Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  Yesan seemed a pretty useless place to go, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook. But when the woman at the ticket desk in Kongju said it wasn’t possible to go to Kapsa, where I’d planned to go, I took the bus to Yesan. From Yesan I could take another bus to Toksan, and from there I could get to a Buddhist monastery called Sudoksa.

  By early evening I was standing under a shop’s awning in the town of Toksan in the pouring rain, trying to figure out where to spend the night, and how to avoid being drenched to the skin. I had my tent in my backpack and would prefer to camp to save money, since all I wanted was to sleep, but it really was pouring down. Rainy season had started in earnest, it seemed. It was too late to get to the monastery, but I hoped I’d be able to find a bus there in the morning. Then a car stopped, the window rolled down and a fine-featured man with a smooth head and soft, voluminous, grey monk’s robes asked:

  ‘Odi gan?’

  Where was I going? ‘Sudoksa,’ I said, wondering if he’d advise me on how to find it or something. But no, it appeared from his gesture that he was offering me a lift.

  ‘Kamsamnida,’ I said, thanking him, and got in.

  I tried to cover my bare legs with my backpack. Of course I had to be wearing my shortest hiking shorts. As we made our way slowly through sheets of rain in the air-conditioned car, he tried to make conversation, but neither of us had enough of the other’s language. Eventually, he found some classical music on the digital dial, then put in the earpiece of his mobile phone to check his messages.

  After driving for ten minutes or so, we passed through a gate, and halfway up a forested mountain arrived at the monastery under darkening skies. Imposing buildings in traditional style rose from the hillside at intervals: long, black-tiled roofs, the eaves painted in delicate pinks and greens, decorated with flower and animal carvings; sturdy red wooden pillars, delicate trellised doors with paper windows. They looked like the palaces in Seoul, except surrounded by woods. Though there is no historical record, historians believe there has been a temple here on the mountain at Toksan since 599, and the worshippers practised Seon, or Zen Buddhism. We stopped and the monk disappeared into one of the halls, asking me to wait.

  I watched the mist rise from the trees and glanced onto the backseat, spying a football and a brochure for ‘Travelling in Malaysia’. I couldn’t help thinking the monk was going to emerge embarrassed, having discovered I had no invitation, no right to be here.

  Instead, he invited me into what turned out to be a canteen, and asked if I wanted to eat. When I said I wasn’t hungry, a boy of about twelve gave me an umbrella and two monks led me across the sandy courtyard, skirting puddles, past a stone pagoda and towards the Hall of the White Lotus. Instead of passing by, we walked up steps to a raised walkway kept dry under the long eaves – aha! Now the shape of the roofs made sense. Sliding wooden doors were drawn open on a bright, bare room. I left my shoes outside as was customary and from behind more sliding doors the monks brought out pretty satin cushioned quilts and a pink, seed-filled pillow, and I was left alone with a bow and a smile.

  Incredulous, I spent the evening sequestered in that perfect, simple space, listening to thunder in the hills and the ceaseless splashing and crashing of the rain as it poured off the eaves. Opening my wood-and-paper shutters, which were held back by carved wooden turtles, I looked out into the semi-dark and smelled the fresh air. Lightning floodlit the courtyard from time to time, revealing gnarled trees and, sheltered by a wooden pavilion, a giant iron bell and a hanging log in the shape of a fish. Monks ran around in robes and slippers, carrying umbrellas, avoiding the pooling water. The two who’d brought me here returned a couple of times, once to give me a candle when the storm was too bad to have the electric light on, and again to check I was comfortable. ‘Breakfast is at eight,’ they said, then conferred. Wrong word? ‘No, sorry, six.’ Smiles, bows.

  Because of the unfamiliar routine, I found myself lying wide awake at midnight and in a dead sleep by the morning. It was my first time with seed-filled pillows and quilts on the floor, but at least I was warm and dry. For someone who has always liked sitting on the floor, it’s an easy enough step to sleeping on one. We’ve all done it at people’s houses after parties.

