The Nine Cloud Dream

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CLASSICS

THE NINE CLOUD DREAM

KIM MAN-JUNG (1637–1692) is generally accepted as the author of The Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong), often considered the greatest classic Korean novel. He is said to have composed it in exile as a comfort to his mother. A member of the yangban (ruling class) literati, Kim Man-jung rose to become the head of the Confucian Academy. His other works include The Record of Lady Sa’s Journey South (Sassi Namjeonggi).

HEINZ INSU FENKL is a writer, editor, translator, and folklorist. He is the author of two novels, Memories of My Ghost Brother, a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and Skull Water. He is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. His nonfiction includes Korean Folktales, which he wrote following a Fulbright fellowship. He serves on the editorial board of Sijo: An International Journal of Poetry and Song and is a consulting editor for Words Without Borders. He is a recipient of the Global Korea Award and the Buddhist Yushim Prize for his contributions to Korean literature. His fiction and translations have been published in The New Yorker.

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Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2019 by Heinz Insu Fenkl

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A portion of this book first appeared in different form as The Ghost Story in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Volume 7, 2014.

Illustrations from The Cloud Dream of the Nine translated by James Scarth Gale (London: Daniel O’Connor, 1922). Artwork on this page comprises portions of these illustrations, assembled by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Kim, Man-jung, 1637-1692, author. | Fenkl, Heinz Insu, 1960-translator, writer of introduction, writer of added commentary.

Title: The nine cloud dream / Kim Man-jung ; translated with an introduction and notes by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

Other titles: Kuunmong. English

Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036733 (print) | LCCN 2018050575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705022 (E-book) | ISBN 9780143131274 | ISBN 9780143131274(paperback) | ISBN 9781524705022(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Korean fiction--To 1900--Translations into English.

Classification: LCC PL989.415.M3 (ebook) | LCC PL989.415.M3 K813 2019 (print) | DDC 895.73/2--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036733

Cover art: FeiFei Ruan

Version_1

Dedicated to Musan Cho Oh-hyun & all my teachers

Contents

About the Author and Translator

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction by HEINZ INSU FENKL

Suggestions for Further Reading

A Note on the Translation

Acknowledgments

THE NINE CLOUD DREAM

PART I

1. The Reincarnation of Hsing-chen

2. The Young Scholar

3. Meeting Ch’an-yüeh at Lo-yang

4. A Mysterious Priestess

5. Tryst with a Fairy and a Ghost

6. The Boy at the Roadside

7. The Imperial Son-in-Law

8. Strategy and Tactics

PART II

9. Among the Dragon Folk

10. Strange Dreams

11. The Taking of Ch’iung-pei

12. Shao-yu’s Regret

13. Two Princesses, Two Wives

14. The Contest of Beauties

15. The Wine Punishment

16. Returning to the Source

Appendix A: Names of the Eight Women

Appendix B: Reading Kuunmong in Chinese and Korean

Notes

Introduction

The world . . . is like a passing cloud, like an imaginary wheel made by a whirling torch, like a castle of spirits, like the moon reflected in the sea, like a vision, a mirage, a dream.

The Lankavatara Sutra

New readers are advised that this introduction makes certain details of the plot explicit.

The Nine Cloud Dream, or Kuunmong (九雲夢구운몽, c. 1689),¹ is the most elegant of Korea’s earliest literary novels and one of the most beloved masterpieces of Korean literature. It is a fantastical romance, full of intrigue and deception, the idealized story-within-a-story of the poor son of an abandoned single mother becoming the veritable golden boy of Confucian culture. Over the course of the narrative, the main character becomes a great poet, musician, diplomat, general, and brother-in-law to an emperor; his romantic partners (wives and concubines) are said to be the eight most beautiful women in the world. But that idealized romance is framed within the story of a promising young monk who learns a profound lesson about worldly desire as he follows the Buddhist path. And so Kuunmong—with all its excellent imitations and reworkings of Chinese Tang poetry, metaphysical conundrums, thinly veiled autobiography, and court satire—also serves as a morality tale dramatizing the themes central to the worldview of a Buddhist artist-intellectual in seventeenth-century Korea. All this is found in a single work.

