The passing of Korea/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX
FOLK-LORE
The back attic of Korean folk-lore is filled with a very miscellaneous collection, for the same family has occupied the house for forty centuries and there never has been an auction. Of this mass of material, in the small space here available, we can give only the merest outline, a rapid inventory.
For convenience we may group Korean folk-tales under six heads, - Confucian, Buddhistic, shamanistic, legendary, mythical and general.
Williams defines Confucianism as "the political morality which was taught by Confucius and his disciples and which forms the basis of Chinese jurisprudence. It can hardly be called a religion, as it does not inculcate the worship of any god." In other words, it stops short at ethical boundaries and does not concern itself with spiritual relations. The point at issue between Confucianism and Buddhism is that the latter affirms that the present life is conditioned by a past one and determines the condition in a future one, while Confucianism confines itself to the deciding of questions of conduct beginning with birth and ending with death. It is to be expected, therefore, that, like Judaism in the days of its decadence, every probable phase and aspect of human life will be discussed, and a rule of conduct laid down. This is done largely by allegory, and we find in Korea, as in China, a mass of stories illustrating the line of conduct to be followed under a great variety of circumstances. These stories omit all mention of the more recondite tenets of Confucianism, and deal exclusively with the application of a few self-evident ethical principles of conduct. They all cluster about and are slavish imitations of a printed volume of stories called the O-ryun Hang-sil, or " The Five Principles of Conduct." This has been borrowed mainly from China, and the tales it contains are as conventional and as insipid as any other form of Chinese inspiration. As this is a written volume which has a definite place in literature, it may not perhaps be considered strictly as folk-lore, but the great number of tales based on it, giving simple variations of the same threadbare themes, have become woven into the fabric of Korean folk-lore and have produced a distinct impression, but rather of an academic than a genuinely moral character. Following the lead of this book, Korean folk lore has piled example upon example showing how a child, a youth or an adult should act under certain given circumstances.
These " Five Principles " may be called the five beatitudes of Confucianism, and while their author would probably prefer to word them differently, the following is the way they work out in actual Korean life:
(1) Blessed is the child who honours his parents, for he in turn shall be honoured by his children.
(2) Blessed is the man who honours his King, for he will stand a chance of being a recipient of the King's favour.
(3) Blessed are the man and wife who treat each other properly, for they shall be secure against domestic scandal.
(4) Blessed is the man who treats his friend well, for that is the only way to get treated well himself.
(5) Blessed is the man who honours his elders, for years are a guarantee of wisdom.
Then there are minor ones which are in some sense corollaries of these five, as, for instance :
Blessed is the very chaste woman, for she shall have a red gate built in her front yard, with her virtues described thereon, to show that the average of womanhood is a shade less virtuous than she.
Blessed is the country gentleman who persistently declines to become prime minister, even though pressed to do so, for he shall never be cartooned by the opposition and incidentally shall have no taxes to pay.
Blessed is the young married woman who suffers patiently the infliction of a mother-in-law, for she in turn shall have the felicity of pinching her own daughter-in-law black and blue without remonstrance.
Blessed is the man who treats his servant well, for instead of being squeezed a hundred cash on a string of eggs he will be squeezed only seventy-five.
Korean lore abounds in stories of good little boys and girls who never steal bird's-nests, nor play "for keeps," nor tear their clothes, nor strike back, nor tie tin cans to dogs' tails. They form what we may call the " Sunday-school literature " of the Koreans, and they are treated with the same contempt by the healthy Korean boy or girl as goody-goody talk is treated by normal children the world over.
While these stories are many in number, they are built on a surprisingly small number of models. After one gets used to the formulae, the first few lines of a story reveal to him the whole plot, including commencement, complications, climax, catastrophe and conclusion. For instance, there is the stock story of the boy whose parents treated him in a most brutal manner but who never made a word of complaint. Anticipating that they will end by throwing him into the well, he goes down one dark night by the aid of a rope and digs a side passage in the earth just above the surface of the water; and so when he is thrown in headlong the following day, he emerges from the water and crawls into this retreat unknown to his doting parents, who fondly imagine they have made all arrangements for his future. About the middle of the afternoon he crawls out, and faces his astonished parents with a sanctimonious look on his face, which, from one point of view, attests his filial piety, but from another says, " You dear old humbugs ! You can't get rid of me so easily as that." Be it noted, however, that the pathos of this story lies in its exaggerated description of how Korean children are sometimes treated.
We also have the case of the beautiful widow, the Korean Lucrece, who, when the King importuned her to enter his harem, seized a knife and cut off her own nose, thus ruining her beauty. Who can doubt that she knew that by this bold stroke she could retire on a fat pension and become the envy of all future widows?
Then there was the boy whose father lay dying of hunger. The youth whetted a knife, went in to his father's presence, cut a generous piece of flesh from his own thigh and offered it to his parent. The story takes no account of the fact that the old reprobate actually turned cannibal instead of dying like a decent gentleman. The Koreans seem quite unable to see this moving episode in more than one light, and they hold up their hands in wondering admiration, while all the time the story is exquisitely ironical.
There are numerous stories of the Lear type, where the favourite children desert their parent, while the one who had been the drudge turns out pure gold. There is quite a volume of Cinderella stories in which proud daughters come to grief in the brambles and have their faces scratched beyond repair, while the neglected one is helped by the elves and goblins and in the sequel takes her rightful place. But these stories are often marred by the careless way in which the successful one looks upon the suffering and perhaps the death of her humbled rivals.
Another common theme is that of the girl who refuses to marry any other man than the one, perhaps a beggar, whom her father had jokingly suggested as a possible husband for her. The prevailing idea in this is that the image once formed in a maiden's mind of her future husband is, in truth, already her husband, and she must be faithful to him. Such stories are a gauge of actual domestic life in Korea inversely to the degree of their exaggeration.
