Maninbo (6 page)

After the Japanese army swept up north in 1592

and the walls of Hanyang, the capital, had fallen,

Neung-un, a monk of Docheon-sa temple, rose up,

gathering seven hundred slow-speaking common folk

in the lower Naepo region of western Chungcheong,

He had always been a stately monk.

Now he tore up his crimson gown, wrapped it round his neck.

With his shaven hair growing long,

his face became that of an angry lion.

He hated the king
and
his officials

for allowing the invasion,

hated them more than he hated the invading Japanese.

His intention was to attack Hanyang

where the Japanese were stationed,

with Yi Mong-hak and others,

and establish a new world.

When Neung-un was executed, heavy rain poured down.

On the estuary at Onsuri, Ganghwa Island,

only a couple of boats bobbing,

the hostess of a bar

gazes out

across the mist-shrouded sea.

Her pencilled brows

are lovely.

‘It’s time they were here…’

She is waiting

for anglers

to arrive on the last boat

crossing from Incheon.

Today she has not had one customer.

On the window of the bar

there is a sheet of yellowing paper:

TURN YOURSELF IN, RETURN TO THE LIGHT.

REPORT ANYONE SUSPICIOUS.

In the days of the Liberal Party in the 1950s

at Mirae-sa temple in Mireuk Island,

in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang province,

the disciples of the Great Master Hyobong gathered:

Gusan, Ilgak, Ilcho, Ilgwan and Beopjeong.

Beopcheol and Beopdal were there, too.

And Hwalyeon.

Spring-water-like Hyeyung was also there.

His chanting

sounded like a magpie’s squawk.

One day he left abruptly

and without any preparation went up the southern slopes of Jiri Mountain.

There, in a small rock cave,

he lived like a wild animal

on roots of trees, wild fruits, other such.

All he had was his koan,

the character Mu (
, Nothingness) of Master Zhaozhou.

Later he would get rid of that, too.

The hair on his head growing long,

his beard growing long, he became a wild animal.

He gave up living as a human being,

and died alone.

It was in the late 1970s

that the animal returned to a human state,

when his bones were reverently gathered up.

They should have been left where they were.

Shameful!

Maybe it’s near that perilous sea at Indangsu

where filial Sim Cheong was sacrificed to the Dragon King

after she sold herself for three hundred sacks of rice

in hope of restoring sight to her blind father –

Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea!

It stretches deep under the sea,

with Jangsangot in North Korea nearby.

There lies freedom for seagulls.

There the young priest Ho In-su spends his days.

He has a bed of lovely little cockscombs in his heart.

He quarrels with no one,

never quarrelled with anyone even in childhood.

When one lyric poem emerges

his joy is such that the time for Mass is a bit delayed.

In Incheon across the sea,

a heated sit-in strike is in progress

at the Catholic Centre in Dap-dong,

but here among the sea breezes of Baengnyeong Island

Ho’s clothes are flapping wildly.

King Hyoseong of Silla had a daughter, the princess Yu-hwang.

The king chose Won Il-sin,

renowned for his filial piety, as son-in-law.

The couple had four sons –

Sam-seok, Sam-myeong, Sam-jae, Deuk-yun.

The two sons Sam-seok and Sam-myeong took their father’s family name,

Sam-jae adopted his mother’s Yu as his surname,

and Deuk-yun, his mother’s Hwang.

Later, not those with the family name Won,

but the Yu of Changwon

and the Hwang of Changwon begot descendants.

They were originally a single bloodline,

then diverged into three streams,

flowing on,

flowing on

At times they were indifferent to one another,

like dogs and hens,

at times they desired one another, as hawks hunger for magpies,

and at times they were like a cluster of boils

all breaking out together.

Traveller reaching a village of barking dogs,

a village clouded with evening smoke –

from which family do you trace your descent?

The seats in the slow trains to Busan are hard.

While the trains stop for a while

at Okcheon station

we see a bent-backed old cleaner.

The station is clean,

marigolds bloom in tidy rows,

and cockscombs too.

He pays no heed

to the passing trains,

just keeps on sweeping over and over.

At home, there’s no photo of his dead wife.

For him, the inside of the station

is more like home.

He staggers for a moment

in the wind from the new
Saemaul
express trains.

His American name was David John Seel.

Quite a guy,

quite a guy.

Sometimes a transplanted tree casts a vast shadow.

Arriving in Korea

he spent ten years,

twenty years,

thirty-six years in all.

When he was head of the Jesus Hospital

at the foot of Mount Daga in Jeonju,

once, when a TB patient coughed up black blood and collapsed,

he saved his life by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He sucked in that black blood,

sucked in that dying man’s breath.

