The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

“Have you other complaints?” he asked next.

  They were wary at this until he assured them that he did not come secretly for taxes or for government. Yet their complaints were simple. Each farmer only wanted more land than he had, and each grieved because his sons had no chance to go to school.

  “How can school help you with the land?” he asked.

  An old grandfather leaned out of the shadows to make answer. “Learning clears the mind,” he said, “and books open the spirit of man to heaven and to earth.”

  “Do you know how to read?” Il-han asked.

  The old man touched his wrinkled eyelids. “These two eyes can see only the surface of what life is.”

  When darkness fell and the candle guttered, they slept and Il-han shared the mat upon the floor. Few houses had more than one large room and perhaps a small one or two, and the larger room was where life was lived. At night the family lay on mattresses placed on the floor, parents in the center and the youngest child against the mother, and the eldest son lay nearest the door. A miserable life it might have been and yet was not, he concluded, for he heard no child cry in the night without comfort. Even he, accustomed to a great house and many rooms and his own privacies, felt here in the humble houses of the countryfolk a safety, a creature closeness, which made the night less dark. When morning came, nevertheless, he was glad to be on his way.

  As he went northward, the air changed. The valleys grew more narrow, the fields smaller and the harvests were scanty. He heard of bandits in the foothills, and twice the men of a village went with him to the next village and he knew he was safe because their kinfolk were among the bandits. The answers to his questions now were rough and quick. No, they were not content with what they had. They starved too nearly, and the truebone King and Queen forgot them. As for the Regent, he was no better than a tyrant and they would not have him back. What did they want? They wanted food and justice and land.

  “How will you get more land?” he inquired one night at an inn built for pilgrims to the monasteries. “These mountains rise like walls around you. Can fields be carved from rock?”

  To this they had no answer until one ready fellow shouted that then they must be robbers.

  “We rob the rich to feed the poor,” he sang, “and is this a sin? Under Heaven I say it is virtue!”

  It was true that rich pilgrims were often robbed, and for that reason Il-han was glad that he traveled as a common man with only his horse and one servant following. Yet even these men were not evil for evil’s sake, or so he reasoned.

  Riding through the clear pure air of mid-autumn, he reflected that in a country so mountainous as this, where tillable land was only a fifth part of the whole, the treasure was land. Who owned land held power, and this he understood even more clearly as he listened to the landfolk.

  “Master,” his servant said one morning, “today we must go on foot. We climb mountains.”

  They had spent the night at a small village built on a rock at the foot of the mountains. It was a family village and the folk subsisted on what the monks in the monasteries paid them for food they carried in from more distant villages. Since the monks ate no fish nor fowl nor flesh of any kind, not even a hen’s eggs, their meat was beans, wheat, millet and rice.

  Il-han looked far up the cliffs ahead. The narrow country road became a ledge of rock upon which no horse could walk.

  “Leave the horses here then,” he directed. “Tell the head villager that when we return we will pay him for good care of our beasts.”

  The servant obeyed, and when the sun rose Il-han found himself on his way up the clifflike face of the mountain. Had he been fearful of heights, he would have turned back before the day was half gone, for the ledge, at times not more than eight inches wide, would have been more than he could bear. He kept his eyes on his feet, however, pausing now and again to stand and look about him. The sight was awesome. Above him the mountains pierced the sky, their heads hidden in silvery mists. Far below, bright waters leaped through narrow gorges and the echoes roared about him. Speech was impossible, for no human voice could be heard here. If water did not roar, winds whined among the cliffs.

  All day they walked, stopping at noon to eat their packets of cold beans and bread. It was dusk before they came to the first monastery, where shelter could be found. All that was poet in Il-han’s nature took possession of him as he made the approach. The monastery faced west, and he saw it first in the light of the golden afterglow. Out of the shadows of twilight among the cliffs, he saw a stretch of green against the dark rocks, and among the gnarled pines he saw a curving stair of rock. Then, like a jewel, the ancient temple was revealed, the roofs of gray tile, the pillars vermilion red, the walls white. He climbed the steps and waited before great carved doors in the center of the stone-paved veranda. The doors opened as though he had called and a monk stood there, a tall gray-robed figure.

