A History of Korea (26 page)
Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
THE OUTBREAK OF THE MYOCH’
NG REBELLION, 1135
In early 1135 came news of an uprising in Pyongyang that had quickly spread throughout P’y
ngan province, and soon most of the northwestern region of the country appeared under the control of a band of rebels under the leadership of a charismatic Buddhist monk. Before demonstrating his propensity for havoc, this monk, Myoch’ng, had set his powers of persuasion—the official histories called it something more akin to sorcery—on the king himself, convincing the monarch that the dynastic capital must be moved to Pyongyang in order to avoid national disaster. When the king, under great pressure from his highest officials, changed his mind, Myoch’ng and his cohorts in Pyongyang broke away. The leaders of this movement proclaimed a new, paradisiacal land, but to the Korycourt, of course, this action constituted nothing more than the latest rebellion.
It took over a year to quash the uprising, and the reverberations in this region and, indeed, in the country as a whole, would endure much longer. The Myoch’ng Rebellion shook the foundations of the country and encapsulated important social, political, and cultural developments in the Korydynasty both before and after the uprising itself. Myoch’ng’s downfall also had significant repercussions for the structures of political and social power in Kory, including the decline of the monk’s home region, and reflected the ongoing influence and special character of Korean religion.
THE INSTITUTIONALIZED INFLUENCE OF THE BUDDHIST CLERGY
Following the religion’s inception on the Korean peninsula around the fourth century, the Buddhist clergy and the sociopolitical elite developed a mutually beneficial relationship by incorporating each other into their respective realms of influence and claims to legitimacy. As the Ten Injunctions showed, this relationship had reached a peak by the early Korydynasty (
Chapter 4
). But Buddhism was not limited to the monarchy, for the centuries of steady propagation among the population had produced a culture suffused with Buddhist sentiment. Both the regional and central elites patronized the Buddhist establishment, whether through their support of local temples or sponsorship of nationwide Buddhist festivals. Surely the most visible example of the pervasiveness of Buddhism, especially among the aristocratic taste-setters, was the emergence of the remarkable style of blue-green “Koryceladon,” prized now (as then) even beyond Korea for its ethereal beauty. These ceramics’ almost indescribable sheen itself seems to evoke Buddhist spirituality, as do the many inlaid graphical motifs that refer to well-known Buddhist themes.
The state took the lead in this patronage of Buddhism. The separate spheres of influence had long ago been settled: the spiritual realm, including rituals for the afterlife, for the Buddhist order; and the secular realm of political power for the state. But the state continued to incorporate Buddhist learning and the clergy by recruiting a special segment of the officialdom through a
the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century—a significant issue, given the impact of the printed vernacular on the rise of early modern Europe.
The Buddhist printing advances of the Kory
When asked to name their people’s greatest cultural achievement, most Koreans likely would choose the invention of the native alphabet in the fifteenth century, but they might also list two products from the Buddhist-dominated civilization of the Koryera: the remarkable celadon ceramics, and the great advances in printing developed by the Buddhist establishment. In fact, one could argue that, taken together, the most impressive accomplishments of premodern Korean civilization came in printing technologies, dating back to the Unified Silla era (668–918), when the oldest extant work of woodblock printing in the world was printed and stored in a Buddhist altar. Woodblock printing was invented by the Chinese, but this technique achieved new heights in Korydynasty Korea and, furthermore, these developments laid the groundwork for the next major breakthrough, that of moveable metal type printing, also invented by KoryBuddhist clergy.
Most people in the West associate the invention of moveable metal type, the holy grail of premodern techniques because of the flexibility and durability it provided to enable mass printing, with Johannes Gutenberg of Germany. Gutenberg’s invention in the mid-fifteenth century ushered in the era of widespread information dissemination in Europe, which had an immediately colossal impact through the pamphlets and other rapidly-produced written works that fueled the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Very few people outside of Korea know that moveable metal type was actually invented two centuries earlier, around 1230, by Buddhist monks in a temple in south-central Korea. In fact the earliest extant book printed with moveable metal type, a Korean work of Buddhist scripture, dates to the 1370s, and is held in the French National Library in Paris. (How France managed to gain possession of this book is a matter of dispute.) In Korea, however, this breakthrough did not lead to significant social or religious change, even after the crafting of
Around the same time as this invention, the storied
Tripitika Koreana
—wooden blocks on which were carved nearly the entirety of the East Asian Buddhist canon—was being destroyed by the Mongol invasions that began in the 1230s. Originally produced as a testament to Buddhist devotion amidst the Khitan invasions of the eleventh century, the
Tripitika’s
destruction by the Mongols prompted the Koreans to reproduce it, again as a way of appealing to the Buddha for salvation amidst the
carnage. The result was a project that took nearly two decades in the mid-thirteenth century to carve over 80,000 wooden blocks, which are now preserved in Haeinsa Temple near the southern city of Taegu. This extraordinary feat bespoke not only the cultural centrality of Buddhism at the time, but also the authority of the Korystate and the Buddhist establishment in mobilizing the enormous human and material resources necessary for the project. It also testified to the high level of literacy and technology associated with KoryBuddhism.
Image 5
Wooden blocks of the
Tripitika Koreana
, in Haeinsa Temple, near Taegu, South Korea. (Author’s photo.)