  Thanks to my alarm clock, I made it blearily to breakfast, having splashed myself down with cold water in the washroom. In the canteen a monk in brown robes mutely helped fill my steel tray with rice, boiled greens, fresh beansprouts, tofu and mushroom soup, roasted potatoes and kimchi, all of which were delicious. Breakfast was quiet. Six tiny boys with cropped hair, in T-shirts and shorts, sleepy-eyed but with different expressions like six of the seven dwarfs, were guided to sit near me at the long table. They were ‘child monks’, aged four and five, I was told, training to be monks. One looked especially tired and grumpy, and a middle-aged lady gave them 1,000-won notes to cheer them up.

  So there I was, in a traditional, working Korean Buddhist monastery in the early morning. It was peaceful after the storm, and a fog hung close to the hillside, but it somehow felt lighter and more dewy than any I’d felt before in Seoul. A monk swept a courtyard, but everyone else had disappeared, leaving the place empty, so I ventured to explore. The main temple was a simple wooden structure, with a tall ceiling and plain wooden floor. Its graceful architecture bore signs of the influence of the Paekche Dynasty, of which King Muryong was a part, a sign of the venerable age of this Buddhist site. A hidden inscription on the main beam in the temple apparently said it was completed in 1308, ‘the thirty-fourth year of King Chungnyol’. Few wooden structures had survived that long in Korea, thanks to repeated invasions and the war. Most were burned down and rebuilt again and again.

  Five golden statues faced benignly through the open front wall out across the valley, three of them representing the past, present and future Buddha. Hanging paintings – paper or cloth, unframed and unmounted – lined the walls with stylised but lively, intensely detailed scenes of gods and kings. On the roof beams were faint centuries-old dragon paintings.

  Finding it was still only 7 a.m., I took a path up the moist hillside, vaguely following the tocking of a wooden instrument. Steps led into forest beside a stream cascading over boulders just as I’d seen in paintings in the temple. Several groups of monks passed me on their way down, smiled happily and wished me a good day. One asked cheerily,

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I grinned and shrugged. ‘Up the mountain!’

  He laughed, and pointed up the steps: ‘Only two minutes! See you again!’

  I continued, and fifteen thigh-tightening minutes later realised the monk had a wicked sense of humour.

  I’d reached the top of the steps when I found a thatched house. An inscription on the rock said it was the hermitage of Mangong, a Seon master who lived here in the early twentieth century and helped revive the Buddhist tradition in Korea. During the Japanese occupation, monks who didn’t agree to support the occupiers had simply disappeared.

  With the repression of Buddhism by the Confucian Choson Dynasty, and all the burning down of temples by the Japanese invaders, monks seem to have had a tough calling. Christianity, which arrived in Korea in the eighteenth century, has grown in popularity, particularly during Korea’s recent economic boom. But a quarter of South Koreans call themselves Buddhists, and people are often Confucianists, Buddhists and Christians at the same time.

  As I turned away from the hermitage, I realised the path continued straight up. Although it was tough walking that steep path in the growing heat and humidity, and views down the valley were obscured by clouds, the forest was peaceful: just rocks, short bushy pine trees, whistling birds, and mist blown along on a faint breeze. I continued up. There were mounds of pebbles by the stream, and slabs of rock for bridges, and little messages I couldn’t understand on flags hanging from the tree branches over the path. Then suddenly, the path turned into a clearing and revealed the most beautiful statue I had ever seen, standing in the mist, against a cliff of pink rock that h
ad been crept over by moss and ivy. The Buddha stood the height of two men, holding a vial, with an expression of absolute serenity. Candles and flowers and brass bowls had been laid at the statue’s feet. Across the clearing was a spring beside tall bamboo. The trees around held still the moist air, and the mist enclosed the whole scene – nothing could be seen beyond. The only sounds were of birds and water.

  Back at the monastery, I met a cheerful woman with short black hair and gold-rimmed glasses and a pretty laugh. Her grey clothes made me think she might be a nun.

