A History of Korea (27 page)

nationwide Buddhist examination system. The state also sponsored the erection of massive temple complexes throughout the country, which enjoyed tax and other benefits that allowed them to accumulate, and often abuse, extraordinary wealth. The monarch, furthermore, appointed national and royal preceptors, who served as religious advisors to the king and maybe more importantly provided the stamp of Buddhist blessings on the monarchy. Perhaps the most eminent monk to be named national receptor, albeit posthumously, was Chinul, a figure of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Chinul developed a unified system of thought and practice for Korean Buddhism, which had long been divided, sometimes bitterly, into the meditation (
s
n
) and textual (
kyo
) schools. The largest Buddhist order in South Korea today counts him as its founder.

What proved most distinctive about Kory
Buddhism, however, was the incorporation of shamanistic and geomantic elements. As the Ten Injunctions strongly suggested, Korean Buddhism by this time drew from a great mixture of Buddhist orthodoxy, underlying folk beliefs in local gods and spirits, and geomancy, or the systematic combination of nature worship with geography. The great state-sponsored Buddhist celebrations, the Lotus Lantern Festival and the Eight Gates Festival, incorporated these various elements. Through this mixture of religious influences, together with the development of Buddhist scholarship, a distinctively hybrid form of Buddhist practice emerged. Indeed, Korean geomancy was itself systematized by a Buddhist monk in the Unified Silla era,
Tos
n, who integrated the geographical features of Korea into an organic vision of the peninsula as a living entity fed by the spiritual energy of Buddhist temples and practices. Tos
n’s followers, including Myoch’
ng, cultivated and popularized this perspective, to the extent that geomancy, including the notion of a geomantic unity for Korea, held an influential standing among the aristocracy and monarchy well into the twentieth century. The location of the capital of the next dynasty, Chos
n—still the capital of (South) Korea today—was determined according to geomantic principles, for example. Well before then, however, geomancy played a central role in a watershed moment in the history of Kory
.

MYOCH’ONG’S REBELLION

Aside from the fact that he was a Buddhist monk from Pyongyang, little is known about Myoch’
ng’s life before his role as protagonist in the tumult that engulfed the country in the early twelfth century. The official historical accounts excoriate him for his deceitfulness and cunning, but he clearly had considerable charisma and skill. Like Rasputin, who held an unshakable grip over the Russian royal family at the turn of the twentieth century through his seemingly magical ability to treat the Romanovs’ hemophilia, Myoch’
ng appears to have cast a spell over the monarch, Injong. Most tellingly, the monk convinced him of a direct geomantic relationship between the ongoing misfortunes of the dynasty—especially the constant attacks and threats of invasion from the Jurchen people to the north—and the location of the dynastic capital in Kaegy
ng (present-day Kaes
ng). Myoch’
ng’s solution, not coincidentally, was to move the capital to his home town of Pyongyang, which held more positive geomantic features, he claimed. He also urged the monarch to declare Kory
an empire and launch a campaign against the Jurchen, steps bitterly opposed by the king’s ministers.