A favourite model is that of the boy who spends his whole patrimony on his father's funeral and becomes a beggar, but after a remarkable series of adventures turns up Prime Minister of the land. But in actual Korean life it has never been noted that contempt for money is a leading characteristic of officialdom. Far from it. There is also the type of the evil-minded woman who was found weeping upon her husband's grave, but when asked why she was inconsolable, she replied that she was moistening the grave with her tears so that the grass would grow the sooner, for only then could she think of marrying again.
Korea is rich in tales of how a man's honour or a woman's virtue has been called in question, and just as the fatal moment came the blow was averted by some miraculous vindication ; as when a hairpin tossed into the air fell and pierced the solid rock, or an artery was severed and the blood ran white as milk, or the cart which was to carry the traduced but innocent official to his execution could not be moved an inch, even by seven yoke of oxen, until the superscription "traitor" was changed to that of " patriot."
These are but a few of the standard models, and in examining them we find that they are all highly exaggerated cases, the inference apparently being that the greater includes the less, and that if boys and girls, youths and maidens, men and women, acted with virtue and discretion under these extreme circumstances, how much more should the reader do so under less trying conditions. But the result is that, as Confucianism proposes no adequate motive for such altruistic conduct and provides no adequate punishment for delinquency, the stories are held in a sort of contemptuous tolerance without the least attempt to profit by them or to apply them to actual conduct. This tendency is well illustrated in another phase of Korean life. When asked why his people do not try to emulate the example of the West in industrial achievements, the Korean points to the distant past and cites the case of Yi Sun-sin, who made the first iron-clad war-ship mentioned in history; and he actually believes Korea has beaten the world, though Korea to-day does not possess even a single fourth-class gunboat. Even so they point to these fantastic tales to illustrate the tone of Korean society, when, in truth, these principles are as obsolete as the once famous tortoise boat.
It should be noted that while the models given in the " Five Rules of Conduct " are mostly from the Chinese, yet a vast number of the tales which are based on these and which pass from mouth to mouth, are purely Korean in their setting. The Confucian imprint is there, but translated into terms of Korean life and feeling.
I have already hinted that the more recondite and esoteric ideas of Confucianism are entirely waved aside and only the practical application is brought to the fore. It is to this fact that we must attribute the virility of Confucian ethics as a code, even though there be no effort to live up to it. These ideas are such as belong to every religion and every civilisation, and it is just because they are fundamental principles of all human society that they survive, at least, as a recognised standard. They are axiomatic, and to deny them would be to disregard the plainest dictates of common sense.
These stories form, as I have said, the " Sunday-school " literature of the Koreans, and they are taken, as in the West, by a select few on select occasions. Everyone knows about them and has a general familiarity with their contents, just as every Western child knows about David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, Daniel and the lions; but just as in the Western nursery Mother Goose, Cinderella, Jack the Giant-killer, Alice in Wonderland and the Brownies are more in evidence than religious tales, so in Korea the dragon or fox story, the ipp and elf and goblin story, are told far oftener than the tales illustrative of Confucian ethics.
When we come to Buddhistic stories, we find a larger volume and a wider range. Being a mystical religion, Buddhism gives a much wider play to the imagination; being a spectacular religion, it gives opportunity for greater dramatic effect; carrying the soul beyond the grave and postulating a definite system of rewards and punishments, it affords a much broader stage for its characters to play their parts upon. The Confucian tales are short, intended each to point some particular moral, and conciseness is desirable ; but with the Buddhistic tales it is different. The plots are often long and intricate, the interrelation of human events is more carefully worked out and the play of human passions is given more extended illustration. They approach much closer to what we would call genuine fiction than do the Confucian tales. The latter are mere anecdotes, and afford no such stimulus to the imagination as the Buddhistic stories do.
Another reason why Buddhist tales are so common is that Buddhism was predominant in the peninsula for a period of over a thousand years, and antedated the general spread of Confucianism by many centuries. Coming in long before literature, as such, had made any headway in the peninsula, Buddhism took a firm hold upon all ranks of society, determined the mould into which the thought of the nation should be poured, and gained an ascendency over the Korean imagination which has never been successfully disputed. It is probable that at the present time three stories hinge upon Buddhism, where one draws its motive from Confucian principles. The former cult entered Korea about three centuries after Christ, but it was not until 1 100 A. D. that there was any serious rivalry between it and Confucianism. By that time Buddhism had moulded Korean fancy to its own shape, and had constituted itself some sort of substitute for genuine religion ; but Confucianism never went deeper than the reason, and so the former cult, by the priority of its occupancy and by its deeper touch, made an impression that the latter code of morals has never been able to efface.
Another cause of the survival of Buddhistic ideas, especially in folk-lore, even after Confucianism became nominally the state religion, was that the latter gave such an inferior place to women. Buddhism makes no such invidious comparisons. The very nature of the cult forbids it, and Korean history is full of incidents showing that women were equal sharers in what were believed to be the benefits of religion. Confucianism, on the other hand, gave woman a subordinate place, afforded no outlet to her religious aspirations, and made child-bearing her only service. It is a literary cult, a scholastic religion, and women are debarred from its most sacred arcana. They retorted by clinging the closer to Buddhism, where they found food for their devotional instincts, albeit the superstition was Egyptian in its darkness. In this they were not opposed. Confucianism, the man's religion, seemed to fancy that by letting despised woman grovel in the darkness its own prestige would be enhanced. The fact remains that one of the most striking peculiarities about Korean society to-day is that while the men are all nominal Confucian ists, the women are nearly all Buddhists, or at least devotees of one or other of those forms of superstition into which Buddhism has merged itself in the peninsula. What would have become of Buddhism and the monasteries if it had not been for the queens of the present dynasty ? Even the last twenty years give abundant evidence of its potent power in the female breast. It is the mothers who mould the children's minds; and every boy's and girl's mind is saturated with Buddhistic or semi-Buddhistic ideas long before the Thousand Character Classic is put into his hands. The imagination and fancy have become enthralled, and, while it is true that in time the boy will be ridiculed into professing contempt for Buddhism, the girl clings to it with a tenacity born of sixteen hundred years of inherited tendency. It is, of course, a modified Buddhism. The basic fetichism and animism which the Korean inherits from untold antiquity has become so thoroughly mixed with his Buddhism that we can hardly tell where the one leaves off and the other begins. We are speaking now of the common folk-tales and not the written literature of the country. The formal writings of the past five centuries are Confucian, and the models have been those of the Chinese sage; but they are not for the mass of the people, and they mean even less to the common crowd than Shakespeare and Milton mean to the average Englishman or American.
