The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  Then, when the temple took charge of Keiton, the first thing to be dealt with was that name. They probably had reservations about calling, “Keiton! (Dog shit!) Keiton!” on the sacred grounds of the temple. Despite its actual meaning, it was an expression of heartfelt love, but in the end, it was just a nickname, not a proper human name. After all, a name that so condoned namelessness, that so ignored individual humanity, could not be allowed in a world governed by mercy and compassion. With this in mind, the benevolent old priest took the opposite of “Keiton” and named him “Mandogi,” meaning “countless virtues.” Moreover, if the laymen ran around investigating, even if they went back through hundreds—no, thousands—of years of clan records, they couldn’t discover anything, since what was given was a priest’s name, which required neither a family name nor a pon’gwan.

  As with saju p’alja, I suppose my readers aren’t very familiar with pon’gwan, but if you are born in Korea, it stays with you for your entire life. All Korean family names have a pon’gwan, which tells you the name of the homeland established by the clan’s founder in ancient times, which is much more antiquated than the residence listed in the registry. The pon’gwan serves to differentiate between parts of the same clan that split off a thousand years ago, so it’s used to prevent marriages, which goes to show you just how anachronistic it is. You couldn’t carelessly fall in love without first checking the family register (as pon’gwan was an entry in the register). If you dared to break the taboo, you would be considered filthy and deviant, completely fallen from human society.

  But then, can people really keep track of every single one of their “relatives” from the past thousand years? But although our Mandogi never had much hope of marriage or anything in the first place, it must be said that he was free from this antiquated clan system—no, that he was never included in it in the first place—largely because of his priest’s name.

  On a different note, the word kongyangju didn’t originally mean just young priests who worked in the kitchen, or temple hands. It originally referred to the honorable benefactors of the temples. Funny that the cooks, who wash their clothes in their own sweat, who work behind the scenes of the dazzling lamplight of services attended by the pious men and women of the temple, like the celebration of the birth of Shakyamuni (held on the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar), should be called by the same name as those brilliant priests and priestesses. And so, in front of the benefactors, “Mother Seoul,” the temple manager, had to control her usual reckless screaming and beating of Mandogi. Called “Mother Seoul” at the temple—“Seoul” because she had run an inn in the red light district of Seoul, and “Mother” because of her devout faith3—she was a hysterical old widow. To make matters worse, she had a sadistic streak. A few times a day, for no reason at all, she couldn’t help but bully Mandogi, beating him with a bamboo switch until she heard him scream.

  “You! You! You’re so fucking thick, you’re as thick as cow hide! You dim-witted louse of a kongyangju! Did the Buddha tell you to burn the damn rice, you shit-headed kongyangju? Your tool’s all crooked, like a dog’s when it pisses on the wall, kongyangju! You nasty little pissant! You eat like the devil, but don’t work worth a damn, you fucking dolt!” As he continued to take the beating, Mandogi’s big, six-foot-tall frame would bend in two, like a dog’s when hit by its master, until he would trudge through puddles of blood on the floor, wailing in pain. If she were to scream, “Fucking kongyangju! Fucking kongyangju!” in front of the respectable kongyangju, the benefactors, then surely one of them would take offense and there would inevitably be trouble.

  People slighted Mandogi by calling him “dimwit” and “kongyangju,” but the name “kongyangju” was especially appropriate for Mandogi, because he served the Buddha from his heart.4 But staying a temple hand even long after he turned twenty and came of age made him an outlet for all the good-humored disdain and feelings of pity the temple-goers had to offer. After being a temple servant for ten years, you would normally be released from your job as a temple hand and begin to prepare full-time for the path of becoming a priest. There are plenty of temple hands in this world. Mandogi wasn’t the only one. The kongyangju at other temples had a little more foresight. With a little cunning, they would quickly become full-fledged priests, and their bodies would itch beneath their stoles, longing to be flooded with sidelong glances from the women at the temple. But our Mandogi just stayed a temple hand. Mandogi, moving through this world and the next as a temple hand, could even be seen as an embodiment of the law of endless rebirth. In this world, he was a crushed pebble on the road to others’ success, a worthless dimwit just like everyone said. But he didn’t think of himself as that crushed pebble, so he cheerfully accepted their pity and disdain. But their sneers and rumors, and even their words of sympathy that overflowed with compassion, had no power to disturb his quiet heart.

