SONG OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN: NEGOTIATING HISTORY
It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled entity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language.1
INTRODUCTION
In the middle of the fifteenth century, the fourth king of the Choson dynasty, Sejong (1418-1450), ordered the composition of a song to praise and celebrate the founding of the new dynasty. Yongbi ŏch’ŏn ka, Song of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, described the actions of the dynastic founder, Yi Sŏng-gye, reign name T’aejo (1392-1398); his son Pang-wŏn, the third king (T’aejong, 1400-1418); and their four ancestors at the end of Koryŏ and beginning of Chosŏn. The song sketches the story of the gradual movement of the Yi family from their home in the southwest, in the city of Chŏnju, up to the opposite end of the peninsula and then down to the capital, from which Yi Sŏng-gye went out in the 1380s to win distinction as a military commander in campaigns against the Japanese pirates along the southern coast, and against rebellious tribes in the north. The Song asserts directly that it was not personal ambition but a response to the will of heaven and the wishes of the people that led General Yi to assume control of the state. The Song describes the signs, portents, and many ancestral deeds that foretold Yi Sŏng-gye’s eventual accession to control of the state; highlights the efforts of T’aejong, the third king, to solidify his hold on the throne and succession; then closes with a series of stanzas admonishing the future Yi descendants to remember, when seated comfortably on the throne and surrounded by all the accoutrements and temptations of office, the difficult trials their founding ancestors endured.
To some degree, the Song has been slighted in Korean histories of literature. It is esteemed as the first official occasion for the use of the new Korean alphabet but criticized for being, like other examples of the akchang verse form in which it was composed, overly didactic.2 Yet the individual components as well as the overall structure of its argument are elegantly crafted and assembled. The Song turns history into prophecy and registers the transition from the Yi family’s initial struggles to establish and stabilize the dynasty to the ongoing ceremonial and administrative tasks required to maintain it. For all the seeming directness and simplicity of its argument, the Song is a complex hybrid of intertwining histories and languages. This chapter explores these component features and pursues the argument that the Song, like the Story of Chŏyong examined in the preceding chapter, incorporates certain negotiations toward a desired goal. As the final fifteen stanzas become explicitly contractual in nature, they flourish history as a sign, like Ch’ŏyong’s likeness, to bind the future rulers of the Chosŏn state to behavior that will continue to fulfill the purposes of their ancestors’ actions.
HISTORY AS PROPHECY
The first two stanzas frame the overall project of the Song by asserting the cosmological significance of the change in dynasty.
Haedong’s six dragons rise in flight,
their every deed heaven’s gift,
the sign the same as the Ancient Worthies.3
According to Chinese-language annotation attached to this, as to every stanza, Haedong is a customary term for Korea, meaning “East of the (Yellow) Sea” or “East of Parhae,” Parhae being the remnant of the earlier Koguryŏ kingdom. The six dragons are Yi Sŏng-gye, his son the third king Pang-wŏn, and their four ancestors. The first line and its annotation state that the six founders are a manifestation of the first hexagram, ch’ien, described in the Chou book of divination, known as the Book of Changes or Yijing. All the lines in the hexagram are unbroken. The dominant fifth line, the “governing ruler of the hexagram,” according to the Book of Changes, indicates “Flying dragon in the heavens, a great man will appear.”4
That fifth line would correspond neatly to Yi Sŏng-gye, the fifth member of the Yi family to be mentioned in the opening stanzas and the actual founder of the dynasty. Interestingly, the Yiing interprets the unbroken line at the top to mean “Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent,” and warns against “titanic aspirations,”5 a reading that could easily have been applied to Pang-wŏn, Yi Sŏng-gye’s politically astute and thoroughly ruthless son. The second line of the stanza asserts that each action – il mada – of the six dragons/ancestors also constitutes a sign of heaven’s blessing, while the third line states that the process of signification described in the first two lines about Korea’s recent history is the same as that which marked the rise of the ancient Chou dynasty (c. 1027-236 B.C.) in China. The first stanza also initiates the song’s structural pattern of pairing a Korean historical event with a Chou Chinese counterpart.
