by Kim Man-jung
“Each of us will say good-bye by offering you a cup of wine,” they said.
But just as they were about to begin pouring, they heard the sudden sound of a staff striking the stone pavement below. They were startled and wondered who would have come up so far, when they saw an old monk. His eyebrows were long and white, his eyes as clear as waves on the sea, and his bearing mysterious.
He came up to the dais and bowed politely to Shao-yu. “An old monk would like to see you,” he said.
Shao-yu, already realizing this was no ordinary monk, quickly rose and returned the bow. “Where do you come from?” he asked.
The old monk smiled. “Do you not remember me?” he said. “I heard long ago that people of high rank have short memories. It seems to be true.”
Shao-yu took a closer look at the old monk. His face was familiar, but Shao-yu couldn’t seem to remember who it was. And then, suddenly, glancing back at Ling-po, he remembered. “When I defeated the Tibetans I dreamed that I went to a banquet held on my behalf by the Dragon King of Tung-t’ing Lake,” he said. “On the way back, on Heng-shan, I saw an old monk chanting sutras with his disciples. Are you the monk I saw in that dream?”
The old monk clapped his hands together, laughing. “That’s right!” he said. “But while you remember our brief meeting in your dream, you do not recall the ten years we lived together! And they say you are so smart!”
Shao-yu was puzzled. “Before I was fifteen, I never left my mother,” he said. “At sixteen I passed the state examination and since then I have served the state. I traveled east as an envoy to Yen, and west to fight the Tibetans. Otherwise, I never left the capital. How could I possibly have lived for ten years with you?”
The old monk laughed. “So you have yet to awaken from your spring dream.”
“And how would you wake me up?” Shao-yu asked.
“It wouldn’t be hard,” said the old monk. He raised his staff and tapped the stone railing a few times. Suddenly, a mist rose from every direction in the gorge and nothing could be seen.
Shao-yu felt as if he were in a drunken dream, and after a while he cried out, “Why do you resort to magic and not show the truth?”
Before he had even finished speaking, the mists vanished. Shao-yu looked right and left, but the old monk and the eight women were gone. And in a moment the terrace and the pavilions also vanished, and he found himself seated on a prayer mat in a small monk’s cell. The flame had died in the incense burner and the light of the setting moon shone through the window. He looked down and saw the mala of 108 beads hanging from his wrist. His hair was stubbly and rough. Clearly, this was the body of a young monk, not the distinguished old chief preceptor. It took him a while to realize he was Hsing-chen, at the monastery on Lotus Peak.
“I was scolded by my master and sent to Hell, and then I was reincarnated into the world of man as the son of the Yangs. I took first place in the national examination and became vice chancellor of the Imperial Academy. Then I served with honor as a general, retired, and enjoyed my life with two princesses and six concubines. But it was all only a dream.
“My master knew of my wrongful thoughts and made me dream this dream to learn that worldly riches, honor, and desire are nothing.”
He quickly splashed some water on his face and went out to the main hall of the temple. The other disciples were already gathered there, and the master called out to him, in a loud voice, “Hsing-chen, Hsing-chen! Did you enjoy your worldly pleasures?”
Hsing-chen suddenly opened his eyes and saw his master, Liu-kuan, standing before him, looking wrathful. Hsing-chen bowed low, striking his head on the ground, and cried out, “I have been impure! No one else can be blamed for my bad behavior and the sins I have committed. Cast into the world of dust, I should have endured an endless cycle of pain and suffering, but, Master, you have awakened my mind in a dream of one night. I could never repay your kindness even in ten million kalpas.”6
“You went seeking your desires, and now you have returned, for they have faded,” said Master Liu-kuan. “What have I to do with it? You say the dream and the world are two separate things, and that is because you have yet to awaken from the dream. Chuang Chou once dreamed he was a butterfly, and upon waking he could not tell if he was the butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.7 Hsing-chen, Shao-yu—which is real and which is a dream?”
