Chapter 1

At Kannon Temple, in the heart of a deep valley, there was a young priest who worked in the kitchen, a temple hand, in other words. People called him "dimwit." When they didn't call him that, they called him "Mandogi." And when they didn't call him that, they called him plain old "temple hand." Of them all, "Mandogi" was the least insulting, but that was the Buddhist name given to him when he entered the priesthood. If you have a priest's name, you should still have the secular name you had before you became a priest, but he didn't have a common name like that. He just had the nickname "Keiton" (meaning "dog shit"), and that was it for his names. In other words, he had been nameless since birth. People feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be human. All the same, people didn't let go of the nickname "Keiton" until long after he was given the name "Mandogi."

But it could be said that it's normal, anytime, anywhere, to not pay much attention to the lineage of people in the lower class. It's certainly that way in our Korea. In Korea, a temple hand, or let's say a young priest who works in the kitchen, was just like a farm hand, so because of his lowly birth, people didn't find Mandogi's kind of ambiguous identity out of the ordinary. And it isn't just lineage. In the same way, people don't really mind if you don't have a humanlike name. When people see a beggar on the roadside, do they really care to know his name? "The beggar who sits under the column on the left side of the front entrance of Seoul Station," or "the crippled beggar and the one-eyed beggar at the entrance to Pagoda Park," or "the beggar who sits under the cherry trees in Ch'anggyong Garden and pulls on your sleeves as you pass" are more than good enough.

And so, as for people like temple hands (called kongyangju in Korea), if they have a name, that's fine, and if not, that's fine too. Since temple hands are made for hard labor, they just need some kind of signal for calling them, like "Hey!" or "Here!" As is the case with common names, you can't be sure of anything beyond them, like birthplace, parents, or age. So, for example, when they are entered into the book of the dead, the length of time they spent in this corrupt world may not even be clear.

As for Mandogi, his life was short, but even so, nobody knows exactly how old he was. His entry in the executioner's log says that he was twenty-four, but that can't be exact. Even Mandogi himself wasn't positive about his age. The reckoning that made him twenty-four began a few years back, toward the end of the Japanese annexation, when he was taken from this lone island of Cheju and drafted to labor in the chromium mines of Hokkaido. He had been nameless since birth, with no family register, so when he was asked for his name, age, parents' names, and permanent residence, he didn't have a good answer. This kind of person, the kind without any distinguishing data, became a nuisance for the draft officials making the lists. The vagabonds with no addresses were no problem, as they could be arrested and sent straight to the work camps, but those without definite birth dates, and especially those without definite names, were even difficult to put on the draft list. And so, at the time, the officials attached the Japanese given name "Ichiro" to the name "Mandogi," making his given name "Mandogi" into his surname, and they gave him the strange name "Mantoku Ichiro." But Mandogi couldn't understand a word of Japanese. "I ain't Mantoku Ichiro. That's not my name. My name's not Mantoku, but the priest's name, 'Man . . . dogi.'" Licking the pencil, he painstakingly wrote down the two Chinese characters and showed the page to the official.

"Idiot! How can you complain, when you don't even have a name? There is no one without a name in Japan! You have the honor of being given a Japanese name, of being treated like a human being!" said the officer, through an interpreter. Even so, Mandogi kept insisting that he didn't know nobody named "Mantoku Ichiro." No matter how they told him, "You're Japanese now," and no matter how much they shouted, "You are Japanese!" he had no idea what that meant. They told him, "You are a loyal subject of the Japanese Empire , and therefore you are Japanese," but deep down, he could never feel "Japanese." Anyway, while they were at it, they also made up an age for him. If you started counting from there, he would have been twenty-four.

You might say it's the same just about anywhere for people of humble birth. Beggars, farm hands, paekjong (one of the lowest social classes, including people employed as butchers and such), temple hands, they all generally fall into that category. If you take Mandogi, for example, even if he were never given the name Mandogi, " kongyangju " or "temple hand" would have sufficed. Society would blame that kind of lowly birth on saju p ' alja . S aju p'alja takes the four signs of your birth year, month, day, and hour, the saju (as in the year of the Yang Wood Rat, the month of the Yin Wood Ox, the day of the Yang Fire Tiger, and the hour of the Yin Fire Rabbit), and combines them with the corresponding zodiac signs of the saju to make eight Chinese characters, or p ' alja . Basically, these could predict people's fortunes over their lifetimes, and they served to reinforce people's ideas about karma. In other words, from the spectacular p ' alja of kings and ministers down to those of poor and lowly birth like Mandogi, all fates could be attributed only to the stars. Indeed, s aju p ' alja was a kind of opiate of the masses, so over the years it must have been very convenient at times for the statesmen of this country.