The second stanza restates the prognostication about the long life of the new dynasty as metaphor:
The tree with deep roots does not tremble in winds;
its flowers are perfect, its fruit abundant.
Waters rising from deep sources do not end in drought;
forming a river they flow on to the sea.6
The opening phrase, “The tree with deep roots,” has become, in effect, the modern Korean-language counterpart to the Chinese Haedong to mean the Korean people and nation. South Korean President Park Chung Hee used the phrase for his New Year’s calligraphy in 1974, and it has in the decades since spread to the commercial realm in South Korea as well, as a name for a wide range of products and companies.
The cosmological claim of the first stanza, reworked into the metaphors of the second, is translated one last time in the third and fourth into the human narrative that will follow the Yi family ancestors and dynastic founders up to stanza 109:
The King of Chou residing at Pin Valley
there began the works of empire.
Our ancestor residing in Kyŏnghŭng
there began the works of the kingdom.When he ventured among the barbarians
and the barbarians came to threaten,
he moved to Lofty Mountain,
and this was part of heaven’s doing.
When he ventured among the Jurchen
and the Jurchen came to threaten,
he moved to Virtue Source,
and this was part of heaven’s doing.7
There are several observations to be made about these two stanzas. For one, the stanza about the founding ancestors, the King of Chou and “our (Korean) ancestor,” reiterates the stanza immediately preceding, for it describes the roots of the family tree that then grows throughout the balance of the song. Kyŏnghŭng, the city named in the third stanza as the ancestral home of the Yi family, was former Kongju, in the southwest. This was an area particularly mistrusted by Wang Kŏn, the founder of the Koryŏ dynasty, and the city was destroyed on his orders. The third stanza seems to suggest that whatever “our ancestor” (Mokcho, great-grandfather of Yi Sŏng-gye) had been doing in Kyŏnghŭng, simply by being there he was initiating the (new) kingdom that was to become the Chosŏn dynasty. How did Mokcho’s presence in that place set in motion the downfall of one dynasty and the triumph of the next?
Kyŏnghŭng was an important town in the southwest, singled out and destroyed by Wang Kŏn at the time of the founding of Koryŏ. The History of Koryŏ contains an intriguing passage regarding the fate of the southwestern region. The relevant section is the eighth of the ten injunctions that Wang Kŏn announced to his followers shortly before his death:
In the territory south of the Ch’aryŏng Mountains and beyond the Kongju River, the shapes of the mountain ranges and the features of the terrain are disordered. The character of the people of that place is likewise disordered. If they should manage to work their way into government or marry into the royal family and seize political office, they will bring turmoil and disaster to the country. Or in their continu- ing resentment at Packche’s incorporation into the unified kingdom, they might demonstrate their feelings and cause disturbances along the routes of royal processions. . . .8
Wang Kŏn had ordered the destruction of the city of Wansan, in North Chŏlla Province, in 936. Rebuilt, it was later known as Chonju or Wansan, in the Kyŏnghŭng area mentioned in the Song. Kyŏnghŭng had in turn been known as Kongju, the region mentioned in the Eighth Injunction. The history of the various names of the regions where the family lived and the sequence of their moves from one to the next, including the beginning of the whole story in a quarrel over the affections of a kisaeng, is described in maplike detail in the annotation to the third verse.9 The subsequent story reads like an overlay of the family narrative on that verbal map, much as the account of King Hŏn’gang’s reign, in the Story of Ch’ŏyong, marked out the various ritual directions and key locations around the Silla capital.10 The Yi ancestors had thus started their series of heaven-intended actions leading to the overthrow of Koryŏ and establishment of Chosŏn, the “works of the kingdom,” from precisely the politically and geomantically charged area that Wang Kŏn had predicted would be a political threat and that he had destroyed, in rather uncharacteristic style, in a vain attempt to uproot that threat. The Yi family thereby fulfilled the prediction of the injunction by their deeds, as described in the verses that follow in the Song, beginning from the mere fact of their residence in the area. Having its beginning in Kyŏnghŭng, in other words, gives the story of the Yi family’s moves from one place to another the significance of a human prophecy being fulfilled.