“I cannot tell if the dream was not reality or if this reality is not a dream,” said Hsing-chen. “Please teach me the Way so I may understand.”
“I shall teach you the Great Way—of The Diamond Sutra,8 but you must wait a moment, for new followers are coming,” said Liu-kuan. But before he had even finished speaking, the gatekeeper came to say that the eight fairies who were the ladies-in-waiting of the Taoist immortal Lady Wei had arrived.
When Liu-kuan let them in, they came and bowed, their hands folded before them. “Though we attend to Lady Wei, we have no learning, and we have lusted after the world of mortals, unable to control our sinful desires,” they said. “No one has awakened us. But since you accepted us with your mercy and compassion yesterday, we have said good-bye to Lady Wei and her court. Now we are back and ask if you will forgive our sins and enlighten us with your teaching.”
“Your intention is good,” said Master Liu-kuan. “But you cannot realize it without persistence and great effort. The dharma9 is deep and profound, and each of you must find your own way. Consider carefully before you dedicate yourselves.”
The eight fairies left. They washed off their face powder and rouge, and they each cut off their own hair. Then they returned and said, “We have already changed our outward appearance. We swear we will dedicate ourselves to your teaching.”
“Very well,” said Liu-kuan. “I am touched to see that all eight of you are of one mind.” Then he went up to the teacher’s seat and the light of the Buddha’s brow shone into the world and flowers fell from the heavens like rain as he began to teach from The Diamond Sutra.
All things conditioned
are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows—
like dewdrops, like a flash of lightning,
and thus shall we perceive them.
When he had finished his teaching, Hsing-chen and the eight new nuns awakened, in a flash, to the unborn and undying truth of the dharma. Seeing that Hsing-chen’s faith was lofty and pure, Liu-kuan called together all of his disciples and said, “I came to bring the teachings of the Buddha to China. Now that I have found another who can deliver the dharma, I shall return to the place from which I came.” And giving his mala, his rice bowl, his water gourd, his ringed staff,10 and the text of The Diamond Sutra to Hsing-chen, he departed toward the western sky.
From that time forward, Hsing-chen taught well and oversaw the monastery at Lotus Peak, where immortals and dragons, men and spirits, all revered him as they had Master Liu-kuan. The eight nuns served Hsing-chen as their master until, by and by, all of them became bodhisattvas and the nine entered, together, into Paradise.
APPENDIX A:
Names of the Eight Women
(in order of appearance):
CHINESE
ROMANIZATION (WADE-GILES) AS USED IN THE TEXT
MEANING
1
秦彩鳳
Ch’in Ts’ai-feng
Rainbow Phoenix
2
桂蟾月
Kuei Ch’an-yüeh
Moonlight
3
狄驚鴻
Ti Ching-hung
Shy Wild Goose
4
鄭瓊貝
Cheng Ch’iung-pei
becomes Princess Ying-yang
Jasper Shell
Blossom
5
賈春雲
Chia Ch’un-yün
Spring Cloud
6
李簫和
Li Hsiao-ho
known as Princess Lan-yang
Panpipe Harmony
Orchid
7
瀋鳥烟
Shen Niao-yen
Cloud of Starlings
8
白凌波
Po Ling-po
Whitecap
APPENDIX B:
Reading Kuunmong in Chinese and Korean
While I have attempted to give as full a sense of this novel as translation allows, some nuances of Kuunmong’s linguistic sophistication are simply impossible to convey in English. As a postscript to the translation, I wish to offer an example of the brilliant linguistic complexity of Kuunmong, in its convergence of Chinese and Korean, in order to give a sense of the depth of its wordplay and to show how its language relates to its central themes on many levels.
