Man from Earth
I spun the axe left and right like a pair of nunchaku.
It wasn’t really necessary, but apparently it was what people wanted. Even in the middle of all this, the cheers bursting up from here and there made it plain that Joseon people loved a spectacle.
“You said that after last year’s war, you’d gained the ear of the Dragon Kings, didn’t you?”
[Indeed. Leave it to me.]
In a way, it was moving.
Only a short while ago, he’d been screaming for every Catholic to be killed, and now he was trying to protect them instead.
But my sentiment shattered like a wave the very next instant.
[All those bastards born to Yang Gwi-ja are about to die. They think that even if they fall into the water, the Dragon King of the Southern Sea will save them, wrapping them in lotus blossoms like Sim Cheong. Let the ship so much as crack, and before the sail even touches the water, my servant will cut off every one of their heads.]
Who’re you calling your servant? Call me your host, if anything.
[You meddle in the mortal world by putting humans forward? And that’s violating your nature? Very well. This fellow interfered in the divine realm first. An axe that smashed a god’s head can easily handle hundreds of humans. If you understand, stop this at once.]
The storm ceased.
I really didn’t want to do it, but I took the axe and, following the Mountain Spirit’s advice, threw it down and lodged it in the gunwale at my feet.
The heavy thunk of the axe biting into wood had the same effect as a burst of fireworks at a concert.
The Joseon onlookers, having caught the cue, raised their hands in unison.
“Ooooh!”
“Such divine power from Park Dokae’s axe!”
“You Catholic bastards don’t have anything like that, do you?”
Watching their cheers, I felt a little guilty.
I felt even worse when Choi Yang-eop came toward me with a furious expression.
It reminded me of Easter at the training camp.
We’d broken the Catholic-Protestant truce that said, since neither side had any money, we should keep things simple, and the chaplain had gone and arranged a McDonald’s seven-item set.
Of course, the trainees who’d heard about it in advance all crowded over to the Protestant side.
The chaplain who came to protest looked just like this.
“Even the faithful people of Israel, though they fled slavery, did not even endure the forty days of Lent before worshiping idols. How am I supposed to lead people down the hard road ahead? I may not have received any stone tablets, but I cannot simply overlook this!”
This one’s lost his mind too.
I looked at him for a moment.
Choi Yang-eop’s expression shifted to one of alarm.
“O-of course, there’s no way you really stopped this storm. I only meant that you shouldn’t be misleading the believers like this.”
[It was you who misled them. If you feel wronged, then show a sign of a miracle like I do!]
The Mountain Spirit’s thunderous laughter was thoroughly obnoxious.
But I had no rebuttal. Too many people had already seen it.
Some had already gone cold toward their faith. Of course, since belief doesn’t actually change according to evidence, everyone except those few still seemed to believe Choi Yang-eop’s claim that I was a Catholic.
Choi Je-u, the future leader of Donghak, looked the most shocked of all.
He had a face like the opposite of a cold skeptic.
He wasn’t thinking something strange, was he?
But that wasn’t the sort of worry I needed to have about Choi Je-u, or anyone else.
The Mountain Spirit, who had been looking in the same direction as me, whispered in a voice like an idol with a goat’s head.
[An excellent thought has just come to me.]
* * *
The fleet first landed on Goerido.
There, the craftsmen were handed over to Kim Yang-won, who was acting in Taesu’s place. Since the artisans here had originally been Kim Yang-won’s associates, he was the ideal man for the job.
Kim Yang-won, awestruck, slung the Samneungjang over his shoulder.
“Coming and going, coming and going, leaving and coming again. The sea of people stretches boundless and endless!” he cried. “I lived long in Seoul, too, but I’ve never seen so many people won over so quickly.”
Goerido, where copper casting had been the limit of local work, saw its efficiency soar as technicians from many different fields were brought together.
The industry that contributed most to that efficiency hardly needs saying.