The project of compiling and writing the History of Koryŏ, Koryŏ sa, in which the injunctions were recorded, was initiated during Yi Sŏng-gye’s reign, but the history was not completed and published until 1451, four years after the Song itself was produced and one year after Sejong’s death. For both the History and the Song, the work of compilation was carried out by a single group of scholars, one of whom, Chŏng In-ji (1396-1478), wrote the prefaces for both works. We know from Chŏng’s preface to the History, furthermore, that Sejong put Chŏng in charge of the project at a fairly advanced stage with orders to correct it, and that the compilers under Chŏng’s direction consulted with the king on all matters concerning the “basic direction” of the History.11 Thus it seems reasonably clear that Sejong took a direct interest in both projects, and that in some way he intended to bring the two stories, one about Wang Kŏn’s founding of Koryŏ and concerns about his dynasty’s historical longevity, the other about his own family’s parallel accomplishment and concerns, into some form of mutual confrontation.
This concern with events in Korea’s recent past seems particularly significant with regard to the actual founding of the Chosŏn state. The Yi family and their followers engineered the removal and murder of the last two kings of the Koryŏ state, son and grandson of a monk advisor to Koryŏ’s King Kongmin, who was childless. They installed a collateral member of the Wang family, a relative of Wang Kŏn, only long enough to remove and banish him, thereby ending the Wang family’s reign. In the maneuvering to finish Koryŏ and establish the new royal line, Yi Sŏng- gye’s son Pang-won, the sixth of the dragons celebrated in the Song and the father of Sejong, proved to be an adept and ruthless political figure. When Yi Sŏng-gye chose another of his sons as his heir, Pang-wŏn ar- ranged the murder of the government ministers who supported that son, then murdered the son, his own half-brother, and another half-brother for good measure. Most notoriously, it was Pang-wŏn who assassinated the Koryŏ statesman Chŏng Mong-ju, whose loyal resistance against the Yi faction had become increasingly troublesome. This incident is recorded in the History of Koryŏ, and the treatment of the moment when Pang-wŏn reports the deed to his father makes it clear that the Yi rulers were concerned to clear Yi Sŏng-gye of guilt and ascribe Pang-wŏn’s action to the motive of filial concern for his father’s safety.12
The scene is translated in the section “Chŏng Mongiju,” from the Biographies section of the History of Koryŏ in the present collection. The key line, given to Yi Sŏng-gye, reads like a reply in a court of law to the question, “Did you kill, or did you cause to have killed, the Koryŏ statesman Chŏng Mong-ju?” Yi retorts: “You have gone off on your own accord and killed the minister. Do you suppose the people of this land will actually think that I knew nothing about it? You were brought up to follow the dictates of loyalty and filiality, but now you have dared to commit this most unfilial act!”13
Like Wang Kŏn before them, the Yi family evidently faced a residue of resentment at their actions. Against such feelings, the Song advances the initial argument that these deeds were all done in obedience to heaven’s will. In the closing sequence of admonitions to future monarchs, the Song engineers a shift from historical description to ritual presentation as it maneuvers past the same difficult problem that beset the Athenian city-state. How does a state shift the actions of its citizens, who may feel aggrieved by greater or lesser perceived injuries, from direct retribution to obedience, however reluctant? More generally, how does the state bring order and control to situations of disorder or unrest? In ancient Athens, womens’ laments, in recounting the circumstances of individual deaths, had prompted revenge against the parties responsible, leading to the end- less cycles of violence that the Oresteia trilogy engages. The Athenian city-state banned the laments and deployed in their place the funeral oration, a generalized account of the glory of death in the service of the state.14 As will be seen, the Song of the Dragons moves from depictions of the military and political exploits of the founders, against whom resentment might have encouraged the kind of counterplot that Wang Kŏn had feared, to a generalized portrait of the ruler as a ceremonial leader against which, or whom, no personal animosity could be directed.
