The Nine Cloud Dream

by Kim Man-jung

  In its amalgamation of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist themes in its plot, Kuunmong ends by clearly privileging Buddhism as its underlying moral rhetoric. It does so by offering an analogy by which readers, after seeing Hsing-chen’s realization, might model themselves on the young monk and thereby break the “fourth wall” of the text and extend its central Buddhist themes into real life. Just as Hsing-chen wakes up from being Shao-yu, having moved from reality to dream and back again with the realization that the two are indistinguishable, the reader may wake out of being immersed in the fantasy of the novel to realize that its themes are not any different from real life. For a typical Western reader, the analogy may stop here, but Kuunmong is an important and especially sophisticated example of Buddhist metafiction. A Buddhist understands that one’s consciousness of “reality” is actually only an illusion created by the mind and that the world one “lives” in is a once-removed construct of consciousness. In that context, the trajectory of Kuunmong’s plot is especially resonant, because it plays out a life of pleasure and accomplishment into one of depression (the unsatisfactoriness of dukkha, the primary Buddhist truth of suffering) and resolves Hsing-chen’s depression by having him wake up to follow the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The resonance with which Kim played out the Buddhist rhetoric in Kuunmong seems to have made the work widely influential. A hundred years after the publication of Kuunmong, China’s greatest novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng 紅樓夢), would feature similar plot details and parallel themes.

  Most critical studies of Kuunmong have tended to examine its Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist themes as separate entities. Reality and illusion in Kuunmong have been discussed in detail by academics, though Francisca Cho Bantly’s Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in The Dream of the Nine Clouds is the only book-length critical work in English on Kuunmong. Academics have also taken a Taoist lens to Kuunmong, one of the most innovative being Marion Eggert, who makes a compelling case for considering the eight women in Kuunmong as a symbolic expression of the underlying cosmology of the I Ching (an allusion that would have been far more apparent to readers of Kim’s time). From that perspective, Hsing-chen’s eight fairies are not a sign of sensual excess, but a necessary number for symbolic completion paralleling the Buddhist resolution at the end. The Taoist I Ching has eight trigrams, Buddhism has its eightfold path to enlightenment, and even Confucians call one’s fate “the eight characters.” But Kuunmong reveals its true syncretic brilliance in the way in which its Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist features converge, and one of the ways to find access to this syncretism is via the symbology of numbers, which both introduces and concludes the novel.

  The numbers that bracket the narrative must be examined through a lens of three traditions to be fully appreciated. The number nine is presented even before the story, in the title, and is easy to gloss as the eight fairies and Hsing-chen. But the narrative itself begins with the number five, referring to the “Five Peaks” of China on the surface, but implicitly evoking the Buddhist skandhas, the “five heaps” that account for how one lives in a world of illusion (i.e.,“cloud dreams”) created by the senses. Into this setting of the five heaps amplified into mountains comes the monk named Liu-kuan, meaning “six perceptions” (a reference to the fact that there are six senses in Buddhism, the sixth being consciousness). Finally, Hsing-chen (the one) and the eight fairies are introduced after this to constitute the nine clouds.

  Kim’s use of the number eight has a range of meanings that are especially relevant because they weave together the three traditions in a way that any culturally literate person of the times would immediately have understood. For example, the eight trigrams of the I Ching, mentioned above, are often arranged around the taijitu (the yin/yang symbol, which also represents the feminine and masculine principles) in a diagram of cosmic order understood during both the Tang dynasty and Joseon Korea.

  With a variant yin/yang in the center and with the trigrams rearranged, this Taoist symbol would eventually be adopted as the eogi, the royal standard of Joseon in the nineteenth century (and one of the early designs for the flag of the Republic of Korea).

  Even scholars who had not memorized the I Ching would have known the eight trigrams, as they were also associated with the cardinal and ordinal directions, with their arrangements in a square three-by-three grid. The empty position in the middle was the ninth position, which corresponded to the center of a squared circle and was also associated with the position of a village well surrounded by houses or fields. This grid was a cosmological and political structure, and would have been well-known to any Joseon intellectual.

  In the novel, this structure corresponds to Hsing-chen in the middle with the eight fairies around him or Shao-yu in the center with his eight wives and concubines surrounding him. In Joseon and Tang culture, this diagram was a general model for social organization: houses around a village well, districts around the capital, advisers around the king, buildings around the courtyard, wives and concubines around a lord—a structural model for public as well as private relationships,12 precisely those whose mismanagement led Kim to criticize King Sukjong.

  In Buddhism, the circle made by eight trigrams corresponds to the empty circle at the eighth place in the “Oxherding Cycle” (a well-known series of ten pictures with commentaries that chart the journey of a follower of the Zen path).

  This eighth picture is transcendence, the primordial emptiness, the condition from which all things emerge (parallel to Hsing-chen, whose name means “Original Nature,” characterized by primordial emptiness, from whose mind the dream narrative emerges), but in the Zen tradition it is required that one return from this state, back into the world, to help others achieve enlightenment.

