The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  With no obvious help from the Shintō gods, the opportunity was taken to redouble spiritual efforts before sending the party to sea a third time. This was achieved by bringing into play the Buddhist monasteries as well as the Shintō shrines of Kyushu, while right across the Japanese Empire there were to be daily readings of a Buddhist sutra, The Scripture of the Dragon-King of the Sea, who was a cult figure in Korea, Japan and parts of China. The envoys felt very doubtful about setting out yet again: they had witnessed the perils of the sea, and had lost a ship on the first attempt. Takamura, the deputy ambassador, fell sick with a diplomatic illness and – while Fujiwara insisted that he was ready to die 10,000 times to serve the emperor – his deputy and several other high-ranking envoys were sent into exile for disobeying imperial orders, which was at least a better fate than being strangled to death, the penalty the emperor could have imposed.49

  What has been said so far is based on the reconstruction of events from the Japanese official archives by the editor of Ennin’s diary, Edwin Reischauer. But at this point the words of Ennin himself become audible, as he describes the third voyage towards the coast of China, cutting across the open sea so that the Japanese ships did not have to coast along the mildly hostile shores of Korea. Off the coast of China, however, the ships encountered a fierce east wind, and Ennin’s vessel was blown on to a shoal, whereupon its rudder snapped in pieces. To add to their confusion, their Korean interpreter was worried that they had already overshot the entrance to the canal that would lead them down to the Yangtze River and towards Yangzhou, the first city they hoped to reach en route to the Tang capital further inland. Ennin, the ambassador and their fellow passengers were stranded offshore on a ship that was breaking up. The ambassador managed to reached the shore in a lifeboat, but Ennin was among those left on board: ‘The ship eventually fell over and was about to be submerged. The men were terrified and struggled to climb on to the side of the vessel. All bound their loincloths around them and tied themselves with ropes here and there to the ship. Tied thus in place, we awaited death.’50

  The broken ship shifted back and forth in the mud, and Ennin and his companions were forced to switch from one side to another as the waves pushed it from side to side and as ‘the mud boiled up’. When a small Chinese cargo vessel came alongside, the first act of those still on board was to pass across the ‘national tribute articles’ destined for the emperor of China; but in reality they lay very close to the shore and eventually they landed on terra firma, dried out the tribute items that had been soaked in seawater, and made their way upriver, finding out that the ambassador and his secretaries had survived their own harrowing experiences and were heading in the same direction. Two other ships experienced easier crossings, though one of them did begin to break up, and several crew members died of mysterious and sinister ‘body swellings’ before being rescued by more Chinese ships.51 Not surprisingly, members of the party of monks were keen to present gifts of gold to a monastery where they were lodged for a while, as thanksgiving for surviving the perils of the sea, and as they travelled they offered simple feasts of vegetarian fare to monks they visited.52

  The disasters at sea prove that the Japanese had not mastered the art of ship construction. Ennin’s terrifying account of his shipwreck is not the only report he offers of a rudder that broke under strain, nor of ignorance of the art of navigation. The Japanese were a maritime people, but the sheer proximity of their islands meant that long journeys across the open sea were rare, although there is good evidence that the Koreans could handle more ambitious voyages. Ennin had come to China to make contact with fellow Buddhists, and his travels along the rivers and roads of the Tang Empire took him far from the sea, but he says that the crew of one Chinese boat, carrying Fujiwara himself back to Japan in 839, was Korean, and the crew was knowledgeable about the coastline of northern China and about the best routes towards Japan.53 While it is no surprise that they prayed to the Shintō and Buddhist gods on setting out on a voyage, the Japanese were willing to rely on a soothsayer for information about weather prospects. Ennin described how the sailors on board one ship lost all sense of direction once they could not see the sun, and ‘wandered aimlessly’; when they saw land the soothsayer first declared it was Silla and then decided it was China – the matter was resolved when two Chinese were found who knew where Korea actually lay.54 The Japanese attitude to the open sea can be summed up in Ennin’s terse comment: ‘we saw the ocean stretching far and mysterious to the east and south.’55 It was not an inviting place.

  Following the disasters of the outward journey, from which only one ship had survived, new ships had to be commissioned in Yangzhou, the great commercial city that was China’s gateway to the open ocean. It was vital to find people ‘familiar with the sea-routes’, and more than sixty Korean sailors were hired, along with nine Korean ships.56 The larger fleet suggests that the ships themselves were smaller, or that a rich cargo of gifts and surreptitious purchases was now ready for loading. However, when members of the delegation attempted to trade privately in the marketplaces of Yangzhou they were arrested and held overnight; they had ‘bought some items under imperial prohibition’; and other delegates were in such a hurry to escape the market inspectors after detection that they left behind more than 200 strings of cash, each made up of 1,000 copper coins and threaded together through the hole in the middle. Unfortunately, there is no record of what they were trying to buy, which may have included the rare medicines, spices and incense that wealthy Japanese consumers craved. When they set out, the crews underwent purification according to Shintō rites, praying to the sea gods for a safe journey; and at one point a Japanese sailor was prevented from boarding because he had polluted himself by having sexual relations with another man. Once the ships were at sea, a sailor who was thought to be dying was placed on land so that his dead body would not pollute the ship on which he was sailing. The fearsome sea had to be treated with punctilious respect.57