Funny, then, that a village wise man, white-haired, filthy, and emaciated, whose appearance made it clear that he could have nothing to do with good fortune, told the fortunes of others. A meter-long pipe sticking out between his mustache and beard, he interpreted the signs with a little abacus and Zhuge Liang's book for interpreting ancient secrets. Then, out of the blue, he would begin to explain the person's current and lifetime fortunes. "Mmhmm, this sign, it means you don't have a single relative under the sun, no one to depend on, but if you become a traveler, then a savior will appear. It's that kind of sign. That is, out on the wide ocean, if your little boat should meet wind, you'll go north, you'll go south, you'll lift up your head and see no one familiar. Mmhmm, if you distance yourself from both north and south, praying and laughing all the more . . . it's that kind of sign," and so on.

"Right, right, he's exactly right! Maybe that's why I'm so poor," they would think, following the social convention. But before long, people started laughing out loud at the wise man. How could his predictions, based on the year, month, day, and hour of one's birth, make any sense for those who didn't even know what year they were born, much less the month, day, and hour?

At any rate, as long as they aren't heroes, I think that human beings want to die peacefully in their beds if they can. Of course, Mandogi, a plain old temple hand, was no hero, and he wouldn't have thought it improper to die in his sleep. All the same, he never got the chance. If you had asked the wise man, he would have said that Mandogi had bad saju p ' alja .

Mandogi never knew his parents. And not just his parents. He didn't even know his own name. In a society where people must respect their family names as much, if not more than, their own parents, as a subject of the "Eastern Kingdom of Virtue," as it were, it was quite natural for Mandogi to be deprived of his citizens' rights. This alone meant that he could never associate with respectable people. But none of this was Mandogi's fault. He was just born the way nature intended. "Mandogi" wasn't the name he had from the beginning. He could only remember being called "Keiton" (dog shit) when he was young. "Keiton" was a nickname usually given to boys among the common folk who might as well have been princes. In other words, if many of the children had died and only one son survived, the parents would pray for him and give him that name. Or if he were the only son in a family full of daughters, or if he were born a weakling, his parents would give him that name. Calling a child "Keiton," meaning "a mangy cur's shit," was actually a way of praying for his health and happiness, a way of expressing heartfelt love for him. So, because of Mandogi's childhood name "Keiton," you can imagine the kind of love his parents had for him.

Of course, Mandogi had put "Keiton" behind him by now. But even so, his childhood would only reawaken and take shape with the sound of someone's voice calling, "Keiton." It was probably the voice of someone vaguely motherlike. Then, he would see himself, still a toddler on his mother's back, struggling up a mountain trail to a temple in the heart of a deep valley. He could remember being made to walk and tripping along the way as his mother's small hand pulled on his while she called, "Keiton! Keiton!" His mother seemed to be mute, so he could never catch anything else she said. He only had memories of times she said, "Keiton!" He could remember an old man with a very long, white beard, and being held on his lap while he quietly stroked his head. But even this memory was only rekindled along with a motherlike woman's voice somewhere nearby, incessantly calling, "Keiton! Keiton!"

Mandogi had in fact been brought up the mountain to Kannon Temple by his mother, just as he had in his faded memory. His young mother, nearly mute, her face round like the moon, knelt before the old priest and told him that she had come all the way from Japan. Using mostly hand gestures, she told him that she wanted to give the child to the temple or, rather, to leave the child to the temple. Holding the child, who didn't even know how to cry, the priest asked, "Who is his father?"

She smiled to herself and shook her head, "I don't know."

"Mmhmm." He asked, "What happened?"

Again, she smiled quietly, and said, "I don't know." At last, in a very nasal voice, she stammered out, "I heard a voice saying, 'Come, come.' I went into the closet, and the next thing I knew, I was pregnant."

"But, what do you mean?" the old priest asked.

