I found lodging in a shelter for laborers located in the Cho-ryang neighborhood. My room was so small that I could not lie down, even diagonally, without my feet pressing against the wall. But this was the room where I sharpened a pencil and solemnly wrote the first draft of Wolli Wonbon (the original text of The Principle). I was financially destitute, but this was of no importance to me. Even living in a garbage heap, there is nothing a determined soul cannot do. All we need is the will.

       Won Pil Kim had just turned twenty. He did all sorts of jobs. He worked in a restaurant and brought home the scorched rice that couldn’t be served to customers. We ate this together. Because of his gift for drawing, he soon got a job with the U.S. military as a painter.

       Eventually, he and I climbed up to Beom-net-gol in Beom-il Dong and built a house. Because this area was near a cemetery, there was nothing nearby except a rocky ravine. We had no land we could call our own, so we leveled a section of the steep slope and built a home there. We didn’t even have a shovel! We took a small shovel from someone’s kitchen and returned it before the owner realized it was missing. Won Pil Kim and I broke rocks, dug the earth, and carried up gravel. We mixed mud and straw to make bricks, then stacked them up to make the walls. We got some empty ration boxes from an American base, flattened them out, and used them as the roof. We laid down a sheet of black plastic for the floor.