  At the last minute, Ennin and a few of his fellow monks decided to stay in China, with the approval of Ambassador Fujiwara but without permission from the Chinese authorities; the ambassador tried to warn Ennin that the Chinese authorities would be furious at his breach of the imperial order that the delegation should now depart, but he understood that Ennin’s first priority was to study Buddhist scriptures. So Ennin conspired with Korean merchants to be left on the shore of the Shandong peninsula, which sticks out of China to the west of Korea. A bribe of gold dust and a Japanese girdle helped; the Korean response was a gift of powdered tea and pine nuts, which seems a rather modest exchange.58 And yet thick matcha tea, widely known for its use in the tea ceremony, was valued by Buddhist monks, as it kept them awake through long hours of study and meditation; documents preserved in the Shōsō-in at Nara show that it remained extremely costly in the late eighth century, worthy of being brewed by the abbot himself before it was offered to the emperor as he processed past the great temples of central Japan.59

  Ennin felt it was important to send some Buddhist scriptures back to Japan, which he asked to be placed on board one of the Japanese ships in a bamboo box.60 But the embassy had not satisfied his craving for deeper knowledge of Buddhist law and lore. He hoped to reach the holy places of Chinese Buddhism, and he and his companions tried to pose as Koreans. How this worked when they met some Korean sailors is a mystery – what language did they speak? They had not gone very far when they encountered a village elder called Wang Liang, who sent them a written message:

  You monks have come here and call yourselves Koreans, but I see that your language is not Korean, nor is it Chinese. I have been told that the ships of the Japanese tributary embassy stopped east of the mountains to wait for favourable winds, and I fear that you monks are official visitors to China who have fled to this village from the ships of your own country. I dare not let official visitors stay.61

  So in China, as in Japan, envoys from afar were expected to be tightly controlled and shepherded from place to plac
e. When the police arrived Ennin claimed to have been suffering from beri-beri, and insisted that he had come ashore with his companions because he felt so ill; but now they wished to join the Japanese ships, which were said to be anchored not far away. They were duly accompanied to one of the Japanese ships that stood close to a temple of the Dragon King of the Sea, and put on board.62 Ennin was in despair at the failure of his plans: ‘we have tried every idea, but we cannot stay. The officials are vigilant and do not permit the slightest irregularity.’63 No doubt Ennin’s wish to stay was also prompted by fear of what lay before him as he crossed the open sea once again. Once he was back on board ship, fog rather than wind proved to be the greatest danger; becalmed, the passengers found that supplies were running low, and Ennin made offerings to the Shintō sea gods, an act which was seen as perfectly compatible with his Buddhist faith. Then they faced storms that left the ships sheltering off the Shantung coast. Still desperate to stay in China, Ennin made his way to a Korean monastery and the ships carried on without him – seven reached Kyushu within three weeks or so, though those aboard the ninth ship took nine months to find Japan: ‘find Japan’ because, with a broken mast, it wandered all over the western Pacific, and may even have floated as far south as Taiwan, ‘the region of the southern brigands’.64 It is surely significant that this ship was manned entirely by Japanese sailors, whereas the others carried Koreans as well. After an attack by hostile islanders, new boats were fashioned out of the ruined hull of the ship, and some of the exhausted travellers eventually reached Kyushu.

  Ennin’s difficulties with the Chinese authorities resumed. Fortunately the Korean prior of the monastery on Mount Chi where he had taken refuge was willing to support his request to stay in China; this monastery had been founded by the great Korean warlord Chang Pogo, who had endowed it with estates rich in rice.65 However, in Tang China, Confucian bureaucracy reigned supreme, and Ennin had to battle with a sequence of officious jobsworths before he could gain the credentials and travel permits he needed; the fact that he wished to study Buddhism was at first largely ignored.66 Ennin would spend nine years in China, during which he witnessed a fearsome persecution of Buddhist monks and nuns at the behest of Emperor Wuzung, a fanatical supporter of the Daoist faith; the suppression of the Buddhist monasteries by the ‘Commissioners of Good Works’ and other imperial officials has even been described as ‘the most severe religious persecution in the whole of Chinese history’.67 Ennin submitted requests for an exit visa which were repeatedly ignored, until the persecution reached a point where foreign monks were being expelled. At one point a ship was being built on his behalf to take him back home, or so he claimed, but there were endless bureaucratic obstacles. Ships came and went but he was not aboard them.68 He finally left China in 847 and sailed back to Japan, where he arrived at the imperial court the next year, to face a hero’s welcome. His return voyage past Korea to Hakata Bay was uneventful compared to the trials experienced on the way to China, and, predictably, the ship in which he sailed was under Korean ownership.69