  On that note, perhaps we should ask what his “occupation” was. I wonder what he would say? When he was executed on the outrageous charge of treason, at the interrogation he was asked for his occupation. To the end, he insisted that his occupation was “sentry.” Finally, the Sŏngnae police station’s demonic chief investigator shouted, squaring his already square jaw, “No! For god’s sake, no! For the last time, get it through your thick skull! Your occupation is ‘priest.’ ” Still, Mandogi stubbornly refused to give in. After all, he really had been a sentry. Leaving aside the question of whether or not “sentry” is an occupation, there is no doubt that he had been a sentry at a lookout post. There was a reason for Mandogi’s persistence. In the shadow of martial law, not a moment passed on this island without bloodshed. To cut off the “mountain unit” partisans on Mount Halla from the villagers, they set up lookout points called “sentry tents” all over the place. When Mandogi was picked up by the police, he had already been forced to evacuate Kannon Temple and had moved down Mount Halla to S Hill Temple, where he was roped into joining the militia manning the S Hill sentry tent. The police even admitted this much. Mandogi thought that something like this, something that he was coerced into doing, was his “occupation.” So even when they told him that it wasn’t, he stubbornly refused to give in. Mandogi, who was usually as weak and gentle as a baby, stood as unwavering as a boulder. Perplexed by his persistence, the chief investigator finally just started laughing and said, “You, you’re a complete idiot.” To the end, Mandogi insisted, “ ‘Kongyangju’ ain’t my occupation. My occupation’s ‘sentry,’ ” and they left it at that.

  It was bewildering to Mandogi that you could even call “kongyangju” his occupation. He didn’t even know how to respond. He didn’t think of kongyangju as a job as the chief investigator did. Just as a human doesn’t think that “human” is his occupation, Mandogi thought of himself as kongyangju, and of kongyangju as himself. In other words, his self was his work, and his work was his self. He couldn’t possibly think of kongyangju as his occupation, because it would mean detaching it from himself. It would be like tearing the flesh from his bones. One time, a “high priest” came to the island from a famous temple on Mount Chiri, a sacred mountain on the mainland. He took one look at Mandogi and proclaimed, “Truly, in your eyes, I see the heart of the Buddha.” The “high priest” wanted to take him back, probably to fully train him in the ways of Buddhism, but Mandogi didn’t accept. His beloved, benevolent old priest had already passed away, so he was no longer bound to the temple. Even so, at the high priest’s suggestion, he cried just like a child. He thought that he’d be torn in two if he stopped being a kongyangju at Kannon Temple. A few years before, he had been drafted to labor in the mines in Japan, where he was forced to work until the end of the war. So, if you made him give his occupation, that would have been his first. When, in the same way, he was drafted to the militia and forced to work as a sentry, that became his “occupation.”

  Mandogi thought of his work as his calling, rather than his choosing. No, callings and choosings, both were established by fickle humans. Man
dogi felt that working was living. It was a biological function, just like eating, walking, running, sleeping, or relieving himself. No, he felt that it was really more of a motivation for living. He would readily do any kind of work. He would beat the temple drum and chant the sutras in place of the ever-absent priest. In the summer, he would pull weeds from the temple grounds, and, in the winter, he would sweat as he swept away the deep snow. He also swept the floors in the sanctuary, split wood, cooked the meals at morning, noon, and night, emptied the outhouse and spread it on the vegetable patch as fertilizer, cut the grass, gathered firewood, and did the laundry out in the sun. He performed countless tasks in service to the Buddha. Yet even if he didn’t have a moment to rest, Mandogi said his prayers. Whispering to himself, he chanted “Hail Mother Kannon” a thousand times a day. Not knowing how to refuse, he would always take on extra work if asked, and once in a while he would burn the rice or forget to massage Mother Seoul’s back and shoulders, giving her an excuse to satisfy her sadistic cravings on him.

  1 Kannon, one of the most important deities in East Asian Buddhism, is the goddess of mercy.

  2 Parenthetical explanations throughout the translation are the author’s own. Explanations by the translator appear in footnotes only.

