Korea (21 page)

The price to be paid for such a system, though, would be considered steep by most Westerners. In the older and poorer Korean houses, only one room is usually used by all the family for living, eating and sleeping. This was certainly the case in Haedarng’s tiny house. During the daytime the room was almost empty of furniture—chairs are quite unknown, and when a meal was to be served small black lacquer tables were brought in from the kitchen and taken away when everyone was done. A large cupboard stood at one side of the room, and inside it, piled in colourful bundles, were the silk-lined mattresses and coverlets that would be brought out at night. Mr Landor (whose other work,
Alone with the Hairy Ainu
, is, I suspect, a classic of its kind) shows that little has changed in ninety years:

The Corean custom is to sleep on the ground in the padded clothes, using a wooden block as a pillow. The better classes, however, use also small, thin, mattresses, covered with silk, which they spread out at night, and keep rolled up in the daytime. As the people sleep on the ground, it often happens that the floor gets so hot as to almost roast them, but the easy-going inhabitant of Cho-sen does not seem to object to this roasting process—on the contrary, he seems almost to revel in it, and when well broiled on one side he will turn over to the other, so as to level matters. While admiring the Coreans much for this proceeding, I found it extremely inconvenient to imitate them. I recollect well the first experience which I had of the use of the ‘kan’, which is the native name of the oven. On that occasion it was ‘made so hot’ for me, that I began to think I had made a mistake, and that I had entered a crematory oven instead of a sleeping room. Putting my fist through one of the paper windows to get a little air only made matters ten times worse, for half of my body continued to undergo the roasting process, while the other half was getting unpleasantly frozen. To this day it has always been a marvel to me, and an unexplainable fact, that those who use the ‘kan’ do not ‘wake up—dead’ in the morning!

It is rather more comfortable now. As soon as the sun went down, and as soon as we had had a frugal supper of soup and rice,
kimchi
and strawberries and
poricha
, and as soon as I had washed (out in the open, an upended
kimchi
jar as my washstand), Haedarng spread out the mattress, the
yo
(he gave me two ‘because I suspect the English backside is not used to sleeping on the floor—am I right?’), and the
ibul
(the coverlet) and the
pegae
, or cornhusk pillow. He gave himself a hard wooden block, African-style, on which he rested his neck. Within seconds he was asleep, and snoring hard. I fiddled around, trying to avoid the hot spots on the floor—the flue connected directly to the
yontan
nozzle seemed to surface wherever I planted my hipbone—and in a matter of moments was asleep. The next thing I knew, daylight was filtering in through the paper screens and Haedarng was up, off to give the Buddha his morning rite. Would I care to come?

Buddha was seated next door, in a tiny, darkened, fragrant, and slightly smoky cell. He was about three feet high, white and gold, and was seated in the classic position of the mendicant pauper. The smell and the smoke came from a tiny sheaf of incense sticks that smouldered in front of him. A prayer mat, with a small bell and the
moktak
, lay before him, and it was on this that the barefoot Haedarng now stood and motioned me to be silent and follow what he did. He knelt, in what I now know (but learned only with some pain) to be the classically acceptable Buddhist kneel: I had to bend my toes (stiff from my first eighty miles of walking) and kneel on the mat, then straighten my toes and sit back on the soles of my feet, then bend my back forward until my forehead touched the mat, and finally bring my hands over my head and lay my hands, palms uppermost, on the mat beside my ears.

That was quite tricky enough for someone fit and perfectly sober to do without falling over, but it had to be reversed. Without—and this is the killer—without being allowed to use my arms as support, I had to stand up, essentially using only my toe muscles to help me do so. The first time I tried it I stumbled wildly in the dark, pitched into the impassive figure of Haedarng
(who managed these movements with enormous grace, the Nureyev of the elephant world) and nearly brought the whole proceeding to an undignified halt. And it wasn’t as though a Buddhist morning rite has just one episode of genuflection: I must have gone down on my knees thirty times in the following thirty minutes, sometimes at such a pace that I began to have a sort of nightmare that I was in the gymnasium back at school, with whoever had so signally failed to teach me P.E.