There is, finally, a point about the meaning of a key word in the original fourth stanza that needs to be clarified. The phrase “heaven’s doing” is difficult to translate because of its echo in the considerably altered context of stanzas 110-125, the admonitions to current and future monarchs. The original term is hansŭl ŭi ttŭt, the ttŭt of heaven. There are several ways in which the term ttŭt could be rendered, including “intent,” “meaning,” or “significance.”15 Thus, the early moves of the Chou king and of Mokcho could be read as “that which heaven intended”; that is, they were essential parts of the heaven-intended founding of the two dynasties. The phrases could also be read to mean that the actions were revelations of “heaven”; that is, of the operating principle of the universe. The matter is complicated by a distinction in the Chinese-language version of the stanza: in the case of the Chou king the phrase ch’ŏnsim, or “heaven’s heart,” is used, whereas for the Korean ancestor the phrase is slightly different: ch’ŏn’gye, or “heaven’s opening” or “revelation.” This point is explained in the Chinese annotation. Doing is meant to suggest that heaven caused the event to happen, and also that the event was a revelation of heaven itself.16
HYBRID NATURE AS A QUESTION OF MEANING
The term ttŭt is a key component in the Song’s overall argument, as it marks the reframing of historical narrative as prophecy. In the Story of Ch’ŏyong, a similar function is fulfilled by certain characters in the narrative. When fog appears, the soothsayers are asked to explain it; when a strange, four-legged apparition is found in Ch’ŏyong’s bed, he turns aside, in a gesture resembling the way the narrator will turn out of character and address the audience during a performance of the p’ansori,17 and asks, in effect, What is the meaning of this two-plus-two? At the end of the story, the narrator’s voice is heard in the passage explaining the meaning and the significance of the strange message, Chi ri da do p’a do p’a, of the spirits’ song. In the Song of the Dragons, individuated characters do not ask the question; rather, the text is filled with many different questions involving ttŭt, which provoke explanations from grammatical and vocabulary notes to historical allusions and cosmology.
A practical reason for the repeated emphasis on explication is that the Song is highly elliptical and allusive; its verse format summarizes and hints at the events it records, rather than describing and explaining them in such full detail as would be found in a history. The Song employs an effective pedagogic strategy by providing a discernible but not entirely clear verbal passage with each stanza. A reader can follow the passage, though it is elliptical in most cases and written in Korean – not Chinese – in all cases, but then is left with the question, What lies behind this? What does this signify at some deeper level? What is the meaning, the ttŭt? The meaning is given explicitly and repeatedly in the annotation at the end of each Korean verse, at the end of each Chinese verse, and then in summary annotation ranging from a brief paragraph to a lengthy essay that explains both together. The message is the same: just as the event in Chinese history was a sign of heaven’s intention to change that dynasty, so too the event in recent Korean history was a sign that heaven intended the dynasty to change, and intended the Yi family to be the agents.
The Song is, in fact, a complex hybrid. With the exception of the second stanza and the closing sequence of admonitory stanzas, each stanza begins with a Chou Chinese historical example that is then paired with an event from the recent history of the Yi family and their rise to power. This feature of the Song’s composite structure has been noted in Korean commentaries addressing the question of whether or not it demonstrates Korean cultural subservience to China. Cho Tong-il, for example, observes, “There is the opinion that, because the Chinese example is always put first, (the Song) . . . shows a subservient attitude, but it would be more appropriate to say that it shows equality between the two.”18 Each Korean-language stanza is annotated in Chinese, then paired with a Chinese qua- train. It is entirely likely that the Chinese stanzas were the “originals,” composed in response to Sejong’s initial order but then translated into Korean as the concurrent alphabet project neared completion. Cho Tong-il offers one explanation for the inclusion of the Chinese verses: the rules of the new alphabet were not widely known at the time of the Song’s official promulgation and a literary Chinese version would, therefore, have been more accessible; he adds that another reason would have been the practice of rendering royal praise songs in the form of the poems in the Shijing, the Chinese Book of Odes19 To accompany each pair of stanzas, Korean and Chinese, extensive annotations in Chinese were prepared over the course of two years by a special committee appointed at Sejong’s order in 1445. The final version of the Song is thus in the form of Korean-language verses followed by brief notes in Chinese, each stanza paired with a Chinese-language “translation” with its notes, and a final, extensive Chinese-language annotation on each stanza’s historical background and references.
