Korea (20 page)

The path entered a small copse of pine trees where the sunlight was split into thin shafts of dusty air. It became much cooler. The air was fresh with the clean, crisp smell of resin. A tiny stream burbled somewhere in the deeper gloom. The birdsong, bright and cheerful out in the warmer air, was muffled. I walked steadily for ten minutes, always slightly uphill, until I came to a small clearing, strewn with old pine needles. A small obelisk, inscribed with Chinese characters, stood on a mound; it was probably a gravestone or a village guardian designed by the local shaman to keep away unfriendly spirits. I stood still for a while, lingering over this tranquil spot. And then I became aware of someone else also standing in the shadows. It was a man dressed in a neat blue suit and well-shined brown shoes. He hadn’t seen me and was just standing stock still, gazing up towards the patches of blue sky. I watched him for a few minutes and then coughed to let him know I was there. He turned round, and his face broke into a broad smile.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and in impeccable English added, ‘What is your name?’

I told him and said how sorry I was for spoiling his reverie. ‘Oh no!’ he replied. ‘It is so nice to have company. I was just looking for somewhere for my parents to live. They will be retiring soon; she is seventy, you know, a wonderful woman, and she and my father have always said they would like to retire to a peaceful place in the hills. I told them I would look out for somewhere. It is Saturday, I had time off, so here I am. What about you; why are you here?’

I told him of my walk, and he chuckled approvingly. It was
so unusual, he said, to see people in Korea doing things alone. The Confucian spirit, he said, laid great emphasis on the group, on togetherness. ‘Solitude is not a Korean pleasure,’ he said. ‘You and me, we like it. We shall be friends, I think.’

We walked slowly together across the mossy floor of the woods, while he told me a little of his life. He worked as a manager of a tyre factory in Kwangju. He had been a teacher until three years before, but he had left his job. There had been some trouble. In fact he would tell me about it. It was a strange little story. I might find it amusing.

‘You will know we have a president in power who is not very well liked down in these parts. Well, even if we like him or not, it is part of our way of life that we give him great respect. Not everyone does—the students up in Seoul do not, for instance—but most of the older people, like myself, we do. And of course the young children are in awe of him and his position.

‘Well, some years ago we were told that he was coming down to our town and that he would visit a local school. There was great excitement. The security people wouldn’t say exactly when he was coming, but they told the school to go ahead and make all the preparations to greet him properly. So they did just that: they arranged a big ceremony, and as one of the ways of welcoming him, they made a huge portrait of him, broken up into hundreds of pieces on the back of coloured cards. When the children held the cards up one way, they made a pretty pattern. When they turned the cards over, there was the president’s face.

‘The day arrived, and we were told when he would be arriving. The children were ready, everyone very nervous. Then one of the children asked permission to go to the bathroom. His teacher said that would be fine, but hurry. Well, you can guess what happened; while the boy was in the bathroom the president arrived, and the security people wouldn’t let the boy back onto the field. So the celebration went on, the children did their dances with the cards and turned this way and that, and then, all together, turned them over.

‘The president’s face was there all right—except that it was
missing a left eyebrow. The official people went crazy! The president himself didn’t say anything, of course, but after the party had gone the education department had the master in and fired him on the spot. The headmaster was in trouble. I even heard they visited the parents of the child and warned them of the consequences. And then an instruction went out. If ever there was a demonstration of loyalty like that held again, the children had to be told if they wanted to pee, they peed where they stood. Understand?

‘I got to hear that there was another demonstration some weeks later, and the president was late, and the children were waiting several hours. And they did as they were told. And when it was all over the children, particularly the girls, went back to their mothers, terribly upset by it all. It had been a bad experience for them all. So it was then that I decided to leave. I just didn’t seem to be in the right job. Tyres are not much fun, but out in the commercial world I’m not so much a part of the machine. I feel better now, although I miss the children. I miss teaching.’

I have no way of knowing whether his story was true or not. It is about a microcosmically unimportant event, but one that nonetheless somehow illustrates the way that authority occasionally works in today’s Korea. There is no way of finding out if what my tyre maker alleged had indeed happened or whether it was the fanciful invention of a man who loathed the regime. I did, though, mention it to a doctor in Kwangju and to another in Seoul, and both said they had heard the tale and believed it to be true. So my initial nervousness about including the tale evaporated: even if it is not literally accurate, and even if my guide had a somewhat selective memory, it represents the kind of assumptions that are made these days about the behaviour of governments, and as such it has a purpose. The beginning of the tale was amusing enough, anyway, and Mr Shin—as he later introduced himself—was an excellent storyteller.

But he had no idea where Kumtasa might be, and when we reached the next hamlet we asked, and no one knew. Then I remembered that most Buddhist monks were called
Sunim—
whether that was a title or not I wasn’t really sure—and so I tossed that word around a little, and sure enough a small boy, bright-eyed and smiling, said yes, he knew where a
sunim
lived, and pointed up through a grove of bamboo higher still up the mountainside. ‘Haedarng,’ I heard him say, and suddenly there was a murmur of agreement, and everyone started nodding and grinning and pointing up into the hills. My friend was no stranger, thank heavens.

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.