I would like to say that the morning prayer was an exercise in serenity and beauty. But my nerves and my strained muscles made it descend into something perilously close to farce. Haedarng didn’t seem to mind. He was evidently thinking of other things, for as we left and emerged once more into the sunlight—and the cloying smell of the incense was replaced by the crisp tang of balsam firs—he asked, rather chirpily, ‘Have I told you about my theories about your William Shakespeare?’

He then began to rattle off lines from memory and to ask questions I wished I could answer more readily. ‘“’Tis in ourselves that we are thus”,’ he said. ‘Do you know it? “Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme…” What exactly is hyssop, Mister Simon?

‘“The expedition of my violent love outran the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan…” Tell me what you think of Duncan, please.’ He would ask his questions with great deliberation, and I could see him note down the replies on a mental notepad. I was lamentable and told him of my shame. ‘Do not be ashamed, Mister Simon. It is my great study. My life’s work. I shall be honoured to give you a copy of my recent paper.’ And from a chest he pulled a slim, yellow paperback volume—a book that, for me, at least, proved somewhat difficult to comprehend:
Shakespearean Tragedies Illuminated by Buddhism; or, Around the Philosophy of Retribution of Cause and Effect, Thoughts of Dhyana, and Matters of Ignorance
. It had been privately printed and was written in a confusing mixture of Chinese characters,
hangul
, and rather fractured English. The nub of Haedarng’s theory—which
he had propounded after ‘years of intense study’ of the five tragedies,
Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth
and
Romeo and Juliet
—was that Shakespeare and the Lord Buddha were both able to recognize the causes of tragedy (the ultimate being human ignorance) and their effects (death, sin and misery), but that only Buddha bothered to try to do something about them:

One thing I would like to say is why Shakespeare did not tell us the way to get rid of the causes of human tragedy. I expected to find out it in the five works of his tragedies because it could be the fruit of his philosophy concerning human beings. We Buddhists understand that is the emphatic core of Buddha’s teachings…

In conclusion, Shakespeare showed up the cause and effect of human tragedy so dramatically in his masterpieces, and Buddha told us the way to avoid human tragedy and attain the Pure Land through his whole life of over eighty years.

Or, put another way, William Shakespeare may have been a wise old bird, but he couldn’t hold a feather to Buddha, who had wisdom in unrivalled abundance. Haedarng’s paper was, I suppose, an essentially chauvinistic document, the kind of thing one might expect from a very enthusiastic convert to a new religion. And he had been an English teacher, so, West meets East, and the East wins. I felt briefly tempted to ask him if he was now thinking of reviewing the General Theory of Relativity in relation to the Buddha’s teaching but then thought better of it and held my tongue.

Cars began to arrive. Haedarng looked up, and exclaimed: ‘Ah! I regret we must stop this most interesting discussion. It is my wayward family! They have come for the birthday party.’ Mother, it transpired, was sixty-three years old this April Sunday, and her children were gathering about her for a morning celebration of the occasion. (Remember, a Korean is counted as being born at age one; the sixty-third birthday of a Korean is thus equated to the sixty-second birthday of a Westerner.)

The most notable of Haedarng’s relations to appear was his
younger brother Hwang Chi-Woo—the monk Haedarng actually being a Mr Hwang in his teaching days, before he converted to Buddhism and took a sacred name. Chi-Woo, who had driven down from Seoul the night before with his wife and two children, is a celebrated poet, a former aesthetics student at Seoul National University. ‘Korea’s Oxford,’ he said proudly. ‘I have to tell you we are not a very popular family with the government,’ he explained. ‘One of us has become a monk because of the Kwangju massacre. Another is a schoolteacher. Here am I, well known as an anti-government poet. And the fourth is a trade union organizer in Inchon, and he is in hiding. He has been on the run from the police for most of the last two years. So you have picked yourself dangerous company.’

By the time the last couple had arrived—a woman and child whose role in the family was never explained—mother emerged from wherever she had been hiding these past hours, and a lacquer table was brought in with scores of steel and china dishes balanced precariously on it. It was ten in the morning. This was a birthday brunch, I supposed. Haedarng leaned over to me. ‘Forgive me, Mister Simon, but you will see
meat
on this table. I do assure you it is only there because mother is still a Christian, and so is my—indeed, so is everyone at this table, as are you, I think, yes? I decided that even though I am sworn not to eat meat, we shall have it today in mother’s honour. I have asked the Lord Buddha, and he has said it will be all right.’