  Finally, the circle and the number eight together represent the wheel of dharma, the symbol of Buddhism, which refers to the Buddha’s teaching of the eightfold path (the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism being the more distinct spokes).

  The circle itself also represents samsara, the continuous cycle of birth and rebirth sustained by the accumulation of karma. The swirl in the center is parallel to the primordial emptiness from which all reality emerges. The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is the concept of dukkha, generally glossed as “suffering” but more accurately rendered “unsatisfactoriness,” which is Shao-yu’s condition just before he wakes up.13 Highlighting these Buddhist themes, many editions of Kuunmong use a four- and/or eight-part structure in their printing.

  The presence of the number five in Kuunmong, after the initial overt reference to the five great mountains and the Five Peaks at the beginning of the novel, will be less apparent to a Western reader because it is implied throughout the rest of the story (except in allusions to the Chinese Five Classics). But to an educated reader of Kim’s era, the number five was a matter-of-fact part of one’s worldview, with immediate additional associative connections related to cosmology and social structure: the Five Relationships of Confucianism, the five elements of Taoism, the five colors, the five tones, the five cardinal directions (with the center being the fifth). Kuunmong implicitly critiques King Sukjong’s violation of Confucianism’s Five Relationships (ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder to younger, and friend to friend), which were seen as vital to maintaining social stability, by integrating that structure into the Buddhist theme of dream and illusion.

  For a Buddhist, there are five emotions and five spiritual faculties, and a process of five steps that condition one’s perception of reality. Here, it is important to remember that, in Buddhism, dream and reality are not a binary pairing of opposites. What Western culture considers reality is, in Buddhist philosophy, simply another layer of illusion because it is a “conditioned” reality, meaning that even our mundane perceptions of the world are a result of the operation of a five-part system, the five skandhas (or “heaps”) mentioned above: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. We, in
our normal state, are never in touch with real reality, or the thing itself, but constantly experience a world “conditioned” by those skandhas, whose sequential interactions produce our very consciousness. Form is the world and the corporeal body, which experiences sensations, which are then filtered and assembled into perceptions, which give rise to associative mental formations, which finally produce our ego consciousness. (In this way, the Buddhist understanding of consciousness is very close to the current findings in neuroscience.)14 Kuunmong implies that the Five Relationships and the Five Peaks are parallel to the skandhas, and thus the very social fabric of Confucianism and reality are illusions, maya within maya.

  Six, of course, follows five, but here it does so in both a numerological and a thematic sense, as Kuunmong ends with a prominent reference to the number six. The old Buddhist master Liu-kuan, whose name means “six perceptions,” recites a passage from The Diamond Sutra that lists precisely those six illusion-like things that serve as an analogy for the “conditioned” world as perceived, via the five skandhas, by the unenlightened: one, dreams; two, illusions; three, bubbles; four, shadows; five, dewdrops; and six, a flash of lightning. This summary is the last dramatic moment in the novel, and when the fairies are mentioned again they are “eight new nuns.” Finally, the number nine refers to the former fairies and Hsing-chen when they have become bodhisattvas. That nine concludes the novel.

  Ultimately, Kuunmong is a Buddhist metafiction, a reader-involved demonstration of the Buddhist concept of tongdal, the interpenetration of phenomena. When Hsing-chen wakes up on the prayer mat, he first realizes that he has experienced an illusory lifetime in an instant in the form of a dream, but then he further realizes that he cannot distinguish whether his former or current state is the actual dream. Prior to his waking, his “real” life as Hsing-chen had penetrated the dream of himself as Shao-yu on at least two occasions. And even within the “dream,” his Shao-yu self had other dreams that challenged the “reality” of that state. Likewise, the novel itself anticipates the reader “awakening” from the illusion of the fantastical story, having been immersed in a waking dream while reading, having lost track of one’s reality as one does while engaged in a vivid story. In the same way that the five skandhas create our “normal” consciousness (which is technically an illusion), they likewise create our consciousness of the novel as we read the text and assemble images from memory. The words of the novel trigger recollections from our “real” lives, but also from our memory of “illusions” such as other novels, poems, songs, and plays. The act of reading Kuunmong is meant to be analogous to Hsing-chen’s life as Shao-yu was within the novel. These layers of illusion and reality interpenetrate and, from a Buddhist perspective, become indistinguishable in the conditioned phenomenon of what we call “reality.”

  Kuunmong’s sophistication in its Buddhist themes suggests Kim’s goal was far more than simply to write a romantic fantasy to entertain and comfort his lonely and worried mother while he was in exile. He clearly knew that the work would have a wide readership in court, including King Sukjong, for whom it may have been Kim’s last poignant advice as minister. It was a message to members of the royal court and to King Sukjong himself regarding the ultimate consequence of politics, intrigue, and romance—not simply a critique, but a remedy for the scandalous conduct of the Joseon court and its fickle monarch. It is no wonder that Kuunmong is one of the most beloved novels in Korean history, while Sukjong’s reign is one of the favorite subjects for historical soap operas.