One of the most subtle and interesting examples of the complex wordplay in the novel is the reference to Shao-yu’s birthday in the last chapter. Kim writes that it was “around the twentieth day of the eighth month,” which is quite curious when he could simply give a precise date—it is fiction, after all. (Gale and Rutt have rendered the date as the “sixteenth day of the eighth moon” whereas Kim Byong-Cook, in his translation of Kuunmong into modern Korean, has kept the actual date reference.) But with this apparently casual term, which is in keeping with approximate date references in Chinese, Kim Man-jung gives a very direct and yet elegantly subtle insight into the novel’s underlying Buddhist themes. The date given in the text, 念間 (Chinese: nianjian; Korean: yeomgan 염간), can be rendered as the time “before and after the twentieth” or “sometime around the twentieth.” “Twenty” (similar to the English “score”) is one of the primary meanings of 念 and “interval” or “period” is one of the primary meanings of 間.
A closer reading of those two Chinese characters reveals that Kim is not being needlessly vague or imprecise about the date of Shao-yu’s birth. In keeping with the multilayered wordplay of the best Tang poetry, which often shows awareness of underlying pictographic elements in the etymologies of specific graphs, these two Chinese characters point to the very heart of Kuunmong’s theme and structure.
If we look at the semipictographic, archaic small seal script version of 念, we can see a male child being born under a roof. While the upper part of the character shows the roof, the lower part is actually the archaic pictographic version of “heart,” depicting its chambers, but it also looks like a penis and scrotum:
The second character, 間, looks like an infant coming out from between the mother’s legs:
In sequence, the two small seal script characters look like a cartoon depicting Hsing-chen’s incarnation as Shao-yu: a male child born in a shack, which is, indeed, what happens in the novel.
Typically in fiction, a character’s name can serve as an associative shorthand revealing his or her traits, as in Jane Eyre.1 Kuunmong incorporates that technique for its main characters as well, but here Kim has used the date as a similar summarizing symbol, and we can unpack from it many other layers of meaning.
念 can also be read as “longing” or “to miss” or “to show compassion or affection for” and the bottom part of 間 is a pictogram for the moon, suggesting moonlight coming through a pair of doors. This represents Shao-yu’s feelings for Ch’an-yüeh (蟾月), whose name has two characters associated with the moon. And “anxious” or “worry,” which are other readings of念, suggest his anxiety brought on by his longing and concern for her.
Another reading of 念, particularly in a Buddhist context, is “thought” or “memory,” and another reading of 間 is “instant” or “moment.” Shao-yu’s birth, in this sense, is like a fleeting thought. Indeed, his entire dream incarnation happens in a mere moment on the prayer mat, and this ephemeral illusion is the quality of all conditioned phenomena, as indicated in the verse of The Diamond Sutra quoted at the end of the novel.
In Buddhism, it is understood that time is an illusion created by human consciousness, and that makes Kim’s use of those two Chinese characters especially interesting. Their pronunciation in Korean, yeomgan, is oddly similar to the word yeongam (영감,令監), which means “lord,” “husband,” and “old man”—all three of which apply to Hsing-chen in his dream incarnation as Shao-yu. In this associative reading, Shao-yu’s birth already has his old age inscribed within it. The first syllable, yeong, can also be read as “soul,” “mountain pass,” or “zero,” which are also relevant to Shao-yu and the plot of the novel, especially when one considers that the second syllable, gam, can be read phonetically as “material used in making,” “feeling,” or “impression.” Not only is Shao-yu’s birth implicitly associated with old age, it is also imbued with the makings of emptiness (zero), pointing once again at the interwoven depth of Kuunmong’s Buddhist themes.
So the story that Kim Man-jung wrote Kuunmong in one all-night session is obviously a bit of mythmaking parallel to the story of Lao Tzu composing the Tao Te Ching in one night. It is clear that Kim thought deeply about all aspects of Kuunmong, from the allegorical plot to the underlying moral message to the interlocking meanings of individual words written in Chinese characters with their auditory and pictographic values. To his readers, most of whom would have memorized the same Chinese classics he had memorized, Kim’s novel would have been profoundly resonant, echoing layer upon layer, each revealing an integrated and coherent intention. It is no wonder that many scholars call it the “crown jewel” of Korean literature.