SEOPO KIM MAN-JUNG AND HIS TIMES

Both Korean and Western scholars are in general agreement that Kim Man-jung 김만중, 金萬重 (1637–1692), also known by his penname Seopo (서포, 西浦, meaning Western Shore, West Bank, or Western Port), is the author of Kuunmong. This is based primarily on Kim Tae-jun’s seminal 1933 work History of Korean Fiction (趙鮮小說史 Choson soseolsa) and the reminiscence of Kim’s grandnephew Yi Jae (1680–1746) in A Record of Three Government Agencies (三官记 Samgwan-gi).² Kim himself never claimed authorship, but the Korean literati of his time not only wrote fictional works like Kuunmong anonymously, but also customarily disavowed authorship of such low works both out of modesty and from fear of sullying their reputations.

Kim was well-known and well regarded in his time. He was a yangban (a member of the ruling class) related to eminent scholars; he was also an intellectual and political figure of some note in the court of King Sukjong, the nineteenth king of the Joseon dynasty. Like Shao-yu, the protagonist of Kuunmong, he became a government minister after getting the highest score on the national civil service examination. The general consensus in the Korean scholarly community is that Kim, a dutiful son whose father died before his birth,³ wrote Kuunmong during his exile in order to comfort his mother, a highly educated and accomplished woman who had raised him and his brother by herself. The story of Kim composing the whole of Kuunmong in a single night is typical of literary folklore (Lao Tzu, for example, is said to have composed all of the Tao Te Ching in one night); but in Kim’s case, the story may, in fact, be an associative conflation with the story of his mother, who borrowed the Chinese classics she was too poor to buy for her sons’ education and hand-copied them overnight before she had to return them the next day.

Kim lived during the latter part of the Joseon dynasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1897. Joseon’s political and social structures were modeled after Confucian China of the Tang dynasty (618–907). The carefully defined Neo-Confucian ideals governing the Five Relationships—ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder to younger, and friend to friend (all of which privilege men, and which are significantly dramatized and problematized in Kuunmong)—were seen as the key to social and political harmony. Meanwhile, Buddhism, which had been a defining characteristic of Korea during the earlier golden age of the Unified Silla (668–935), had begun to wane during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) and was actively suppressed in favor of the social control offered by Neo-Confucianism. During this period, Korean women had gravitated toward Buddhism and made up much of its infrastructure, a fact implicitly invoked by Kuunmong’s strong representation of women. Taoism, which had long existed in harmony with Korea’s indigenous shamanic religious tradition, was recognized by this time primarily in its more philosophical and intellectual form—centering on texts like the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, and the writings of Zhuangzi—while its tantric and alchemical practices were largely relegated to the folk culture of superstition and magic.⁴

Kuunmong is generally dated by scholars at 1689, but its literary provenance has been much debated, particularly in recent years. At one time it was believed that Kuunmong was the first major work of Korean literature composed in the native hangul alphabet. However, the current consensus, after the discovery of an eighteenth-century Chinese edition, is that it was composed in Chinese, which was the language of literature and government in seventeenth-century Korea in much the same way Latin was used in Europe for many centuries. It is important to remember that before Korea had its own alphabet, all writing was done in Chinese characters or a combination of Chinese with indigenously developed phonetic scripts that were rather unwieldy. In the mid-fifteenth century during the reign of King Sejong the Great—a golden age for art, science, and culture—hangul was developed in order to encourage literacy among the general population. It was so well designed that the common saying is that a smart man can learn it before the end of the day and even an idiot can learn it in ten days. Ironically, though it quickly took root in the popular culture, hangul’s very efficiency was its initial downfall in literary and official circles. The Korean literati felt it demeaning to write in such an easy script, and it is said that, at the time, Chinese characters were called jinseo (true letters) while hangul was known as amgeul (women’s script) or ahaetgeul (children’s script). It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, during the Japanese colonial era, that literary writing in hangul was revived on a large scale as an issue of national pride and identity. Kuunmong, it is now generally agreed, was originally composed in Chinese and later reprinted in hangul to make it more accessible.⁵

THE NOVEL

In its Korean literary and historical context, Kuunmong is one of the seminal works of Korean prose fiction, along with Kim Si-seup’s mid-fifteenth-century work New Stories from Mount Geumo (Geumo Shinhwa, 금오신화; 金鰲新話) and Heo Gyun’s The Story of Hong Gildong (Hong Gildong jeon, 홍길동전; 洪吉童傳), which dates to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.⁶ If Hong Gildong jeon is like the Korean Robin Hood, Kuunmong, in its status and impact throughout the years, more closely parallels Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Buddhist and Taoist themes in Kuunmong played out in Korean literary and intellectual culture in much the same way Dante’s confrontation of political and religious themes resonated throughout Europe. Both works involve the journey of the central character into another reality, in which he learns valuable moral, ethical, and religious lessons. Both works are also deeply personal and laden with satirical agendas partially stemming from each writer’s political exile.