  The monk spoke the Buddhist greeting, “Na mu ah mi to fu.”

  Il-han replied with the Buddhist prayer which his mother had taught him years ago, when he was a small boy and she took him to the temple with her.

  “Po che choong saing.”

  “Enter,” the monk said. “You are one of us.”

  He entered the vast hall and into the silence, and confronted a great gold Buddha sitting cross-legged upon a golden lotus, the hand upraised, the fingers in position. The golden face, benign and calm, looked down upon him and he felt peace descend upon him.

  … For a month Il-han lived in the monastery among the priests. He slept at night in a narrow cell, and daily at sunrise he went into the Chamber of Spirits where the abbot, in hempen robes dyed saffron, sat upon a black cushion on the floor and read the Buddhist scriptures.

  This monastery, the abbot told him, was rich in treasures of the spirit, and had been since the beginning of the kingdom of Koryo, when the monk Chegwan had taught the King himself that the unity of the Three Kingdoms revealed the unities of Buddhism, of which there were also three, doctrines, disciples and priests. The power of Buddhism had increased through such unity, spreading into distant China from India to the surrounding countries, and thence to Korea, and from Korea to Japan. Under this influence the Buddhist scriptures had been translated into the Korean language. The great Buddhist Tagak, son of King Munjon, and the twenty-eighth patriarch in direct descent from Sakymuni Buddha, himself went to China in the Sung dynasty and collected these precious books.

  “We were preparing for the future,” the abbot told Il-han. “It was foretold even then that the Mongols from the north would invade our land. It is out of the north that the destroyers always descend upon civilized man. Did not China build the Great Wall against the north? The Mongols came from the north, but under our influence the nation stood as one people against the barbarous tribes.”

  “To yield at last to Genghis Khan,” Il-han reminded him, “and the books burned—”

  “Not to yield, only to submit,” the abbot said sharply. “True, our king fled to the island of Kanghwa. But we, believing that Buddha would save us, cast new wooden types and working, hundreds of us, for sixteen years, we gathered together again the sacred books, printing three hundred thousand and more pages of them. They are here, the most vast collection of Buddhist books in the whole world. And our country has remained intact, united under Buddha.

  “Chegwan, who founded the School of Meditation, sat for nine years with his face to the wall so that he could not be distracted in meditation. The truly valuable things he taught are attained only by that inner purification and enlightenment which come through quiet pondering and meditating. For the source of all doctrine is in one’s own heart and therefore we who are Buddhist monks retire to the mountains.”

  “Can you believe in this?” Il-han exclaimed. “What refuge is there here when armies swarm into our valleys and over our mountains?”

  “In the age of Silla,” the abbot said, neither lifting nor dropping his mild voice, “an ancestor of your own, a prince, Hsin-lo, surn
amed Kim, became a monk. He traveled to China and as he went up the river Yangtse he paused at the Mountain of Nine Flowers and received from the local magistrate as much silver as his prayer mat could cover. He then sat in meditation for seventy-five years, a white dog always at his side, and as he sat a radiance surrounded him and people realized his divinity. In the seventy-sixth year, the seventh month, the thirtieth day, he received the great illumination and was accepted by death. After death, his body did not decay, and tongues of fire flickered over his grave. Why? Because he had descended into Hell in love and pity for those doomed.”

  “Of what use is this now?” Il-han cried. “All this meditation has not saved us. And is it enough to descend into Hell, as my ancestor did? Better if he had stayed in the Hell we now have in our country. We, too, may be the doomed, and remember that under the Koryo rule the Buddhist monks and priests and abbots themselves grew accustomed to power and so to luxury and corruption.”

  The abbot was silent. The accusation was true. As rulers grew effete, even the religious days of ceremony had become occasions for feasting and carousing. Confucian scholars, fresh with the energy of a new philosophy, had denounced the Buddhists for their decadence and before this young and righteous energy the kingdom had fallen to the dynasty of Yi. Thereafter, Confucianism became the religion and the custom of the state and the nation, and the monks had retreated forever to these temples in the mountains of the north.

