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.”