The basic plot of Kuunmong is an edifying fantasy: for violating his vows and doubting his vocation, a promising young Buddhist monk named Hsing-chen (Original Nature) is made to experience an incarnation as Shao-yu (Small Visitor or Brief Resider), the most ideal of men, his life full of fabulous intellectual, diplomatic, martial, and sensual accomplishments. It is an ironic punishment that plays out like an incarnation-within-an-incarnation, and as the narrative develops, we are slowly and subtly introduced to a world of layered illusions. Shao-yu’s view of things is constantly obstructed or occluded by intervening elements, sometimes as subtle as a willow branch; there are minor dream sequences within a greater dream; and there are numerous disguises, deceptions, and misperceptions that play with the idea of compromised and multilayered reality. When Hsing-chen’s old master, Liu-kuan (Six Perceptions), finally enters the illusory world of Shao-yu—now growing old himself—he causes Shao-yu to remember a dream of himself as Hsing-chen the monk. Liu-kuan accompanies him out of his dream and back to reality, and in the end the monk wakes up as Hsing-chen back on his meditation mat, to learn that reality and dream are interpenetrating phenomena and are ultimately indistinguishable. He has experienced an entire lifetime in a moment.

Kuunmong addresses this theme of reality and dream in such a way that it poignantly critiques the moral and ethical misconduct of the controversial king Sukjong, who took the throne at age thirteen and ruled from 1674 to 1720.King Sukjong’s reign was characterized by intense factional disputes and sudden turns of the political tide due to his amorous, fickle, and shrewdly manipulative nature. His name, Sukjong, 肅宗, which he took as ruler, was the name of the Tang emperor who reigned from 756 to 762, and the Chinese characters can be read as purge factions. The life of Shao-yu parallels and inverts that of Kim in ways too numerous to be merely coincidental, and Shao-yu’s relationship with the emperor seems to be a nostalgic and wishful reminiscence of Kim’s once-advisory role to the much younger Sukjong. Kim Man-jung was a member of the Western faction, which was dominant early in Sukjong’s rule but lost favor during a controversy regarding the proper period of mourning to follow the death of the king’s first wife, Queen Insun. When the Southern faction gained control in 1674, Kim was exiled, and it wasn’t until five years later, just before a Southern faction member was executed for treason, that Kim was able to return to court. In 1687 Kim was exiled again, this time to Seokcheon for protesting the king’s treatment of a scholar official, but was allowed to return a year later. Then, in 1689, Kim was involved in protesting Sukjong’s dismissal of his second wife, Queen Inhyeon. Sukjong was so in love with his consort Lady Jang (said to be the most beautiful woman in the whole of the Joseon dynasty) that he made her his queen and her one-year-old son the crown prince. For siding with Queen Inhyeon, who was the daughter of a Western faction member, Kim was exiled yet again, this time to the remote island of Namhae, where he is likely to have written both Kuunmong and his other major work, The Record of Lady Xie’s Journey South, shortly before his death.⁷

The plot of Kuunmong, when it is considered in light of the scandalous reign of King Sukjong, reads as an idealized remedy for all of the negative machinations in the Joseon court, particularly regarding the consequences of romantic relationships and the relationships among high court women, official wives, and concubines. Sukjong’s relationship with his queen mother was hostile, and his wives and concubines were constantly involved in intrigues that are still fodder for historical soap operas today. Sukjong’s senior concubine, Jang, was the living historical embodiment of the Korean stereotype of the seductive and conniving beauty.⁸ By comparison, the queen, the princess, the wives, and the concubines in Kim’s novel all dearly love and go out of their way for each other, practically outdoing one another in their humility and deference to the others’ wishes. The treachery and deceptions that caused exiles and executions in Sukjong’s court are replaced, in Kuunmong, by romantic stratagems and practical jokes without dire consequence.

KUUNMONG AND ITS INFLUENCES

Kuunmong, on its surface, is a historical fantasy novel set in ninth-century Tang China—a kind of fantasy golden age evoked by Korean literature of the Joseon era, much as writers in English today look back on the literature of Elizabethan times—and in addition to being originally written in Chinese, it emulates and alludes to Chinese Tang dynasty works so gracefully that Chinese scholars themselves have praised its merits.