  * * *

  Kuunmong continues to play a remarkably visible role in Korean culture to this day. Choi In-hun, a major Korean literary figure, wrote a novel called Kuunmong in 1962, applying many of the original’s themes in a modern context. More recently, 2014 saw the release of an otome game, a gender-reversed animated game/visual romance novel, called The Cloud Dream of the Nine: Love Story of a Girl. Uhm Jung Hwa, one of the most enduring K-pop singer-actresses, released an album in 2016 sharing James Scarth Gale’s 1922 translation of the title, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, featuring a music video of the main track, “Dreamer,” that might very well emulate the novel’s singing and dancing competition. Allusions to Kuunmong are ubiquitous in Korean culture—from subtle nods in the use of coded names and numbers in the works of the avant-garde writer Yi Sang to transparent and humorous parallels in superhero films like Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009). Most recently, the blockbuster 2017 film Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds, directed by Kim Yong-hwa, combines themes from Kuunmong and Dante’s Inferno in the story of a fireman who dies and must examine his karma as he is tried in the Underworld. Even outside its Korean context, Kuunmong reveals the deep history of the themes one sees in today’s international blockbuster mind-benders produced in the West: The Matrix, Inception, and even Blade Runner and its sequel.15

  My own exploration of the themes in Kuunmong began many years ago with my study of classical Korean literature, Tang poetry, Vipassana meditation, and dream theory, and it was this combination of interests that motivated me to set out to do this translation. Kuunmong is a novel whose themes subtly—perhaps subliminally—permeate the reader. What began for me as a two-year translation project slowly transformed into a deep engagement with Tang dynasty literature, Buddhist philosophy, Taoist alchemy, Korean folk religion, and Korean religious syncretism. My engagement with Kuunmong—or, more precisely, my attempt to understand the original text and convey its complexities in English—has not only provided me with vivid and nostalgic memories of a fantastical romance, it has fundamentally changed my very theory of the interaction of reading and writing. I hope Kuunmong will do the same for you.

  HEINZ INSU FENKL

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Bantly, Francisca Cho. Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in The Dream of the Nine Clouds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

  Birch, Cyril, ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

  Bouchez, Daniel. “On Kuunmong’s Title.” Kuunmong-ui jemog-e daehayoe<구운몽>의제목에대하여. 東方學志 (Dongbang hakji), No. 136, December 2006, pp. 387–409.

  Cho, Francisca. “A Literary Analysis of Kuunmong.” Introduction to the James Scarth Gale translation of The Cloud Dream of the Nine by Kim Man-choong. Fukuoka, Japan: Kurodahan Press, 2004.

  The Cloud Dream of the Nine. James Scarth Gale, trans. London: Daniel O’Connor, 1922.

  Eggert, Marion. “Kuunmong and the Sino-Buddhist Sphere.” Paper presented at the 2nd International Meeting for the International Convention of Asia Scholars [ICAS], Berlin, 9–12 August 2001.

  Eggert, Marion. “Yijing Cosmology in Kuunmong.” Paper issued in Proceedings of the 1st World Congress of Korean Studies, Sŏngnam, Korea, 2002; Embracing the Other: The Interaction of Korean and Foreign Cultures, Vol. 1, 2002, pp. 213–18.

  Evon, Gregory N. “Chinese Contexts, Korean Realities: The Politics of Literary Genre in Late-Chosŏn (1725–1863) Korea.” East Asian History, No. 32/33, December 2006/June 2007, pp. 57–82.

  Fessler, Susanna. Introduction to the James Scarth Gale translation of The Cloud Dream of the Nine by Kim Man-choong. Fukuoka, Japan: Kurodahan Press, 2004.

  Kim, Byong-Cook. Kim Man Jung’s The Cloud Dream of the Nine: A Modern Korean Translation with a Critical Essay. Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2007.

  Kim, Kichung. An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature from Hyangga to P’ansori. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

  Lee, Peter H., ed. An Anthology of Traditional Korean Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017.

  McNaughton, William, ed. Chinese Literature: An Anthology from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974.

  Moore, Steven. The Novel: An Alternate History 1600–1800. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 495–500.

  Mun, Sang-duk. “The Cloud Dream
of the Nine, a Buddhist Novel.” Korea Journal 11:3, March 1971, pp. 24–32.

  Pu Songling. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. John Minford, trans. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

  Rutt, Richard, and Kim Chong-un, trans. Virtuous Women: Three Classic Korean Novels. Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, 1974.

  The Story of Hong Gildong. Minsoo Kang, trans. New York: Penguin Classics, 2016.

  Wu Ch’eng-en. Monkey: Folk Novel of China. Arthur Waley, trans. New York: Grove Press, 1970.

  Yu, Myoung In. “The Role of Keijō Imperial University in the Formation of Korean Literature Studies: The Case of Kuunmong Studies.” International Journal of Korean Studies / Kukche koryŏhak 12, 2008, pp. 165–98.

  Yu, Myoung In. “Kuunmong and Sinosphere: Focusing on Its Title.” Sixth Biennial Korean Studies Association of Australasia Conference, University of Sydney, 9 July 2009.

  Yun, Chang Sik. “The Structure of the Kuun mong [A dream of nine clouds].” Korean Studies 5, 1981, pp. 27–41.