WHEN THE WORLD CALLS BACK: RESPONSIVE LISTENING IN MUSAN CHO OH-HYUN’S ZEN SIJO
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Abstract
This article examines sound and listening in Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s Zen sijo by shifting attention from the doctrinal significance of hearing to the relational transformations staged by auditory experience. Drawing on a survey of the 108 poems included in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems and close comparative readings of selected poems against Cho’s 2012 Korean collected edition, the article brings Buddhist accounts of hearing into dialogue with auditory phenomenology. It proposes the concept of responsive listening to describe a recurrent poetic configuration in which sound solicits attention, renders spatial, bodily, perceptual, or relational boundaries permeable, and may reorient the listener’s position. Such reorientation can be spatial, somatic, perceptual, hermeneutic, or ethical, but it is neither automatic nor complete. Some poems instead defer self-hearing, destabilize the distinction between departure and continued perceptual presence, or acknowledge the failure of listening itself. The article argues that Musan’s sonic poetics presents hearing not as passive reception or a secure path toward spiritual realization, but as a form of relational exposure in which sound alters how the listener is situated toward the world while simultaneously revealing the limits of audibility.
Keywords
Musan Cho Oh-hyun, Zen sijo, responsive listening, sound, auditory phenomenology, Buddhist hearing
Article Details
References
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