"My child -- my child -- " she trailed off, smiling quietly, her expression so innocent you could have called it idiotic. In short, she had Keiton while she worked as a kitchen maid -- a kongyangju -- at a brand-new Korean temple near the Korean district of Osaka. One day, as she was working in the kitchen by herself, a man she had met once before came in unexpectedly. Once they had started chatting, he stood up and opened the closet, looked inside, and then went in. Before long, his voice beckoned to her, saying, "Won't you come in? Come here, come here!" Knowing nothing but trust, she wiped her wet hands and did as she was told. They say that when she bent over and crawled into the closet, the man closed the door, and everything went pitch black. The man left, of course, and she had to leave the temple with child. She had survived the worst of it, and she said she had raised the child up to where he was starting to be able to walk. Now that he was out of diapers, she had come back home to Mount Halla. She wanted to give her child to the temple, hoping that somehow, by the power of the Buddha, he could become a great man. She gave her bundle of tattered clothes and broken toys, along with a little money, to the priest, but he wouldn't take the money. After three days, she left the temple and headed back to Japan, and was never heard from again. When she left the temple, she put black hard candy wrapped in white paper in Keiton's hand, and he never shed a tear as he watched her walk away.

Then, when the temple took charge of Keiton, the first thing to be dealt with was that name. They probably had reservations about calling, "Keiton! (Dog shit!) Keiton!" on the sacred grounds of the temple. Despite its actual meaning, it was an expression of heartfelt love, but in the end, it was just a nickname, not a proper human name. After all, a name that so condoned namelessness, that so ignored individual humanity, could not be allowed in a world governed by mercy and compassion. With this in mind, the benevolent old priest took the opposite of "Keiton" and named him "Mandogi," meaning "countless virtues." Moreover, if the laymen ran around investigating, even if they went back through hundreds -- no, thousands -- of years of clan records, they couldn't discover anything, since what was given was a priest's name, which required neither a family name nor a pon ' gwan.

As with saju p ' alja , I suppose my readers aren't very familiar with pon ' gwan , but if you are born in Korea, it stays with you for your entire life. All Korean family names have a pon ' gwan , which tells you the name of the homeland established by the clan's founder in ancient times, which is much more antiquated than the residence listed in the registry. The pon ' gwan serves to differentiate between parts of the same clan that split off a thousand years ago, so it's used to prevent marriages, which goes to show you just how anachronistic it is. You couldn't carelessly fall in love without first checking the family register (as pon ' gwan was an entry in the register). If you dared to break the taboo, you would be considered filthy and deviant, completely fallen from human society.

But then, can people really keep track of every single one of their "relatives" from the past thousand years? But although our Mandogi never had much hope of marriage or anything in the first place, it must be said that he was free from this antiquated clan system -- no, that he was never included in it in the first place -- largely because of his priest's name.

On a different note, the word kongyangju didn't originally mean just young priests who worked in the kitchen, or temple hands. It originally referred to the honorable benefactors of the temples. Funny that the cooks, who wash their clothes in their own sweat, who work behind the scenes of the dazzling lamplight of services attended by the pious men and women of the temple, like the celebration of the birth of Shakyamuni (held on the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar), should be called by the same name as those brilliant priests and priestesses. And so, in front of the benefactors, "Mother Seoul," the temple manager, had to control her usual reckless screaming and beating of Mandogi. Called "Mother Seoul" at the temple -- "Seoul" because she had run an inn in the red light district of Seoul, and "Mother" because of her devout faith -- she was a hysterical old widow. To make matters worse, she had a sadistic streak. A few times a day, for no reason at all, she couldn't help but bully Mandogi, beating him with a bamboo switch until she heard him scream.

"You! You! You're so fucking thick, you're as thick as cow hide! You dim-witted louse of a kongyangju ! Did the Buddha tell you to burn the damn rice, you shit-headed kongyangju ? Your tool's all crooked, like a dog's when it pisses on the wall, kongyangju ! You nasty little pissant! You eat like the devil, but don't work worth a damn, you fucking dolt!" As he continued to take the beating, Mandogi's big, six-foot-tall frame would bend in two, like a dog's when hit by its master, until he would trudge through puddles of blood on the floor, wailing in pain. If she were to scream, "Fucking kongyangju ! Fucking kongyangju !" in front of the respectable kongyangju , the benefactors, then surely one of them would take offense and there would inevitably be trouble.