Most scholarly commentary on the Song and other less formal comment, such as the literary handbooks and the self-study manuals prepared for college entrance examinations, focuses primarily on the Korean-language verses. Even observations about the aesthetic qualities of the Song or its component parts tend to be couched in the same terms. In commenting on the widely known second stanza, which begins with the line “A tree with deep roots,” one of the Korean literature self-study manuals observes, “Of all one hundred and twenty-five stanzas (stanza 2). . . has the highest literary worth, the reasons for which are 1) the writing is entirely in Old Korean, 2) it shows novelty and suggestiveness in its deployment of metaphor, and 3) there is no reference at all to Chinese matters.”20 A reader might wonder if there was anything at all distinctive about the use of the Korean language in stanza 2; might observe that the stanza in Korean is, like all the others in the Song, accompanied by a Chinese translation with vocabulary usage note; and might infer a strongly felt need to find and claim Korean cultural independence behind the third point, “no reference at all to Chinese matters.” This last point seems apropos with regard to Cho Tong-il’s unusually balanced observation, mentioned above, concerning the nature of the relationship between the Chinese and Korean examples that each stanza presents.
As a major cultural icon, the Korean alphabet has overshadowed the Song in many ways. More specifically, the hybrid nature of the Song may be overlooked because of the present-day emphasis on the alphabet as a distinctly Korean national project. In the event, the alphabet was vigorously resisted by the scholar-official class until the very end of the nineteenth century, not least because it seemed likely to produce an unruly combination of Korean practice and Chinese theory in at least some levels of government as well as the society at large.21 The Song’s complex mix of Chinese and Korean history, oral and written sources, Korean songs and stories transformed into Chinese-language stanzas and annotations, embellished with Korean and Chinese signs and portents, does not easily lend itself to the modern teleological narratives of growth toward Korean cultural independence. It might, in fact, serve as a textbook example of the contradictions, tensions, and embattled tendencies referred to in the head-note to this chapter.
To give some sense of the complex character of the Song, a translation follows of verse 15, in which the connection is drawn between the founding ruler of Koryŏ, Wang Kŏn, who fears the possibility of a threat to his rule originating in the region to the southwest, and the Yi family’s destruction of Koryŏ and founding of their own dynasty, which fulfills Wang Kŏn’s anxious vision. The Korean verse (translation in larger type) is followed in the original by the Chinese version of the same; each is accompanied by brief Chinese commentary and note (translations italicized). A summary of the historical annotation is also appended.
Leery of the region south of the Yangtze
he dispatched an envoy;
but who could have blocked
the rise of the Seven Dynasties?
Yangtze Prefecture ts part of Chinju. The Yangtze River is in the southern part of the prefecture and forms the boundary between it and Chingang, in western Zhejiang. The envoy was, as below, a luminary.
Leery of the region south of the Kongju River
he admonished his descendants,
but were the Prophecies of the Nine Transformations
merely a human’s doing?
The character kuk here means prophecy, the Prophecies of the Nine Transformations being the name of a book of prophecies collected in the Spirit Annals. It states that the country’s capital will be changed nine times, and also that the founder will have received the mandate of heaven.
Uneasy of the region south of the Yangtze
he sent an envoy,
but who was there to command
the Seven Dynasties to stop?
Stop here means verbal command.
Fearful of the region south of the Kongju River
he admonished his descendants,
but was the altering of the Prophecies of the Nine Transformations
a matter of man’s intention?
Succession here means descendants.22
A lengthy summary of the Chinese historical background to the first part of the stanza is followed by a description of the Ten Injunctions and their historical background. The same general account of this part of Kory6 history can be found in a passage from the Koryŏsa translated and included in the anthology section of this book.23
WARRIORS BECOME KINGS
The Song turns history into prophecy, and the past into the future in that transmutation; the two, mutually inscribed, become the body of the song. This is more than just a characterization of the local argument that this text repeatedly articulates. Linked as they are in the successive stanzas, Chinese and Korean history also assume the relationship of langue and parole, the universal language of literary Chinese and the particular, Korean written statement. By distinguishing it, repeatedly marking the difference between it and Chinese history, the Song gives Korean history retrospective significance. The same formula seems to continue in the concluding stanzas, numbers 109-124, the admonitions to future monarchs. The paired structure remains the same, though with a Korean historical event, not a Chinese one, cited at the beginning of each couplet, followed by a reference to the present or future situation of the king on the throne, surrounded by court officials and confronting the difficulties not of pacification and establishing rule but of maintaining the monarchy. Each of the stanzas ends with the same phrase: “Do not forget the meaning and significance ( ttŭt ) of this (the earlier ancestor’s deed).” With the significance of the Korean historical events related to the founding of the dynasty established in the first part of the Song, the admonitions project that significance forward, turning it into example. Stanza 112, for instance, draws a contrast between Yi Sŏng-gye’s physical discomforts during his harrowing military campaigns and Sejong’s dangerously comfortable situation as reigning monarch.