As Choi Je-u had said, Kim Yang-won’s profession was, like that of most thugs, that of a pimp.
He brought the bar hostesses he knew from Seoul and opened a tavern on Goerido. Not a single technician ran away.
The larger island of Gyodongdo was assigned to Choi Yang-eop and Deacon Gong.
Unlike Goerido, Gyodongdo was not uninhabited. The Gyodongdo team began work there as best they could, using the ruins of the emptied Yeongchae and the houses abandoned by civilians as a base.
This place would serve as both a military base and a rear logistics zone for smuggling operations.
When things were more or less settled, Taesu stood Choi Je-u in front of him and said,
“You are not averse to consorting with heretics when seeking the Way far and wide, so why do you avert your eyes from what you saw today?”
Even though Taesu’s tone seemed to have changed abruptly, Choi Je-u felt no suspicion. People lose all doubt about the things they most want to hear.
Choi Je-u’s eyes widened.
“I-I simply could not believe it. Then are you saying the merchant guildmaster truly commanded such a divine miracle?”
“No. I am but a tiny and insignificant human. How could taming wind and rain be the work of man? Without the response of Heaven, Earth, and the gods, it would be impossible.”
Choi Je-u could not even sense the faintest resistance in Taesu’s eyes.
That was how desperate he was.
He needed some way to save this world of misery and the people suffering in it.
And that “way” might lie with the one who was, right now, actually doing just that in the Kaesong and Ganghwado region.
At the very least, it would never be found in this court, which denied a man even the chance to govern the country merely because he was the son of a remarried widow.
The axe of Park Dokae saved the people abandoned by the state. Then when the state abandons all of its people, he may yet save the whole mortal world.
The people helped by Park Dokae were not only direct cases like Son Yu-jak.
The peddlers who shouldered a hundred geun a day and walked a hundred ri, only to be beaten and robbed by soldiers idling on the roads, extorted by petty clerks, and tricked out of their goods by the taesang sub-office, were also enjoying prosperity unprecedented in their lives.
Even the religious fanatics despised by the very lowest ranks, the sort of mosquitoes and peddlers alike, had likewise been saved by Park Dokae—though perhaps they were being treated a little roughly.
No matter how one looked at it, Park Dokae was hardly a good man, but Choi Je-u did not cling to the childish notion that good and evil were fixed temperaments. His long wandering had not been in vain.
Beyond the nature of good and evil, in the true nature of things—jinseong museonak, “true nature has no good or evil”—there stood a single god, an ilshin, to whom one could entrust oneself.
Choi Je-u’s tone had become respectfully formal as he asked,
“Then how may one attain the response of Heaven and Earth and the gods? I had thought to seek one means of doing so through Western teachings, but must I abandon that?”
“No.”
If Choi Je-u ran off and said he wouldn’t take part in the Christian armed-Taliban business, Taesu would be in trouble.
“Then must we abandon the orthodox learning upheld by the state—Confucianism?”
“That, too, is not so. The greatest Way is not found in casting something aside and leaving it behind. It lies only in embracing all things and holding them within.”
It was as if lightning had struck Choi Je-u’s mind.
Truth cannot be reached by a process of elimination, by denying whatever is not truth.
Truth lies in expansion. The totality and harmony of what is possible and impossible, good and evil—that is the universe, and that is truth.
“Please, I beg for more detailed instruction.”
Taesu spoke in the same tone he was sure would have made Choi Yang-eop conclude he had been possessed by a ghost—correctly so.
“There is Seokmodo between the Seogeomdo and Gyodongdo we visited today, and in a quiet cave on Nakkasan, there stands Beopmunsa. Take this axe there and meditate for one night. You will gain great enlightenment.”
“I shall certainly carry it out.”
* * *
Honestly, I even wanted the axe to fit Choi Je-u better and just possess him instead of me.
Of course, as with all things like this, reality was not so easy.
