The child—one of those curious mop-headed youngsters whose sex is quite indeterminate, to themselves as well as to everyone else—offered to lead the way and skipped ahead down the rough track. She—for that is what I came to think the child was—wanted to try to carry my rucksack, and so I gave it to her: she promptly fell over into a ditch, giggling. ‘Mukkop-ta!’ she said, and I had to agree that it was very heavy, but the brief respite from the never-ending pressure of the shoulder straps was a great relief.
It was a half mile, through bamboo thickets, past a field with a pair of tumuli—old graves, probably for a husband and wife—across a mountain stream, before we came to a wall, pierced by a green gate. I rang an electric doorbell—the Korean government manages to insert electricity into the deepest recesses of the country—and lo! there was Haedarng, beaming genially. ‘My friend! You came! What a great honour it is for me. A great, great honour. Come, both of you, Mister Simon and your friend. Please enter my humble house. I am so sorry. This really is most inconvenient, I must be honest with you. A very inconvenient time to visit. But you must come and stay. I am so happy. So happy.’ And thus, trilling like a little fat bird, he led the way through the vegetable garden and sat us down on the floor. ‘Welcome!’ he beamed, and in shuffled a middle-aged woman with a tray on which were three small glasses of tea and a plate of sliced apples.
I started to protest at the inconvenience of our call, but Haedarng would have none of it. He was an honest man, he said, and didn’t want us to think that we had called at the most propitious of moments. It was not that we weren’t welcome, it was simply that there was nowhere to sleep because that very afternoon his mother had travelled down from Seoul, and she had naturally occupied the only other room. ‘So I am thinking. Tonight you and me, Mister Simon, we will have to sleep together. Tonight I will not sleep with my wife.’
Wife? I had supposed Buddhists to be monogamous and celibate. In fact, I learned later, the whole question of monastic celibacy had caused a furious debate in Korea, and only thirty years before. The Japanese colonial masters had introduced the notion of married monks to Korea; it was all part of the Japanese grand design to do all they could to lessen the cultural and religious differences between the two countries, as part of their moral rationale for having carried out their annexation. By the time World War II ended, and the Americans and the Russians had thrown the defeated Japanese out, several hundred monks had married and had started families. Indeed, many monasteries were run by married ‘monks’, if the phrase doesn’t sound too oxymoronic.
The consequences of this development, however, were dire. Not only did it reduce the number of traditional-minded lay supporters of Buddhism (though it did not increase the number of more liberal-minded ones—they, presumably, were more tempted by the proselytizing of the Christians), but it also squeezed the monasteries of funds, which were needed to provide for wives and families. The Chogye sect, who were (and still are) the largest of the various major groups in Korean Buddhism, argued vociferously against permitting married monks: the hierarchy in Seoul dismissed married men from their positions in many temples; two factions, bitterly opposed, grew up. The situation became almost grave, threatening Buddhism’s classically non-belligerent attitudes, and it was to deal with this emergency that President Syngman Rhee had to intervene in 1954, calming down the Chogye elders, insisting on a compromise.
But even today the row smoulders on, the actual fact of monastery marriage being probably rather less obnoxious than its symbolism as a relic of the habits of the Japanese.
Anyway, the middle-aged lady who brought us the sliced apples and tea was in fact Haedarng’s wife, though in the customary ways of the Korean family, I only saw her that first evening when she brought food or took away the dishes, playing the role of serving wench.
Since it became clear very quickly that Mr Shin was going to have to leave, Haedarng invited him to tell his story—why he had fetched up at such an obscure hamlet as Ojung-ri. As Mr Shin explained, telling us again how he was searching for somewhere peaceful where he could build a cottage to which his parents could retire, the monk’s face beamed, until it was illuminated by a kind of radiance. ‘You see!’ he turned to me. ‘What a good man this is. All this trouble he goes to for his old parents. He should be very proud. I hope you will tell such stories in your home. Do people in your country do such things?’ And then Mr Shin did leave, and a lot of deep bowing went on, the two men clearly deeply respectful of each other. I was mildly pleased at having played catalyst to what might be the beginnings of a friendship.