I must mention one more reason for the survival of the Buddhist element in Korean folk-tales ; that is, its localising tendency. The story plays about some special spot; it clings to its own hallowed locus, and without this it would lose force, just as the story of William Tell or King Arthur or Evangeline would suffer if made general as to locality. It is because the Korean can lead you to a mountain-side and say, " Here is where Muhak the monk stood when he pronounced the fatal words that foretold the great invasion," or show you the very tree, now centuries old, that Tosan planted - it is because of these definite local elements that these tales are anchored so firmly in the Korean consciousness. Any Confucian story might have occurred where at any time. But old Diamond Mountain carries as many tales of famous monks as it bears pines, and the shoulders of old Halla Mountain are shrouded in as heavy a cloak of Buddhist lore as of the driving mist from off the southern seas.
The style and make-up of the Buddhistic story are almost infinite in variety. What we may call the inner circle of Buddhist philosophy never appears in these tales, but through them is constantly heard the cry for the release from the bane of existence. The scorn of merely earthly honours is seen on every page. Well indeed might the women of Korea be willing, nay, long, to sink into some nirvana and forget their sorrows. Buddhism is consistent at least in this, that it acknowledges .the futility of mere existence and says to every man, "What are you here for?"
The plots of Buddhist stories are too long to give in extenso, but a few salient points can be indicated. The monastery is the retreat to which the baffled hero retires, and in which he receives his literary and military education, and from it he sallies forth to overthrow the enemies of his country and claim his lawful place before the King. Or, again, a monastery may be the scene of an awful crime which the hero discloses, and thus vindicates the right. There is no witch nor wizard nor fairy godmother in Korea. It is the silent monk who appears at the crucial point and stays the hand of death with a potent drug, or warns the hero of his danger, or tells him how to circumvent his foes. Now and again, like Elijah of old, a monk dares to face the King and charge him with his faults, or give enigmatical advice which delivers the land from some terrible fate. Often a wandering monk is shown a kindness by some boy, and in after years by his mysterious power raises the lad to affluence and fame.
In these days one never connects the idea of scholarship with a Buddhist monastery, but the folk-lore of Korea abounds in stories in which the hero retires to a monastery and learns not only letters but astrology and geomancy. Even military science seems to have been taught in these retreats. From no other source do we derive so much information about the monasteries in the middle ages as we do from these same stories. While in Europe the monastery was the repository of learning and culture, to which the war-worn veteran retired to do penance for his sanguinary career, in Korea it was the school in which the young man learned the science of war as well.
Folk-lore shows the part that Buddhism has played in determining many other phases of Korean life as seen to-day. Take, for instance, the penal code. The punishments until lately inflicted upon criminals were evidently copied from the representations of the Buddhistic hell. Of course these originally emanated for man's imagination, and one might argue that the horrors of the Buddhist hell are borrowed from the system of punishments in vogue in Korea, were it not that the system was brought complete from India by way of China. The crystallisation of these inhumanities into religious forms has perpetuated the ancient and gruesome horrors, and prevented the advent of humaner forms of punishment commensurate with the general advance in civilisation.
Buddhistic stories have bred in the Korean a repugnance to taking the life of any animal. To make blood flow is beneath the dignity of any decent man, and though Buddhism has been politically under the ban for five centuries, the butcher has, until recently, been counted with the chilban, or " seven kinds," which include mountebanks, harlots, slaves and sorceresses. And yet this repugnance to taking life does not prevent the most revolting cruelty to animals of all kinds. Many other points might be cited to show how Buddhist lore has tended to perpetuate ideas that are not only outside the Confucian system but directly antagonistic thereto.
And this brings us to our next point, the antagonism between these two religions. During the whole of the Koryu dynasty (918-1392) a bitter fight was kept up between the adherents of these two cults. No one was then both a Buddhist and a Confucianist, as is quite common to-day. Sanguinary struggles took place in which Buddhism was uniformly successful; but there was always left the nucleus of an opposition, and in the end, when Buddhism had dragged the nation in the mire and made her contemptible, the Confucian element came to the surface again, and by one bold stroke effected, at least on the surface of things, one of the most sweeping changes that any people has ever experienced, comparable to the French Revolution. This struggle between the two systems could not but leave an indelible mark upon the folk-lore of the country. A volume could be filled with stories illustrating in detail the successes now of one side and now of the other. Once when the Confucian element prevailed and the Buddhist pontifex was condemned to death, he foretold that when his head fell his blood would flow white like milk to vindicate his cause. It turned out even so, and his executioners bowed to the logic of the occasion and reinstated the formerly despised cult. Again a raven was the bearer of a missive to the King bidding him to hasten to the Queen's quarters and shoot an arrow through the zither-case. He obeyed, and found that the arrow had taken effect in the body of the high priest, who had taken advantage of the King's absence to attack the honour of the Queen. In one instance a test was made to see whether Confucian or Buddhistic principles were better able to control the passions. A leading representative of each of the cults were subjected to the blandishments of a courtesan, with the result that Confucianism scored a notable triumph.
So far as we have found, Korean folk-lore accords the palm of victory in a majority of cases to the Buddhist side. This is doubtless because Buddhism made far greater use of folk-tales to impress itself upon the people than did Confucianism. The latter is the more reasonable cult, but Buddhism chose the better, or at least the surer, part by capturing the imagination and monopolising the mystical element which is so prominent in Oriental character. After Confucianism had secured a firm hold upon the government, it cared little what Buddhism did in the moral sphere. All physical contest between them came to an end, and they became blended in the Korean consciousness in so far as the antipodes can blend. This also has left its mark upon Korean folk-lore. The longest and most thoroughly elaborated stories show Buddhism and Confucianism hand in hand. The former supplies the dramatic element, and the latter the ethical. The motive is Confucian, the action Buddhistic.
