The 111-Year Prophecy 1-3: Man Is Heaven Itself

Section 3 — Man Is Heaven Itself

The years flowed like the water of Cheongsugol.

After the Teacher went to Heaven, the state of the country did not improve. No; it grew more disordered with every year. In famine years the taxes were not lowered, and the officials’ extortions grew more cunning by the day. From across the sea strange ships came in demanding trade, and the court, unable to find its bearings, festered from within. Through those years, the Way the Teacher had left was pressed down under the magistrate’s hand but did not die. If anything it spread deeper and wider into the hearts of a people who found it hard to live. Like a pressed seed waiting for spring, the believers closed ranks in secret around those who had succeeded the Teacher, and waited for their time.

Through those years Yeon So-mun grew.

The child was not like other children. While his age-mates splashed in the stream and hunted birds’ nests on the mountain, So-mun sat at the door of the men’s quarters and listened to the grown-ups talk. He learned his letters early. His father pointed through the Thousand Character Classic a few times and he was soon reading it on his own, and when he was sent to the village school the schoolmaster clicked his tongue in disbelief. He never forgot a text he had seen once, and when asked its meaning he gave answers beyond his years. The schoolmaster called the child’s father in and told him quietly: this child is no ordinary vessel; either teach him greatly or hide him altogether. A talent too bright, he said, draws calamity instead in a disordered world.

The father chose to hide him. Sitting the examinations and going into office he had never had in mind to begin with. He had no wish to send a son into a rotten court, and above all, the father believed another road was prepared for So-mun. So instead of the writings of the world, he taught his son the writings of the Way. The scripture the Teacher had left behind.

The Teacher had left writings in classical Chinese and writings in songs in our own tongue. Those in Chinese held the principle of the Way; those in vernacular song unfolded that principle so the common people could easily learn it by heart. These writings, copied and passed from hand to hand beyond the magistrate’s eyes, So-mun’s father read with his son late at night in the men’s quarters. Then, around the time So-mun reached sixteen or seventeen, the father at last had his son copy out the scripture. It was the task of gathering the scattered versions and making one complete fair copy. That was not merely a matter of copying letters. Among the believers it was an act of devotion, and a discipline.

Night after night So-mun sat under the lamp and took up the brush.

With each character he copied, the child — the boy, for he could no longer be called a child — read the Teacher’s heart laid over his own. When he wrote the three characters for serving the Lord of Heaven, his fingertips trembled. When he wrote the four characters for serving man as Heaven, the silence he had felt before the village shrine in the spring of his fifth year came back to life. The boy would stop his brush and sink a long time into thought. If man is Heaven, why does Heaven kill and imprison and rob Heaven so freely? Why is the world in such disorder? At the end of that question the boy always arrived at the same place. Because the Way has not yet taken root in the world. Because people do not yet see the Heaven inside people. So to make them see it is the task of the one who carries on the Way.

Under the lamp the boy’s hand did not stop until the night was deep.

He ground the ink, spread the paper, wet the brush, and copied character after character with care. The smell of ink soaked into his fingertips followed him to bed. So, over several years, So-mun made a complete fair copy of the Teacher’s scripture. That manuscript was later passed around and read as a treasure among the believers of Cheongsugol. So-mun’s hand was straight and strong, and yet somehow clear like water, everyone who saw it said. If a person is held in his handwriting, then that handwriting already held no ordinary person.

In copying, So-mun learned in his body the strange power that writing has. The Teacher was no longer in the world. He had been beheaded and gone to Heaven. But the writing he had left was here, coming back to life at the tip of So-mun’s brush. A dead man’s words, borrowing a living man’s hand, flowed into the world again. That was writing. A man died, but writing did not die. No, writing carried a dead man’s purpose to the living. Each time So-mun copied the Teacher’s scripture, it was as if he sat face to face with the Teacher across thirty years. This power — the power of writing to carry a purpose across death — So-mun learned with his whole body in those years. And that learning became the foundation stone on which he would later establish this family as a family of “those who write things down.”