As a result, Kuunmong needs to be considered in light of Chinese as well as Korean literature. In a Chinese context, Kuunmong fits into the genre of quanqi (strange tales) that young Confucian scholars would sometimes write as part of their civil examinations to entertain their elder examiners (and perhaps thus earn a higher score). It also refers back to famous dream stories of the Tang period, most prominently The Record Within a Pillow (枕中記, c. 719) by Shen Jiji (also known as Li Mi) and The Governor of Nanke (南柯太守伝, c. 794) by Li Gongzuo.⁹ In both of these stories the protagonist temporarily enters a dream world before eventually returning to reality, the dream episode involving marriage to a beautiful woman of royal family, attainment of a high-ranking position, military exploits, and ultimate dissatisfaction with material success. Kim Man-jung would certainly have known these works, though they are more tragic and lack Kuunmong’s structural and linguistic elegance—suggesting he might have set out to remedy those qualities of the older works.

Kuunmong brims with allusions to Chinese literary texts in a way characteristic of Joseon-era Korean literary works, which idealized and emulated Chinese literary culture. Both the narrator and the characters make constant allusions to Chinese literature and history. The way in which allusions abound even in casual descriptions of landscape suggests the underlying consciousness of an outsider mimicking a tradition—perhaps even overcompensating to show off his knowledge. That, in itself, is not unusual, but what is truly astonishing is the degree to which the allusions are interwoven into the narrative and serve to convey the novel’s underlying Buddhist themes in an especially subtle and powerful way. Korean literary culture, for the upper classes in the Joseon era, was characterized by a syncretic interweaving of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian themes, but Kim’s use of allusions is uniquely resonant with ideas central to Buddhism: the illusory nature of the world (maya 麽也), the idea of the interpenetration of phenomena (tongdal 通達), and essence-function (che-yong 體用).¹⁰ These are ideas one finds especially significant and enduring in Korean Buddhism after Weonhyo and Jinul,¹¹ two great monks of the earlier Silla dynasty, Korea’s golden age of Buddhism. During Kim Man-jung’s time, Confucianism was the state ideology and Buddhism was actively suppressed, and so to write a novel in which an elaborate Confucian pipe dream gives way to dissatisfaction that is remedied by Buddhism would also have been an overt act of resistance and criticism, especially from a writer in exile for rebuking the king.

In its amalgamation of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist themes in its plot, Kuunmong ends by clearly privileging Buddhism as its underlying moral rhetoric. It does so by offering an analogy by which readers, after seeing Hsing-chen’s realization, might model themselves on the young monk and thereby break the fourth wall of the text and extend its central Buddhist themes into real life. Just as Hsing-chen wakes up from being Shao-yu, having moved from reality to dream and back again with the realization that the two are indistinguishable, the reader may wake out of being immersed in the fantasy of the novel to realize that its themes are not any different from real life. For a typical Western reader, the analogy may stop here, but Kuunmong is an important and especially sophisticated example of Buddhist metafiction. A Buddhist understands that one’s consciousness of reality is actually only an illusion created by the mind and that the world one lives in is a once-removed construct of consciousness. In that context, the trajectory of Kuunmong’s plot is especially resonant, because it plays out a life of pleasure and accomplishment into one of depression (the unsatisfactoriness of dukkha, the primary Buddhist truth of suffering) and resolves Hsing-chen’s depression by having him wake up to follow the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The resonance with which Kim played out the Buddhist rhetoric in Kuunmong seems to have made the work widely influential. A hundred years after the publication of Kuunmong, China’s greatest novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng 紅樓夢), would feature similar plot details and parallel themes.

Most critical studies of Kuunmong have tended to examine its Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist themes as separate entities. Reality and illusion in Kuunmong have been discussed in detail by academics, though Francisca Cho Bantly’s Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in The Dream of the Nine Clouds is the only book-length critical work in English on Kuunmong. Academics have also taken a Taoist lens to Kuunmong, one of the most innovative being Marion Eggert, who makes a compelling case for considering the eight women in Kuunmong as a symbolic expression of the underlying cosmology of the I Ching (an allusion that would have been far more apparent to readers of Kim’s time). From that perspective, Hsing-chen’s eight fairies are not a sign of sensual excess, but a necessary number for symbolic completion paralleling the Buddhist resolution at the end. The Taoist I Ching has eight trigrams, Buddhism has its eightfold path to enlightenment, and even Confucians call one’s fate the eight characters. But Kuunmong reveals its true syncretic brilliance in the way in which its Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist features converge, and one of the ways to find access to this syncretism is via the symbology of numbers, which both introduces and concludes the novel.