Haedarng had come up here to this sweet-smelling retreat just two years before, when he had completed four years of training and had been accepted as a monk. He had been a teacher before that in Kwangju for fifteen years, cramming physics and English down the throats of youngsters whose eagerness to learn impressed him still. The coincidence of dates was interesting, and I asked him if there was any connection.
‘Yes, of course! Of course! I saw the whole thing, the whole awful massacre! I saw bodies being slung off the back of army trucks like so many pigs. I saw terrible things. I couldn’t stand thinking about it. I went into deep meditation almost immediately after it was all over. It affected me very deeply. I decided then and there to give my life over entirely to the Lord Buddha. Will you, perhaps, excuse me while I give the evening rite to him?’
And he slid the paper doors back quietly and left the room for another next door. In a few moments I heard the clacking of the hollow wooden clapper known as the moktak, and I heard the faint, pleasantly relaxing notes of his sutra, which, he chanted slowly before the image of the man whose life he now followed.
I looked about his room. The floor, as in most Korean homes, was quite bare, was covered with a pale-yellow-lacquered paper, and was very warm. It was a typical ondol floor, much used in today’s Korea (except in modern apartment buildings, which find it difficult to arrange the necessary pipework). I find the ondol one of the most comforting aspects of a Korean house, but Henry Savage Landor, whose book Corea—The Land of Morning Calm is one of the more amusing late-Victorian accounts of the country, thought otherwise:
The Corean process of heating the houses is somewhat original. It is a process used in a great part of Eastern Asia—and, to my mind, it is the only thoroughly barbaric custom which the Corean natives have retained. The flooring of the rooms consists of slabs of stone, under which is a large oven of the same extent as the room overhead, which oven, during the winter, is filled with a burning wood fire, which is kept up day and night. What happens is generally this: the coolie whose duty it is to look after this oven, to avoid trouble fills it with wood and dried leaves up to the very neck, and sets these on fire and then goes to sleep; by which time the stone slabs get heated to such an extent that, sometimes, notwithstanding the thick oil-paper which covers them, one cannot stand on them with bare feet.
These days there is no subterranean room to house a fire but a series of flues that carry the hot gases from the kitchen range beneath the floor. It is a very cheap and efficient system: the cylindrical yontan briquettes that heat the cooker cost 200 won apiece—12 pence—and each lasts for eight hours: one will boil the cabbage and steam the fish and roast the beef, and heat the floor of the living room, too. The system is still used in Afghanistan—many’s the deep winter night I have spent out on the ice-cold deserts there, snug on the floor of a tiny inn, the baked earth yielding up the kitchen warmth to the frozen bones of the travellers. But elsewhere locally—Japan, for instance—they don’t seem to use ondol, and more’s the pity.
The price to be paid for such a system, though, would be considered steep by most Westerners. In the older and poorer Korean houses, only one room is usually used by all the family for living, eating and sleeping. This was certainly the case in Haedarng’s tiny house. During the daytime the room was almost empty of furniture—chairs are quite unknown, and when a meal was to be served small black lacquer tables were brought in fr
om the kitchen and taken away when everyone was done. A large cupboard stood at one side of the room, and inside it, piled in colourful bundles, were the silk-lined mattresses and coverlets that would be brought out at night. Mr Landor (whose other work, Alone with the Hairy Ainu, is, I suspect, a classic of its kind) shows that little has changed in ninety years:
The Corean custom is to sleep on the ground in the padded clothes, using a wooden block as a pillow. The better classes, however, use also small, thin, mattresses, covered with silk, which they spread out at night, and keep rolled up in the daytime. As the people sleep on the ground, it often happens that the floor gets so hot as to almost roast them, but the easy-going inhabitant of Cho-sen does not seem to object to this roasting process—on the contrary, he seems almost to revel in it, and when well broiled on one side he will turn over to the other, so as to level matters. While admiring the Coreans much for this proceeding, I found it extremely inconvenient to imitate them. I recollect well the first experience which I had of the use of the ‘kan’, which is the native name of the oven. On that occasion it was ‘made so hot’ for me, that I began to think I had made a mistake, and that I had entered a crematory oven instead of a sleeping room. Putting my fist through one of the paper windows to get a little air only made matters ten times worse, for half of my body continued to undergo the roasting process, while the other half was getting unpleasantly frozen. To this day it has always been a marvel to me, and an unexplainable fact, that those who use the ‘kan’ do not ‘wake up—dead’ in the morning!