Around the time his marriage was arranged, So-mun suddenly thought again about his own name. So-mun. The word that comes back to life. As a child he had taken it merely as a name his father gave him. But now, having copied the Teacher’s scripture with his own hand and felt in his body how a dead man’s words come back to life at a living man’s fingertips, he understood that his name had not been chance. The two characters his father had said came to him suddenly that day, the day the milky light came down on the roof. The word that comes back to life. It was a name that had already carved, in the moment of his birth, the road this man would walk all his life. So-mun felt himself straightening his collar before his own name. He had to live up to the name. Live up to the word that comes back to life. Bring dead purposes back to life, keep names that would be forgotten from being forgotten: live up to that.

The year So-mun turned twenty-four was the year Gyemi (1883).

In the tenth month of Gyemi, So-mun was joined with a woman who carried the root of the Way. She was a daughter of the Gyeongju Choe clan, and her name was Do-hyang.

After the marriage, So-mun stood at last in the place of leading the believers of Cheongsugol.

It was the place his father had left as he grew old. So-mun was young, but his words had a weight beyond his years. The believers followed him. Night after night he unfolded the Teacher’s word to those gathered in the men’s quarters. Man is Heaven, so treat one another as Heaven. Do not be proud because you are of the gentry; do not lower yourself because you are called base. Under Heaven all men are the same Heaven. To the people of Cheongsugol, pressed down under the yoke of rank, the words sounded like the promise of a new world. People gathered at So-mun’s men’s quarters every night, and their number grew with the years.

Choe Do-hyang kept her place at her husband’s side. She too was a woman who knew the Way. So-mun never once saw her step back from the road her husband walked. Rather, she walked it with him. By day she managed the household of the head house; by night she quietly looked after the believers gathered in the men’s quarters. The warm rice and the clean dawn water that came from her hands warmed the hearts of those who walked a hard road. The believers of Cheongsugol looked up to So-mun like a teacher, and followed Choe Do-hyang like a mother.

The couple’s nights mostly ended with reading the scripture together.

So-mun would read a passage aloud, and Choe Do-hyang would turn its meaning over and ask. The questions were usually short and the answers usually long, but by the time the night deepened and the lamp wick sank, it happened often that the long answer stopped short before the short question.

Once she asked this:

“Can one who knows no letters know the Way?”

So-mun could not answer readily. The scripture was written in letters, and he was a man who had reached the Way through letters. But among the people he had met in Cheongsugol, not one in ten could write the three characters of his own name. If those nine in ten could not reach the Way, then it was not a Way but a wall.

“The one who does not know will know first,” he answered at last. “Letters are only one of the many roads to the Way. Knowing a road and walking it are different things, and letters are of no use in the walking.”

“Then why does my husband copy out those letters night after night?”

So-mun held the brush and said nothing for a while. Her questions were always like this. Without reproach, they had a way of setting a person back in his proper place.

“They are of no use in the walking,” he answered slowly, “but they are of use in the leaving behind. When the one who walked is gone, his steps go with him; but if it is written down, the one who comes after can pick up those steps and put them on.”

She asked no more. Only, from that day on, when So-mun unfolded the scripture to the believers, he no longer put the letters first. His wife was to him not merely a partner who kept the house, but a companion on the Way, one who practiced it beside him.

The fair copy of the scripture that So-mun had made over several years, Choe Do-hyang bound with a cover made by her own hands. She backed it carefully with cotton cloth so that it would not spoil with the years. That manuscript was passed around and read as a treasure among the believers of Cheongsugol, and moved secretly from house to house out of the magistrate’s sight. That what is written in letters remains after a person dies, that however the magistrate pressed it down it passed from hand to hand — So-mun dimly learned this watching the manuscript travel around the village. The distant seed of the understanding that would make him choose writing over the bamboo spear in the winter of calamity was, in truth, already sprouting from the scripture manuscript he and his wife had put away together in those years.

Around the time So-mun was leading the believers, this happened in Cheongsugol.

At the water mill below the village there was a girl named Gopdan. She had been born a slave’s daughter and raised a slave. One summer Gopdan caught malaria and lay ill for days. Because she was a slave’s child no physician came, and her master shut the sick girl in a storeroom and did not tend her. When So-mun heard that Gopdan was near death, he went by night to that storeroom himself. He opened the storeroom door and went in, and sat at the pillow of the fever-flushed girl. And with his own hands he felt the girl’s forehead, fed her thin gruel, drew dawn water and set it beside her, and chanted all night.

