I watched a TV show about how a master craftsman, who is designated as intangible cultural asset, makes Bangjja, Korean type of hand-forged glossy brassware with yellowish color. Bangjja of such high quality were used for the king’s table.
Bangjja made with traditional techniques has good durability, so it preserves its shape for a long time, doesn’t get discolored easily, and it gets the glossier as you use it more. Recently, it has been attracting more people’s attention because it’s proven that Bangjja neutralizes heavy metal toxicity and eliminate food toxicity and food poisoning bacteria. To make brassware with such outstanding effects, not only highly sophisticated skills but also a fairly complex process is demanded.
The first step is melting copper and tin at a high temperature of 1,200℃ [2,200℉] at a ratio of 78:22. Then the molten metal gets casted in the round and flat stone molds to become the pieces of alloy. In this process, there mustn’t be any errors in the ratio, because if there is, the alloy will break.
The next step is forging. It is to heat up a piece of alloy in the fire and hammer it. When it is repeated numerous times, the alloyed metal is flattened in the shape of a bowl or dish. When a bowl is successfully hammered more than 1,000 times, it is put in cold water to have solidity so that it won’t break even if it is stricken by a hammer.
After its shape is corrected one more time, the last step begins. It is to softly grind the surface of the bowl which turned dark in the fire, so that the original gold color can be revealed. When everything is done, a Bangjja bowl of high quality that looks like gold gets completed.
I was moved to see some ordinary chunk of metal being put in and out of the burning furnace several times and hammered thousands of times. Finally it becomes an amazing piece of art that cannot be compared with the original form. However, what touched me even more was the master craftsman who was hammering Bangjja metal again and again, sweating buckets, in front of a hot furnace to complete a piece of Bangjja.
He sometimes got burned by melted metal in hundreds of degrees Celsius, hammered his hand by accident, and got iron powder on his face. Since a dangerous situation could happen at any time, the master craftsman had to fully focus on every step of the process. He had calluses as hard as a stone on his hands and injuries all over the body, but he smiled at the beautifully finished work and said he could forget all about tough work.
To put off the old self stained with sins and to be clothed with a beautiful robe that shines the light of heaven, each and every one of us has to endure and overcome sufferings. However, the Ones who sacrifice and endure sufferings most, hoping that we will be reborn, are Heavenly Father and Mother. They are putting indescribable efforts into us until we are all changed. Father and Mother have spent thousands of years with a burning heart and endured pains only with the joy of finding Their children. How can we complain about our hardship to Them?
Although it is painful to be refined in faith, I will always give thanks to God, remembering God’s sacrifice. To become a great vessel, I will endure the required process, dreaming of being used for God’s work and getting reborn as a complete being who will display God’s glory throughout the world.