Notes
Certain terms, names, and places may be spelled differently in the notes than in the text. While I employed the more archaic Wade-Giles Romanization in the text, I have used the standard Pinyin romanizations in the notes, except where other romanizations have become established as the familiar form. For a fuller explanation, please refer to A Note on the Translation.
INTRODUCTION
1. Kuunmong predates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (c. 1719)—often considered the first English-language novel—by some thirty years.
2. See Daniel Bouchez’s 2006 essay “On Kuunmong’s Title” (Kuunmong-ui jemog-e daehayoe), in which he gives an excellent overview of this issue and cites the relevant passage.
3. Kim Man-jung’s father, Kim Ikgyeom (1614–1636), committed suicide by blowing himself up with gunpowder rather than surrender to Manchu invaders.
4. The indigenous tradition of shamanism was repressed by the Confucian state and by the institution of Buddhism during the Joseon era (and continues to be repressed today, especially by Korean Christians, who have become a major political force). Although there are elements of shamanism in Kuunmong, they can be seen as tied to the Taoist folk beliefs of Tang China, in which the story is set.
5. This is in keeping with what I found in the process of translation: the linguistic jokes meant to be humorous when read visually in Chinese with knowledge of the auditory Korean are in keeping with Korean, and not Chinese, authorship. At the same time, these forms of wordplay also support the theory of Kuunmong’s initial composition in hanja and not hangul. The poetry composed by the characters in the story, which is based on Tang dynasty models and alludes directly to well-known Tang poetry, is highly unlikely to have been written in hangul. There are also formal letters and edicts compo
sed by the characters that would not make sense written in hangul, not only because the story is set in China, but because official documents were written in Chinese even in Korea.
6. I have provided the generally accepted authorship and dating here. See Minsoo Kang’s discussion of the issue of authorship and dating of the text in his new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (New York: Penguin Classics, 2016), pp. x–xiv.
7. To give a sense of the royal conflict during this period, Sukjong was eventually remorseful about deposing Queen Inhyeon. When the Southern faction tried again to purge the Western faction, Sukjong had one of his about-faces and purged the Southerners instead, reinstating Queen Inhyeon. It is said that the consort Jang then murdered her by using black magic. When Sukjong found out, he had Jang, her companions, and a number of relatives executed in 1701.(But before she died, Jang so seriously injured her own son that he became sterile and had to relinquish his role as Sukjong’s successor to another son.)
8. In fact, she may have aspired to be the Joseon parallel to the Tang dynasty empress consort Wu Zetian (武則天, 624–705), one of the most powerful women in Chinese history, with three sons who later became emperors. But Jang would have been associated more with the scandalous beauty Zhao Feiyan (趙飛燕, c. 32–1 BCE), of the Han dynasty, for her behavior and her humble class background.
9. See William H. Nienhauser, ed., Tang Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader (Singapore: World Scientific, 2010).
10. The themes of reality/illusion (maya) and interpenetration (tongdal) are fairly explicit in the plot of Kuunmong, but the issue of essense-function (che-yong) is more implicit and layered into the language. Hsing-chen’s name refers to the Buddhist original nature, which is his essence. In Buddhism, one’s original nature is in keeping with Buddha nature (the unconditioned state), and it is what gives all sentient beings the potential for enlightenment. On the other hand, Hsing-chen’s dream counterpart, Shao-yu (whose name can be glossed to mean “Small Visitor” or “Brief Resider”), is his function, representing a parallel to the world as perceived in the conditioned state. At the end of the novel, the illusion (conditioned) returns to reality (the original nature) and permits Hsing-chen to become enlightened. Thus the structure of the novel is a kind of microcosmic analogy to what happens in the greater world of reality (though, ironically, the illusory world in the novel occupies most of its narrative).