Pursuing the work of the king,
leading the army formations,
many were the days, one after another,
when he did not remove his armor.When you stand draped
in the royal dragon robe
wearing the belt of precious jade round your waist,
do not forget his example.24(Stanza 112)
For the stanza above, the annotation explains that the dragon robe and jade belt were gifts from the Chinese (Ming) emperor to the sovereign ( chŏnha ), who would have been Sejong. The image recorded in that stanza thus represents the Ming emperor’s recognition of Sejong’s status as the monarch and presentation of him to the world as king, designated or symbolized by the robe he wears. The robe itself is described in some detail in the annotation, which reads as a verbal portrait of a king defined, as it were, by the symbols of his office rather than by his or his ancestors’ historic struggles to seize power:
The emperor bestowed upon our ruler a dragon robe to drape his body and a belt decorated with precious gems. The dragon robe was three measures in size, woven with gold dragons. The head and right foreleg were on the front, the tail and left foreleg on the right shoulder, with the right rear leg on the back. The dragons around the hem were woven in gold, eight in front and eight behind. The belt was woven in the style of a sword belt, with a jade ring buckle. The belt was laced with red silk, with loops of yellow gold, decorated with red and green jewels in fine silk. Thus did the emperor bestow upon our monarch the dragon robe and jeweled belt.25
This is a formal portrait of the monarch, Sejong, as civil ruler. Of necessity, perhaps, given the exigencies of space within a stanza, or perhaps because of customary practice, the portrait is not a likeness of Sejong himself but of his kingly figure in the royal Ming robe. Divided between the reference in the verse stanza to wearing the robes and thus acting as king and the physical description of the robe presented in the annotation without the human wearer, this portrait functions rhetorically in much the same way as did the verbal map of Korea, sketched in the earlier part of the Song as a political and geomantic force field divided between Kyŏngŭng and the capital. By their move from Kyŏnghŭng to the capital and their struggles along the way, the Yi family fulfills Wang Kŏn’s anxious prophecy; by wearing the dragon robe, Sejong fulfills the meaning of his identity as king. The shift from descriptions of historical events, even in allusive or attenuated form, in the earlier part of the Song to a description of the size, pattern, and nature of the decorations of the king’s robe in stanza 112 and its annotation signals the shift in attention from the functions of the ruler as military leader—the role fulfilled by the founder of the dynasty, his son Pang-wŏn, and their four ancestors, the six dragons of the Song— to the monarch’s identity as ceremonial head of the state.
There are no surviving, original portraits of Sejong or other early Chosŏn monarchs, so there is no way to trace the iconographic change directly in Korean materials, but the contrast expressed in stanza 112 is directly represented in Chinese art history by a parallel and contemporaneous shift in Ming royal portraits.