Under the head of shamanistic stories I include all tales which hinge upon shamanism, fetichism, animism and the like. They are the stories which appeal to the basic element in the Korean. Before he was a Confucianist, before he was a Buddhist, he was a nature worshipper. True enough, the monk can scare him with his pictures of a physical hell, but it is as nothing to the fear he has of the spirit which inhabits yonder tree on the hillside. The Confucianist can make the chills run up and down his back by an inventory of the evil passions of the heart ; .but it will not begin to compare with the horror which seizes him when in the middle of the night a weasel overturns a jar in the kitchen, and he feels sure that a tokgabi is at work among his lares and penates. The merchant will not be moved by a homily on the duty of fair dealing with one's fellow-men, but he will spend all day spelling out from the calendar a lucky day on which to carry out a plan for "doing" an unwary customer. Countless are the stories based upon these themes. The spirits of mountain, stream, tree, rock or cave play through Korean fiction as the fairy, goblin or genius does through the pages of the "Arabian Nights."
This portion of our theme is of greater interest than almost any other, for while Buddhism and Confucianism are both importations, and bring with them many ideas originally alien to the Korean mind, we have here the product of the indigenous and basic elements of their character. And yet, even after the lapse of so many centuries, it is difficult to segregate the original Korean and the imported Chinese ingredients in these tales ; but we may be sure that here if anywhere we shall come near to the genuine Korean.
First come the stories based upon the belief that animals can acquire the power to transform themselves into men. These are among the stories that children love best. There was the wild boar that drank of the water that had lain for twenty years in a human skull, and thus acquired power to assume the human shape, but with this fatal limitation, that if a dog looked him in the face he would be obliged to resume his natural shape. There is the fox which turned into a woman, an Oriental Circe, and worked the destruction of an empire. Now and again a centenarian toad assumes human shape, and acts as valet to the tiger, who is masquerading as a gentleman. A serpent turns into a beautiful maiden and lures a man to the brink of destruction, but, being thwarted, changes its tactics and infests his body with a myriad of little snakes, from which he is delivered by the sparrows, who kindly peck holes in his skin and let the reptiles out. There is a clear line of demarcation between the good and the bad animals. The fox, tiger, wild boar, serpent and toad are always bad, while the rabbit, frog, tortoise and dragon are invariably good. As the tiger is the most destructive animal in Korea, we are not surprised to find a great number of stories, telling how he turned into a girl and came crying to the door of a house in order to lure out its inmates. This is the " bugaboo " story with which Korean children are frightened into obedience.
Many are the wonders worked by the tokgabis, the imps that delight to make trouble in the household. No Korean will profess to have seen one or to have been the victim of his tricks, but every Korean knows of someone else who has so suffered. They believe that these imps are the spirits of wicked men who have been refused entrance into the place of the blessed, and have no option but to haunt their former places of abode ; or they may be the spirits of good people who have died by violence, or under other painful circumstances, and cannot go to paradise because of the desire of revenge which burns in them. Sometimes they take the shape of a man with the lower half of his body gone, sometimes that of a flying man or child. At other times they appear in the shape of fire or lightning, or a crash as of thunder.
Many stories are told of how these tormented spirits have leagued themselves with men, promising that the unholy compact will bring riches and power. This corresponds to the witchcraft of the West. By the aid of these familiar spirits many a deed of darkness is done; but the promises always fail, and the man becomes pinched and pale, and he gradually wastes away. It is only by breaking the compact that he can save himself from disaster. The things the tokgabi dreads the most are silver, a red colour and a tree that has been struck by lightning. Men may break the spelf by hanging about the house cloths dipped in a red dye. This barrier the spirit cannot pass, and after four days of waiting he departs never to come again. His dread of silver reminds us of the superstition in the West, that in order to shoot a ghost one must load the gun with a silver piece as well as the regular charge. If a tokgabi seizes a man, it always lays hold of his top-knot ; for this reason it is that so many Koreans wear a little silver pin in the end of that ornamental member. If a tree is struck by lightning, the boys of the neighbourhood will hasten to secure splinters of the wood to carry in their pouches as a charm against the fiends.
This meddlesome sprite is a sort of Korean Puck, and any casualty whose cause is not patent is laid at his door. One of his favourite pastimes is to bewitch the rice-kettle and make the cover fall in. The cover is a trifle larger than the kettle's mouth, and the trick would seem to be impossible; but if the cover were cold and the kettle made very hot, the expansion of the metal might make even this possible. This may have occurred once or twice in all the centuries, and it is still cited as evidence of the existence of these imps. The tokgabi seldom plays the leading part in a Korean story, but he flits in and out and adds spice to the narrative.
Prominent among the folk-tales are those of the Uncle Remus type; and it is very commonly the rabbit that outwits his stronger enemies. A wicked tortoise, in search of a rabbit's liver to use as medicine in healing the sea-king's daughter, inveigled a rabbit into riding on his back across the water to an island that the tortoise said was a rabbit's paradise. When well out from shore, the tortoise bade the rabbit prepare to die, for his liver was needed down below. After a moment's thought the rabbit laughed and said : " You might have had it without all this trouble. We are made with removable livers, so that after eating too much we can throw our livers out and wash them and keep them cool. I had just laid mine out to dry when you came, and your story was so fascinating that I forgot the liver entirely. You are welcome to it if you will let me show you where it is.. So the rabbit got safely back to shore and had a good laugh at the expense of the tortoise.
Spirits are everywhere, and they turn up on the most unlikely occasion. Even the door-hinges or the chopsticks may be the abode ol an imp who has the power to change a man's whole destiny. As a rule, they seem to be on the watch for someone to injure them, for only so can they gain the power they crave. These stories deal with the lowly and humble things of life, and it is in them that Korean humour shows itself to the best advantage. Their influence is very great, and it may be said with some degree of confidence that they define the religion of far more Koreans than do the more high-sounding names of Buddhism and Confucianism. If they had been left to themselves and had not been made the dumping-ground for other people's religions, it is probable that they would have developed some such pantheon as that of the Greeks; but even as it is, we find them worshipping the spirits of grove and rock and mountain with a fervour that neither Buddhism nor Confucianism can arouse.