  3 , or “bodhisattva,” is translated here as “mother,” a more natural choice for a term of religious respect in English. It should be noted, however, that “bodhisattva” is a Buddhist term for an enlightened being who chooses to help others along the path to enlightenment, perhaps comparable to a saint in Christianity.

  4 The first two characters in “kongyangju” mean “service,” as in service to the Buddha or memorial service. The final character, “ju,” in this case is best translated as “one who… .” A kongyangju, then, is one who serves the Buddha, or a servant of the Buddha.

  For Mandogi, who knew nothing of what the world calls one’s “home-town,” the heart of the deep valley on Mount Halla was truly home. It wasn’t just where he lived, where he grew up, and where he learned to read and write from the benevolent old priest. The place was adorned with the flapping wings and cheerful songs of countless little birds, woodpeckers, chickadees and cuckoos, owls and pheasants. If you managed to climb up the steep, zigzagging trail on the side of the mountain, a wide, flat trail would suddenly open up before you, and if you went straight ahead for two hundred meters, you would reach the temple gate. Ancient cedars, dense and thick, towered above both sides of the temple trail, and if you looked up, the bright blue sky cut through in between. Within this forest of thousands of cedars, so dense that they blocked out the sun, Mandogi knew every single tree by heart. The flowers in the near valley, and the ones blooming in the far valley, which overflowed with vivid colors, and the trees in the dense woods, Mandogi could tell them all apart, as one distinguishes between people by their faces. There were even trees that had grown tall together with him, like childhood friends. He knew that squirrels often jumped out from the shadows cast by the the matronly cedars, their heavy branches dangling over the temple trail. He knew all the nesting places of the crows, who cried just like babies as they flocked and twirled above the forest at twilight. At dawn, a snow-white fog always lay quietly in the valley, creating the illusion of a deep abyss. Soaking up the smell of the tree bark in the morning, filling his lungs, Mandogi would look up at the sun. Before long, the gaseous veil of the fog would fold up layer by layer and make way for the sun. At the same time, the forest trees were reborn, their deep black trunks coming alive, as if they were baptized in deep water. As the birds fluttered about in the sunny sky above the valley forest, another day would begin. In short, it could be said that, to Mandogi, the place was its own harmonious little universe, with a rhythm mere mortals could not comprehend.

  One day, in this huge cradle of a forest, the old priest told little Mandogi to release a cicada he had caught. His sorrow knew no bounds, but he never shed a tear. After he freed the cicada, the priest quietly wiped little Mandogi’s running nose. His sorrow was absorbed by the priest’s kind heart, and he peacefully went to sleep. As soon as he woke up, he hurried into the forest, where he realized that the sorrow in his heart was no different from the sorrow in a cicada’s heart. Right then, even as a child, he decided not to bother the cicadas anymore. Even at night, Mandogi slept in the old priest’s warm embrace. He would wrap the priest’s incredibly long, white beard around his thin neck, kiss him on the cheek, and go to sleep. “Hohoh!” he would laugh, grabbing the little thing shaped like a cayenne pepper between Mandogi’s legs. Mandogi liked the priest, and they were friends. Mandogi was quite strong, and he was good at giving massages, so he would please the elderly priest by rubbing his back and shoulders. “Father Priest, instead of studying, I’ll massage your shoulders,” he would say, hanging on his shoulders and engaging in a bit of blackmail. He resented the priest for making him study, but if he didn’t do as he was told, he would be all alone. And so, the priest would hold his troubled little heart against his own gentle one and quietly put him to sleep.