It is rather more comfortable now. As soon as the sun went down, and as soon as we had had a frugal supper of soup and rice, kimchi and strawberries and poricha, and as soon as I had washed (out in the open, an upended kimchi jar as my washstand), Haedarng spread out the mattress, the yo (he gave me two ‘because I suspect the English backside is not used to sleeping on the floor—am I right?’), and the ibul (the coverlet) and the pegae, or cornhusk pillow. He gave himself a hard wooden block, African-style, on which he rested his neck. Within seconds he was asleep, and snoring hard. I fiddled around, trying to avoid the hot spots on the floor—the flue connected directly to the yontan nozzle seemed to surface wherever I planted my hipbone—and in a matter of moments was asleep. The next thing I knew, daylight was filtering in through the paper screens and Haedarng was up, off to give the Buddha his morning rite. Would I care to come?
Buddha was seated next door, in a tiny, darkened, fragrant, and slightly smoky cell. He was about three feet high, white and gold, and was seated in the classic position of the mendicant pauper. The smell and the smoke came from a tiny sheaf of incense sticks that smouldered in front of him. A prayer mat, with a small bell and the moktak, lay before him, and it was on this that the barefoot Haedarng now stood and motioned me to be silent and follow what he did. He knelt, in what I now know (but learned only with some pain) to be the classically acceptable Buddhist kneel: I had to bend my toes (stiff from my first eighty miles of walking) and kneel on the mat, then straighten my toes and sit back on the soles of my feet, then bend my back forward until my forehead touched the mat, and finally bring my hands over my head and lay my hands, palms uppermost, on the mat beside my ears.
That was quite tricky enough for someone fit and perfectly sober to do without falling over, but it had to be reversed. Without—and this is the killer—without being allowed to use my arms as support, I had to stand up, essentially using only my toe muscles to help me do so. The first time I tried it I stumbled wildly in the dark, pitched into the impassive figure of Haedarng (who managed these movements with enormous grace, the Nureyev of the elephant world) and nearly brought the whole proceeding to an undignified halt. And it wasn’t as though a Buddhist morning rite has just one episode of genuflection: I must have gone down on my knees thirty times in the following thirty minutes, sometimes at such a pace that I began to have a sort of nightmare that I was in the gymnasium back at school, with whoever had so signally failed to teach me P.E.
I would like to say that the morning prayer was an exercise in serenity and beauty. But my nerves and my strained muscles made it descend into something perilously close to farce. Haedarng didn’t seem to mind. He was evidently thinking of other things, for as we left and emerged once more into the sunlight—and the cloying smell of the incense was replaced by the crisp tang of balsam firs—he asked, rather chirpily, ‘Have I told you about my theories about your William Shakespeare?’
He then began to rattle off lines from memory and to ask questions I wished I could answer more readily. ‘“’Tis in ourselves that we are thus”,’ he said. ‘Do you know it? “Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme…” What exactly is hyssop, Mister Simon?
