The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (11 page)

Indeed it had been so, for even in Il-han’s memory Frenchmen had made effort to reach the capital city, Seoul, and might have succeeded except when they tried to come up the river Han, the only entrance to the city, the Wall of the Three Sons held them back and they too were repelled and the capital was saved.

Mountains and valleys, sea and farmlands and island, he would travel everywhere and see his country and his people as they were.

… With what words shall a man tell of love for his country? Before he was conceived in his mother’s womb, Il-han was conceived in the earth of his native land. His ancestors had created him through their life. The air they breathed, the waters they drank, the fruits they ate, belonged to the earth and from their dust he was born. When he bade farewell to his Queen and to his wife and children, Il-han laid aside for the time being all other loves except this one pervading love, the love of his country, and he opened his heart and his mind, day by day, to the people he now met, the scenes he saw, the life he lived. With no other companion than his servant, he traveled by day and slept by night wherever he happened to be when darkness fell.

Northward he went in the beginning and in a score of days he was in the Kumgang-san or Diamond Mountains, the name given to them not because jewels were there, but because the Buddhist monasteries built in high places were such that they shed enlightenment more illustrious than any sun. He had never traveled into these mountains and had only heard of their tortuous shapes, carved by high winds and torrential rains. They were barren cliffs, and in the dark and narrow valleys between, white torrents of water leaped in waterfalls to join the great rivers that emptied into the surrounding seas.

He had read the record of the mountains, made some two hundred and fifty years before he was born, by a great geographer, Yi Chung-hwan. These mountains, he read, formed three strong ranges: the Taeback Range, which ran across the country from north to south like the spine of some vast animal; in the northeastern corner three smaller ranges were parallel; and in the southwest was a third range, running north. Rain and melting snows washed the soil down from the mountains and each winter it piled, rich and fertile, into the valleys. How fertile, Il-han saw every day as he rode northward on his horse, for the fields were already golden with the rice harvest, and persimmons, yellow and red, were ripening on the trees. Against the gray cliffs of the mountains tall narrow trees of poplar rose like candles of yellow flame, few in number in the scanty soil, but each tree standing single and emphatic.

In the midst of this stern beauty the people walked like prophets and like poets, tall men in their white robes and high black hats, and women as tall in bright full skirts and short jackets, carrying baskets on their heads or jars of oil. Children were everywhere, the gay children of countryfolk. By night he saw them close, for he stopped each evening after sunset at the first village to which he came and asked for shelter at some grass-roofed house. Without fail he was made welcome to what the family had—a pot of soup, wheat with dried bean curd, a bowl of rice, a crust of wheaten bread, a dish of mixed herring and shrimps pickled together, kimchee for relish, and a cup of hot tea at the end of the meal. He made talk with the men while the women sat in the shadows and the children pressed about to stare and listen.

The talk was simple enough. “Have you enough to eat?” he asked first and the answer was usually, yes, enough, but sometimes not enough before the harvest.

“Have you other complaints?” he asked next.

They were wary at this until he assured them that he did not come secretly for taxes or for government. Yet their complaints were simple. Each farmer only wanted more land than he had, and each grieved because his sons had no chance to go to school.

“How can school help you with the land?” he asked.

An old grandfather leaned out of the shadows to make answer. “Learning clears the mind,” he said, “and books open the spirit of man to heaven and to earth.”

“Do you know how to read?” Il-han asked.

The old man touched his wrinkled eyelids. “These two eyes can see only the surface of what life is.”

When darkness fell and the candle guttered, they slept and Il-han shared the mat upon the floor. Few houses had more than one large room and perhaps a small one or two, and the larger room was where life was lived. At night the family lay on mattresses placed on the floor, parents in the center and the youngest child against the mother, and the eldest son lay nearest the door. A miserable life it might have been and yet was not, he concluded, for he heard no child cry in the night without comfort. Even he, accustomed to a great house and many rooms and his own privacies, felt here in the humble houses of the countryfolk a safety, a creature closeness, which made the night less dark. When morning came, nevertheless, he was glad to be on his way.

