The qualities which the upper classes of Korea have most in common are—love of art and literature, reverence for law, kindness of disposition, and love of nature. The point upon which they most differ is religion. Korea is really a country without religion. The upper classes are intellectual to a degree, but their intellectuality is invariably of the agnostic order. Rationalism and agnosticism are the only recognized religions in upper Korean circles.
The Korean populace also profess agnosticism, but do not practise it; at least they do not practise rationalism; for if they believe in no gods, most of them believe in countless devils.
The sacred devil-trees are supposed to be (after the blind) most efficacious in ridding the land of the spirits of evil. A writer—one of the best writers on Korea—thus describes a devil-tree upon which he came one bleak autumn day:—“An ancient tree, around whose base lies piled a heap of stones. The tree is sacred; superstition has preserved it, where most of its fellows have gone to feed the subterranean ovens. It is not usually very large, nor does it look extremely venerable, so that it is at least open to suspicion that its sanctity is an honour which is passed along from oak to acorn or from pine to seed: however, it is usually a fair specimen of a tree, and, where there are few others to vie with it, comes out finely by comparison: otherwise there is nothing distinctive about the tree, except that it exists,—that it is not cut down and borne off to the city on the back of some bull, there to vanish in the smoke. On its branches hang, commonly, a few old rags, evidently once of brilliantly-coloured cloth; they look to be shreds of the garments of such unwary travellers as approached too close; but a nearer inspection shows them to be tied on designedly. The heap of small stones piled around the base of the tree gives one the impression at first that the road is about to undergo repairs, which it sadly needs, and that the stones have been collected for the purpose. This, however, is a fallacy: no Korean road ever is repaired.
“The spot is called Son Wang Don, or ‘The Home of the King of the Fairies.’ The stones help to form what was once a fairy temple, now a devil-jail; and the strips of cloth are pieces of garments from those who believed themselves possessed of devils, or feared lest they might become so. A man caught by an evil spirit exiles a part of his clothing to the branches of one of these trees, so as to delude the demon into attaching there.”
We have tried to peep at Söul—the Söul of the people. But not all Söul is plebeian. It has a most decided aristocracy, both architectural and human.
Söul has no temples. None may be built within her walls. Of all civilized countries, Korea is the one country without a religion. Religion or its analogous superstitions are there, of course; but that religion is in Korea, not part of Korea. In Korea, religion is under a ban of official discountenance, or national discredence. Such temples as do exist in Korea dwell (like architectural lepers) without the city’s walls. But Söul has her official buildings, and the dwellings of her rich. Above all, she has her palaces.
But hold! there is one temple within the walls of Söul; but it is there on sufferance, there against the law. And it is just inside the walls. It is on a high, lonely mountain place, and far remote from the actual city—the throbbing, breathing, human city.
And Söul has also what was once a temple. It is as interesting as anything in Söul. In the first place it is the only pagoda in Söul—almost, if not quite, the only pagoda in Korea. In the second place, it is extremely beautiful. In the third place, it, more than any building I know, accents the decay of all things human, even of (those perhaps greatest of all human things) great thought-systems.
Yesterday—the yesterday of five hundred years ago—this, Söul’s one pagoda, was a Buddhist temple. To-day it is a neglected, unconsidered, tolerated, rather than admired, ornament, in a middle-class Korean’s back yard.
The pagoda of Söul owes its solitary, but not honoured, old age to the fact that unlike most pagodas of its period and kind, it was built of stone. It has eight stories (representative of eight stages or degrees of the Buddhist heaven); but it is entirely composed of two pieces of stone. In idea it is Chinese; but its form is a modification or a local adaptation of its idea; and it is peculiarly rich in most exquisite Korean carvings.