People slighted Mandogi by calling him "dimwit" and " k ongyangju ," but the name " k ongyangju " was especially appropriate for Mandogi, because he served the Buddha from his heart. But staying a temple hand even long after he turned twenty and came of age made him an outlet for all the good-humored disdain and feelings of pity the temple-goers had to offer. After being a temple servant for ten years, you would normally be released from your job as a temple hand and begin to prepare full-time for the path of becoming a priest. There are plenty of temple hands in this world. Mandogi wasn't the only one. The kongyangju at other temples had a little more foresight. With a little cunning, they would quickly become full-fledged priests, and their bodies would itch beneath their stoles, longing to be flooded with sidelong glances from the women at the temple. But our Mandogi just stayed a temple hand. Mandogi, moving through this world and the next as a temple hand, could even be seen as an embodiment of the law of endless rebirth. In this world, he was a crushed pebble on the road to others' success, a worthless dimwit just like everyone said. But he didn't think of himself as that crushed pebble, so he cheerfully accepted their pity and disdain. But their sneers and rumors, and even their words of sympathy that overflowed with compassion, had no power to disturb his quiet heart.

On that note, perhaps we should ask what his "occupation" was. I wonder what he would say? When he was executed on the outrageous charge of treason, at the interrogation he was asked for his occupation. To the end, he insisted that his occupation was "sentry." Finally, the Songnae police station's demonic chief investigator shouted, squaring his already square jaw, "No! For god's sake, no! For the last time, get it through your thick skull! Your occupation is 'priest.'?" Still, Mandogi stubbornly refused to give in. After all, he really had been a sentry. Leaving aside the question of whether or not "sentry" is an occupation, there is no doubt that he had been a sentry at a lookout post. There was a reason for Mandogi's persistence. In the shadow of martial law, not a moment passed on this island without bloodshed. To cut off the "mountain unit" partisans on Mount Halla from the villagers, they set up lookout points called "sentry tents" all over the place. When Mandogi was picked up by the police, he had already been forced to evacuate Kannon Temple and had moved down Mount Halla to S Hill Temple, where he was roped into joining the militia manning the S Hill sentry tent. The police even admitted this much. Mandogi thought that something like this, something that he was coerced into doing, was his "occupation." So even when they told him that it wasn't, he stubbornly refused to give in. Mandogi, who was usually as weak and gentle as a baby, stood as unwavering as a boulder. Perplexed by his persistence, the chief investigator finally just started laughing and said, "You, you're a complete idiot." To the end, Mandogi insisted, "' Kongyangju ' ain't my occupation. My occupation's 'sentry,'?" and they left it at that.

It was bewildering to Mandogi that you could even call " kongyangju " his occupation. He didn't even know how to respond. He didn't think of kongyangju as a job as the chief investigator did. Just as a human doesn't think that "human" is his occupation, Mandogi thought of himself as kongyangju , and of kongyangju as himself. In other words, his self was his work, and his work was his self. He couldn't possibly think of kongyangju as his occupation, because it would mean detaching it from himself. It would be like tearing the flesh from his bones. One time, a "high priest" came to the island from a famous temple on Mount Chiri, a sacred mountain on the mainland. He took one look at Mandogi and proclaimed, "Truly, in your eyes, I see the heart of the Buddha." The "high priest" wanted to take him back, probably to fully train him in the ways of Buddhism, but Mandogi didn't accept. His beloved, benevolent old priest had already passed away, so he was no longer bound to the temple. Even so, at the high priest's suggestion, he cried just like a child. He thought that he'd be torn in two if he stopped being a kongyangju at Kannon Temple. A few years before, he had been drafted to labor in the mines in Japan, where he was forced to work until the end of the war. So, if you made him give his occupation, that would have been his first. When, in the same way, he was drafted to the militia and forced to work as a sentry, that became his "occupation."

Mandogi thought of his work as his calling, rather than his choosing. No, callings and choosings, both were established by fickle humans. Mandogi felt that working was living. It was a biological function, just like eating, walking, running, sleeping, or relieving himself. No, he felt that it was really more of a motivation for living. He would readily do any kind of work. He would beat the temple drum and chant the sutras in place of the ever-absent priest. In the summer, he would pull weeds from the temple grounds, and, in the winter, he would sweat as he swept away the deep snow. He also swept the floors in the sanctuary, split wood, cooked the meals at morning, noon, and night, emptied the outhouse and spread it on the vegetable patch as fertilizer, cut the grass, gathered firewood, and did the laundry out in the sun. He performed countless tasks in service to the Buddha. Yet even if he didn't have a moment to rest, Mandogi said his prayers. Whispering to himself, he chanted "Hail Mother Kannon" a thousand times a day. Not knowing how to refuse, he would always take on extra work if asked, and once in a while he would burn the rice or forget to massage Mother Seoul's back and shoulders, giving her an excuse to satisfy her sadistic cravings on him.

***

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The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

9780231153119

0231153112

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