In 1592, Hideyoshi sent his great army from Japan to conquer Korea. It was under two generals, one a Christian and the other a Buddhist. The invaders wrought great destruction in the unfortunate peninsula. Many of the temples and monasteries in the mountains were destroyed, altars were stripped of treasures, monks and priests driven from their sanctuaries. During this invasion some of the priests showed themselves loyal, thus Hulbert tells us:
Hyu-Chung, known throughout the Eight Provinces as the great teacher of Sosan, was a man of great natural ability as well as of great learning. His pupils were numbered by thousands and were found in every province. He called together two thousand of them and appeared before the king at Euiju and said: “We are of the common people, but we are all the king’s servants and two thousand of us have come to die for Your Majesty.” The king was much pleased by this demonstration of loyalty and made Hyu-Chung a Priest-General and told him to go into camp at Pop-Heung Monastery. He did so, and from that point sent out a call to all the monasteries in the land. In Chulla province was a warrior-monk, Ch’oe-Yung and at Diamond Mountain another named Yu-Chung. These came with over a thousand followers and went into camp a few miles to the East of P’yeng-Yang. They had no intention of engaging in actual battle, but they acted as spies, took charge of the commissariat and made themselves generally useful. During battle they stood behind the troops and shouted encouragement. Yu-Chung, trusting to his priestly garb, went into P’yeng-Yang to see the Japanese generals.
Thus we see, that notwithstanding the condition of poverty, ignorance and unimportance to which the Buddhist monks had sunk there were still among them teachers of great learning with crowds of students, who were ready to serve their king in his hour of trial.
In 1660 a curious condition had arisen. With these mountain monasteries open to all who came, they had become a refuge for the disaffected. Suppose a man had trouble with his family, he would become religious and retire to a monastery as a monk; if a man failed in business, he might find refuge there; for one reason or another it was easy for a man who was vicious or a failure or unhappy to seek escape in the mountain monasteries. Thousands flocked to them until the government became disturbed and about 1660 the king issued an edict “that no more men with family ties should desert them in this way and that all monks who had families living should doff their religious garb and come back to the world and support their families like honest men.”
Notwithstanding neglect, poverty, and limitations the monasteries showed remarkable recuperative power after the destruction wrought by Hideyoshi’s armies. Thus, Pawpchu-sa was practically destroyed and the great mass of fine buildings now there has been constructed since. Some of the great monasteries farther south also suffered severely; yet the damage has been fully repaired. ([Plate II].)
Nor did scholarship completely disappear in these later years. When Dr. Legge translated Fa-hien’s diary into English, he had four editions of the work at hand—two Chinese, one Japanese and one Korean; the latter, which bears the date 1726, was the most satisfactory and was superior as a piece of book-making.
KOREAN BUDDHISM:
CONDITION
With the exile of Buddhism to the mountains several results ensued. In the first place each monastery became a thing by itself; there was no unity, no combination, no force in the movement of Buddhism as such, over the kingdom. In the second place, not being permitted to enter the cities, the Buddhist priests came to be looked upon with contempt by the people; they were, of course, beggars, vowed to poverty—they had always been that, but they had had respect; with their seclusion in the mountain monasteries they lost what honor had been attributed to them; they became ignorant, vicious and depraved.
In his History of Korea Dr. Hulbert says:
“In 1902, a very determined attempt to revive the Buddhist cult was made. The Emperor consented to the establishment of a great central monastery for the whole country in the vicinity of Seoul, and in it a Buddhist high priest who was to control the whole church in the land. It was a ludicrous attempt, because Buddhism in Korea is dead.”