We will now consider briefly the legends of Korea. Under this heading we include all supernatural or extra-natural incidents, believed by the credulous to form a part of the history of the country. These stories are always short and pithy and are truly indigenous. Most of them are of great antiquity and antedate any considerable Japanese or Chinese influence.
Many legends deal with the founding of the various dynasties and kingdoms that have flourished here from time to time. We find upon examination that the egg plays a very important part in the origin of ancient heroes. To be sure, the Tangun, the most ancient of all, had another and a unique origin. A bear, by patient waiting in a cave, at the command of the great spirit became a woman. Whan-ung, the son of the Creator, sought and found her, and she bore a son who is known as Tangun, contemporary with Noah. The founder of the great southern kingdom of Silla (57 B. c.-o,i8 A. D.) was brought forth from a gigantic egg that was found in a forest. The founder of Koguryu in the north came also from an egg of superhuman origin. One of the early heroes of Silla came from an egg that floated in from the sea in a chest. The origin of the three heroes of Quelpart is different. They arose from a hole in the ground. The founder of Koryu had for mother the daughter of the sea-king, the Korean Neptune. Another mighty man came from beneath a boulder in the shape of a golden toad.
Closely connected with these are the tales which deal with the omens and signs that heralded the coming of momentous events. It was always the evil fortune that was thus foreshadowed. Fear is a main element in the religion of all semicivilised people, and this fear has made them quick to detect the signs of coming danger. Before the kingdom of Pakche fell, imps flew through the palace corridors, screaming, "Pakche is fallen," and then dived into the earth. Digging at the point where they disappeared, the King found a tortoise on whose back was written, "Pakche's sun is at the zenith," which meant that it was ready to go down. In other cases, tigers have come down from the mountains and wandered in the streets of the capital; the sea has turned red like blood ; meteors, comets and eclipses have appeared; abnormal births, either human or animal, have taken place; a white fox has crossed the road in front of the King, insects have fallen in showers, thunder has been heard in winter, fruit trees have blossomed late in the fall, a white bow has pierced the sun, red snow has fallen, wailing sounds have proceeded from the royal tombs, a city or temple gate has been blown down, clouds or frogs have fought with each other. All these and many more are met with in Korean legend, and every one of them has meant death or destruction or some other dire calamity. It is interesting to note how closely some of these correspond to the signs which were dreaded by the ancient Romans. Among the signs which predict good fortune, the most prominent are the meeting with a white deer, the finding of a white pheasant or a white crow, or the discovery of a stem of barley with two stalks. But many happy events have been foretold by dreams. The founder of the present dynasty is said to have dreamed that he saw a sheep running over the hills, and as it ran its horns and tail dropped off. This meant that the two upper strokes and the lower stroke of the Chinese character for sheep had been taken away, leaving the character for king. Yi Sun-sin, who saved Korea in 1592, had a dream in which he saw himself defending a tree which vandals were attempting to cut down. A maiden dreamed that she saw a dragon enter her father's ink-water bottle. When she awoke she took the bottle and hid it until in after years her own son was ready to go up to Seoul and take the examinations. She gave it to him, and promised that the dragon would help him take his degree. It did, and he became Prime Minister.
Prophecy plays an important part in Korean legendary lore. Of course, it is almost all ex post facto prophecy, but the Koreans still cling to it. Most of the leading events in Korean history since the tenth century are said to have been foretold at some earlier time. There does not seem to have been any prophetic office, but now and again a monk or a scholar has been moved to tell his vision of the future. The monk Muhak objected to the site upon which it was proposed to build the first palace at Seoul, and affirmed that if it was built there a great calamity would overtake the country in just two hundred years. His words were unheeded, and just two hundred years later the armies of Hideyoshi landed on the coast of southern Korea. To prove that these prophecies were not all made after the event, the Korean points to those prophecies which have existed for centuries and are as yet unfulfilled. The most striking of these is that the present dynasty will be followed by one that will have its capital at Kye-ryong Mountain in the south. Another affirmed that this dynasty would have great difficulty in passing its five-hundredth anniversary. As that year came just after the China-Japan war, many Koreans watched with the utmost solicitude to see whether the dangerous point would be passed in safety. The latest one to come to light is that, " When white pines grow in Korea, the northern half of the peninsula will go to the Tartar and the southern half to the shrimp." The Koreans interpret the " white pines " to be the telegraph poles, and Tartar to be Russia, and the shrimp to be Japan; for the islands of Japan are noted as being in the shape of a shrimp.
When the monk Tosan in 918 ascended Songak and chose the site for the capital of the Koryu dynasty, he made a mistake, for when he went to take another look in the morning he saw far away to the south the peaks of Samgak Mountains peeping above the nearer range, thus forming the dreaded kyubong, or "spying peak"; and for this reason he said that within five hundred years the dynasty would fall before another whose capital should be at the foot of Samgak. Four hundred and seventy-six years later his word came true.
Another style of legend deals with the supernatural aid that was given in important crises in history. When Chumong fled from home before his brothers and came to an impassable river, the fish came to the surface and formed a solid bridge upon which he crossed to safety. When the capital of Silla was attacked by wild men, strange warriors appeared with ears like bamboo leaves and delivered the town. The next day the King found his father's grave strewn with the leaves, and he then knew that his father's spirit had led forth an army of spirits and had delivered him.
The battlefields of Korea, as of every other land, form the background for many a thrilling tale. When the army of Koguryu went forth to conquer Puyu, they heard the sound of clashing arms in Yimul forest. The leaders pushed forward and found swords and spears clashing against each other in mimic battle, but wielded by invisible hands. It was deemed a good omen. The weapons were taken, and with them the foe was conquered. When rebels besieged Kyong-ju, a star fell in the city, a sign of destruction. The rebels rejoiced; but the stubborn general within, defying even the fates, sent up a kite with a lantern attached, and the rebels, thinking that it was the star and that the decree of heaven had been reversed, raised the siege and decamped.
