as an ethics of hosting and sacrifice. While the previous section established Musan’s acceptance of bodily decay, his poem “Forest” pushes this further, redefining the very purpose of existence through the lens of radical interdependence. To fully grasp this symbiotic matrix, the structural poetic text must be examined:

To live like that,

to go on living like that

Mountains forming valleys

to let the waters flow

And trees breeding insects

under their rough bark

(Cho 2016, p. 96)

In Musan’s ecological vision, the mandate “to live like that” is not dictated by Darwinian survival of the fittest or the expansion of power. Instead, “living” means becoming a host or habitat for the non-human other. At the macro level, Musan observes the material agency of the landscape: “Mountains forming valleys/to let the waters flow”. Conventionally, mountains are reified as symbols of immutable, static obstruction. Yet, Musan highlights the mountain’s active “spatial-making” capacity: it willingly embraces the erosion of its own form to create a hollowed valley, ensuring the continuous flow of another life form (water). At the micro level, this symbiotic relationship becomes even more visceral: “And trees breeding insects/under their rough bark”. The tree utilizes its decaying bark as a sanctuary, functioning as a trans-corporeal host (Alaimo 2010, p. 2). This is the essence of ecological altruism: the tree’s material decay is the absolute prerequisite for the insect’s survival. To achieve Nirvana, the human practitioner must transform their own mind and body into “valleys” and “rough bark”—becoming a porous, open site where the fluxes and flows of non-human lives can thrive.

The final step in achieving this ecological Nirvana is the realization of emotional equivalence, which requires the complete de-psychologization of the human ego. In Western humanism, human emotions such as joy and sorrow are elevated as supreme, exceptional manifestations of the soul, separating humanity from “instinctual” animals and “lifeless” matter. Musan systematically deconstructs this hierarchy by biologizing human affect. In “Days Living on the Mountain”, he writes: “One day crying like a bug in the grass, / One day laughing like a flower in the field” (Cho 2016, p. 103). Here, the animal and botanical similes function not merely as ornamental rhetorical devices, but as radical ontological declarations. The poet asserts that a human’s cry is fundamentally a biological vibration, no different from the chirping of an insect—a manifestation of vibrant matter (Bennett 2010, p. viii) resonating within the global environmental mesh; a human’s joy is merely an energetic, organic blossoming, as natural and unburdened as a wildflower. By stripping human sorrow and joy of their romanticized, exceptionalist tragedies, the social “I” vanishes, leaving only a sentient organism within the cosmic mesh (Morton 2010, p. 28), where there is no absolute center or edge.

This dissolution of dualistic boundaries reaches a mystical climax in “Elm Tree & Moon”, where the distinction between subject and object (the tree and the moon) dissolves into a state of absolute trans-corporeality: “she a dragonfly’s wings… / and I a peacock shaft, a mole upon her body” (Cho 2016, p. 4). The Zen master realizes he is but a “mole”—an organic, minuscule, yet inseparable fleshly manifestation upon the vast, vibrant body of nature. When the poem concludes with the prayer: “Rise high, shine far”, it is no longer the isolated, egocentric plea of a human observer. It is the synchronized chorus of the elm, the moon, and the monk. In this state, Nirvana is materialized: it is the moment when the human mind is extinguished of its arrogance, returning to the mud and the grass to beat in unison with the agentic assemblage of the wilderness.

The ultimate proof of Musan’s ecological Nirvana as a profound descent into materiality is found in his radical reimagining of the Zen tradition’s final stage of enlightenment: “The Tenth Bull: Return to Society” (ipsi suisu/入市垂手). Traditionally, this stage depicts a sage entering the marketplace to radiate bliss; however, Musan shatters this, clean iconography with a visceral, almost repulsive immersion into the lowest strata of existence:

Getting to like the smell of fish, I’m out at market wearing a money belt.

Get married, throw away the legal wife—shall I try living with a concubine? Wooden shoes, those wooden shoes—give one away and still I’m rich.

Sold a wife for 300 won,

Plucked out both eyes and sold those for 300 won, too.

