South Korea: The sound of one brain snapping

Soo Bool Sunim smiles broadly and asks: "Can you see your own eyes?" This is not a question that has ever occurred to me, but now it becomes troubling as I turn it around in my head, looking for an angle into it, wondering whether there is an answer at all.

Or even if that is really the question.

Soo smiles the same benign grin he has been shining at our small group for the past 15 minutes and knows we are baffled. We smile back helplessly, because this bewilderment is what Zen masters can do to decades of logic the conscious mind has laid down.

There is no correct answer of course, but that doesn't stop a few of us here in his home-cum-temple retreat in suburban Seoul having a stab - and Soo enjoying the range of weakly rhetorical answers offered.

Later, a few us agree you could get very annoyed by Soo's beaming countenance, his quiet composure and a youthful appearance which belies his 50-something years. And we agree we have come away with many more questions than answers, and some to try on our friends back home.

Soo is a Zen master - of a Korean branch of Buddhism - and his home is a quiet refuge from the streets outside where fashionable art galleries, hip wine bars and low-rise apartment blocks jostle for space.

It would be possible to walk past his orderly house and garden hidden by a high stone wall and not know it was there. And in Seoul these collisions of the ancient and modern are common - and sometimes downright strange.

Next to the Ahnkook Zen Institute a couple of streets away is the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art - and the spire of the local Presbyterian church (in South Korea, 30 per cent of the population are Christian, about five per cent more than are Buddhist) rises above the traditional tiled roofline of Soo's home.

You can be very easily bewildered in Seoul - and nowhere more so than at Soo's.

I was one of a small group invited to enjoy a vegetarian lunch and speak with the master afterwards. The lunch went down a treat, then things got problematic.

Ironically, I should have been better prepared than the others in our group - a few of whom were food writers just along for the lunch. I not only studied Zen at university in a Chinese philosophy course, but have read much Zen poetry and writing since.

So I was at least familiar with the notion of koans (riddles or paradoxical stories to test the mind), and should have been up for it.

But Soo could answer a question with a question better than anyone I had ever met - and having read about Zen proved no help at all. He seemed to give straight answers to the food writers and baffle me at my every question.

The foodies later said they thought I had done well and that they couldn't get a straight response out of him, so by some curious law of inverse expectation, Soo must have done his work well.

A monk for about four decades, Soo studied under masters himself, had a small group of students (mostly adults in their middle years and older), and meditated for at least 12 hours a day. Which probably explained his youthful appearance.

He said he kept excellent health and we put that down to a diet of delicious but simple vegetarian food.

Through a translator, he answered questions about his daily regimen - think a lot, eat a little, repeat until bedtime was the gist of it, I think - but matters became complicated when he spoke of impermanence.

At this point, the foodies started glazing over and others were restless after having had to sit cross-legged for 45 minutes. But here I could see my opportunity.

I asked if there was such a thing as change - the kind of question I thought a Zen master might appreciate and be willing to bat around with someone like me, who was clearly broadcasting on a similar frequency.

I should be so lucky.

His long reply seemed to involve a mild rebuke - with the kind of smile in my direction that one might offer an idiot child - and then a monologue which appeared directed at the few Koreans in attendance. It might have been something along the lines of: "This clown here has just asked me..."

Oddly enough, the interpreter's translation was brief and elusive. But one phrase rang through with clarity, which might have been either a revelation or a condemnation, given my chosen profession: "Don't be captured by words."

I think I shut up after that, but later in the garden we exchanged pleasantries and I told the interpreter the master's statement about words had amused me, given what I did for a living. He passed this on and Soo nodded, then we had a photo taken together.

It was a fascinating if brief encounter - a little over an hour of somewhat one-sided talk - and I came away much wiser and no wiser at all.

Back home I typed out his words and they are placed above my laptop. Why? I have no idea - and maybe that is the answer. Who knows?

Incidentally, Master Soo said he could see his own eyes, but the convoluted explanation he gave was so bewildering my brain started to hurt.

The bugger didn't stop smiling then, either.