The sources drawn on in the text are listed here by kind, in alphabetical order. Where a work was read in Korean translation, the original edition is given. The notes at the end of each chapter were kept short so as not to interrupt the reading; the bibliographic details are established here.
Books
Albom, Mitch, Tuesdays with Morrie, New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Antonovsky, Aaron, Health, Stress and Coping, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979; Unraveling the Mystery of Health, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987.
Buber, Martin, Ich und Du, Leipzig: Insel, 1923 (I and Thou).
Ehrenberg, Alain, La fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et société, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998 (The Weariness of the Self).
Eliade, Mircea, Le Sacré et le Profane, Paris: Gallimard, 1957 (The Sacred and the Profane).
Han, Byung-Chul, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010 (The Burnout Society; Korean edition trans. Kim Tae-hwan, Moonji, 2012).
Ham, Min-bok, “Flower,” in On Every Boundary, Flowers Bloom, Seoul: Changbi (Changbi Poetry 156), 1996.
Heaney, Seamus, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Derry: Field Day, 1990. A version written during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The chorus passage in the text is a rendering of the sense rather than a direct quotation; quoting it as verse would require permission.
Jung, C. G., Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works vol. 7. On persona, inflation, and individuation.
Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Levi, Primo, I sommersi e i salvati, Turin: Einaudi, 1986 (The Drowned and the Saved). The argument that the complete witnesses are those who did not return, and that survivors speak only in their place.
Maslow, Abraham H., Motivation and Personality, New York: Harper, 1954.
Maté, Gabor, The Myth of Normal, New York: Avery, 2022.
Maturana, Humberto R. & Varela, Francisco J., Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980.
Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 1853.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols, 1889.
Nouwen, Henri J. M., The Wounded Healer, New York: Doubleday, 1972.
Nurse, Paul, What Is Life? Five Great Ideas in Biology, Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2020.
Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory, New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
Rogers, Carl R., On Becoming a Person, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.
Toynbee, Arnold J., A Study of History, 12 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961. The passages cited in the text are vol. 1 p. 201 (yin and yang), vol. 1 p. 205 (cosmic pulsation), and vol. 2 p. 31 (“ease is inimical to civilization”).
Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score, New York: Viking, 2014.
van Gennep, Arnold, Les rites de passage, Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909 (The Rites of Passage).
Wilson, Edmund, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. The title essay treats Sophocles’s Philoctetes and established, as a modern theory of the artist, the argument that wound and gift are attached to the same person.
Journal Articles
Armel, K. C. & Ramachandran, V. S., “Projecting sensations to external objects: Evidence from skin conductance response,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 270(1523), 2003, pp. 1499–1506.
Berglas, S. & Jones, E. E., “Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36(4), 1978, pp. 405–417.
Botvinick, M. & Cohen, J., “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, 1998, p. 756.
Campbell, K. L. et al., “Exercise guidelines for cancer survivors: Consensus statement from International Multidisciplinary Roundtable,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 51(11), 2019, pp. 2375–2390.
Crum, A. J. & Langer, E. J., “Mind-set matters: Exercise and the placebo effect,” Psychological Science 18(2), 2007, pp. 165–171.
Crum, A. J., Salovey, P. & Achor, S., “Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104(4), 2013, pp. 716–733.
Declerck, C. H. et al., “A registered replication study on oxytocin and trust,” Nature Human Behaviour 4, 2020, pp. 646–655.
Epel, E. S., Blackburn, E. H., Lin, J., Dhabhar, F. S., Adler, N. E., Morrow, J. D. & Cawthon, R. M., “Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101(49), 2004, pp. 17312–17315.
Friston, K., “The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(2), 2010, pp. 127–138.
Gerritsen, R. J. S. & Band, G. P. H., “Breath of life: The respiratory vagal stimulation model of contemplative activity,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12, 2018, article 397.
Helander, H. F. & Fändriks, L., “Surface area of the digestive tract — revisited,” Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology 49(6), 2014, pp. 681–689.
Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., Brantley, M. & Fredrickson, B. L., “How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone,” Psychological Science 24(7), 2013, pp. 1123–1132.
Kosfeld, M., Heinrichs, M., Zak, P. J., Fischbacher, U. & Fehr, E., “Oxytocin increases trust in humans,” Nature 435, 2005, pp. 673–676.
McEwen, B. S., “Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators,” New England Journal of Medicine 338(3), 1998, pp. 171–179.
Menard, C. et al., “Social stress induces neurovascular pathology promoting depression,” Nature Neuroscience 20(12), 2017, pp. 1752–1760.
Nave, G., Camerer, C. & McCullough, M., “Does oxytocin increase trust in humans? A critical review of research,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(6), 2015, pp. 772–789.