The transformation, about the year 1500, of the Ming imperial image from a heroic warrior-king to an iconic representation in which the human dimension of the emperor all but vanishes behind a surfeit of ceremonial paraphernalia reflects the increasingly ritualistic and de- personalized imperial rule of late Ming China. While the early Ming emperors directed military campaigns, proclaimed laws, and managed the affairs of the state, the Hung-chih emperor, characterized by historians as the most humane of the Ming rulers, personified the ideal ab- solute monarch precisely because his demeanor and implementation of imperial rule were passionless and impersonal. In his portrait he has become a ritual vessel; devoid of personality, he is the ultimate embodiment of the absolutist state. It is this new schematic representation that would become the model not only for Ch’ing imperial court portraiture but for all later Ming and Ch’ing private ancestral portraits.26
Like the Song itself, the portrait in stanza 112 is more complex than it seems at first. The king is wearing the dragon robe, a gift from the Ming emperor and a sign of that worthy’s official, public recognition of the new Chosŏn state some sixty years after its founding. Further, while the king himself is addressed in the stanza, being urged not to forget the significance of his ancestors’ deeds, that admonition is then projected into the future toward any and all successors who would put on the dragon robe. In its negotiated effect, this moment in the Song seems structurally similar to the confrontation in the story of Ch’ŏyong between Ch’ŏyong and the demon. The demon pledges to stay away, but only on the condition that Ch’ŏyong or his likeness, the gate plate, be there. The king in his robe, a gift that in the annotation becomes an iconic representation, a likeness, of the monarch, is admonished not to forget the meaning, the purpose, the significance– ttŭt – of his ancestors’ actions, which were intended for precisely that moment. It will be the glory of the future rulers to wear the robe, but also their task to govern in the spirit of their ancestors and to conduct those rituals, such as the performance of the Song, whose purpose it is to reaffirm the pledge.
M. M. Bakthin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 272.↩︎
Han Yŏn-su and Kim Pong-gun, eds., Hairai’ŭ munhak casŭbsŏ (Seoul: Chihaksa, 1993), 212: “it is well known that, because of the didacticism of the genre, the literary quality is not high.”↩︎
Yi Yun-sŏk, ed., Wanyŏk yongbi ŏch’ŏn ka, 3 vols. (Seoul: Pogosa, 1994), 126-7.↩︎
Richard Wilhelm, trans., The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 9, 364.↩︎
Ibid., 9-10↩︎
Yi, Wanyŏk, 1:11-13.↩︎
Ibid., 7-17.↩︎
See above, “The Ten Injunctions and the Death of the Founder, Wang Kŏn.”↩︎
Yi, Wanyŏk, 1:11-13.↩︎
See previous chapter, " Ch’ŏyong and Manghae Temple: A Parable of Literary Negotiation," p. 109.↩︎
Pak Si Hyŏng, Hong Hŭi Yu, trans., Koryŏsa. 11 vols. (P’yŏngyang: Tong P’yŏngyang Inswae Kongjang, 1962; reprint, Seoul: Pogosa, 1994), 1:40.↩︎
For more detail on a reading of late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn history as a hidden history of violent struggle, see my “Performing Drangons: The Construction of a Korean Classical Moment,” in Gail Holst-Warhaft and David R. McCann, eds., The Classical Moment: views from Seven Literatures (Lanham, Md: Rownan and Littlefield, 1999), 105-108.↩︎
See above, p. 39.↩︎
Gail Holst Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Womens Laments and Classical Greek Literature, 4-6 and passim.↩︎
See Peter H. Lee, Songs, 86 re the term ttŭt as it is used in the closing section of admonitions.↩︎
Yi, Wanyŏk, 1:13.↩︎
See Marshall R. Pihl, The Korean Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 1994), 85-87, 96-99; Kichung Kim, An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature: From Hyangga to P’ansori (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sahrpe, 1996), 200-203; Cho Tong-il and Kim Hŭng-gyu, eds., P’ansori ŭi ihae (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 1979), 19-22. For a splendid modern version of the p’ansori-style narrative, see Ch’ae Man-Sik’s Peace Under Heaven, trans. Chun Kyung-Ja (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993). The passage beginning “There’s an old saying” on page 66 is an example of the narrative aside, and there are many other such passages elsewhere in the novel.↩︎
Cho Tong-il 1994, 2:287.↩︎
Ibid., 285.↩︎
Han and Kim, Hairaitŭ, 214.↩︎
Ki-Moon Lee, “The Inventor of the Korean Alphabet,” in Young-Key Kim Renaud, ed., The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 25 f.↩︎
Yi, Wanyŏk, 1:147-149.↩︎
See above, pp. 33-36.↩︎
Yi, Wanyŏk, 3:239.↩︎
Ibid., 239-240.↩︎
Wen C. Fong, “Imperial Portraiture of the Ming Dynasty,” in Wen C. Fong and James C. Wyatt, eds., Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (New York: Abrams, 1996), 332.↩︎