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Next morning, I hop on a train that struggles north and east across South Korea's waist toward the ancient Silla capital of Kyongju. On the grounds of the magnificent Pulguksa Temple, I fall into conversation with Dr. Cho Hong Jun, a Seoul physician making the tourist rounds with his family. There are so many reasons for the radiant smile Cho wears on this fine afternoon. The ancient pagodas and gilded shrines have, like Cho, survived to witness the current economic boom, the indictment of dictators like Chun and Roh, the faint stirrings of some sane resolution between North and South, the youthful optimism seemingly dispelling decades of oppression and gloom. But that smile, it turns out, is defiantly idealistic in the face of stubborn facts. In Cho's estimation, South Korea remains a chronic case, where institutional corruption taints even the most heroic would-be leaders, where democracy has not lived up to its promise, where the national destiny remains a plaything of geopolitical forces far beyond Korea's control.
"I don't like the United States," Cho says frankly, beneath his floppy, blue golf hat. "I like the people in the United States, but I don't like the government, which interferes with our unification with North Korea." Cho has a personal reason for wanting peace with the North. His father left it in 1948, just in time to fight the Korean War on the South's side. He couldn't contact his own father—Cho's grandfather—over the next decades, and, in any event, he dreaded two equally plausible scenarios. "My father thought that his father might have turned to communism," says Cho. "But he was also afraid he might have been sent to a detention camp because his family was relatively wealthy." At any rate, when Cho's father was suffering from liver cancer, he longed to find out what had become of his own father. "The cancer changed him," says Cho. "He knew he would not last long, and to him kinship became more important than ideology." Cho's brother, a newspaper reporter, tried to track down the lost grandfather, but he failed to reunite the family.
Cho was radicalized as a college student in the 1970s; he read contraband books like The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the works of Karl Marx's. He rejoiced when Cholla leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped, exiled and nearly sentenced to death for supposedly instigating the revolt in Kwangju—finally ascended to the presidency. Cho's wife, Eunmynya Ko, believed so strongly in Kim that she left the maternity ward the day she gave birth to cast her vote during his failed 1992 election. She isn't as chagrined as her husband seems to be by the recent bribery scandals involving Kim's sons. "As President," Cho says, "Kim Dae Jung had to change his appearance, but he not only changed his appearance—he changed his substance. That is the tragedy of Korean politics."
The Buddha had a prescription for escaping tragedy, and I decide to take advantage of it, retreating for a night to the ancient monastery of Dong Hwa Sa, in the mountains north of the commercial city of Taegu. The approach to the temple is none too salutary for someone wanting to travel back in time: along with the bric-a-brac shops and restaurants stand humming soft drink and snack machines.
I'm consigned to two youthful monks—Hyunjin Sanjin and Won Il Sanjin—who have outfitted themselves not only with the order's gray robes but with cell phones. Together the two monks teach me how to bow properly to a golden Buddha: with my forehead to the floor. I eat enough spicy tofu and kimchi to inflame my inner ears before the monks break it to me that I'm not permitted a glass of water until I've polished off everything on the plate. At 3 in the morning, I awaken to a gong, chanting and ablutions. I ascend the circular steps leading to the modest temple, its roof elegant and upswept as a crow's wing in the darkness. The sun, when it does rise, is brutal, and Won Il hands me a broad straw hat that casts my visitor's robe and beard into shade. The photographer traveling with me jokes that I look like a cross between Osama bin Laden and Madame Butterfly.
Won Il leads me through a wonderful birch and pinewood forest where the rare mushrooms have all been purchased by gourmet restaurant wholesalers even before they have sprouted. In a hillside clearing, he shows me enormous stone funerary urns of the order's past sages. Won Il sits on the corner of the urn for a 13th century priest he especially admires, its swollen expanse grazed by a bullet from the Korean War. The priest's sermons are lost to human memory, but his presence isn't. "When I step on this land," Won Il says, "I can feel its power." At this moment, Won Il is dragged back from his reverie by the chirpy ringing of Hyunjin's cell phone.
Won Il believes that "the Oriental world is spiritual, while Western thought is after material things." Yet he knows the membrane between them is collapsing. Western mass media and the accompanying consumer impulse have eroded traditional Korean society as even war never could. Staring at a slender reed, flipping open his cell phone to check for any new messages at the foot of the great sage, he can offer only this parting uncertainty: "I don't know why I live in this world."
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