Of the forty-five monasteries and monastic shrines which exist in the Diamond Mountain, enhancing its picturesqueness and supplying it with a religious and human interest, Chang-an Sa may be taken as a fair specimen of the three largest, as it is undoubtedly the oldest, assuming the correctness of a historical record quoted by Mr. Campbell, which gives the date of its restoration by two monks, Yul-sa and Chin-h’yo, as A.D. 515, in the reign of Pöp-heung, a king of Silla, then the most important of the kingdoms, afterwards amalgamated as Korea.
The large temple is a fine old building of the type adapted from Chinese Buddhist architecture, oblong, with a heavy tiled roof 48 feet in height, with wings, deep eaves protecting masses of richly-colored wood-carving. The lofty reticulated roof is internally supported on an arrangement of heavy beams, elaborately carved and painted in rich colors. The panels of the doors, which serve as windows, and let in a “dim religious light,” are bold fretwork, decorated in colors enriched with gold.
The roofs of the actual shrines are supported on wooden pillars 3 feet in diameter, formed of single trees, and the panelled ceilings are embellished with intricate designs in colors and gold. In one Sakyamuni’s image, with a distinctly Hindu cast of countenance, and a look of ineffable abstraction, sits under a highly decorative reticulated wooden canopy, with an altar before it, on which are brass incense burners, books of prayer, and lists of those deceased persons for whose souls masses have been duly paid for. Much rich brocade, soiled and dusty, and many gonfalons, hang round this shrine.
The “Hall of the Four Sages” contains three Buddhas in different attitudes of abstraction or meditation, a picture, wonderfully worked in gold and silks in Chinese embroidery, of Buddha and his disciples, for which the monks claim an antiquity of fourteen centuries, and sixteen Lohans, with their attendants. Along the side walls are a host of dæmons and animals. Another striking shrine is that dedicated to the Lord of the Buddhistic Hell and his ten princes. The monks call it the “Temple of the Ten Judges.” This is a shrine of great resort, and is much blackened by the smoke of incense and candles, but the infernal torments depicted in the pictures at the back of each judge are only too conspicuous. They are horrible beyond conception, and show a diabolical genius in hellish art, akin to that which inspired the creation of the groups in the Inferno of the temple of Kwan-yin at Ting-hai on Chusan, familiar to some of my readers.
Besides the ecclesiastical buildings and the common guest-room, there are Government buildings marked with the Korean national emblem, for the use of officials who go up to Chang-an Sa for pleasure.
It was difficult for me to find accommodation, but eventually a very pleasing young priest of high rank gave up his cell to me. Unfortunately, it was next the guests’ kitchen, and the flues from the fires passing under it, I was baked in a temperature of 91°, although, in spite of warnings about tigers, the dangers from which are by no means imaginary, I kept both door and window open all night. The cell had for its furniture a shrine of Gautama and an image of Kwan-yin on a shelf, and a few books, which I learned were Buddhist classics, not volumes, as in a cell which I occupied later, full of pictures by no means inculcating holiness. In the next room, equally hot, and without a chink open for ventilation, thirty guests moaned and tossed all night, a single candle dimly lighting a picture of Buddha and the dusty and hideous ornaments on the altar below.
At 9 P.M., midnight, and again at 4 A.M., which is the hour at which the monks rise, bells were rung, cymbals and gongs were beaten, and the praises of Buddha were chanted in an unknown tongue. A feature at once cheerful and cheerless is the presence at Chang-an Sa of a number of bright, active, orphan boys from ten to thirteen years old, who are at present servitors, but who will one day become priests.
It is an exercise of forbearance to abstain from writing much about the beauties of Chang-an Sa as seen in two days of perfect heavenliness. It is a calm retreat, that small, green, semicircular plateau which the receding hills have left, walling in the back and sides with rocky precipices half clothed with forest, while the bridgeless torrent in front, raging and thundering among huge boulders of pink granite, secludes it from all but the adventurous. Alike in the rose of sunrise, in the red and gold of sunset, or gleaming steely blue in the prosaic glare of midday, the great rock peak on the left bank, one of the highest in the range, compels ceaseless admiration. The appearance of its huge vertical topmost ribs has been well compared to that of the “pipes of an organ,” this organ-pipe formation being common in the range; seams and ledges halfway down give roothold to a few fantastic conifers and azaleas, and lower still all suggestion of form is lost among dense masses of magnificent forest.
As I proposed to take a somewhat different route from Yu-chöm Sa (the first temple on the eastern slope) from that traversed by my predecessors, the Hon. G. W. Curzon and Mr. Campbell, I left the ponies and baggage at Chang-an Sa, the mapu, who were bent on ku-kyöng, accompanying me for part of the distance, and took a five days’ journey in the glorious Keum-Kang San in unrivalled weather, in air which was elixir, crossing the range to Yu-chöm Sa by the An-mun-chai (Goose-Gate Terrace), 4,215 feet in altitude, and recrossing it by the Ki-cho, 3,570 feet.
Taking two coolies to carry essentials, and a na-myö or mountain chair with two bearers, for the whole journey, all supplied by the monks, I walked the first stage to the monasteries of P’yo-un Sa and Chyang-yang Sa, the latter at an elevation of about 2,760 feet. From it the view, which passes for the grandest in Korea, is obtained of the “Twelve Thousand Peaks.” There is assuredly no single view that I have seen in Japan or even in Western China which equals it for beauty and grandeur. Across the grand gorge through which the Chang-an Sa torrent thunders, and above primæval tiger-haunted forests with their infinity of green, rises the central ridge of the Keum-Kang San, jagged all along its summit, each yellow granite pinnacle being counted as a peak.