Choi Je-u returned the next day, carefully carrying the axe. The night had been quiet, but now it was going to get noisy again.
I studied Choi Je-u’s face.
Then I asked the Mountain Spirit, ‘Did you brainwash him or something?’
[No. I cannot speak at will unless it is to a fool connected to my spirit, like you.]
The Mountain Spirit, who shared my soul and spirit, could tell what I meant when I used language.
So by now, even when I spoke in modern expressions or concepts, he understood almost everything. We’d had plenty of chances to talk about my “hometown,” after all.
[I merely appeared to him in a dream by borrowing the power of the Avalokiteshvara enshrined there and the mountain spirit of Nakkasan. Since the royal aura also lies over Ganghwa, you might call it a synthesis of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.]
You’re saying he made up for lacking power by fusing three religions?
I have at least some objections on the Buddhist side.
I knew Beopmunsa was on Ganghwado, and it wasn’t some abandoned temple—it was an actual temple, repaired by the state and still inhabited by monks.
So did everyone run away when Choi Je-u showed up with an axe? According to boatman Kim Sun-won, there were even the stone statues of the Twenty-Two Arhats there, handed down since the Silla dynasty. What the hell were they doing?
I was too afraid to ask. I was afraid that if I did, I’d become part of this uncanny thing myself.
So I asked something else.
‘What did you do in the dream?’
[Ask that fellow. Anyway, from now on he’ll work of his own accord like a willing sucker… no, I mean, he’ll work hard.]
Taesu did as he said.
The next moment, he realized he had fallen for the Mountain Spirit’s scheme to the very end.
Choi Je-u said with an expression of deep emotion,
“How did you know that I attained great awakening through a dream vision inside the stone chamber? Indeed, this is not the work of a single self; it is one god revealing itself through all things.”
“……”
“In that cave, I came to understand the great current of what the gods call Donghak. It is not Donghak for rejecting Western learning. It is Donghak for embracing all of Western learning as well. I shall devote myself to the great work of the merchant guildmaster from now on, too.”
“……”
“You’re not planning to start some kind of sect or church somewhere later, are you?”
“I cannot say I never entertained such a thought, but now I see that, too, was merely attachment to the illusion of self. It is the work of the divine, not mine or the merchant guildmaster’s. All things will simply unfold according to principle.”
I could roughly tell what he was saying. Let’s just stop here.
There was probably some old movie with a scene like this.
I remembered those professors having a mental breakdown when Jesus confessed that he had really been their retired senior professor all along.
I felt like I’d react the same way. So I decided to get on with the work.
* * *
The problem with moving the able-bodied men first was the livelihood of their wives, children, and elderly parents.
In Joseon, men did not bear the entire burden of the household economy. So it wasn’t as if they would start starving the very next day.
But in this age, with no equipment to speak of, the loss of labor was far more painful. It was time to plow the fields—who was supposed to pull the plow? If you had an ox, you wouldn’t even go near a so-called promised land.
Choi Je-u said,
“If we are to buy all the grain needed to feed so many people, only the river merchants of Seoul will do. But the river merchants are deeply entangled with high officials in the court, so they will be troublesome. Word is certain to spread.”
He would also dislike ignoring what was happening in Ganghwado and Kaesong.
Taesu looked troubled. Then Choi Je-u came up with an idea that could only be described as having received the fire of the Holy Spirit.
“Since it is spring, I shall try to obtain government grain advances from the authorities.”
Taesu knew the concept well enough.
In the age of “reason and science” in Britain, a nation so prosperous it would rather burn grain than give a single kernel to the “natural-selection-inadequates” lacking enough effort, Joseon was the country of “feeling and ethics” that spent most of its nonexistent national wealth on relief for the poor.
That was hwangok, the government grain loan system.
When people think of hwangok, they usually imagine the government lending a single doe of miscellaneous grain in spring, then demanding a whole sack of white rice in autumn as a grotesque form of plunder.
That part was true. But there are no one-sided relationships in this world.