  Ennin’s vivid account of his experiences not merely lights up the social and religious history of Tang China, but helps one understand the distant yet watchful relationship between Japan and China at this period. His simple references to ships sailing back and forth between China, Korea and Japan break through the silence of many official records to show that, despite the infrequency of the Japanese embassies to Tang China, dedicated to the formal presentation of tribute and to the receipt of handsome gifts, the waters between the two empires were populated, if not exactly crowded, with shipping. Much of it was operated by Korean sailors whose prime purpose was undoubtedly private trade. These boats tramped up and down the coast between Yangzhou or other towns in northern China and the coasts of Silla and Kyushu. Nonetheless, these seas were not calm: not just the storm winds and periodic fogs but the depredations of pirates made these waters dangerous, and no doubt many of these Korean shipowners were happy to turn to piracy when trade failed to pay. Among the pirate lords of the waters off Korea the most famous was Chang Pogo, who appears several times in Ennin’s diary, and also in the Korean chronicles.

  IV

  Chang Pogo, or Jang Bogo, has become a national hero in South Korea, and has even been made the hero of an adventure film; well before that, he was worshipped as a god. His Korean name was Kangp’a, and his status at birth, in a land very conscious of rank, is unknown; but he began his career as a soldier in the service of the Tang Empire before returning to his native land in 828. By then he was already a wealthy man, and he set up a garrison said by the Korean chronicler to have numbered 10,000 men (that is, a large number) at Ch’ŏnghae-jin on Wando island, an important command post off south-western Korea that lay alongside the sea routes linking Silla to Tang China.70 In a thirteenth-century collection of legends about the Korean past, he appears as Kungp’a, ‘a man of chivalrous spirit’.71 When he was living in Tang China, he had witnessed the wholesale import of Korean slaves by Chinese traders, and, with the approval of the king of Silla, he used Wando as a base for attacking the slavers. The king appointed him his Commissioner at Ch’ŏnghae-jin, so officially, at least, he acted as a crown agent. The problem was that as his command of the sea grew so did his independence from the king of Silla. He had taken up residence on Wando to suppress piracy; but his role there had made him into the greatest pirate of all. This was an era during which powerful local lords were intruding themselves into the turbulent politics of the Sillan court, and Chang Pogo too was tempted to try his hand there; what distinguished him was that his power was based more on the sea than on land and that he managed to exercise such power in Silla, for a few years that coincided with Ennin’s stay in China.

  Ennin thought of him as an independent warlord who might well interfere with his sea voyage. On the other hand, Ennin had plenty of reason to be grateful to him, as the founder of the Korean monastery that gave him asylum when he was trying to stay in China and to escape from the prying Chinese authorities. Chang Pogo was a merchant-prince as well as a warlord; he tried to set up a triangular trade linking China, Korea and Japan, but an attempt to interest the Japanese court in 841 was rebuffed when his merchants were accused of inventing tales about what was going on in Korea and were refused permission to trade.72 However, he had his own commercial agent at his monastery whose task, Ennin relates, was to sell goods in China. This agent, Ch’oe, became a good friend to Ennin, and offered to provide transport on a Korean ship so Ennin could travel south along the coast of China towards the Buddhist centres he really wanted to visit. Ennin was overwhelmed by this kindness, even if this did not actually come about. He wrote a series of letters to Chang Pogo himself:

  Although I have never in my life had the honour of meeting you, I have for long heard of your great excellence, and I humbly respect you all the more … I find it difficult to express in words anything but great happiness … I do not know when I shall have the honour of meeting you, but in my humble way I think of you all the more from afar … In order to seek the Buddha’s teaching, Ennin has come here from afar, moved by your virtue, and has tarried in your region. He has been fortunate enough to enjoy your benevolence. Being a mere nobody, he is overcome with gratitude.73

  Ennin even suggested that he might call on Chang in Ch’ŏnghae-jin. However, just at this moment, in 839, Chang Pogo was busy at the court in Silla; he helped a royal ally seize the throne, declaring, ‘a person who sees an injustice and does nothing is without courage’.74 According to Korean accounts, he would have married his daughter to the king, had not the Korean nobles vigorously opposed the wedding of the daughter of a mere ‘islander’ or ‘low-ranking commoner’ to a princess. He duly paid the price of being an interloper and was assassinated in 841 or 846. A Korean tradition described how he plotted a dastardly coup against the king, and then was deceived by a refugee courtier named Yomjang or Kim Yang whom he had taken in, having failed to realize that this man’s flight from the court was just a ruse int
ended to win his confidence:

  ‘I have offended the king,’ Yomjang repeated, ‘and so I have come to seek asylum under your command in order to escape death.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ Kungp’a [Chang Pogo] said. ‘Raise your cup. I drink to your health and your successful flight.’