When day broke the master saw this and raised an uproar. The eldest-line heir of a gentry house nursing a slave wench; what kind of indecency was this? The master shook his finger in So-mun’s face and scolded: following this devilish Way, you mean in the end to break down the very law of high and low. So-mun rose quietly. And facing the master, he said in a voice that was low but did not waver:

“There is Heaven in this child too. As there is Heaven in you, sir. When Heaven lies sick and dying, and a person is standing beside it, how could he let go of her hand?”

The master was struck dumb at that. Partly it was outrage; but partly it was that something in the young believer’s eyes had a force that would not be handled lightly. So-mun sat down again at the girl’s pillow. And for three more days he nursed her in that storeroom. On the third day Gopdan’s fever broke. The girl opened her eyes and saw the face of the one who had saved her. A child born a slave, who had never once been treated as a person, had for the first time in her life met someone who treated her as Heaven. Gopdan could say nothing, and only wept.

After that, the number of those who followed So-mun in Cheongsugol grew sharply. Especially those who were called base and never treated as people. To them So-mun’s Way was not simply a teaching; it was like the first permission they had ever been given to live as people. In the eyes of the magistrate and the gentry, that looked dangerous. It looked like a wicked band breaking down the order of high and low. In fact, So-mun was dragged off by the runners two or three times in those days and interrogated. But even under the rod he did not forsake the Way, and the magistrate, finding no proper grounds to charge him, had no choice each time but to release him. Each time he came home from interrogation So-mun’s body was broken, but his Way had grown harder instead. Choe Do-hyang rubbed salve into her husband’s body, beaten until there was no sound place on it, and never once told him to stop. She only drew fresh dawn water and set it out, and chanted at her husband’s side.

In those days, the Way that everyone had thought extinguished was rising again across the three southern provinces.

After the Teacher’s martyrdom, his successor had kept the Way alive, hiding from mountain to mountain out of the magistrate’s sight. They were years of being pressed down and hunted, but the Way did not die. If anything it spread like wildfire among a people who found it hard to live. In the districts of Chungcheong, Jeolla, and Gyeongsang, local assemblies were founded, and larger circles that bound the assemblies together. Believers passing through Cheongsugol dressed as peddlers stayed a night in the men’s quarters and brought such news. In one district, they said, the believers numbered thousands; in another the magistrate had made it his very trade to arrest believers and squeeze them for money. So-mun heard the news in the men’s quarters. The pressed seed was spreading its roots in the soil.

But So-mun was not wholly glad of the spreading. When the people increase, the magistrate’s hand grows harsher too. If there were districts where squeezing believers for money had become a trade, then that wrong would pile up and pile up and one day burst out somewhere. At night he sat before the dawn water and thought about where that bursting place would be. Whether it would be the day the Way set the world right, or the day the believers were cut down, he could not tell. He only dimly felt that some great wave was rising far away. And in that dimness he thought again of the child who had not yet come to him. The old wish that, into this disordered world, a child should be born who would light it.

But the world was growing darker and darker.

The magistrates’ extortion reached its height, and the people’s grievance pierced the sky. In every district of Chungcheong the clerks’ hands reached deeper by the day. Cheongsugol, half a day by mountain path from the town of Gongju where the provincial headquarters of Chungcheong sat, could not escape that reach, and the villagers’ hardships were past telling. At night, in the talk of the believers gathered in the men’s quarters, there was mixed in more and more, alongside the principle of the Way, something aimed at a state of the world that could not be borne, and the voices rose with it.

So-mun quieted those voices, and yet in a corner of his mind he felt something approaching. What is pressed down will one day burst. Whether it would be a great wave that changed the world by the strength of the Way, or a calamity that swallowed countless people, was not yet decided. Even before a dike breaks, the water is already rising inside it. In So-mun’s ears the level rose a little each night. And inside that foreboding he suddenly thought of the child not yet come. Six or seven years had passed since the marriage, and there was still no child under their roof. At night he would sit before the dawn water and ask himself whether it was right to have a child in such a disordered world. But at the end of the question he always came to the same answer. The darker the world, the more a light must be born to brighten it. The Way passes from person to person; if there is no one to carry it on, the Way too is cut off.

So he prayed before the dawn water. Into this disordered world, send down a child who will light the world. And let that child carry on the Way, and push it forward to a place that neither I nor the Teacher could reach.

Perhaps that prayer reached Heaven. Under a roof empty for six or seven years, at the close of the year Gichuk (1889), Choe Do-hyang at last was found to be with child.