A History of Korea (24 page)

Like Buddhism, Confucianism had entered the peninsula from China in the Three Kingdoms era. By Wang K
n’s time, Confucian thought had pervaded the vocabulary of statecraft on the peninsula, and a critical mass of interested scholars and officials had emerged. Wang K
n himself appears in the Ten Injunctions as holding a keen awareness of the importance of Confucian precepts, and four of the injunctions allude to Confucian teachings in prescribing lessons for royal succession and the management of state affairs, including the acceptance of admonishment by the ruler. The numerous allusions to passages in the Confucian classics, in fact, might lead one to take Wang for a Confucian scholar himself.

Wang appears well versed in the great thought systems that had originated from abroad, but the pronounced tenor of the Ten Injunctions is actually a proto-nationalistic call for maintaining the distinctive ways of Korea in the face of foreign influences, including those from the Middle Kingdom. “In the past we have always had a deep attachment to the ways of China ... but our country occupies a different geographical location and our people’s character is different from that of the Chinese,” warns the fourth injunction. “Hence, there is no reason to strain ourselves unreasonably to copy the Chinese way.” Buddhism, though, is considered a native cultural element, as stated explicitly in the sixth injunction, which insists that the great state-sponsored Buddhist festivals retain the worship of the shamanistic and geomantic spirits of primal Korean religion. Indeed in the fifth injunction Wang credits his great achievement of peninsular reunification to the combination of geomancy and shamanism, and he implores his descendants to remember the centrality of Py
ngyang in Korean civilization. He designates this city the Western Capital, second in importance only to his home town, the Kory
capital of Kaegy
ng (formerly Songak, and later known as Kaes
ng). This dualism suggested by the Ten Injunctions—on the one hand, native, including Buddhist, ways, and on the other, “Chinese” Confucian learning—would rise to the level of considerable tension over the course of the Kory
dynasty.

The strong nativist impulse in the Ten Injunctions is reinforced by the explicit condemnation of the people lying to Kory
’s north, the Khitan, who are referred to as “savage beasts” (more Confucian language). The periodic invasions and skirmishes from the north—a recurring theme throughout Korean history—was not lost on Wang. In his ninth injunction Wang instructs his followers to maintain a watchful eye on the northern frontier. This proved prescient, for Kory
would suffer major invasions from various northern peoples, beginning with the Khitan, and then the Jurchen, then finally the Mongols, who would conquer Korea in the thirteenth century and rule the country as semi-colonial overlords for almost a hundred years (
Chapter 6
).

The wariness of the northern part of the peninsula was understandably inscribed into the Ten Injunctions, but what of the wariness of the southern part, in particular the southwestern territory of the peninsula that had previously stood as the domain of Latter Paekche (and before then, Paekche)? In the infamous eighth injunction, Wang goes into detail about the negative geomantic and cultural features of this area as a prelude to the stunning instruction not to allow people from this region to become government officials. The recent history of straining to conquer Latter Paekche is unequivocally acknowledged as the source of Wang’s suspicion of this region. Even so, as historians have pointed out, it is remarkable that Wang would put forth such a pronouncement, given his general policy of appeasement of local elites around the country (he married several women from this region), and given that one of his highest officials came from the southwest. Here we encounter, then, the doubts about the authenticity of the Ten Injunctions itself as originating with their purported author, Wang K
n. There are persuasive arguments that indeed, the Ten Injunctions date to the early tenth century, more than fifty years after Wang K
n’s passing, and that they reflected the political circumstances and concerns of that subsequent period. The more important point, however, is that, regardless of the precise dating of this document, it exerted a great influence in the following four centuries of the Kory
as the blueprint for proper rule. In any case, the eighth injunction did not raise doubts about Wang’s authorship of the Ten Injunctions until
the latter part of the twentieth century, when regional hostilities, particularly on the part of the South Korean dictatorships toward this area, flared into a major detriment to South Korean political culture.