Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

His chanting

sounded like a magpie’s squawk.

One day he left abruptly

and without any preparation went up the southern slopes of Jiri Mountain.

There, in a small rock cave,

he lived like a wild animal

on roots of trees, wild fruits, other such.

All he had was his koan,

the character Mu ( , Nothingness) of Master Zhaozhou.

Later he would get rid of that, too.

The hair on his head growing long,

his beard growing long, he became a wild animal.

He gave up living as a human being,

and died alone.

It was in the late 1970s

that the animal returned to a human state,

when his bones were reverently gathered up.

They should have been left where they were.

Shameful!

Maybe it’s near that perilous sea at Indangsu

where filial Sim Cheong was sacrificed to the Dragon King

after she sold herself for three hundred sacks of rice

in hope of restoring sight to her blind father –

Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea!

It stretches deep under the sea,

with Jangsangot in North Korea nearby.

There lies freedom for seagulls.

There the young priest Ho In-su spends his days.

He has a bed of lovely little cockscombs in his heart.

He quarrels with no one,

never quarrelled with anyone even in childhood.

When one lyric poem emerges

his joy is such that the time for Mass is a bit delayed.

In Incheon across the sea,

a heated sit-in strike is in progress

at the Catholic Centre in Dap-dong,

but here among the sea breezes of Baengnyeong Island

Ho’s clothes are flapping wildly.

King Hyoseong of Silla had a daughter, the princess Yu-hwang.

The king chose Won Il-sin,

renowned for his filial piety, as son-in-law.

The couple had four sons –

Sam-seok, Sam-myeong, Sam-jae, Deuk-yun.

The two sons Sam-seok and Sam-myeong took their father’s family name,

Sam-jae adopted his mother’s Yu as his surname,

and Deuk-yun, his mother’s Hwang.

Later, not those with the family name Won,

but the Yu of Changwon

and the Hwang of Changwon begot descendants.

They were originally a single bloodline,

then diverged into three streams,

flowing on,

flowing on

At times they were indifferent to one another,

like dogs and hens,

at times they desired one another, as hawks hunger for magpies,

and at times they were like a cluster of boils

all breaking out together.

Traveller reaching a village of barking dogs,

a village clouded with evening smoke –

from which family do you trace your descent?

The seats in the slow trains to Busan are hard.

While the trains stop for a while

at Okcheon station

we see a bent-backed old cleaner.

The station is clean,

marigolds bloom in tidy rows,

and cockscombs too.

He pays no heed

to the passing trains,

just keeps on sweeping over and over.

At home, there’s no photo of his dead wife.

For him, the inside of the station

is more like home.

He staggers for a moment

in the wind from the new Saemaul express trains.

His American name was David John Seel.

Quite a guy,

quite a guy.

Sometimes a transplanted tree casts a vast shadow.

Arriving in Korea

he spent ten years,

twenty years,

thirty-six years in all.

When he was head of the Jesus Hospital

at the foot of Mount Daga in Jeonju,

once, when a TB patient coughed up black blood and collapsed,

he saved his life by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He sucked in that black blood,

sucked in that dying man’s breath.

The first and most sacred task in this world

is saving another’s life.

Eom Ju-pal, the eldest son of Mr Eom of Hwagokpon-dong,

turned up late for his father’s wake.

Late at night,

dead drunk,

he sang an old popular song,

‘An Unfilial Son is Weeping’.

Under the awnings people whispered.

His brothers tried to stop him.

Tried,

but they were grabbed by the collars, knocked down

by Eom Ju-pal’s powerful fist.

For long ages, men have performed so-called filial and unfilial acts.

Animals are really pure.

Winged animals

and land animals are pure.

Mother and

father

give birth to their young then rear them, and that’s all.

They do not live at the expense of their children,

depending on their filial devotion.

Bearing and raising them,

that’s the end of it.

What pure disinterestedness.

In general,

exalting filial love quickly leads to exalting loyalty,

and when loyalty is exalted

comes, often enough, dictatorship.

On the southern slopes of Namsan

was a spot that just after Liberation

came to be known as Liberation Village.

It was on a steep alley

that twisted so

that once you were inside

there was no way out.

The roofs were head-high.

Mr Foul-Mouth from Pyeongan province in North Korea,

his stiff white hair in a crew cut,

would go up and down,

swearing in a loud voice every day.

‘Bloody goddamn…

Bloody goddam…

That f..cking bastard…’

On March 1, 1978, the Independence Movement holiday,

there was no peep from Mr Foul-Mouth,

him with the stiff white hair in a crew cut.

That morning he died, as if to celebrate

the Anniversary of the Independence Movement.

King Sinmun of later Silla,

came to the throne with the help of Jang Bo-go

who controlled Cheonghaejin, the West Sea.

Therefore

the king’s son, when he became the next king,

intended to take the second daughter of Jang, his father’s benefactor, as his queen.

How could Your Majesty take an islander’s daughter as your queen?

Objections came thick and fast.

Hearing of this, Jang Bo-go grew furious

and decided to destroy Seorabeol, the Silla capital:

Outrageous!

Outrageous!

Then the Silla general Yeom Jang

claimed it was he who had complained to the king,

and hastened out to meet Jang Bo-go.

The two of them drank their fill together

and that night, once they were drunk,

Yeom Jang

pulled Jang Bo-go’s sword from its sheath

and drove it into his breast.

A great hero who could not be killed by others’ swords

had to die by his own.

After that came a time when Korea lost control of the sea,

the sea by which they could cross not only to Okinawa

but to distant Annam.

Chusa Wandang Kim Jeong-hui,

created a new pen-name for himself

every time he produced a piece of calligraphy,

every time he painted.

He ended up having hundreds of pen-names.

His inkstone from Dangye

accompanied him when he was exiled

to Daejeonghyeon on Jeju Island.

It spent its whole life with him,

until at last he wore a hole in it

with so much grinding,

repeated grinding of ink,

and could no longer function as an inkstone.