Buddha’s Birthday

By C. Adam Volle
Photos by Christina Green

The birth certificate of the Korean people reads thusly:

MOTHER: 웅녀 (UNGNYEO). A FEMALE BEAR.
FATHER: 환웅 (HWANUNG). GOD. “THE KING OF HEAVEN.”

But don’t give a second thought to it – the Koreans don’t. Like adopted children everywhere, they’ve largely ceased to care about the deadbeats who sired them, preferring to lavish their attention instead on the adoptive parent who stuck around, the one who kept them safe during dark adolescence and taught them their most important lessons about life: the Indian wise man named Siddhartha Gautama, better known to the world by his title of Buddha. This past May 28 afforded 2012’s best opportunity to contemplate the father he’s been, as the lunar calendar declared it once again Buddha’s Birthday (부처님 오신 날, lit. “The day when the Buddha came”), on which he became 2,575 years old. Or possibly 2,636. Unless he’s 3,900.
Well, what’s it matter? We know “the day when the Buddha came” to Korea dawned sometime in the year 372 CE, when a Chinese monk named Sun-do facilitated his introduction to one of the peninsula’s three then-rulers, King Sosurim of Goguryeo. So reportedly enthusiastic was the ruler to familiarize himself with the Awakened One’s teachings that rather than receive the missionary in his throne room, the king is said to have gotten up off his royal posterior and met the monk at his city’s gate. Admittedly, the king’s great interest in the “Middle Way” likely stemmed in part from the clear wisdom of warmly welcoming the representative of a religion with which the emperor of neighboring China was so taken. If Mitt Romney is elected president of the United States, what Mexican official will start persecuting Mormons? Yet the royal households of all three peninsular nations would soon realize there was much to recommend this “Sage of the Shakyas”.

No, not his offer of inner peace, or nirvana upon death; they were of a far more practical mind than that. Like most monarchs in feudal systems, the kings of the Han considered it intolerable that, despite being princes of Heaven, they had to request all of their troops and money from the aristocrats who directly controlled most land. The blue bloods claimed to derive their authority from the various patron gods of their own noble houses. It only stood to reason, then, that the eclipse of those deities by a much greater one would mean the correspondent wane of that upper class’s power as well. The process could even be accelerated through propaganda stories in which the Buddha miraculously appeared to endorse royal judgment.

Still more useful than the Buddha’s utility against domestic rivals was his power over foreign ones. It was believed that a kingdom which encouraged the practice of the Middle Way among its people fell under Siddhartha Gautama’s special spiritual protection. Never mind that warfare was not, strictly speaking, listed on the Awakened One’s resume as a skill set in which he was proficient. As Jesus would discover later, being a god to the Han is like any other job: to accept the position is to assume all its responsibilities, regardless of prior background. And anyway it would be the hard heart indeed, certainly not that of any enlightened being, which could resist the elaborate invocations devised by the Han to entreat the Buddha for his aid in battle. One of the Goryeo Dynasty’s most extravagant wartime offerings survives today, on view inside the Haein Temple: the Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of 80,000 Buddhist scriptures utterly devoid of copyist errors. So the teacher of inner peace went to war and, what’s more, acquitted himself quite well. He failed only to rescue Korea from Mongolian vassalage in the 13th century, and really, how many gods could say otherwise? When the Japanese Empire finally annexed the Korean headland in 1910 and terminated the last dynastic line, many Korean Buddhists blamed their colonization on the government having dismissed the Sage from his post as national protector. They did not fail to point out that Japan was itself at that time very solicitous of the Buddha’s favor in battle.
But by then, the Korean upper-class had already learned how dangerous the Buddha could be if not properly handled. That was why they’d issued a restraining order against him.