  Il-han shared his day with the monks, and when it was finished he walked at twilight in the shallow gardens planted upon the ledges of rock surrounding the monastery. About him, whereever he went and whatever he did, the sharp dark mountains loomed toward the sky. The hollows were filled with darkness even at high noon and the shadows were black.

  One evening at dusk he heard a special chanting of priests, a melancholy music, the human cry to Heaven of despair and hope, and he drew near and looked into the Hall of Chanting. The priests sat cross-legged on floor cushions, their eyes closed, their fingers busy with their rosaries of sandalwood and ivory, the dim lights of candles flickering upon their unconscious faces. Not one was young—not one! These were the old, the beaten, men in retreat from life, and the peace in which they lived was the peace of approaching death … Death! Yes, this was a tomb for men’s minds and men’s bodies.

  He turned away and summoned his servant.

  “We leave tomorrow at dawn,” he told the man.

  “Master, thanks be to God!” the man said. “I feared you would never leave this doleful place.”

  And yet, when he entered his cell to pass his last night he saw that the candle on the table was lighted, and someone waited for him, cross-legged on the floor. It was the young monk who had arranged the abbot’s robes in the morning. He rose when Il-han entered.

  “Sir,” he said, “is it true that you leave us in the morning?”

  “Before dawn,” Il-han replied.

  “Take me with you, sir, I beg you take me with you!”

  The young monk’s eyes glittered in the candlelight, his face yearning with demand. Il-han was dismayed and surprised.

  “How can I?” he asked. “You have taken your vows.”

  “In my ignorance,” the young monk groaned. “I was only a peasant’s son, and when I was seventeen I ran away and was found by Christians and put into their school. But my soul was not satisfied, and I sought the Lord Buddha here. Alas, my soul is still thirsty for truth. I have read many books, East and West. From pilgrims I have had books of western philosophers, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, but I find no peace. Where is truth?”

  “If you cannot find it here,” Il-han told him, “you will not find it elsewhere.”

  And steadfastly refusing the young monk’s pleading, he sent him away and drew the bar across the door.

  When he went to the abbot the next morning to bid him farewell and to thank him for his hospitality, Il-han felt, nevertheless, a pang of separation. Much, very much of his country’s past was embalmed in this place and in other temples like these in other mountains. Mountains had become hiding places for the remnants of a lost glory. What doom lay ahead? What force could hold his people together, now that the love of Buddha was forgotten?

  “Pray for us,” he told the abbot, “you who still pray.”

  “I pray,” the abbot replied, and he stood up to bless Il-han. The man was tall, but the priest was taller, and he folded his hands on Il-han’s bowed head.

  “Buddha save you, my son! Buddha guide your footsteps! Buddha grant you peace! Ah mi to fu—”

  With this blessing, Il-han left the mountain and went southward to the sea.

  The eastern coast of Korea is smooth but the western seas eat away at earth and rock and this for eons, so that shores are cut in deep and narrow bays and coves and the tides are high and perennial. Along such shores Il-han traveled as roads would allow, following the rough and sandy footpaths of seafolk as they walked from their huts to their nets. These men of the sea were different from farmer or monk. They were hard, their voices were rough, their skin was encrusted with salt, their eyes were narrowed by sun and storm. They were fearless, setting forth in small sailboats upon high seas and at the mercy of the tides. When they came home all their talk was of the sea and the fish, the soft fish and the shellfish. While the men went to sea their wives and children dug ginseng roots in the hills behind the fishing villages, a good crop, for the best ginseng root was to be found near the eastern town of Naeson. Yet it was rare and it was the more precious for its tonic qualities in soup and tea. A root of ginseng in a broth of salted fish was medicine enough for any ill, and old folk drank it to loosen the coughs that racked their lungs. For vegetables the seafolk used the young shoots of wild herbs steamed and then dipped into vinegar and soy sauce. They seldom ate meat, and indeed in the many days that Il-han traveled among the fishing villages, he ate no meat. True, one day he saw some dried beef hanging before a house, but when he inquired how it came there, the owner said the cow had died of a disease.

