The 111-Year Prophecy 1-2: The Teacher’s Martyrdom

Section 2 — The Teacher’s Martyrdom, and the Silence That Fell on the Village

It was the spring of the year Gapja (1864), the year Yeon So-mun turned five.

Spring came unusually late that year. The second month passed and the third came, and still there was old snow on the mountain skirts of Cheongsugol, and the ice on the stream broke up later than in other years. The villagers said it was the foul weather, but some said quietly that Heaven was holding back the spring because it was grieving over something. Those who said such things were mostly the people who gathered in secret at the men’s quarters of the head house after dark.

For some years now, Yeon So-mun’s father had carried in his heart the new Way that had begun in Gyeongju. When he later heard the story that on the very day and at the very hour of his son’s birth, a man hundreds of li away had heard the voice of Heaven, he did not take it for chance. That his son had been born on the very day, at the very hour, that this Way was opened came to him like a summons. So he had entered the Way in secret, and quietly led a few people of Cheongsugol who shared his mind. The teaching that man is Heaven, that noble and base alike bear Heaven within them, all the same, soaked into the hearts of this valley’s people, who had bent their backs for generations over other men’s land, the way water soaks into a dry paddy.

But the state called that Way a heresy.

For disturbing the order of the world and bewitching the ignorant, the magistrates arrested those who followed the Way. And in the third month of Gapja, the news reached even Cheongsugol that the Teacher who had first opened the Way had lost his life at the provincial headquarters in Daegu. The charge was that of leading the right world astray by a crooked way. The Teacher had been beheaded, it was said, in the marketplace by the high road, before many eyes. The one who brought that terrible news was a believer from the Gyeongju side dressed as a peddler. He gave the news in the men’s quarters of the head house, and without staying even one night slipped quickly back into the dark. The eyes of the magistrate were everywhere, and those who followed the Teacher could not even weep freely.

That night, the night the news came, the lamp in the men’s quarters of the head house did not go out.

Little So-mun opened his eyes in his sleep. It was not like other nights. A low sound was leaking from the direction of the men’s quarters. At first he did not know what it was. It was not wailing and it was not talk. It was the sound of several grown men weeping with the sound held in. The sound of men who could not cry aloud, and were swallowing their weeping inward, inward, and this was what escaped. The child crawled into the inner room looking for the hem of his mother’s skirt. His mother too was sitting up, unable to sleep. She pulled the child to her and said nothing at all. Only the hand that stroked down the child’s back was trembling, finely.

The next morning the village was strangely quiet.

On any other morning the valley would have been busy with the voices of people going out to the paddies and the fields, the calls to the oxen, the murmur of women at the well. But that day there was no sound. People went out to the fields as always, but they did not speak to one another. When their eyes met they looked at each other a moment and then lowered their heads. What was in those eyes could not be spoken aloud, so people only exchanged the look. The child felt the silence too. A five-year-old could not have known what death was, or martyrdom. But the heavy quiet that lay over the whole village he could feel distinctly on his young skin. It was not an absence of sound; it was a silence filled to bursting with sounds that could not be made.

That day, So-mun walked alone to the village shrine at the mouth of the valley.

No one had told him to. The child simply found the heavy air of the house hard to bear and went outside, and his feet turned of their own accord toward the shrine. It stood under the old zelkova tree at the mouth of the village, a heap of stones with strips of colored cloth tied to it. For as long as anyone remembered, people passing in and out had laid a stone on it and made a wish. The child stood blankly before it. He still had on the white cotton clothes his mother had hurriedly made him the winter before, for a visit to a neighbor’s house of mourning. They were hardly mourning clothes, but that all-white dress made the small body look smaller still.

The child stood before the shrine a long, long time.

He was not praying for anything. What would a five-year-old know, to pray for? The child only stood still, as if trying in his own way to make out where the weeping the grown-ups had swallowed had come from, and what the silence that covered the whole village was. The wind passed through the branches of the zelkova and stirred the colored cloths. The cloths fluttered without a sound. It looked as if they were weeping toward Heaven in place of the villagers who could not weep aloud.

An old man passing by saw the sight. It was the same old man who, at dawn on the day the child was born at the head house, had fretted over the persimmon blossom, saying it had bloomed too prettily. He saw the child in white standing alone before the shrine and stopped. The old man stood there a long while, looking at the child’s back. And then, suddenly, he felt his own eyes grow hot. It seemed to him that the little one was standing there doing, with his whole small body, the wailing that even the grown-ups did not dare do openly. The old man could not go up to the child. He did not know what he could have said if he had. He only stood at a distance, and stood in that silence together with the child.

