The lkl korea Trip 2010

Friday 7 May: Sancheong County, day 2

29. Early morning prayers and sutra-painting

I wake up at 3 o’clock. My body seems to be ready for early morning prayers even though I hadn’t signed up for them. And I wanted to hear those moktaks and chants again, so I stumbled into my clothes and went out to the main temple courtyard to wait for the prayers to start.

I am rewarded not only with the moktaks and chants, but the main temple bell as well. I sit listening for half an hour, before returning to my room to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before breakfast.
Breakfast is pretty similar to supper the previous evening: rice and vegetable side dishes with a rich variety of tastes. I could eat this for every meal, without any problem.
Our next appointment is sutra-painting. Again, we meet in the car park to go to the side chapel meant for use by temple-stayers. Two tables are laid out with black paper and gold paint blocks. Yoseph and I are to do the painting, while Morgan is on translation and camera duty.
We take our seats on the floor and await further instruction. The black paper is faintly marked with an intricate tracery of lines which depict a seated [maitraya]. We are to paint over these delicate lines with the gold paint and the brush provided. The exercise is in patience, concentration, but because it does not require too much brainpower it is also intended as an aid to meditation, to help you focus on yourself.
The only thing I can focus on is that there’s an awfully large number of lines to paint, and they’re very fiddly, and the driver is coming in an hour’s time to take us away. I wonder where I’m supposed to start, and decide on the eyes.
With hindsight, I realise that was a bit of a faux pas. I later thought back to my visit to Haeinsa the previous year, when a lot of the external temple paintings were being restored. All the paintings were pretty much finished, apart from the Buddha’s faces. The faces and eyes are always the last to be painted.
Never mind. I carry on. The brush seems too thick, the paint seems too dry, and I’m never going to finish it in time.
“Slow down. Relax. Enjoy yourself,” was the constant message from Neunghae. I try, but I’m torn between wanting to do a good job and wanting to finish it off. Neunghae realises that she’s not going to get me to relax unless she starts helping me out with the picture. I’m amazed by her dexterity, by the smoothness and delicacy of her lines, and by her unhurried execution. I enjoy listening to the musical sound of her voice as she chats and laughs with Morgan. She is totally relaxed, unselfconscious, and helps me to unbend as well.
I ask her about life in the temple: how cut off from the world are they? Do they listen to the news? Apparently it depends. Some of the monks focus on meditation and on their inner lives. These monks don’t follow the news. Other monks go out into the world, or try to introduce people to Buddhism. In order to engage with the world, they need to know what’s happening in it. So yes, they do follow the news.
With Neunghae’s help, the painting is soon finished, and she then embellishes it with an inscription. Yoseph is not far behind.
I’d forgotten that we were due to have more tea before setting off on our travels again. We return to the room at the corner of the courtyard where we had drunk tea the previous evening. There is a large glass bowl of yellow tea with a lotus flower floating in it. On the table is more fruit, and dark green rice cakes made that very morning by the senior monk herself.
We are joined for tea by our local guide and by my local friend Kyung-sook, who has done so much to introduce me to Korean culture. We talk about the history of Daewonsa – how it was burned in the partisan struggles which preceded the Korean War, to be rebuilt years later through the dedication of a woman who used to be a banker. I learned that Park Chan-soo, whose sculpture was currently on display in London, and who is helping to oversee the rebuilding of Gwanghwamun, and who is an advisor to the Bucheon Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo (clearly an important figure in Korean culture) used to live at Daewonsa.
The temple is a special place, in a beautiful and peaceful location. Before leaving, we have the opportunity to explore the grounds more fully. We see the storage area where the big earthenware jars of kimchi, home-made soy sauce and bean paste are carefully arranged and labelled. We are shown the ancient pagoda, national treasure [ ], and savour to the last the atmosphere of the place in the warm morning sun.
Neunghae tell us that our stay has been too short. She is, of course, right.