At one time or another almost every foot of Korean soil has been the scene of battle, and the tales of wonderful marksmanship, heroic daring, gigantic strength, subtle stratagem, inventive genius, intrepid horsemanship and hairbreadth escape by field and flood are among the commonest household words in Korea. Who can worthily sing the praises of Yi Yu-song, against whose body bullets flattened themselves and fell harmless to the ground; or of Kwak-Cha-u, the "General of the Red Robe," who to-day would be falling upon the enemy in Chulla and to-morrow would take breakfast in Kyong-ju, a thousand li away, because he had the power to "wrinkle the ground"? He would make the ground contract before him, and, after he had stepped over it, expand it again and find that he had gone a hundred li. Many are the dei ex machina like this, whereby men have been saved from seemingly desperate situations.
Women, too, come in for their full share of attention, from the time of Yuwha, the mermaid princess mother of Chumong, down to the time of Nonga, the dancing-girl patriot, who seized the Japanese general, her enforced paramour, and leaped to death with him from the wall of Chin-ju, in the days of the great invasion. Most notable was the Queen of the last King of Pakche, who, upon the approach of the ruthless enemy, led her maids to the top of a beetling precipice and threw herself into the water below rather than suffer indignity at the hands of the conquerors. That is the Nakwhaam, or "Precipice of the Falling Flowers," a name of most poetic beauty.
Tongman, the first woman ruler in Silla, divined, from the fire in the frogs' eyes, that the enemy had crossed the border of her realm. Seo, the faithful wife, followed her husband to Japan on the flying boulder and became a queen there. She wove the magic silk on which the King of Silla sacrificed, and thus brought back the light of heaven to his realm, which, since her departure, had been shrouded in Egyptian darkness. There was also the Korean Judith, who, during the occupation of Pyeng-yang by the Japanese in 1592, brought her brother over the wall at night to smite off the head of her captor, who slept bolt upright at a table with a sword in each hand and with only one eye shut at a time. Even after his head had rolled to the floor, he arose in his place and hurled one of his swords with such tremendous force that it went clean through a massive wooden pillar.
There are stories of women notorious for their wickedness, as, for instance, the Princess of Ang-nang, who married a prince of Yemak and one night went and cut open the head of the big drum which, without touch of mortal hand, always emitted a booming sound when an enemy was approaching. Soon after this messengers came hurrying with the news that the Ang-nang forces were crossing the border, but the King laughed at it, saying that the drum had given no warning. Too late it was found that the drum was destroyed.
A fruitful source of Korean legend is the wisdom shown by magistrates and governors in deciding knotty questions of law. These bear witness to the rich fund of humour in the Korean, which keeps him cheerful and patient through centuries of - what shall we say? - anything but ideal government.
A boy accidentally shot his parent and came weeping to the prefect, who had not the heart to execute the penalty of the law on him. But the prefect's son, coming at the moment and seeing his father's perplexity, asked the cause, and, being told, exclaimed: "The boy must be killed. If his heart had been right, he would not have waited for the law to punish him; he would have killed himself. It is plain that his tears are only to excite pity." So the prefect sent the boy up to Seoul for execution.
A hunter had wounded a fox and was chasing it down when a dog ran out of a house and caught the animal. The owner of the dog claimed the game. The magistrate decided as follows : " It is evident that what the hunter was after was the animal's skin, while the dog thought only of its flesh. Let each have what he was after."
Early one morning at a country inn a good horse was stolen and a poor spavined brute was left in its place. The prefect was appealed to. He ordered that the miserable animal that had been left be deprived of water for two days and then set free upon the road. Of course it went straight for its former master's house in a distant village, and there the stolen horse was found.
When we speak of myth, we take the word in its strict meaning, some extra-natural origin of a natural phenomenon. At the very start we must say that the Korean imagination has never been capable of those grand flights of fancy which produced the enchanting myths of Greece. Nor has it been virile enough or elemental enough to evolve the stern heroes of the Norse mythology. The Greek, the Roman, the Scandinavian pantheons are filled with figures that loom gigantic and awful, while in Korea these agencies all seem, somehow, less than man; sometimes craftier, often stronger, but seldom worthier or better. So, instead of giving us a Phcebus Apollo to lead out the chariot of the sun, the Korean gives us the reason why the bedbug is so very flat. Instead of fancying that the cirrus clouds are flocks of sheep feeding in ethereal pastures, the Korean tells us why sparrows hop on both feet while magpies walk by putting one foot before the other. The Greek mythology is telescopic, the Korean microscopic. If you want to know the origin of fire, of the precession of the equinoxes, of echo or of lightning, you must go to the Greek; but if you desire to learn why the ant has such a small waist, or why the louse has a black spot on its breast, or why crabs walk sideways, you must consult Korean lore. A single sample will suffice.
The flies and the sparrows had a quarrel and agreed to arbitrate. The governor of Pyeng-an was chosen to settle the matter. The flies charged the sparrows with stealing the rice from the harvest fields and of building their nests under the eaves of the houses and causing all sorts of disturbances. Without waiting to hear the other side of the case, the governor ordered the sparrows to be beaten on the legs. As the blows began to fall, the sparrows hopped up and down in pain and begged that their side of the story be heard. The governor complied, and then the advocate of the sparrows charged the flies with laying eggs in the standing rice and ruining whole crops, with entering houses and defiling the food and waking the sleepers in the early morning. The governor would hear no more, but ordered the flies to be beaten unmercifully. It was their turn to be humble then. They came before the governor and, rubbing their hands together as Koreans always do when supplicating, asked that they be let off. After thinking it over, the governor pardoned both sides, but, in order that neither the sparrows nor the flies should forget the warning, he decreed that for all time the sparrows should hop instead of walk, and that whenever a fly alighted he should rub his hands together, as they had just done before him.
