The last two chapters were about the man who did not board the ship.
This one is the other side. It follows what the man who waited eleven years and went alone did and brought back.
And at the end of the chapter the two miss each other once more. This time it is at a cave by the sea.
The Ship and the Teacher
In a year of the Longshuo era Uisang went into Tang.
He took passage on a returning envoy’s ship. Where he went was Mount Zhongnan, and a teacher named Jieom was there.
The record gives the teacher’s dream first.
The night before, Jieom dreamed of a great tree growing out of the eastern country. Its branches and leaves spread wide enough to cover China, and there was a phoenix nest in it.
He climbed up and found a bright jewel in the nest whose light carried far.
Jieom woke startled, had the place swept, and waited. Uisang came that day, and he received him with special ceremony and took him as a disciple.
In study Uisang went as far down as it goes.
His teacher was glad to have found someone to talk it through with, the record says. What he learned was Hwaeom, which holds that everything hangs on everything else, so that touching one thing moves all of it.
Home, and a Temple
The reason he came home had nothing to do with study.
He learned that Tang meant to attack Silla, and he took ship in haste to carry the word to the court.
A man who had gone to study came back carrying news.
Some years later he founded a temple on Mount Taebaek. Buseoksa. He taught Hwaeom there, and ten temples followed after it.
He put what he taught into writing as well.
There is a piece that presses the sense of Hwaeom into two hundred and ten characters arranged like a figure, and because it is short it was read for a long time. The names of ten disciples are in the record too.
That is the account of the one who went all the way.
He crossed a sea, found a teacher, learned, came back, founded a temple and raised disciples. Everything the other man in the last chapter did not do, he did.
The Cave at Naksan
This is after his return.
He heard that the true body of Gwaneum was inside a cave on the eastern shore. He went there.
He did not go straight in.
He purified himself at the mouth of the cave and waited seven days. At dawn on the seventh he floated his mat on the water, and the spirits of the sea led him into the cave, the record says.
He came out of it with a string of crystal beads.
The dragon of the eastern sea offered him a jewel as well. But he had not yet seen her.
So he waited another seven days.
Only at the end of the second seven did he meet Gwaneum. And he was told one thing. A pair of bamboo would rise on the ridge above where she sat, and a temple should be built on that ground.
He came out and the bamboo had risen.
He built a golden hall there and set an image in it, round of face and fine of form as though born of the sky. The bamboo went away again. He named the temple Naksansa, left the two jewels there, and departed.
Seven days, and then seven days. The longest thing anyone does in this chapter is wait.
When Wonhyo Went the Same Road
Later Wonhyo came to pay his respects at the place.
Reaching the fields to the south, he saw a woman in white cutting rice. He asked her half in jest to give him the rice.
She answered. The rice was not ripe, she said.
Going on, he saw a woman washing under a bridge. He was thirsty and asked for water, and she scooped up the water she had been washing in and held it out.
Wonhyo poured it away and drew fresh water from the stream.
At that a blue bird in a pine out in the field spoke. Let it be, it said, and vanished. Under that pine lay a single shoe.
At the temple he looked at the image of Gwaneum.
The other shoe of the pair lay beneath her seat. Only then did he understand who he had met on the road.
People called that pine the Gwaneum pine.
Wonhyo tried to enter the cave and see her too. But the sea rose high against him, and he could not get in, and he left.
The Four Lines Iryeon Added
Iryeon set four lines at the end of Uisang’s entry. In our words it runs:
Through thickets, over the sea, into smoke and dust he went and the gate of Jisangsa opened and received a bright treasure he gathered the many flowers and planted them in his own country and Zhongnan and Taebaek came into one same spring
The four lines follow this chapter’s road exactly.
The crossing, the gate of the temple where Jieom taught, and the planting of what he learned. In the last line a mountain in China and a mountain in Silla come into the same spring.
Reduce what the man who crossed did to one line and that is it.
Today, Two Who Went Different Roads
This chapter sets two scenes side by side.
One man waited seven days twice at a cave and met her. The other passed her twice on the road and did not know.
Most readers snag on the second.
Meeting and not knowing feels like a worse loss than never meeting. We have been through a place like it, in chapter 21. A man met the Maitreya, was shown into a room, and then asked where he was.
But there is something here that was not there.
Wonhyo did find out. He knew when he saw the shoe, and knowing, he tried to enter the cave. It was the sea that stopped him then.
The question this chapter leaves is right there.
Does knowing after the fact count as knowing? Can a difference in when you recognise something be turned into the difference between meeting and not meeting?
That the record put both men in one entry is probably why.
Write only one of them and this is a story about meeting Gwaneum. Write both side by side and it becomes a story about recognising.
Our work has two kinds of people too.
Those who prepare and wait and meet the moment, and those who recognise afterwards what they have already walked past. Most of us do both.
More people who lived the idea come from here.
One set out the rules, and one nobody could recognise because he did not look like much.