I am the leper going to beg for food, to the ridge of the barley field where the

   sun comes up—a true leper.

(Cho 2016, p. 19)

In this “ontological bottoming out”, Nirvana is stripped of its ethereal, celestial fragrance and replaced with the “smell of fish” and the “leper’s” decaying flesh. To become a “true leper” is the ultimate act of trans-corporeality, signifying the complete dissolution of the “pure” religious self into the “impure” suffering of the world’s vibrant matter. Musan’s Nirvana does not seek to heal the world from a distance; it seeks to be the wound, the infection, and the decay itself.

This radical descent from the sacred to the mundane extends into the very biological mire of modern civilization in the poem “This Body of Mine”:

I went up to the top of Namsan and watched the sun go down

Seoul was a dark, red, frothing swamp

And in it, this body of mine, a leech stuck to a duckweed leaf

(Cho 2016, p. 91)

Gazing at the metropolis of Seoul from Namsan mountain, the poet does not see a monument of human progress, but a “dark, red, frothing swamp” where his own physical presence is reduced to “a leech stuck to a duckweed leaf”. This final stripping of human dignity completes the journey toward ecological Nirvana: enlightenment is not found in rising above the “swamp” of industrial existence, but in realizing that the human “I” is merely a parasitic, transient vibration within the larger, frothing metabolism of the Earth. By identifying as both a leper and a leech, Musan asserts that the enlightened being is one who has fully accepted their status as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11)—subject to the same laws of disease, decay, and material interdependence as all other vibrant forms in the mesh.

This radical identification with the lowly matter echoes Dōgen’s non-dualistic insistence that the “walking” of the blue mountains (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217) is not a majestic, distant myth, but is enacted within the most mundane and seemingly stagnant realities. For Musan, the leper’s decaying limb and the leech’s parasitic vibration are not deviations from the Dharma; they are the Dharma walking in its most visceral, material form. By dissolving the distinction between the pure Buddha and the impure swamp, Musan’s ecological Nirvana confirms Dōgen’s insight that the path of the ancient Buddhas is the very movement of the mountains and waters themselves—regardless of whether they manifest as a serene peak or a frothing, leech-filled mire.

4.3. Implications for Spiritual Ecology: A Call for Radical Humility in the Anthropocene

The concept of ecological Nirvana extracted from Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s sijo poetry offers profound implications for contemporary spiritual ecology, particularly in addressing the existential crises of the Anthropocene. Current mainstream environmental discourses are often dominated by a technocratic approach, where humans position themselves as the “saviors” or “resource managers” of a passive Earth. Musan’s poetry aggressively challenges this managerial arrogance, proposing that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a spiritual and epistemological one—a crisis driven by an oversized, illusions-ridden human ego. The transition from anthropocentric domination to deep ecology demands what can be termed a radical humility.

This radical humility is manifested first through a de-centering of the human spiritual authority, shifting from individual sovereignty to distributive agency (Bennett 2010, p. 21). In the poem “As I Look Upon Myself”, Musan drastically subverts the traditional solemnity of the meditation hall. Instead of achieving a transcendent vision, the monk finds his equal in a common insect:

Sitting, in the meditation hall,

I look upon myself—

a single bug crawling by

stretches its body, contracts it;

gnawing at all manner of things,

it evacuates, but

also does lay its eggs.

(Cho 2016, p. 93)

By observing the bug’s raw, unfiltered biological cycle—stretching, gnawing, evacuating, and laying eggs—the poet recognizes that the venerable Zen master and the crawling insect are governed by the same primordial, metabolic laws of physical existence. Within this dynamic agentic assemblage of the monastery, the monk is no longer an exceptional, superior observer standing outside the web of life; rather, he is a fellow actant in a vast material system where “there is no absolute center or edge” (Morton 2010, p. 29).