Only when the sun was going down did the child come home.

His mother did not ask where he had been all day. She only washed his feet in cold water, and kept her face pressed a long time to the small tops of them. That night the father sat the child on his knee and spoke, for the first time, about the Way. Not because he hoped the child would understand. Only in the hope that someday, grown, the child would remember this night.

“The man in Gyeongju said this,” the father’s voice was low and careful. “He said that man is Heaven. There is Heaven in you, and there is Heaven in the hired man driving the ox out in that field, and there is Heaven in the magistrate’s runner who comes to seize us and lock us up. So, he said, serve man as you would serve Heaven. That one saying was so fearful a thing that the state killed him. If man is Heaven, then a nobleman cannot order a commoner about as he pleases, and a king cannot handle his people as he pleases… That true word became a crime instead, and today he has gone to Heaven.”

The child did not understand all of what his father said. But the words “gone to Heaven” lodged strangely clear in his young breast. Not death, but going to Heaven. A sad thing, and yet somehow not only sad, those words. They were planted deep in the child’s heart like a small seed. The belief that when a person dies they do not go back to the earth but go to Heaven. What those words would become in this house in later days, the little So-mun of that night did not know; he only said them over to himself many times before he fell asleep.

On the seventh night after the Teacher was gone, the believers of Cheongsugol went up the mountain.

To escape the magistrate’s eyes, they had decided to hold a rite for the Teacher’s spirit on a broad flat rock in a deep valley some ten li from the village. They could not set out a great offering table, nor wail aloud. There was only a bowl of dawn-drawn well water, a stick of incense, and whatever devotion each had carried up in his heart. So-mun’s father went too. And for whatever reason, that one night he took his small son along. In later years when people asked him why, the father would answer: this child was born on the day that man opened the Way, so it seemed right that he should be present when that man was sent off.

The mountain path was rough and dark. The grown-ups could not even light pine torches; they climbed by moonlight alone. So-mun rode that night road on his father’s back. On his father’s back the child did not sleep. The rough breathing of the grown-ups climbing in the dark, the snap of dry twigs under their feet, the call of an owl now and then from far off: the child heard it all with his whole body. And when at last they reached the flat rock, the child was set down from his father’s back and stood among the grown-ups.

A bowl of dawn water was set on the rock. The moon shone on the water in the bowl. It was as if another sky were held inside the water. The oldest of the believers lit the incense. Its scent rose in a thin thread into the night air. People stood around it and bowed without a sound. There was no wailing. Only every one of the bowing shoulders was trembling. Someone began, low, very low, to chant the incantation. *Si-cheon-ju jo-hwa-jeong yeong-se-bul-mang man-sa-ji* — serve the Lord of Heaven and harmony takes its seat; never forget that grace, and all things will be known — the thirteen syllables the Teacher had left behind. The sound that began in one mouth soon passed to many, and filled the valley like a low swell of water.

Little So-mun stood in the middle of that sound.

The child did not know the meaning of the thirteen syllables. But the moment the sound wrapped around his body, he dimly felt that the heavy silence he had felt before the shrine by day had here become something else. If the silence of the day was a weeping swallowed, the low chanting of the night was a weeping let go. A sound that sent the weeping up to Heaven. Without knowing it, the child brought his small hands together like the grown-ups. And with those black, deep eyes he gazed a long time at the moon held in the bowl of dawn water. Each time the incense smoke drifted across it, the moon on the water shivered into ripples, and then found its round shape again.

Then the child suddenly spoke. It was a voice like talking in one’s sleep, and yet clear.

“Father, there is a sky in that water too.”

The grown-ups turned to the child all at once. The chanting stopped for a moment. That one sentence from a five-year-old had pierced straight through the meaning of the thirteen syllables they had just been chanting, the meaning of serving the Lord of Heaven, more directly than any grown man’s sermon. The old believer looked down at the child. His wrinkled eyes filmed over. He laid his hand on the child’s head and said softly, in a trembling voice:

“Yes. There is Heaven in the water, and there is Heaven in you. The Teacher came to tell us that, and now he has gone back to that Heaven.”

On the way down the mountain that night, the child fell asleep again on his father’s back. The father carried the weight of his sleeping son down the dark mountain path, step by careful step. As he went, the one sentence his son had let fall kept coming back to his ears. There is a sky in that water too. The father did not press to know where the words had come from. It did not seem the kind of thing that pressing would answer. Only a foreboding that this child would one day take up the Way and push it on to some place he and the villagers had never dared reach, warmed his chest together with the warmth of the child on his back.