It was quite a party. Had I been here three years before—when mother turned sixty—it would have been even more so. A sixtieth birthday is a special thing in all those countries that have come under the maternal influence of old China, Korea very much included. The body is then deemed to have passed through the five twelve-year zodiacal cycles—the
yukgap
, as the sixty-year period is known—that constitute the proper life span of the human being. Once someone has successfully completed the span—as old mother Hwang had done three years before—then all time beyond is regarded as a marvellous bonus: you retire from active life, take your respected ease as an elder, let your
children make you as comfortable as they can, and let filial piety take over the reins of your life.

To celebrate this turning point (the only other points so celebrated are the second—or, in Western terms, first—birthday and the hundredth day from birth, when thanks are offered for the child having made it thus far) a great party is staged. It is known as the
hwan-gap
and has become such big business in modern Korea that special
hwan-gap
halls have been built in most big cities—places where families can entertain their elders in a style of which Confucius would have approved.

The old man or old woman at the centre of the occasion sits, dressed in silks and satins and bows and furbelows, on a huge pile of multi-coloured silk cushions, like a large-scale Pekingese dog in a Barbara Cartland romance. Before him or her are ranks of gleaming candelabra and castles of sweetmeats—biscuits,
ttok
(rice cakes), apples, oranges, almonds, toffees—and beyond them an unceasing tide of youngsters who kowtow and in a myriad of other ways display their undying respect and affection for the Honoured One. (In the commercial
hwan-gap
halls the amount of food on display that you are allowed to eat depends, not unreasonably, on the amount of cash you have decided to pay up front. The rest of the food stays right on the table, all wrapped in plastic to keep it fresh-looking for the next celebrants on the day’s schedule.)

After an hour or so of homage has been paid a party gets under way; there is music (cassettes in the
hwan-gap
halls, unless you pay a great deal for a live band; a friend on the drums and the zither if you’re out in the countryside); there is dancing; and there is a great deal of drink. Koreans are an unashamedly bibulous people, and no stigma will attach to those (unless they are Buddhist monks, of course) who stagger away from the
hwan-gap
several sheets to the wind.

This celebration may have been a relatively muted affair, but it was a gastronomic triumph. There were dishes of rice (plain and glutinous) and many kinds of roasted meat; there were nine different types of
kimchi
(for Haedarng’s wife was celebrated all
along the valley for the strength and piquancy and variety of her pickled vegetables, which—like most country people—she buried from November in the strong brown earthenware jars designed for
kimchi
manufacture); there were oysters, quails’ eggs bedded in straw, cloves of raw white garlic, yellow turnips, great scarlet radishes, gleaming piles of silvery whitebait, seaweed (in pressed and toasted squares, as well as in wild untidy masses); neat chunks of tofu, pink and shivering shrimps, various sauces and condiments of every colour imaginable, chillies (red and green); and strawberries, apples, pine kernels, and pears. If any dish was emptied, the monk’s wife scuttled off for more. Rice was consumed in prodigious amounts—the children fattening up before my eyes—so that after an hour of spooning the stuff in (and flattish spoons are provided, as are two pairs of chopsticks, one steel, the other wooden) their bellies were as hard and distended as drums. There was a great deal of contented belching, and legs moved beneath the table in a constant dance as everyone—all seated on the floor—squirmed for more space and more comfort as the meal progressed.

Then a birthday cake, Western in appearance, was brought in, with a circle of twelve dark candles (for the completion of the
yukgap
) and the additional three in the centre. The old lady blew the candles out, there was much applause, and then the cake was put neatly back into its box to be taken back to Seoul. A huge crystal decanter was brought carefully into the room: it held a colourless liquid and a huge ginseng root that, with pinkish arms and legs attached to its thick and wrinkled trunk, looked like a headless little man floating in preserving fluid. The root was so huge, and the decanter’s neck so small, that I began to try to puzzle out how the one got into the other, but it took only about ten minutes for the
soju
(for that is what the liquid turned out to be—the grain-spirit firewater with a taste varying between paint thinner and formalin) to take effect, and I forgot my enquiry until the next day.