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.
“We leave tomorrow at dawn,” he told the man.
“Master, thanks be to God!” the man said. “I feared you would never leave this doleful place.”
And yet, when he entered his cell to pass his last night he saw that the candle on the table was lighted, and someone waited for him, cross-legged on the floor. It was the young monk who had arranged the abbot’s robes in the morning. He rose when Il-han entered.
“Sir,” he said, “is it true that you leave us in the morning?”
“Before dawn,” Il-han replied.
“Take me with you, sir, I beg you take me with you!”
The young monk’s eyes glittered in the candlelight, his face yearning with demand. Il-han was dismayed and surprised.
“How can I?” he asked. “You have taken your vows.”
“In my ignorance,” the young monk groaned. “I was only a peasant’s son, and when I was seventeen I ran away and was found by Christians and put into their school. But my soul was not satisfied, and I sought the Lord Buddha here. Alas, my soul is still thirsty for truth. I have read many books, East and West. From pilgrims I have had books of western philosophers, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, but I find no peace. Where is truth?”
“If you cannot find it here,” Il-han told him, “you will not find it elsewhere.”
And steadfastly refusing the young monk’s pleading, he sent him away and drew the bar across the door.
When he went to the abbot the next morning to bid him farewell and to thank him for his hospitality, Il-han felt, nevertheless, a pang of separation. Much, very much of his country’s past was embalmed in this place and in other temples like these in other mountains. Mountains had become hiding places for the remnants of a lost glory. What doom lay ahead? What force could hold his people together, now that the love of Buddha was forgotten?
“Pray for us,” he told the abbot, “you who still pray.”
“I pray,” the abbot replied, and he stood up to bless Il-han. The man was tall, but the priest was taller, and he folded his hands on Il-han’s bowed head.
“Buddha save you, my son! Buddha guide your footsteps! Buddha grant you peace! Ah mi to fu—”
With this blessing, Il-han left the mountain and went southward to the sea.
The eastern coast of Korea is smooth but the western seas eat away at earth and rock and this for eons, so that shores are cut in deep and narrow bays and coves and the tides are high and perennial. Along such shores Il-han traveled as roads would allow, following the rough and sandy footpaths of seafolk as they walked from their huts to their nets. These men of the sea were different from farmer or monk. They were hard, their voices were rough, their skin was encrusted with salt, their eyes were narrowed by sun and storm. They were fearless, setting forth in small sailboats upon high seas and at the mercy of the tides. When they came home all their talk was of the sea and the fish, the soft fish and the shellfish. While the men went to sea their wives and children dug ginseng roots in the hills behind the fishing villages, a good crop, for the best ginseng root was to be found near the eastern town of Naeson. Yet it was rare and it was the more precious for its tonic qualities in soup and tea. A root of ginseng in a broth of salted fish was medicine enough for any ill, and old folk drank it to loosen the coughs that racked their lungs. For vegetables the seafolk used the young shoots of wild herbs steamed and then dipped into vinegar and soy sauce. They seldom ate meat, and indeed in the many days that Il-han traveled among the fishing villages, he ate no meat. True, one day he saw some dried beef hanging before a house, but when he inquired how it came there, the owner said the cow had died of a disease.
“Master,” his servant exclaimed in horror, “let us eat only fish in these parts.”
For liquor the seafolk drank a homemade brew, muddy to look at and of vile odor. For fuel, as Il-han saw as he rode through this shore country, men and women, too, gathered pine needles and fallen branches, straw and grass and dried seaweed, and this signified, he thought, how little the seafolk cared for land. The houses, too, were smaller here and more filthy than elsewhere, and the people more ignorant. One night in a small village inn where he had stopped he was awakened by voices shouting “Thieves — thieves!” and the villagers burst into his room, believing him to be a thief because he was a stranger, until his servant, berating them loudly, sent them away again.
“Yet we are more lucky than the land toilers,” a fisherman told him one night when he sat by a fire in a hut.
“How are you more lucky?” Il-han asked.
The man spat into the fire and considered his next words. He had two fingers bitten off by a shark, a small shark, he said, with a short laugh, else his whole hand and even his arm would have been off.
“We are more lucky,” the man went on, “because the yangban nobles cannot seize the sea as they seize the land. The sea is still free. It belongs to us because it belongs to Heaven and not to our overlords.”
The words were pregnant. In the fishing villages Il-han found the same anger he had found among the peasants, subdued by the same despair. To be poor, it seemed, was inevitable. None could escape. But here by the sea, poverty with freedom was tolerable, while a peasant without land was a slave to the landowner.
He slept ill that night. The smell of the seafolk was the smell of fish. The fragrance of the temple had been incense and sun-warmed pine, but here even the sea winds could not clean the air of the smell of fish drying, fish molding in the mists, fish salted for the winter, fish rotting on the sand. Even the tea these sea families brewed tasted of fish, and so melancholy was their life, between bare mountain and rolling sea, that he could not linger.
After he had passed Pusan, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, he rested at an inn at Hyang-san, and when the long tables were laid for the evening meal for the guests, he found the same poor fare but he ate as best he could, in order that he might not be suspected of being a rich man or a government official in disguise.