The Korea Times
When I was pursuing my master's degree here, I had a teacher named Choi Chi-won. He was my guide. The one who taught me much of what I would later come to know about Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and the Enlightenment period of Korea. He challenged me in the way that all good teachers do: pushing, probing, setting high standards and asking questions to which I didn’t always know the answer. If we are lucky, we will all meet at least one teacher like this in our lives. Someone who transcends the role of merely being an educator, a servant of the system and into something more impactful. And yes, that was his name. The same exact name as the legendary 9th-century Silla scholar-bureaucrat who mastered the classics and famously struggled against a rigid system. The moment Professor Choi perhaps had the biggest effect on me was when I was sitting my comprehensive exams before writing my dissertation. I had passed all of them, with only my exam on Taoism left. At the time, Taoism was my favorite subject. The Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and all the wonderfully paradoxical stories that floa
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