  ‘I am Kim Moon-sim,’ she said, smiling and adjusting her glasses, ‘and I am curator of Sudoksa Museum.’ Koreans give their family name first, and because Kim is such a popular family name (almost half of South Koreans are called Kim, Lee or Park), they have two given names, hyphenated together. She spoke English, and told me she would show me around. I was being assigned my own guide. The museum opened here in 1999 to promote an understanding of Buddhism and protect the treasures, inspired by the life and practice of the two great Seon masters who lived here. It was created with the help of the Korean government and Askadera, the oldest such temple in Japan. Most visitors were Korean, Japanese or Chinese Buddhists on pilgrimages.

  Taking me into the museum, Kim Moon-sim pointed out the displays showing bowls that once belonged to Seon masters, and their rag robes for winter and wooden slippers for wet weather. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century originals of the hanging paintings from the temple were in glass cases here. Feeling I should find out more about the treasures, I asked about what looked like two tiny pieces of grey stone in a box on display.

  ‘They are, um, relics,’ she said. She looked something up in her pocket dictionary and confirmed. ‘Yes, relics.’ Bones, perhaps, I speculated?

  I tried asking about another object on display, this time pointing to a holy book. With momentarily furrowed brow, Miss Kim flipped through a dictionary. Then she consulted Chung-am, a monk with cropped black hair and a tan complexion, dressed in loose voluminous grey robes and slippers, who’d come to join us. He spoke to her in Korean for what seemed a long time then he threw up his hands with a laugh, eyes sparkling, and went to play on the multimedia screen instead.

  ‘Sorry!’ I laughed. ‘It’s OK.’ It was a little too complex to explain to a neophyte, I suspected. A non-Buddhist western woman arriving alone, wearing short shorts and a tight T-shirt was an oddity here to say the least, yet I’d met with nothing but smiling kindness. As we left the museum, I tried to buy postcards as a thank you, but they wouldn’t accept any money. A softly spoken man in secular clothes invited me to sign the guest book, and followed us across to the canteen for lunch. When we’d been up to the counter to fill our trays and sat down at the long tables, he asked me where I was from.

  ‘I’ve come here from Canada,’ I said, ‘but I’m originally from England.’

  ‘Are there many Buddhist temples in Canada?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, no, I don’t think so.’ Certainly not like this, I thought.

  Meanwhile, Miss Kim had a laugh over my clumsy use of chopsticks, and we bonded over my need for guidance with basic eating.

  Other visitors were milling about or heading up the mountain by the afternoon, when Miss Kim took me on a walk around the monastery. The 1,080 steps I had taken up the mountain that morning, she told me, were related to the path to enlightenment. She took me to the temple and showed me what to do when entering, how to kneel before the Buddha, and how to show respect to the monks by putting my hands together and bowing. I bowed to the lady who looked after the temple, too, and she smiled and said, ‘Have a lucky day!’ I met a lady in a wide-brimmed straw hat who let visitors buy prayer tiles, and Chung-am and Kim Moon-sim pressed gifts on me. To show my gratitude I tried to buy some keepsakes, including a wooden bead bracelet, but again they wouldn’t let me pay, and apparently I couldn’t pay for my room and board either because this was a Buddhist place. These funny, charming, calm people had been so generous and welcoming, I really didn’t want to go back to Seoul. These few days in the countryside had opened up Korea for me as a place with an enchanting spirit.

  When it was time to leave, Chung-am insisted on driving me to town in one of the communal monk-cars. On either side of the road, bright green rice fields descended in tiers from hillsides he told me were named after phoenix and dragons. When we got to Hongsong, he insisted on buying my bus ticket back to Seoul, then said goodbye. I walked around Hongsong for an hour in a light-headed state of confusion before I could bring myself to get on a bus.

  Later I tried to find out about the ‘child monks’ I had seen at the monastery. Monasteries have for centuries taken in small boys to receive a religious education, while giving them the freedom to leave if they choose not to become monks. I read online about a programme at another South Korean monastery, Haeinsa. Most of the thirty-seven child monks there had been abandoned by parents who were divorced or too poor or too young to care for them. More than ninety per cent had been physically abused before being left at the temple. Buddhists say these children were monks in their past lives, and hardship at a young age is necessary to lead them back to the path. But they attend a local school and will make their own decision as to whether they want to become monks. Local volunteers cook the meals and wash their clothes. Muhak, the monk who started that programme, says he refuses to accept children at the parents’ first request, as it’s not simply an orphanage. ‘This is the house of mercy where we cultivate souls.’