In like manner Korean lore tells why flounders have both eyes on the same side of the head, why shad have so many bones, wny the full moon contains a picture of a tree with a rabbit beneath, why sorghum seeds are enveloped in a red case, why clams are simply birds that have fallen into the sea, how the serpent and the octopus had a fight and as a result the serpent had to surrender his four feet to the octopus, how the earthworm had his feet all taken away and given to the centipede, - all these and many another quaint and curious freak of nature is explained to the satisfaction of the Korean.
Thus far we have been able to classify roughly the different types of Korean folk-tales, but outside these limits there is a whole realm of miscellaneous fiction, so varied in its character as to defy classification; and we can enumerate only individual types. I should include under one head all those tales which draw their inspiration from the workings of human passions. Of the love-story, as we know it in the West, Korean lore is entirely innocent. Social conditions, which prevent personal contact between men and women of a marriageable age, sufficiently account for this; and it is this limitation along the line of legitimate affection that is to blame for a wide range of popular literature which cannot be discussed with propriety. Love between man and woman is a thing never spoken of among respectable Koreans.
Many tales are based upon the passion for revenge. Without doubt the prevalence of this type results from a state of society in which even-handed and blindfold justice finds no place; where the principle, " to the victor belongs the spoils," applies equally in the political, industrial and social life. It is a condition in which " pull " in its most sordid sense is the main asset of the politician, the merchant and even the coolie. Here the passion for revenge has daily and hourly food to feed upon, and we see a clear reflection of it in the folk-tales.
A woman has been robbed of her ancestral burial-place by a bad prefect, and she is told by a fortune-teller that she will recover the property as soon as she is able to make one egg stand upon another without falling off. One night, several years after this, the King of Korea, masquerading like Haroun al Raschid of old, peeped through a window and saw an aged woman trying to make one egg stand upon another, but always without success. But even as he looked, behold! the impossible was done. He demanded admittance and, after he had heard the story, gave the woman ample revenge.
A young girl whose father and brother have been wrongfully done to death by the Prime Minister retires to a mountain retreat, and practises the sword dance with the purpose of becoming so proficient that she will be called upon to dance before the court and thus will secure an opportunity to kill the Prime Minister's son. Meanwhile that son has been disowned by the Prime Minister and wanders away among the mountains, where he accidentally meets the girl and persuades her to marry him, promising to let her go when her destiny calls. The boy has been told by a fortune-teller that he will die on his eighteenth birthday. Neither of them tells the other what is in store, and the girl never dreams that she has married the man that she must kill if she is to keep her oath. It would take too long to unravel the plot, but the reader can see that all sorts of complications are possible.
Korea has also its stories of detectives and their wiles. The custom of sending government detectives to the country to spy upon governors and prefects and to right the wrongs of the people forms an easy hook upon which to hang many an interesting tale. These are crude compared with the complicated plots of the West, and yet now and again situations occur that would do credit to Sherlock Holmes himself. In the human heart there is a passionate love of justice. In the end the right must, prevail. Koreans evidently think so, for though there are tragedies enough in actual life there are none in Korean fiction. Things come out right in the end. The Korean may be much of a fatalist, but he is not a pessimist. His fatalism is of that cheerful type that leads him to take things as they come. We may rightly say that the comic muse fills the whole stage of Korean drama. It is the villain only that gets killed off. This craving for justice amounts to a passion; perhaps on the principle that things that are least accessible are the most desired. This feeling is expressed in a multitude of stories in which justice, long delayed, has at last been done. The Korean story-teller has the same penchant for getting the hero into hot water that the Western novelist has, but the Korean always gets his hero out, which is more than can be said for our more realistic style, in which the hero is often left suspended over the coals.
Stories based upon the passion for fame generally take a literary turn. They cluster about the great national examinations. The enormous influence that these examinations have exercised on the life of the Korean is shadowed forth in countless stories relating to the open strife of the competitors, their attempts to cheat or to bribe the examiners, to substitute spurious manuscripts, to forge names, if by any means whatever they may arrive at the Mecca of official position. And right here appears the relative status of literary and military life. The literary man is distinctly above the military. No fame is sufficient that rests merely upon military success. There are a very few exceptions. All Korean fiction goes to show that military glory is thrust upon a man, while it is only literary fame that he eagerly seeks.
Avarice is also one of the chords that are struck in Korean tales, but it is usually only as a secondary theme. Rarely is a story devoted exclusively or even mainly to the illustration of this passion. The Koreans are too happy-go-lucky, and they have too great a contempt for niggardliness to make the sordid acquisitive faculty a pleasing theme in fiction. On the other hand, the tales of generosity and self-sacrifice, of prodigal and even reprehensible bounty, are common enough, for they fit the spirit of the people and go hand in hand with their optimism.
A lad goes forth to seek his fortune. Coming to a village, he meets another boy who is grieving because he has no money with which to bury a parent. Our hero gives the unknown lad every cent he has, and then fares on, a beggar. Of how he tramps up and down the country, and finally comes to the capital and becomes a general, of how the enemy have in their ranks a veritable Goliath, of how our hero goes and challenges him only to find that it is the very person whom he had befriended, and how a happy peace is consummated, all this forms the kind of story that the boys and girls of Korea can listen to by the hour and still wish for more.
The peculiar customs of the country are enshrined in the folklore. The unique stone-fight; the tug-of-war; the detestable widow-stealing and the still more horrible custom called posam, which is veritable murder, committed for the purpose of forestalling the predictions of the fortune-teller that the bride will soon become a widow; the wiles of the ajuns, or hangers-on at country prefectures, who are looked upon much as Judean publicans were, all these themes and many more, based upon national customs and traits, swell the volume of Korean folk-lore.
It is natural that a land as old as this should be filled with relics of other days, and that they should be surrounded with a halo of popular veneration. Even though many of these relics are now lost, like the Holy Grail, yet the stories remain. There was the golden yardstick of Silla, and the pair of jade flutes that refused to sound if taken away from the town of Kyong-ju. There was the magic stone in which one could look and discover the nature of any disease. There was the magic robe which would render its wearer invisible, and the King's stone, from which the ashes of cremated sovereigns of Silla were cast into the Japan Sea. Stories cluster about the dolmens and cromlechs that are found all over Korea, but whose origin no one seems to know.
