In “Among School Children” Yeats meditated on lover’s passion, nun’spiety, and mother’s affection in the tradition of Plato’s dualistic philosophy.Plato’s philosophy is an idealistic system resting on a sharply defineddualism between mind and matter, God and the world, body and soul.Soul is always superior to body. Soul is the ideal world; body is thepresent world. Therefore, those who worship images like lover, nun andmother can not fulfill their dreams in the present world. There is aconflict in the dualistic world. But in the last stanza of the poem, thepoet showed us the unified world of soul and body as in Hawom thought.The main features of the Hawom thought belong to Tushun andChihyum, and Bobchang in China. Great Monk Euisang studied underChihyum and later held the title of National Teacher in Shilla Era ofKorea. His thought was given a pictorial form: a meander design made upof a poem consisting of 210 Chinese characters entitled the Hwaom IisungBubgyedo: the cosmology of dharma in the One-yana of Avatamsakaphilosophy.
In this paper I interpret the last stanza of the poem in the light ofEuisang’s Hawom vision. The Hawom vision of the world can contribute tosolving the problem of dualistic conflict. The Hawom vision of the world isbased on the Mahayana ontology of Emptiness(sunyata) ornonsubstantiality. In Euisang’s Bobsungge, soul and body are not differentfrom each other because both have nonsubstantiality. Yeats also said“Labour is blossoming or dancing where/ The body is not bruised topleasure soul” in the first and second lines of the last stanza. Hecontinued his song, “O Chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,/ Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?” Euisang sang “One is in all, all is in one:one is all, all is one.” A Chestnut-tree consists of the leaf, the blossom,and the bole. The relationship between a part and the whole is in“organic” unity: a part is in the whole, the whole is in a part: a part isthe whole, the whole is a part. Yeats argued “How can we know thedancer from the dance,” Euisang suggested ie is not differ from sa. Forexample, in a golden statue of lion, gold is ie, the statue is sa. ie isrepresented by sa. The dance is represented by the dancer. Nothing isself-sufficient and all things are interdependent.
The Hawom philosophy views the world as a harmonious wholewithout any dualistic conflict of its fundamental nature. Euisang andYeats showed us a beautiful vision of the universal reconciliation andharmony of all beings in the world. Euisang called it Buddha’s worldwhereas Yeats called it “Unity of Being.”