Buddha's Palm

Doing carpentry work, you start wanting to change something up, thinking "this might just work," and you turn it over in your head a lot.

But it's Buddha's palm.

(In Journey to the West, the Monkey King somersaults to what he thinks is the edge of the world — only to find he never left the Buddha's palm.)

You feel it in your bones — there's nothing new under the sun.

Every joinery and fitting that's possible already exists within thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.

Here's something I felt today.

I was working out a joint where the corners of a square all converge on a single point, while still keeping the wood's natural texture visible.

In my head, it was solved.

But the moment the square chisel's angle was off by even a hair, a gap opened up.

A joint where the corners converge on a single point has nowhere to hide an error.

And since I'd committed to keeping the texture visible, I couldn't just sand the surface down to smooth it over, either.

Wrestling with it like that, I realized something. This joint — it was already used in traditional furniture.

I'd thought I'd worked it out myself. Well.

Still, it's not that I copied it. It's that I worked on the same problem and arrived at the same answer.

Every time my chisel slipped a little, I was learning, in my own body, why the old somokjang (fine-furniture joiners) built it that way.

Only one thing is different. They used this joint in chests and cabinets,

and I'm hanging it on a door.

Furniture only has to hold its own weight inside a room,

but a door faces wind and rain, takes impact every time it opens and closes, and expands and contracts with every season.

Whether this joint holds up in that spot is something I still don't know.

Tradition might not be about memorizing the right answer — it might be about solving the same problem all over again.

Now it's my door's turn to give that answer.