After the Teacher was gone, the magistrate’s hand grew harsher.

The state believed that by executing the Teacher it had pulled the Way up by the root, but the Way was not pulled up. If anything, the Teacher’s martyrdom bound the believers more tightly together. The magistrates noticed, and arrested those who followed the Way more harshly than before. Now and then the magistrate’s runners burst into Cheongsugol as well. Give us the list of believers, who are the ones who gather at night, they badgered the villagers. But the people of Cheongsugol did not open their mouths. Beaten, locked up, they did not sell one another. The Way that said man is Heaven had bound them into one like that. Little So-mun grew up watching it. Each time the runners tore through the village and left, the child saw the grown-ups’ tightly shut mouths, and the resolve hidden behind those shut mouths. That keeping one’s mouth shut could also be a way of standing up to them: the child learned it so.

It was a winter’s day around that time. A neighbor, an old man who had been dragged off by the runners and beaten and released, collapsed at the mouth of the village with his body broken. While passersby hung back, afraid of the magistrate’s eyes, not daring to go near, five-year-old So-mun ran up and sat down beside the old man. The child wiped the blood beaded on the old man’s forehead with the sleeve of his own jacket. Then he looked up at the grown-ups and said, in a clear ringing voice:

“There is Heaven in this grandfather too, so why does nobody help him?”

The grown-ups reddened at that one sentence. Then one by one they came forward, and lifted the old man and supported him. A five-year-old had shamed the grown-ups. After that, the villagers murmured that the little young master of the head house was no ordinary child, that he was a vessel fit to carry on the Teacher’s purpose. So-mun’s father laughed it off whenever he heard it, but the old shaman’s words from the hundredth day kept coming back to him. A great vessel is made to hold great things, and whether what it held would be a blessing or a calamity, Heaven alone knew.

That winter, little So-mun fell ill. Perhaps the small body could not bear that heavy season when the whole village held its breath after losing the Teacher. For days the child tossed with fever and talked in his delirium. And mixed into the delirium were words his mother could not understand. He muttered characters he had never yet learned, and called what sounded like the names of people no one had ever heard of. His mother put it down to the fever and let it pass. But the father could not let the ravings pass. Might there be something dwelling in this child that the child himself did not yet know? When the thought came, the father would sit at the child’s pillow changing the dawn water all night and pray to Heaven. Only keep this child safe. Whatever You have prepared for this child, give him too the strength to bear it.

Only, after that night, no laughter was heard in Cheongsugol for a long time.

Spring still came slowly. Only when the old snow had all melted and the stream had fully thawed did the villagers begin little by little to talk to one another again. But between their words something had settled that had not been there before. A vow that could not be spoken aloud: the Teacher was gone, but his word had not died. People buried that vow in their chests, and after dark gathered at the men’s quarters of the head house more secretly than ever. The magistrate’s eyes grew sharper by the day, but as a seed pressed down roots deeper, the Way soaked deeper into the soil of Cheongsugol.

Every year when the day of the Teacher’s martyrdom came round, the believers of Cheongsugol honored him in secret.

They could not hold a great memorial. Only, on that night, in each house, they set out a bowl of dawn water and chanted quietly. So-mun’s house did the same. Every year on that night, little So-mun sat with his father and mother before the dawn water and chanted. As he grew a year older and another, the child weighed the meaning of that night a little more deeply each time. At first he only put his hands together after the grown-ups, but by six or seven he began to ask his father what kind of man the Teacher had been, and why he had lost his life. The father answered each question one by one. How the saying that man is Heaven had become a crime; how a true word had driven a man to his death.

On such nights the child would lie a long time thinking before he slept. If a man who spoke a true word was killed for it, then should the true word not be spoken? Or should the true word be spoken even if one was killed for it? To a child’s mind it was a question without an answer. But as the years went by, the child’s heart leaned to one side. The Teacher had died, but his word had not died. Watching people honor him like this year after year, watching the Way soak deeper into the soil — a true word was something that did not die even when the man was killed. If anything it spread wider through his death. That dim understanding put down roots deep in little So-mun’s heart. The root of the belief that would one day make him choose writing over the bamboo spear in the face of calamity was, in truth, already spreading, little by little, from these nights of sitting before the dawn water and chanting.

And that spring of silence, when little So-mun stood in white before the village shrine, he never forgot as long as he lived. In later years, on the day he came of age and took the Way for his own, the first thing that rose in his mind was not any teaching of the Teacher’s, nor any verse of the scripture. It was the swallowed weeping that had covered the whole village in the spring of his fifth year, and the colored cloths of the village shrine fluttering without a sound.