Sterling, P. & Eyer, J., “Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology,” in S. Fisher & J. Reason (eds.), Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health, Chichester: Wiley, 1988.
Classical Sources
Aeschylus, the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides), 458 BCE. The Greek text and Herbert Weir Smyth’s English translation follow the Perseus Digital Library. The passages cited are Agamemnon 176–183 (pathei mathos, χάρις βίαιος, σωφρονεῖν) and 248–250, together with the Areopagus trial in The Eumenides and the closing transformation of the Furies into the Kindly Ones. Agamemnon 179 differs by edition between ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ (Smyth) and ἀνθ᾽ ὕπνου (the current Loeb).
Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika. The sections on dependent origination and the absence of intrinsic nature.
Sophocles, Philoctetes, 409 BCE. The archer abandoned on Lemnos for a wound that would not heal, and Neoptolemus, who goes to deceive him and gives the bow back.
I Ching. Hexagram Qian, the “Wenyan” commentary and the top line kanglong youhui; Hexagram Fu (Earth over Thunder), the judgment and the “Tuan” commentary (fu qi jian tiandi zhi xin), the six line statements (buyuan fu, xiu fu, pin fu, du fu, dun fu, mi fu) and the “Xiang” commentary on the second line (xiu fu zhi ji, yi xia ren ye); the “Xici” commentary, yi yin yi yang zhi wei dao and qiong ze bian, bian ze tong, tong ze jiu.
Scriptural Citations
Genesis 2:7 (neshamah), 2:15 (avad, shamar) · Exodus 2:22 and 18:3–4 (Gershom and Eliezer), 20:8–11 (the Sabbath) · 1 Chronicles 4:10 (the prayer of Jabez) · John 12:24, 14:10–11 · 1 Corinthians 8:1.
Perichoresis is a concept refined by the Cappadocian Fathers on the basis of John 14:10–11.
Other Sources
National Institute of Ecology, survey of biodiversity in the DMZ area. 6,168 species were confirmed across eight zones, and 102 of the Korean peninsula’s 267 endangered species were recorded in this area.
Joo-Hwan Kim’s discussion of the boundary. He defines meditation as standing at the boundary and beholding the boundary, moving by way of the Markov blanket and Varela’s enactivism to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka. This is the source of the sentence borrowed in the prologue. It parts from this book in concluding that the boundary is ultimately empty. The same argument appears in the lectures on his own channel, “Standing at the Boundary and Noticing the Boundary — The Markov Blanket Model and Enactivism” (March 30, 2025) and “True Love Is Beholding the Emptiness of the Boundary” (May 11, 2025).
World Health Organization, Preamble to the Constitution of the WHO, 1948. The definition of health.
Escher, M. C., “Day and Night,” woodcut, 1938.
The film As One, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, 2012.
The 41st World Table Tennis Championships, Chiba, Japan, April 24 – May 6, 1991. The unified Korean team.
The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
NPR, “In Korean DMZ, wildlife thrives. Some conservationists worry peace could disrupt it,” April 20, 2019. Remarks by Kim Seung-ho, director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, and the plant researcher Jeong Su-young.
Bless derives from Old English blētsian and shares a root with blood. The root of happiness is hap, meaning chance.
Conversations and Unpublished Material
Video conversation with Gabor Maté, 2026.
Conversation with Professor Seong-Hoi Lee. “We” as emergence.
Conversation with Pastor Maria.
The author’s unpublished essay, “Love Keeps a Child Alive; Respect Lets a Child Become.”
The author’s father-in-law’s sermon, early 1990s.
The Author’s Own Record
The Facebook posts quoted in the text are the author’s personal record from 2011 to 2025, with the year given at the end of each quotation. The originals are preserved in year-by-year archives.
Not Yet Verified
The Ham Min-bok quotations in the prologue and epilogue are taken from “Flower,” the title poem of the collection On Every Boundary, Flowers Bloom. The prologue quotes the opening (the first line and the first two lines of the second stanza); the epilogue quotes the final stanza. As this is contemporary poetry, permission from the poet and the publisher is required before publication.
The sentence the prologue credits to Joo-Hwan Kim is one he has repeated on many occasions, and it has not been settled which occasion to cite as the source. The same argument appears in the lectures on his own channel (March 30 and May 11, 2025), and a separate lecture series and panel appearances by him exist on Choi Gyeom’s YouTube channel. The author should confirm where he first heard the phrase and fix the citation.
J. G. Sparks (2017), which appeared in the notes to Chapter Nine, has been removed from this list because it could not be determined what work it refers to.
The story that the koi carp grows small in a tank and large in a river is widely circulated, but no scholarly basis for it could be confirmed. This is stated in the text as well.
Quoting contemporary poetry in the text requires permission from the poet and the publisher. Confirmation is also needed before publication from those who appear under their real names.