As he went northward, the air changed. The valleys grew more narrow, the fields smaller and the harvests were scanty. He heard of bandits in the foothills, and twice the men of a village went with him to the next village and he knew he was safe because their kinfolk were among the bandits. The answers to his questions now were rough and quick. No, they were not content with what they had. They starved too nearly, and the truebone King and Queen forgot them. As for the Regent, he was no better than a tyrant and they would not have him back. What did they want? They wanted food and justice and land.

“How will you get more land?” he inquired one night at an inn built for pilgrims to the monasteries. “These mountains rise like walls around you. Can fields be carved from rock?”

To this they had no answer until one ready fellow shouted that then they must be robbers.

“We rob the rich to feed the poor,” he sang, “and is this a sin? Under Heaven I say it is virtue!”

It was true that rich pilgrims were often robbed, and for that reason Il-han was glad that he traveled as a common man with only his horse and one servant following. Yet even these men were not evil for evil’s sake, or so he reasoned.

Riding through the clear pure air of mid-autumn, he reflected that in a country so mountainous as this, where tillable land was only a fifth part of the whole, the treasure was land. Who owned land held power, and this he understood even more clearly as he listened to the landfolk.

“Master,” his servant said one morning, “today we must go on foot. We climb mountains.”

They had spent the night at a small village built on a rock at the foot of the mountains. It was a family village and the folk subsisted on what the monks in the monasteries paid them for food they carried in from more distant villages. Since the monks ate no fish nor fowl nor flesh of any kind, not even a hen’s eggs, their meat was beans, wheat, millet and rice.

Il-han looked far up the cliffs ahead. The narrow country road became a ledge of rock upon which no horse could walk.

“Leave the horses here then,” he directed. “Tell the head villager that when we return we will pay him for good care of our beasts.”

The servant obeyed, and when the sun rose Il-han found himself on his way up the clifflike face of the mountain. Had he been fearful of heights, he would have turned back before the day was half gone, for the ledge, at times not more than eight inches wide, would have been more than he could bear. He kept his eyes on his feet, however, pausing now and again to stand and look about him. The sight was awesome. Above him the mountains pierced the sky, their heads hidden in silvery mists. Far below, bright waters leaped through narrow gorges and the echoes roared about him. Speech was impossible, for no human voice could be heard here. If water did not roar, winds whined among the cliffs.

All day they walked, stopping at noon to eat their packets of cold beans and bread. It was dusk before they came to the first monastery, where shelter could be found. All that was poet in Il-han’s nature took possession of him as he made the approach. The monastery faced west, and he saw it first in the light of the golden afterglow. Out of the shadows of twilight among the cliffs, he saw a stretch of green against the dark rocks, and among the gnarled pines he saw a curving stair of rock. Then, like a jewel, the ancient temple was revealed, the roofs of gray tile, the pillars vermilion red, the walls white. He climbed the steps and waited before great carved doors in the center of the stone-paved veranda. The doors opened as though he had called and a monk stood there, a tall gray-robed figure.

The monk spoke the Buddhist greeting, “
Na mu ah mi to fu
.”

Il-han replied with the Buddhist prayer which his mother had taught him years ago, when he was a small boy and she took him to the temple with her.

“
Po che choong saing
.”

“Enter,” the monk said. “You are one of us.”

He entered the vast hall and into the silence, and confronted a great gold Buddha sitting cross-legged upon a golden lotus, the hand upraised, the fingers in position. The golden face, benign and calm, looked down upon him and he felt peace descend upon him.

… For a month Il-han lived in the monastery among the priests. He slept at night in a narrow cell, and daily at sunrise he went into the Chamber of Spirits where the abbot, in hempen robes dyed saffron, sat upon a black cushion on the floor and read the Buddhist scriptures.