  Mandogi got used to living at Kannon Temple, and after several years had passed, Mother Seoul came to be the temple manager. It wasn’t long after that that the old priest passed away. While he was alive, the priest had ardently loved the honest, almost animalistic, heart he saw in Mandogi. But in his will, the priest left not a word about where Mandogi had come from, but only told him to be like his mother and like the Buddha. In any case, it must be said that the priest’s will certainly did not ask Mother Seoul to start beating Mandogi as she did. At first, his strong, skillful back rubs must have satisfied her. After a while, he was as obedient as a slave, and his young body started getting accustomed to hard labor. At night, Mother Seoul obeyed the old priest’s words and let Mandogi sleep in her bed, and sometimes she even rubbed his short arms and legs to warm them up. She even let him call her “ŏmŏni.”1 Once, lying in his “ŏmŏni’s” bed, he thought he could almost sense a smell like his mother’s. It was only about six months before he wet the bed and she threw him out, but two or three days before that, he had smelled her hair, and his little heart had reached for a faraway memory. That smell of camellia oil always nudged at his little mind, trying to pull back a curtain that was hiding something. At last, when the curtain rolled back, the smell of his mother, who had put black candy wrapped in white paper in his hand, was revealed. Mandogi had remembered his long-forgotten mother, but her image was already blurred in his memory, so in his mind, she took on the shape of Mother Seoul.

  One day, she caught Mandogi taking a nap in the shed. She picked up a broom, flipped it over, and began to beat him with it. Mandogi didn’t cry; he just crouched there like a stone, taking the beating, but that made her all the more irate. “Don’t you know how to cry, dimwit?” She called him “dimwit” for the first time and kept beating the twelve-, maybe thirteen-year-old kid, almost forcing him to scream out in pain. As if expecting Mandogi, who still didn’t cry out, to take revenge someday, after delivering the last blow, she threw the bamboo broom out. But back then her beatings were always random and sudden, never patterned and cyclical until her hysteria suddenly started getting worse, and she vanished from the temple.

  When Mother Seoul came back after two or three years, Mandogi, at fourteen or fifteen, had grown into a man. Though her disposition was as violent as ever, her changed, gaunt figure seemed to embody the change in her personal life that had come about while she was away. Perhaps there was something dark in her past, but Mandogi didn’t know. He could only guess that she bore an unnatural amount of sorrow, for it seemed that a loved one had just died. Maybe that’s what made this new hysteria set in. When she was in a frenzy, Mandogi made a good target for an outburst. Mandogi would calmly endure her whip. Sometimes while she beat him he could feel himself starting to lose his own sanity, as if he were a lion and she were the tamer.

  Yet even that whip couldn’t tear Mandogi from Kannon Temple, in the heart of the deep valley. There—no, especially there—he w
orked as earnestly as a whipped horse. He worked with an instinctive mission equal to that of ants or bees. The ants and the bees have no consciousness, so just like playing children, they can’t tell the difference between work and play. Perhaps our Mandogi tacitly understood this selfless world of play.

  Of course, people—Mother Seoul included—recognized and praised Mandogi for his hard work, but that, too, they attributed to his dull wit. But Mandogi wasn’t motivated by people’s praise or people’s disdain. Just like a fish knows what water is best for him, Mandogi needed only his beloved Kannon Temple, in the heart of the valley of Mount Halla, to be happy.

  So when the time came for him to be cut off from Kannon Temple, Mandogi was devastated. The government already considered the area around Mount Halla a partisan base. Under the direction of the foreign army, the government organized a coalition army and made plans to capture the area and to burn Kannon Temple. Mandogi and the others received the evacuation order and soon headed down the mountain, abandoning the temple to ashes. On his last day at the temple, Mandogi, who had never known how to cry, knew true sorrow for the first time. More than sorrow, it was a feeling of complete darkness, as if his eyes, ears, and nose had all been plugged up at once. In this sudden darkness, his grief was a lantern, and when it flared up, he howled like a beast. On his way down the mountain, looking like an ox with all his luggage on his back, Mandogi pounded the ground and wailed for the first time in his life.

  At first, he sobbed like a child, and then, falling on his rump, he pounded the earth between his legs with both fists, not caring that he was crying as the women in this country cry. Next, looking up at the sky and wiping his face, he lamented the way men do. He even stood up, held onto a huge pine tree that pierced the sky, buried his face, and wept. Horseflies buzzed angrily around his tonsured head, but in the violent waves created by his cries, they couldn’t find a place to land. Even the autumn breeze flowing up from the brush at the base of the mountain, catching dead leaves from the forest, could not dry the sweat that soaked Mandogi’s entire body. His cries were like the howls of a wild animal, their echoes truly horrifying as they bounced off the walls around the deep valley.