The first and most sacred task in this world

is saving another’s life.

Eom Ju-pal, the eldest son of Mr Eom of Hwagokpon-dong,

turned up late for his father’s wake.

Late at night,

dead drunk,

he sang an old popular song,

‘An Unfilial Son is Weeping’.

Under the awnings people whispered.

His brothers tried to stop him.

Tried,

but they were grabbed by the collars, knocked down

by Eom Ju-pal’s powerful fist.

For long ages, men have performed so-called filial and unfilial acts.

Animals are really pure.

Winged animals

and land animals are pure.

Mother and

father

give birth to their young then rear them, and that’s all.

They do not live at the expense of their children,

depending on their filial devotion.

Bearing and raising them,

that’s the end of it.

What pure disinterestedness.

In general,

exalting filial love quickly leads to exalting loyalty,

and when loyalty is exalted

comes, often enough, dictatorship.

On the southern slopes of Namsan

was a spot that just after Liberation

came to be known as Liberation Village.

It was on a steep alley

that twisted so

that once you were inside

there was no way out.

The roofs were head-high.

Mr Foul-Mouth from Pyeongan province in North Korea,

his stiff white hair in a crew cut,

would go up and down,

swearing in a loud voice every day.

‘Bloody goddamn…

Bloody goddam…

That f..cking bastard…’

On March 1, 1978, the Independence Movement holiday,

there was no peep from Mr Foul-Mouth,

him with the stiff white hair in a crew cut.

That morning he died, as if to celebrate

the Anniversary of the Independence Movement.

King Sinmun of later Silla,

came to the throne with the help of Jang Bo-go

who controlled Cheonghaejin, the West Sea.

Therefore

the king’s son, when he became the next king,

intended to take the second daughter of Jang, his father’s benefactor, as his queen.

How could Your Majesty take an islander’s daughter as your queen?

Objections came thick and fast.

Hearing of this, Jang Bo-go grew furious

and decided to destroy Seorabeol, the Silla capital:

Outrageous!

Outrageous!

Then the Silla general Yeom Jang

claimed it was he who had complained to the king,

and hastened out to meet Jang Bo-go.

The two of them drank their fill together

and that night, once they were drunk,

Yeom Jang

pulled Jang Bo-go’s sword from its sheath

and drove it into his breast.

A great hero who could not be killed by others’ swords

had to die by his own.

After that came a time when Korea lost control of the sea,

the sea by which they could cross not only to Okinawa

but to distant Annam.

Chusa Wandang Kim Jeong-hui,

created a new pen-name for himself

every time he produced a piece of calligraphy,

every time he painted.

He ended up having hundreds of pen-names.

His inkstone from Dangye

accompanied him when he was exiled

to Daejeonghyeon on Jeju Island.

It spent its whole life with him,

until at last he wore a hole in it

with so much grinding,

repeated grinding of ink,

and could no longer function as an inkstone.

Its master, Kim Jeong-hui,

got more than a little drunk,

wept,

buried the inkstone

and performed memorial rites before its grave

the following year.

‘You left this world ahead of me.’

In the Joseon Era, women had no names.

One girl from the Hong family

was adopted as Emperor Gojong’s niece.

Her lips were red as well-ripened boxthorn berries.

The girl grew up

and became the wife of Yi Ji-yong

who was leaving for Japan as Special Envoy;

She accompanied him using the name Gyeong.

She adopted her husband’s family name Yi

so she was known as Yi Gyeong.

Her flesh was like white jade,

her teeth like snowy jade

so she was called Yi Ok-gyeong.

Ok means ‘jade’.

Once in Japan, on receiving a bribe of ten thousand yen

her husband signed the Korea-Japan Protocol,

then concluded the Offensive-Defensive Alliance for the Russo-Japanese War,

allowing the Japanese to use Korea as a military base.

In reality, the whole of Yongsan in Seoul,

some 940 acres,

had served as a base for foreign forces

ever since Japanese forces captured it

during the Imjin invasion of the 1590s.

Finally Korea fell to Japan.

Even a
gisaeng
such as Sanhong refused

to become a concubine of one of the five ministers

who betrayed the nation,

saying that although she was a
gisaeng

she could never live as the concubine of such a man.

Yi Ok-gyeong, however,

not content with her husband,

had relations with the officials of the Japanese legation:

Hakihara

Kuniwake

Hasegawa.

Her domestic servants used to take her photo

and thrust at the crotch with a stick,

saying, This is a hole for Japs.

A hole for Japs.

Reading the
Maecheon Yarok
*

I lingered a moment at this part.