The system survived for centuries precisely because there was money to be made even from below.
Receive in spring, then skip town in autumn.
Transfer the deed of property to the tenant farmer and make the landlord the recipient of the baekgup exemption.
Use outlying household slaves scattered across the provinces for automated county-level hwangok harvesting.
Break up families and manufacture parents and children as readily as Lu Bu treating the Three Bonds and Five Virtues as a joke.
Every trick later used in modern welfare fraud had already been perfected in Joseon.
The Joseon officials knew it, too.
But as with welfare everywhere, the problem was that there were also plenty of people who genuinely needed help.
Besides, the widowed, widower, orphaned, and solitary—hwangwa godok—had been a clearly designated welfare class since ancient times.
Except for widowers, the other three groups swarmed toward the Gunjachang under the jurisdiction of Ganghwado and Kaesong.
“My husband ran off with a concubine and took our whole fortune with him!”
“My father went out to sea and drowned!”
“My son got himself into gambling debts and ran away in the dead of night….”
The reasons were so thoroughly Joseon that no one could possibly find them suspicious.
The petty clerks felt an instinctive unease.
Interest income from hwangok was an essential source of government finance even before extortion.
After King Yeongjo cut the state’s revenue in half with the pincers of the Gyunyeok Law, local governments had basically had no budget at all.
That was because the taxes local offices had been tacitly taking from salt, fish, and their private dry fields were all seized under the pretext that they were “implicit,” in order to make up for the tax cuts elsewhere.
So although the hwangok interest rate was ten percent, that alone was not enough to run an office.
The solution, as always, was Joseon’s specialty: quantum physics.
Just as a single fundamental particle somehow passes through various paths “at the same time,” this ten percent interest also existed simultaneously in multiple functions.
One full ten percent for the provincial office that was originally supposed to receive it, one for the petty clerk’s fee, one for the magistrate who had parents to support, and another for the military unit for reasons no one could quite explain—these all left such unmistakable interference patterns that tax evasion was absolutely impossible.
It was never “excessive interest.”
Confucian scholars would never practice such tyranny.
They were merely allowing the interest to pass through multiple slits at once.
If you don’t understand that, then that’s normal. Richard Feynman said it was normal not to understand quantum mechanics.
Manufacturing was something only modern countries like Britain did.
The more modern the country, the more it outsourced physical labor to the lowborn and made money by clicking a mouse.
Hwangok was the most vital source of revenue in the treasury of finance superpower Joseon.
Because it was such an important business, the petty clerks were as uneasy as a loan shark when a lawyer came asking to borrow money.
Normally, hwangok meant forcing grain into the hands of people who swore they wouldn’t borrow it, or worse, recording that they had borrowed it when they hadn’t, then collecting based on the strict documents of Joseon’s administrative state.
But now the clerks in Kaesong and Ganghwado were, astonishingly, urging the people to make sound household-loan plans.
“You really can pay it back, right? Those who can’t repay hwangok get beaten with a staff even if they’re yangban—what do you think will happen to trash like you? If you’re careless, you won’t be able to avoid getting your limbs broken!”
The Catholics, who already had a God-in-Heaven apartment promised to them after death, weren’t afraid. Hadn’t Park Dokae already shown proof that this wasn’t a real estate scam?
“Hah, starving to death now or getting beaten to death in autumn makes no difference. Better to live one season longer, like a grasshopper.”
The Gunjachang was stripped clean like a swarm of locusts had descended on it.
The clerks decided to think positively for the time being.
Anyway, with so many customers, they could expect more interest income than usual come autumn—as long as the people paid it back.
As long as they paid it back.
Author’s Note
1. The poem quoted by Kim Yang-won is Park Jega’s classical Chinese poem Seongsijondo, which describes Seoul. The concepts Choi Je-u thought of—jinseong museonak, ilshin (Haneullim), asang, and so on—are all doctrines of Donghak.