  CHAPTER TEN:

  HEART AND SEOUL

  ‘Hey babe,’ said Gav, welcoming me back with a big hug.

  Still dreamy over the last few days, somehow I managed to explain everything that had happened.

  ‘I feel bad that you weren’t there,’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m happy for you!’ He said. But I could tell he wished he’d been there. Although I didn’t say it, I felt different after what I’d experienced. A whole new Korea had opened up for me. All the way on the bus back to Seoul, I wrote in my notebook about the monastery. Or, I should say, the story wrote itself. And now I was excited about sharing it with people.

  Although it had been years since I’d done any journalism, having put all that aside once I started working as an agent, I was encouraged enough by this to make an appointment to visit the English-language Korea Herald offices and speak to the editor about writing occasionally for the paper’s weekend supplement. I also made contact with a paper back home. This was a profoundly important summer to be in Korea, with the historic summit in June and the symbolic reuniting of certain families planned for August. But I’d never been good at news and current affairs, at thinking of what the person on the street wants to know. I wanted to discover the secret places that spoke to me of Korea’s culture. Writing would challenge me to explore and think about them. I had this opportunity to follow a new path of learning, and the freedom of a journey dictated by no itinerary.

  Life went on as usual in Seoul, and laundry needed to be done: from the sublime to the ridiculous. But I discovered a new laundry place on our hill which, prosaic as it was, made me happy. Perhaps I was becoming more Buddhist. Laundry places weren’t self-service – you brought your bags of clothes to be washed and dried. The place we had used before was a designated ‘Foreigners Laundry’ near the Hyatt, but there the people had no great prowess in English, and this local one was cheaper and better. The pleasant, smart young man who ran it (and I was impressed to find a young man running a laundry) now recognised me, so the transaction was easy. I gave him the bags with the colours separated from the whites, he gestured he’d wash them separately. I asked in a rudimentary fashion – ‘Naeil?’ – if I could pick them up the next day.

  ‘Tomorrow evening,’ he responded in English.

  And I replied in Korean, ‘Kamsamnida!’ And sure enough, they were all clean and neatly folded as promised the next evening, and I lugged them up the steep hill to our apartment, pleased that I’d been allowed to do some non-foreign lau
ndry.

  My Korean was coming along slowly, and the few days in the country where I got to speak to people had helped my confidence. Single words like naeil were easy enough to master. But sentences seemed infinitely more complicated, words suddenly sprouting polite suffixes like -ssumnida and extra little words I didn’t know all over the place. And something as common as ‘goodbye’ appeared to assume different forms. I’d heard annyung kyeseyo and annyunghi kasipsiyo, not to be confused with annyung haseyo, which is hello. Though there was also annyunghi jumuseyo. Yikes. But most of these seemed to work OK. The sounds of Korean were difficult to reproduce in the Roman alphabet, so it wasn’t always clear how to pronounce things. But I tried to listen.

  My laptop computer had stopped working, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I used the wrong adaptor and caused a power surge or just that, since I bought it second-hand a couple of years ago, it had chosen this moment to die. Thankfully I was in the right country to have a computer problem, and the young man behind the desk at the computer room Click gave me the contact details for a computer doctor, Sean Kim. He spoke good English as he had lived in Australia, presumably why he called himself Sean Kim instead of Kim Sean-something, and he arrived wearing a Roots Canada T-shirt. A computer doctor who did house calls! He and his friend took their shoes off at the door. I told them they didn’t need to, but they felt uncomfortable not doing so, even in a westerner’s flat, as it wasn’t ‘Korean style’. Koreans sit and sleep on the floor, so they always remove their shoes before entering a house.

  ‘You are an English teacher?’ Sean Kim asked me.