‘“The expedition of my violent love outran the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan…” Tell me what you think of Duncan, please.’ He would ask his questions with great deliberation, and I could see him note down the replies on a mental notepad. I was lamentable and told him of my shame. ‘Do not be ashamed, Mister Simon. It is my great study. My life’s work. I shall be honoured to give you a copy of my recent paper.’ And from a chest he pulled a slim, yellow paperback volume—a book that, for me, at least, proved somewhat difficult to comprehend: Shakespearean Tragedies Illuminated by Buddhism; or, Around the Philosophy of Retribution of Cause and Effect, Thoughts of Dhyana, and Matters of Ignorance. It had been privately printed and was written in a confusing mixture of Chinese characters, hangul, and rather fractured English. The nub of Haedarng’s theory—which he had propounded after ‘years of intense study’ of the five tragedies, Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet—was that Shakespeare and the Lord Buddha were both able to recognize the causes of tragedy (the ultimate being human ignorance) and their effects (death, sin and misery), but that only Buddha bothered to try to do something about them:
One thing I would like to say is why Shakespeare did not tell us the way to get rid of the causes of human tragedy. I expected to find out it in the five works of his tragedies because it could be the fruit of his philosophy concerning human beings. We Buddhists understand that is the emphatic core of Buddha’s teachings…
In conclusion, Shakespeare showed up the cause and effect of human tragedy so dramatically in his masterpieces, and Buddha told us the way to avoid human tragedy and attain the Pure Land through his whole life of over eighty years.
Or, put another way, William Shakespeare may have been a wise old bird, but he couldn’t hold a feather to Buddha, who had wisdom in unrivalled abundance. Haedarng’s paper was, I suppose, an essentially chauvinistic document, the kind of thing one might expect from a very enthusiastic convert to a new religion. And he had been an English teacher, so, West meets East, and the East wins. I felt briefly tempted to ask him if he was now thinking of reviewing the General Theory of Relativity in relation to the Buddha’s teaching but then thought better of it and held my tongue.
Cars began to arrive. Haedarng looked up, and exclaimed: ‘Ah! I regret we must stop this most interesting discussion. It is my wayward family! They have come for the birthday party.’ Mother, it transpired, was sixty-three years old this April Sunday, and her children were gathering about her for a morning celebration of the occasion. (Remember, a Korean is counted as being born at age one; the sixty-third birthday of a Korean is thus equated to the sixty-second birthday of a Westerner.)
The most notable of Haedarng’s relations to appear was his younger brother Hwang Chi-Woo—the monk Haedarng actually being a Mr Hwang in his teaching days, before he converted to Buddhism and took a sacred name. Chi-Woo, who had driven down from Seoul the night before with his wife and two children, is a celebrated poet, a former aesthetics student at Seoul National University. ‘Korea’s Oxford,’ he said proudly. ‘I have to tell you we are not a very popular family with the government,’ he explained. ‘One of us has become a monk because of the Kwangju massacre. Anot
her is a schoolteacher. Here am I, well known as an anti-government poet. And the fourth is a trade union organizer in Inchon, and he is in hiding. He has been on the run from the police for most of the last two years. So you have picked yourself dangerous company.’
By the time the last couple had arrived—a woman and child whose role in the family was never explained—mother emerged from wherever she had been hiding these past hours, and a lacquer table was brought in with scores of steel and china dishes balanced precariously on it. It was ten in the morning. This was a birthday brunch, I supposed. Haedarng leaned over to me. ‘Forgive me, Mister Simon, but you will see meat on this table. I do assure you it is only there because mother is still a Christian, and so is my—indeed, so is everyone at this table, as are you, I think, yes? I decided that even though I am sworn not to eat meat, we shall have it today in mother’s honour. I have asked the Lord Buddha, and he has said it will be all right.’
It was quite a party. Had I been here three years before—when mother turned sixty—it would have been even more so. A sixtieth birthday is a special thing in all those countries that have come under the maternal influence of old China, Korea very much included. The body is then deemed to have passed through the five twelve-year zodiacal cycles—the yukgap, as the sixty-year period is known—that constitute the proper life span of the human being. Once someone has successfully completed the span—as old mother Hwang had done three years before—then all time beyond is regarded as a marvellous bonus: you retire from active life, take your respected ease as an elder, let your children make you as comfortable as they can, and let filial piety take over the reins of your life.