30. Remembering the Partisan struggle (80%) (research on Jejudo and Daejeon. Rebuilding of Daewonsa. Final paragraph)

Sancheong County, nestling at the feet of Jirisan in Gyeongsangnam-do, has two memorial museums to the struggle between the leftist partisans and the Southern military and civilian authorities at the time of the Korean War.
The key headlines of the conduct of the Korean War itself are well known: the Northern sweep southwards, the UN Incheon landings and advance beyond Pyongyang, followed by the Chinese drive back south ending in the stalemate near where everything started three years earlier. But behind these headlines, tragic as they are, there is the more tragic story of Korean fighting an ideological war against Korean. It was a struggle which started well before the formal outbreak of hostilities in 1950.
To those who like to explore Korean history through watching Korean film, the classic ones to illuminate this aspect of the Korean war are Im Kwon-taek's Taebaek Mountains and Chong Ji-young's Nambugun¹⁰.
The first major pre-Korean war conflict of this nature was in Jeju-do, [ a bit more detail of the massacre ] after which some partisans escaped to Daegu and ultimately to the Jirisan area. Conflict was rife in the Jirisan area well before the outbreak of the Korean war – and indeed in 1948 the picturesque Daewonsa temple was a casualty of the fighting between leftist elements and the police force, not to be rebuilt until [ ]. But the mountain strongholds proved to be a strong base for the partisans. And following the early successes of the Northern armies the partisan numbers grew stronger as people were encouraged to join with the promise of the best jobs following the inevitable communist victory. Additionally, the sweep south by the Northern armies brought reinforcements in the form of regular North Korean soldiers.
The UN counterattack at Incheon, half way up the west coast, did nothing to clear out the Jiri mountains in the south, and the partisans remained a thorn in the side of the Southern forces, carrying out acts of sabotage and raiding towns and villages for food. The Chinese intervention brought new hope. In the Jiri mountains, the conflict led to atrocities on both sides.
One of the more controversial incidents took place on 7 February 1951, two days before the New Year festival of Seollal, when several villages were cleared by southern forces under the harmless-sounding Plan Number 5, a scorched earth policy to tighten the grip on Wangsan, one of the peaks in the Jirisan area. Unofficial statistics place the number of civilian deaths at 705 (the official death count is 386), as villagers were rounded up and shot by Southern soldiers. Statistics also indicate that nearly half the dead (45%) were under 19 years of age; 84% of the casualties were women, the elderly, or children. The story is movingly told in a 15-minute film shown in the Sancheong-Hamyang Massacre Memorial Park museum in Sancheong County. Elderly survivors of the incident, small children at the time of the shootings, are interviewed and display their wounds. Outside, visitors are invited to keep silence at the foot of the memorial to the incident, and remember that war drive humans to atrocious acts.
Later in 1951, the dirty job of aiming to root out the rebels fell to General Paik Sun Yup, who had fought with distinction in the conflict further north. Learning the lessons of what had gone before, one of his key objectives was not to alienate the local civilian population, while still offering no quarter to the partisans. The operation as a whole was called Operation Rat Killer.
[A safe conduct pass, issued by Paik Sun Yup, encouraging partisans to surrender, displayed in the Nambugun memorial museum, Sancheong-gun.]
While General Paik's campaign against the partisans was judged to be a success, it did not completely eliminate the threat. Indeed, clean-up had to carry on for a further ten years after the 1953 armistice was signed. The last partisans were shot or captured in November 1963. The cottage where the last partisan was caught is the centrepiece of the Nambugun memorial museum, nestling on the hillside beneath what is now a bamboo forest. The last partisan herself, Jeong Suk-deok, was found hiding in the ondol system under the kitchen floor, a place so hot she thought no-one would think of looking there. She was wounded, captured, and eventually died in 1993. The two museums provide an interesting contrast: one a conventional museum documenting a troubled episode in Korean to educate the current generation, and the other a more emotive experience designed to commemorate an appalling tragedy and reminding us that in war humans are capable for terrible deeds.
It is museums like this which [blah]
Further reading:
Sancheong-Hamyang Massacre Memorial Park: http://shchumo.sancheong.ne.kr/