For roughly the first millennium of the divine arrangement, every newly-discovered facet to ruling a Buddhist state had appeared advantageous to the princes of Heaven. The Buddha’s exhortation to be compassionate motivated the creation of a social safety net for the poor; monks agreed to feed the homeless and accept orphans into their orders. Those same Buddhist monks introduced East Asia to the incredibly popular practice of drinking green tea, which they themselves had long cherished as one of the few beverages not forbidden them by their dietary laws. Better still, the schools of thought in which Buddhists studied needed land for their temples and money with which to build them, and they mostly got it from the government. This created obligations the royals never tired of exploiting. They drafted their indebted monks as royal scribes, tax collectors, advisers, heralds – even spies, since the desire to study at foreign schools often led them to cross international borders.

All these services, however, eventually led to the essential integration of religious orders into the nation’s administration, a fusion which should set alarm bells ringing for anyone familiar with the reasons for separating church and state. The monks obtained political influence. As they obtained more of it, their Buddha’s appetite for homage predictably grew as well, and in time it turned insatiable. Government officials found themselves pressured to commission a constant stream of tribute in the forms of religious artwork and construction projects. The expense threatened to beggar the kingdom. Small wonder, you might think, that the Koreans began to depict their Sage as a fat man, borrowing the image of a similarly-named character called Budai, the “Laughing Buddha” still seen throughout Korea today.
The entry of Siddhartha’s servants into court politics, however, was not as threatening to the royals as Buddhism’s popularity among the lower classes was. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the peasantry considered Buddhism to be the good stuff. Indeed, the message of the Buddha, with its cynic’s view of life and its strategy of detachment in the face of certain disappointment, seemed tailor-made for a people so tragically situated as the Han. Their land’s geography sandwiched them between stronger nations. Its topography made it difficult to farm. Life was, as Thomas Hobbes puts it, “nasty, brutish, and short”, with the average woman only living into her mid-twenties and men dying earlier. So when Buddhist missionaries taught the First Noble Truth of the Buddha – that one’s life is essentially comprised of suffering – one imagines the Korean ears perking. Here was theology that jibed with experience.

It was also a theology that lifted them up. “It is through the knowing of truth that one becomes noble, not through caste,” the Buddha says in one story. How could a commoner not consider the egalitarian implications of that? Or marvel at their fulfillment in the monastic orders, where any man (or woman!), rich or poor, born high or low, was considered capable of achieving the status of a buddha? What a far cry from Confucianism, which had so long impressed upon the lower classes a primary duty to know their place in the established social order – a lesson a king could really get behind, and did, after General Yi Seong-gye overthrew the Buddhist Goryeo Dynasty in 1392 and founded the Joseon Dynasty. Within a century of the coup, Yi’s heirs would ban Buddhist monks and nuns from entering cities. They would not be allowed to return for nearly five hundred years. For that matter, neither would anybody else.
That is the origin of the famous “Hermit Kingdom”; it wasn’t a Buddhist invention but a Confucian one. In the name of the Master and not the Sage were the borders shut, religions persecuted, the social classes suffocatingly refined, and women – those perennial targets of every fundamentalist movement – reduced again in status to match their appropriate role in the supposed plan of the universe. Such policies may sound familiar to anyone knowledgeable about a certain government north of the 38th parallel; that regime actually still refers to itself as Joseon, too.

Of course it would be far, far too neat to frame the current stand-off between the two Koreas as Round 3 in a 1,500-year custody battle between Siddhartha Gautama’s Goryeo state and Kong Qiu’s Joseon. Today’s Koreans are grown-ups, with their own issues to work out; they can’t be defined by their parents.
Only a bad parent would care to do so, though, and it will come as no surprise that the Buddha’s stated desires for his children are, well, quite enlightened parenting: “Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real. Discover that there are virtuous things and there are non-virtuous things. Once you have discovered for yourself, give up the bad and embrace the good.”

Acknowledgments:
Il-Mun Kun Sunim of Hwaoem Temple
Yun Sang Soo
John Smith III

 

 

Photos by Christina Green