Crucially, it is at this theoretical intersection that Musan offers a revolutionary contribution to Western vital materialism, effectively resolving a profound limitation within contemporary eco-theory. While Western new materialism, championed by thinkers like Jane Bennett, successfully conceptualizes the independent agency and “thing-power” of non-human entities, it fundamentally operates within a secular, flattened ontology that often lacks an inherent ethical or affective vector; it explains how matter acts, but struggles to ground why this action commands an absolute moral responsibility. Musan fills this theoretical void by synthesizing vital materialism with the Buddhist ontology of compassion (karuna)—which is fundamentally rooted not in a fixed substance, but in the radical interdependence of all beings. In For Nirvana, the physical agency of the non-human world is never a cold, mechanical force; rather, matter is inherently charged with a sacred, soteriological purpose. The crawling insect, the decaying tree bark, and the bleeding bones of the otter do not merely exert physical resistance—they enact a visceral, material sermon of compassion designed to violently shatter human egoism and awaken the shared Buddha-nature within the mesh. By injecting karuna into the molecular and biological flows of the ecosystem, Musan elevates vital materialism from a descriptive scientific framework into an active, emancipatory spiritual practice.

This realization suggests that a viable ecological ethics cannot stem from a position of benevolent human condescension, but must begin with the acknowledgement of a literal material kinship. Human life is not a separate ontological category, but a shared biological and geological process within the global ecological mesh (Morton 2010, p. 28). This kinship is grounded not in romantic sentimentality, but in the cold, hard fact of shared matter. As Morton provocatively reminds us, we inhabit a world where “iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism” and our modern industrial movements rely on the combustion of “crushed dinosaur parts” (Morton 2010, p. 29). By placing the elite Zen practitioner on the same ontic level as the crawling bug—both being transient nodes of crushed history and bacterial by-products—Musan’s poetics enforces an absolute epistemological leveling. It functions as an invitation to recognize that the Dharma is not an abstract, exclusive human property, but a vibrant, material flow that permeates every “strange stranger” within the evolutionary mesh.

Furthermore, Musan suggests that humanity must abandon its “shouting” of technological progress to embrace a strategic epistemological silence. In “2007—Seoul at Night”, he portrays himself as a “Mute tree, mute bird/A picture of me, sitting” (Cho 2016, p. 60). This chosen muteness is not a passive withdrawal; it is a deliberate, radical ethical stance—a calculated retreat of the human logos that effectively deconstructs the hegemony of Western logocentrism, allowing the mujō-seppō (preaching of the non-sentient) to finally be heard. This eco-political silence echoes the profound deflation found in “Bodhidharma 10”, where the primordial Zen sage’s historical presence is stripped of all religious pretension and institutional grandeur:

You made the earth quake

with no wind, nor cloud of dust

Thought a firestorm, made Heaven

and Earth echo with your shout

Yet, in the end, you’re silent—a dog in a house

of mourning, a dog in a house of mourning.

(Cho 2016, p. 73)

To inhabit the world as a “dog in a house of mourning” is to exist as a quiet, somatic witness to the Earth’s systemic suffering, flatly refusing the anthropocentric urge to violently manipulate or rhetorically “defend” the environment for human convenience. In the catastrophic context of the Anthropocene, the silence of the “dog in a house of mourning” transcends mere detachment; it functions as a radical form of ecological politics. Within a global system driven by the relentless, destructive noise of industrial progress, data-driven green management, and the hubristic human urge to loudly speak for nature, the choice to remain epistemologically silent operates as an act of profound resistance. It is an intentional, tactical withdrawal of human sovereignty designed to create an ontological clearing where the non-human world can finally manifest its own independent vibrancy and thing-power. By refusing to impose human language, categories and utility upon the landscape, Musan suggests that silence is a guardian of the non-human other, demonstrating that saving the ecosystem begins with the radical humility to step back and let the earth speak for itself.

Ultimately, Musan’s ecological vision dictates that healing the split between humanity and nature requires a physical and spiritual descent into the messy, vulnerable reality of the world. By continuously identifying as a leech in a swamp or a dying leper in a barley field, Musan asserts that the Earth does not need human management as much as the human soul needs to be urgently salvaged from its industrial alienation by returning bodily to the soil. His poetry serves as a manifesto for an environmental ethics that starts with the extinction of human exceptionalist pride—a biological and ontological performance of anātman (non-self).