Among the miscellaneous tales are those which tell of the introductions of various things into Korea, or their invention. St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, but Prince Yunsan introduced them into Korea. He wanted a few to keep under his bed, but as there were none in Korea he sent to India and secured a cargo of them. As they were being unloaded, some escaped into woods, and ever since that time Korea has had her ophidians like other lands.
The scientific value of a study of folk-lore is the opportunity it affords for comparison. We want to know what are the affinities of Korean folk-lore in order to establish its ethnological relationships. Such comparison seems to be possible when we note that in Korea we have stories that are almost the exact counterpart of that of Cinderella, The Forty Thieves, Brer Rabbit, Haroun al Raschid, Jonah and the Whale, Red Riding Hood, Aladdin's Lamp, Sinbad the Sailor and many another type familiar to the scientific folk-lorist of the West.
PROVERBS
In spite of the lack of a literature that is largely accessible to the common classes, the people have developed a keenness of insight and a terseness of expression that is surprising. The lack of books has resulted in a refinement of the art of storytelling, and this in turn has brought out a large volume of terse and witty sayings which correspond to our saws and proverbs. The Koreans use these much more frequently than we do, and it adds a spice to their talk that is often lacking in ours.
Where we would use the very humdrum formula "Make assurance doubly sure," they would say, "Even though the crab is boiled, you must pull its legs off first and eat them." There is a whole sermon in the proverb, "A finger prick will demand attention, though the worms be eating the heart unknown." The value of personal observation is illustrated by the saying, "If you want to know how deep the river is, wade in and see." "The blind man stole his own hen and ate it" is a finely ironical way of saying that the covetous man will overreach himself. Our proverb, "Lock the barn-door after the horse has been stolen," is expressed equally well in the Korean, "Fill out the prescription after the friends of the sick man have put on mourning." "There cannot be a deep valley without there being a high mountain" means that you cannot get something for nothing. The Koreans better our "Every man's goose is a gander" by saying, "Even the hedgehog says her young are smooth." "Making a mountain of a mole-hill" means to the Korean, "Killing a bullock for a feast when a hen would have sufficed." A frequently observed trait in human nature is touched upon in the saying, "The man who had his face slapped in Tongjagi waits till he gets to Subingo before he makes faces at his insulter"; in other words, he puts some space between before answering. We say that a man must lie upon a bed as he makes it, and in the same way the Korean says that "The man who eats the salt must drink the water." To "build a house beside the main road" is a rather subtle way of saying that "too many cooks spoil the broth," for it means that everyone who passes along will criticise and say, "Why don't you make this part so and that part thus ? " and in this way the builder will at last find that he has made a botch of the whole job. We have an expressive proverb, "Jump from the frying-pan into the fire," but the Korean is abreast of us with his "Cut off a wart and make a tumor." "What looked like blossoms on the dead tree turned out to be only the white mould of decay" conveys the same idea as our reference to a mirage. "You cannot sit in the valley and see the new moon set" means that if we would get the best things we must make an effort. Insincerity is epitomised in the trenchant words, "Honey on the lips, but a sword in the heart." It shows a keen insight into human nature to evolve the proverb, "Never beg from a man who has once been a beggar himself." How often do fashion's votaries in every land illustrate the saying, "He went and caught the dropsy out of envy for the fat man"! The Koreans have gotten rather the better of our proverb, "The pot called the kettle black" by saying, "The aspen blamed the pine for rustling so loudly in the wind," when everyone knows that the least breath of air will set the aspen leaves to quivering. This proverb contains a distinctly poetic touch which is quite lacking in our culinary metaphor. How true it is the world over that "Where there are no tigers, wild-cats will be very selfimportant." This illustrates the man who is clothed with a little brief authority, or, in part, the fact that " When the cat 's away, the mice will play." The idea that we try to convey in the classical allusion to " the Greek calends " the Korean expresses in the more homely way, " Like blood in a bird's foot." The universal desire to escape responsibility is shadowed forth in the proverb, " The cook blames the table because he cannot pile the food high." The skill of a Korean cook is proven by his ability to make a pyramid of cakes or sweetmeats two or three times as high as the diameter of the plate. If he fails, he will say that the plate is crooked. " Even beggars sometimes feast their friends " corresponds to our " Every dog has his day." Excessive caution is illustrated by the hyperbole, " He would not walk beneath the city wall with a load of rotten eggs." The extremely small value of the load and the extremely small liability of the wall falling and crushing them show the measure of the man's timidity. We sometimes enumerate our barnyard fowl before their incubation, and in the same way the Korean says that some people " Make the baby-clothes before the wedding." It is a profound truth that has many close applications that " The horse will be tripped up if you tether it with too long a rope." Many a rich man's son has proved this to be true, not in Korea only. We say truly that "A scalded cat fears the fire," and the Korean is just as near the truth when he affirms that "A man that has once been frightened by a tortoise will jump every time he sees a kettle cover." One of the most expressive of Korean proverbs characterises the fickle man as "The character wul written on chamois skin." Now this character wul is 曰; but if you write it on chamois skin and then stretch the skin vertically, it will become 日, which is the character il, an entirely different thing. It reminds us of Polonius and the cloud which looked now like a camel, now like a weasel and anon like a whale.
These are only a very few of the commoner proverbs that are used as household words. The following might be added to show how the Koreans have picked out for such generalisation those qualities of the heart which are the universal property of the race.
"He ate so fast that he choked."
"The flower that blooms in the morning is withered by noon."
"You can recover an arrow shot, but not a word spoken."
"It is easy to hurt yourself with a sharp-cornered stone."
"To make a mountain you must carry every load of earth."
"If you go across-lots, you will fall in with thieves."
"If the carpenter stretches his marking-cord tight, he will be able to make a straight line."
"If you use good enough bait, the fish will bite, though it kill."
"It is foolish to mourn over a broken vase."
"You can mend now with a trowel what it will take a spade to mend to-morrow."
"You cannot expect to lift a heavy stone without getting red in the face."
"He pours instruction into a cow's ear."
"All roads lead to Seoul."