This monastery, the abbot told him, was rich in treasures of the spirit, and had been since the beginning of the kingdom of Koryo, when the monk Chegwan had taught the King himself that the unity of the Three Kingdoms revealed the unities of Buddhism, of which there were also three, doctrines, disciples and priests. The power of Buddhism had increased through such unity, spreading into distant China from India to the surrounding countries, and thence to Korea, and from Korea to Japan. Under this influence the Buddhist scriptures had been translated into the Korean language. The great Buddhist Tagak, son of King Munjon, and the twenty-eighth patriarch in direct descent from Sakymuni Buddha, himself went to China in the Sung dynasty and collected these precious books.

“We were preparing for the future,” the abbot told Il-han. “It was foretold even then that the Mongols from the north would invade our land. It is out of the north that the destroyers always descend upon civilized man. Did not China build the Great Wall against the north? The Mongols came from the north, but under our influence the nation stood as one people against the barbarous tribes.”

“To yield at last to Genghis Khan,” Il-han reminded him, “and the books burned—”

“Not to yield, only to submit,” the abbot said sharply. “True, our king fled to the island of Kanghwa. But we, believing that Buddha would save us, cast new wooden types and working, hundreds of us, for sixteen years, we gathered together again the sacred books, printing three hundred thousand and more pages of them. They are here, the most vast collection of Buddhist books in the whole world. And our country has remained intact, united under Buddha.

“Chegwan, who founded the School of Meditation, sat for nine years with his face to the wall so that he could not be distracted in meditation. The truly valuable things he taught are attained only by that inner purification and enlightenment which come through quiet pondering and meditating. For the source of all doctrine is in one’s own heart and therefore we who are Buddhist monks retire to the mountains.”

“Can you believe in this?” Il-han exclaimed. “What refuge is there here when armies swarm into our valleys and over our mountains?”

“In the age of Silla,” the abbot said, neither lifting nor dropping his mild voice, “an ancestor of your own, a prince, Hsin-lo, surnamed Kim, became a monk. He traveled to China and as he went up the river Yangtse he paused at the Mountain of Nine Flowers and received from the local magistrate as much silver as his prayer mat could cover. He then sat in meditation for seventy-five years, a white dog always at his side, and as he sat a radiance surrounded him and people realized his divinity. In the seventy-sixth year, the seventh month, the thirtieth day, he received the great illumination and was accepted by death. After death, his body did not decay, and tongues of fire flickered over his grave. Why? Because he had descended into Hell in love and pity for those doomed.”

“Of what use is this now?” Il-han cried. “All this meditation has not saved us. And is it enough to descend into Hell, as my ancestor did? Better if he had stayed in the Hell we now have in our country. We, too, may be the doomed, and remember that under the Koryo rule the Buddhist monks and priests and abbots themselves grew accustomed to power and so to luxury and corruption.”

The abbot was silent. The accusation was true. As rulers grew effete, even the religious days of ceremony had become occasions for feasting and carousing. Confucian scholars, fresh with the energy of a new philosophy, had denounced the Buddhists for their decadence and before this young and righteous energy the kingdom had fallen to the dynasty of Yi. Thereafter, Confucianism became the religion and the custom of the state and the nation, and the monks had retreated forever to these temples in the mountains of the north.

Il-han shared his day with the monks, and when it was finished he walked at twilight in the shallow gardens planted upon the ledges of rock surrounding the monastery. About him, whereever he went and whatever he did, the sharp dark mountains loomed toward the sky. The hollows were filled with darkness even at high noon and the shadows were black.

One evening at dusk he heard a special chanting of priests, a melancholy music, the human cry to Heaven of despair and hope, and he drew near and looked into the Hall of Chanting. The priests sat cross-legged on floor cushions, their eyes closed, their fingers busy with their rosaries of sandalwood and ivory, the dim lights of candles flickering upon their unconscious faces. Not one was young—not one! These were the old, the beaten, men in retreat from life, and the peace in which they lived was the peace of approaching death … Death! Yes, this was a tomb for men’s minds and men’s bodies.

He turned away and summoned his servant.