Ecological Nirvana is thus explicitly reconfigured not as a distant destination in a metaphysical afterlife, but as the active, ethical practice of the present: the realization that saving the environment is synonymous with extinguishing the arrogant, anthropocentric “I” and allowing the human form to dissolve into the vast, trans-corporeal symphony of the planetary ecosystem. In this radical immersion, we find our ultimate place not as masters, stewards, or managers of the planet, but as “walking, talking minerals” (Bennett 2010, p. 11). This realization brings the modern subject back to Dōgen’s ancient Zen insight that “blue mountains are constantly walking” (Dōgen 2008, vol. 1, p. 217). By becoming the walking mineral that mirrors and blends into the walking mountain, the human subject finally achieves a Zen materialist liberation—ceasing its interference to joyfully participate in the infinite cycles of a suffering yet sacred world, where every breath and every decay is a vivid manifestation of the Dharma preaching itself through the vibrant, unceasing movement of matter.

5. Conclusions

This study has navigated the radical ecological landscape of Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems, tracing a journey from the rigorous deconstruction of anthropocentric arrogance to the realization of an ecological Nirvana. Through the lens of material ecocriticism and Zen philosophy, we have demonstrated that Musan’s poetry does not merely aestheticize nature as a backdrop for individual spiritual seeking; instead, it reconfigures the non-human world as a primary site of apophatic preaching, material agency and sovereign ontological authority.

The core findings of this research suggest that Musan’s ecological Nirvana represents a significant, revolutionary departure from traditional, transcendent interpretations of enlightenment. By analyzing the visceral depictions of the mother otter’s sacrifice, the non-linear acoustic materiality of the wild ducks’ cries, and the linguistic defiance of the green frog, this study illuminates how the poet forces the sovereign human ego to retreat in favor of the non-human other. This epistemological withdrawal culminates in a radical aesthetics of decay—a movement that is not upward toward a celestial void, but downward into the biological and pedological mire of the Earth. Through this trans-corporeal porosity of the self, vividly manifested in the radical, lowly identifications of a leper in a barley field or a leech on a duckweed leaf, Musan asserts that the highest spiritual liberation is not discovered in escaping planetary vulnerability, but in the total somatic dissolution of the self into the vibrant, suffering, and interconnected mesh of the ecosystem.

The ultimate contribution of this paper lies in its critical, bidirectional synthesis of Zen Buddhist thought with contemporary Western eco-theories such as trans-corporeality and vital materialism. By constructing a distinct Zen materialist framework, this study has successfully aligned Jane Bennett’s concept of “walking, talking minerals” with Dōgen’s ancient insight of “blue mountains constantly walking”, thereby establishing a non-dualistic paradigm that bridges Western material ecocriticism with Eastern soteriology. Crucially, this paper challenges and expands Western new materialism by demonstrating how Musan injects the core Buddhist principle of compassion (karuna) into the vibrant movements of matter, effectively transforming a secular, flattened ontology into an active ethical and spiritual practice. This synthesized framework recognizes no ontological hierarchy between the human pulse, the biological decay of flora, and the lithic rhythm of the landscape, positioning Musan’s sijo as a critical poetic intervention in the era of the Anthropocene. Consequently, this study demonstrates that Musan’s Zen poetry does not merely offer a harmonious interpretation of Western ecocriticism; rather, it actively enriches Western theory with the transformative energy of compassion and the profound wisdom of transmuting suffering, thereby asserting a distinctive, self-reliant trajectory for contemporary East Asian ecological discourse.

Ultimately, Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s poetic vision offers a powerful manifesto for contemporary spiritual ecology. It reminds the modern technological subject that Nirvana is not an escape flight from our planetary responsibilities, but a radical, immersive entanglement within them. In an era of acute ecological uncertainty and climate crisis, the path toward healing begins with the extinction of human exceptionalism and pride. By learning to practice an epistemological silence—becoming as quiet as a dog in a house of mourning and fully embracing our organic existence as walking minerals within a walking landscape—humanity may finally relinquish its destructive dominance and find its true resonance within the great, enduring, and sacred symphony of the wild.