The numbers that bracket the narrative must be examined through a lens of three traditions to be fully appreciated. The number nine is presented even before the story, in the title, and is easy to gloss as the eight fairies and Hsing-chen. But the narrative itself begins with the number five, referring to the Five Peaks of China on the surface, but implicitly evoking the Buddhist skandhas, the five heaps that account for how one lives in a world of illusion (i.e.,cloud dreams) created by the senses. Into this setting of the five heaps amplified into mountains comes the monk named Liu-kuan, meaning "six perceptions" (a reference to the fact that there are six senses in Buddhism, the sixth being consciousness). Finally, Hsing-chen (the one) and the eight fairies are introduced after this to constitute the nine clouds.

Kim’s use of the number eight has a range of meanings that are especially relevant because they weave together the three traditions in a way that any culturally literate person of the times would immediately have understood. For example, the eight trigrams of the I Ching, mentioned above, are often arranged around the taijitu (the yin/yang symbol, which also represents the feminine and masculine principles) in a diagram of cosmic order understood during both the Tang dynasty and Joseon Korea.

With a variant yin/yang in the center and with the trigrams rearranged, this Taoist symbol would eventually be adopted as the eogi, the royal standard of Joseon in the nineteenth century (and one of the early designs for the flag of the Republic of Korea).

Even scholars who had not memorized the I Ching would have known the eight trigrams, as they were also associated with the cardinal and ordinal directions, with their arrangements in a square three-by-three grid. The empty position in the middle was the ninth position, which corresponded to the center of a squared circle and was also associated with the position of a village well surrounded by houses or fields. This grid was a cosmological and political structure, and would have been well-known to any Joseon intellectual.

In the novel, this structure corresponds to Hsing-chen in the middle with the eight fairies around him or Shao-yu in the center with his eight wives and concubines surrounding him. In Joseon and Tang culture, this diagram was a general model for social organization: houses around a village well, districts around the capital, advisers around the king, buildings around the courtyard, wives and concubines around a lord—a structural model for public as well as private relationships,¹² precisely those whose mismanagement led Kim to criticize King Sukjong.

In Buddhism, the circle made by eight trigrams corresponds to the empty circle at the eighth place in the Oxherding Cycle (a well-known series of ten pictures with commentaries that chart the journey of a follower of the Zen path).

This eighth picture is transcendence, the primordial emptiness, the condition from which all things emerge (parallel to Hsing-chen, whose name means Original Nature, characterized by primordial emptiness, from whose mind the dream narrative emerges), but in the Zen tradition it is required that one return from this state, back into the world, to help others achieve enlightenment.

Finally, the circle and the number eight together represent the wheel of dharma, the symbol of Buddhism, which refers to the Buddha’s teaching of the eightfold path (the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism being the more distinct spokes).

The circle itself also represents samsara, the continuous cycle of birth and rebirth sustained by the accumulation of karma. The swirl in the center is parallel to the primordial emptiness from which all reality emerges. The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is the concept of dukkha, generally glossed as suffering but more accurately rendered unsatisfactoriness, which is Shao-yu’s condition just before he wakes up.¹³ Highlighting these Buddhist themes, many editions of Kuunmong use a four- and/or eight-part structure in their printing.

The presence of the number five in Kuunmong, after the initial overt reference to the five great mountains and the Five Peaks at the beginning of the novel, will be less apparent to a Western reader because it is implied throughout the rest of the story (except in allusions to the Chinese Five Classics). But to an educated reader of Kim’s era, the number five was a matter-of-fact part of one’s worldview, with immediate additional associative connections related to cosmology and social structure: the Five Relationships of Confucianism, the five elements of Taoism, the five colors, the five tones, the five cardinal directions (with the center being the fifth). Kuunmong implicitly critiques King Sukjong’s violation of Confucianism’s Five Relationships (ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder to younger, and friend to friend), which were seen as vital to maintaining social stability, by integrating that structure into the Buddhist theme of dream and illusion.

For a Buddhist, there are five emotions and five spiritual faculties, and a process of five steps that condition one’s perception of reality.