  “Master,” his servant exclaimed in horror, “let us eat only fish in these parts.”

  For liquor the seafolk drank a homemade brew, muddy to look at and of vile odor. For fuel, as Il-han saw as he rode through this shore country, men and women, too, gathered pine needles and fallen branches, straw and grass and dried seaweed, and this signified, he thought, how little the seafolk cared for land. The houses, too, were smaller here and more filthy than elsewhere, and the people more ignorant. One night in a small village inn where he had stopped he was awakened by voices shouting “Thieves—thieves!” and the villagers burst into his room, believing him to be a thief because he was a stranger, until his servant, berating them loudly, sent them away again.

  “Yet we are more lucky than the land toilers,” a fisherman told him one night when he sat by a fire in a hut.

  “How are you more lucky?” Il-han asked.

  The man spat into the fire and considered his next words. He had two fingers bitten off by a shark, a small shark, he said, with a short laugh, else his whole hand and even his arm would have been off.

  “We are more lucky,” the man went on, “because the yangban nobles cannot seize the sea as they seize the land. The sea is still free. It belongs to us because it belongs to Heaven and not to our overlords.”

  The words were pregnant. In the fishing villages Il-han found the same anger he had found among the peasants, subdued by the same despair. To be poor, it seemed, was inevitable. None could escape. But here by the sea, poverty with freedom was tolerable, while a peasant without land was a slave to the landowner.

  He slept ill that night. The smell of the seafolk was the smell of fish. The fragrance of the temple had been incense and sun-warmed pine, but here even the sea winds could not clean the air of the smell of fish drying, fish molding in the mists, fish salted for the winter, fish rotting on the sand. Even the tea these sea families brewed tasted of fish, and so melancholy was their life, between bare mountain and rolling sea, that he cou
ld not linger.

  After he had passed Pusan, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, he rested at an inn at Hyang-san, and when the long tables were laid for the evening meal for the guests, he found the same poor fare but he ate as best he could, in order that he might not be suspected of being a rich man or a government official in disguise.

  When he came to the river Naktong, whose source is somewhere in the region of Andong, he found it could not be forded, and he crossed it by boat These boats were of a shape he had never seen before, narrow in width but sixty feet in length, and this, he was told by the boatman, was because the river is sometimes wide and sometimes narrow. Fishermen cast nets into this river and caught koi fish and carp, and these fish had a different flavor from those caught in the sea.

  Once on a fair day he met a procession of worshipers of Buddha, and was reminded of the temples. In the midst of the procession was a gold image of the Buddha. Three singing girls in palanquins rode ahead, but a bystander said they were going to the temple for amusement and not for worship, since the Lord Buddha, the man said, had died long ago. “You are right,” Il-han replied, “for he lives no more in men’s hearts.”

  There remained now his last stopping place and this was the island of Kanghwa. Thither he now went, staying no more than a night at any inn until he reached his destination. In a fishing boat he crossed the channel where river meets sea, and thus he set foot upon that illustrious island. He had determined to travel it alone and so far as possible in silence.

  “Follow me at a distance,” he told his servant. “Ask me no questions. When night comes, we will sleep where we find ourselves. As for food, buy such as we can eat as we travel, by foot or on horseback.”

  So it was, and Il-han went first to the mountaintop where, it was said, Tangun, the first King, had come down from Heaven. The road was steep and the grass was slippery with frost as winter approached, but Il-han was tireless, his body slim and his muscles hard with much walking. When he reached the crest of the mountain he formed a cairn of stones, and he stood beside it and gazed upward into the pure blue above him. His mind could not believe but his heart did, and he stood in meditation, receiving he knew not what except that he felt calmer and more strong for being there. Before he left he searched among the stones and found a curious pointed rock and he set it on top of the cairn as his own monument. Then he came down from the mountain.