Kuunmong, 'A Nine Cloud Dream', holds a special place in the history of Korean fiction: it has traditionally been regarded as the oldest major novel written in the Korean language, yet it is a story of China and there exists no Korean text that can confidently be identified as the original. It is scarcely a true novel in the modern western sense, but more nearly a romance, which at first reading tells little of the author or his times.
It was written in the seventeenth century, when Korean culture was still dominated by Chinese influences. Even the language of everyday life was deeply imbued with Chinese thought-forms. Korean belongs to a quite different linguistic family from Chinese, but as Latin was the language of literature and administration in the Europe of the high Middle Ages, so Chinese was the language of literature and administration in Korea until the end of the nineteenth century. Koreans looked to China for their artistic, political and moral ideals, and Korean compositions in Chinese often earned the esteem of Chinese critics.
Most of what was best in Korean aristocratic culture had been learned from China. Confucianism, in the syncretistic form developed in China during the Sung dynasty, was the official philosophy and, in effect, religion of the Korean nation. It provided the canons of art and literature as well as the code of ethics. Buddhism was in a period of eclipse, though far from dead: its temples flourished in the mountains outside the cities, and its mysticism satisfied the emotional needs of women, for whom Confucianism had little to offer. Taoism did not exist as a formally-organized religious system, and like Buddhism was officially frowned on, though its myths were known from Chinese books and it was influential in so far as it was mediated through the works of the Sung Confucian commentators. The ruling dynasty had deliberately developed a Confucian system of government with elaborate attention to ritual propriety and manners, which in theory ensured both the continued blessing of heaven and the political stability of the state.
Kuunmong reflects this background: it is a Korean story, but it is set in an idealized China. Korean ideals could not, in the seventeenth century, have been imagined in any other fictional setting. Paradoxically, the chinoiserie of Kuunmong is one of its most typically Korean characteristics.
The author was Kim Man-jung, commonly referred to by his pen name, Sŏp’o (Western Port). He was born in 1637, shortly after the death of his father, who committed suicide on the island of Kanghwa in the aftermath of the Manchu invasion of Korea in that year. The fact that he had never seen his father and was brought up with his only brother in a household of women deeply influenced Kim Man-jung for the whole of his life. His mother was a Yun of the Haep’yŏng clan, and a granddaughter of the royal princess Chŏnghye. Haep’yŏng Yuns were noted for strict adherence to Confucian propriety, especially their womenfolk. In spite of the poverty of the boy’s early days, their social status was maintained and one of Kim Man-jung’s nieces eventually married into the royal family and became Queen In’gyŏng.
His mother was devoted to poetry and learning. To ensure that her sons should learn the Chinese classics and poetry, she taught them herself, begging or borrowing books for them, and even making her own handwritten copies. The effect of this genteel female-dominated upbringing shows in Kim Man-jung’s writings. His poems have a concentration on romance, and his novels a preoccupation with the life of women that accord perfectly with his reputation, which was that of a womanizer. Extreme filial piety and concern for aristocratic manners are characteristic themes of Kuunmong and typical of the impression that he made on his contemporaries.
At the age of 28 he was placed at the top of the list in the national civil service examination, which was the only gateway to a political career, and began to climb through the ranks of officialdom. It was a time when Korea should have been bending her energies to the reconstruction of the country after the destruction caused by the Japanese invasion in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the Manchu invasions at the time of Kim Man-jung’s birth, but the aristocrats of the Korean court spent their efforts in jostling for power. They formed themselves into parties and then redivided themselves. Public life was a constant warfare of accusations and memorials to the throne. The questions at issue were often purely ceremonial; yet the fate of the losers was usually not only dismissal, but also exile to the remote countryside.
In 1671, Kim Man-jung was appointed a royal agent to travel in the provinces incognito and report to the king on the doings of local governments. In the following year he was back at the capital in the central government, but in 1674, on the death of Queen Insŏn, the statesmen indulged in one of their fiercer quarrels. This time it was about the appropriate form of mourning for the Lady Chaŭi, who was the royal consort next in rank to the dead queen. Kim’s party was disgraced and he was removed from office. In 1679 he was restored to office and, after serving with the Board of Rites, in 1683 he became Minister of the Board of Works, and then held office in the justiciary, but was impeached again by the other party and forced out of office. In 1685 he was back at work once more at a high post in the office which concerned itself with the royal archives and rescripts. Before long he was in trouble again because he protested against what he considered an injustice in the treatment of another scholar-official. This time he was exiled to Sŏnch’ŏn, in the northern province of P’yŏngan. A year later, in 1688, he was recalled and was at once embroiled in the troubles arising from the king’s dismissal of his queen, Inhyŏn, of the Min family. She was sent out of the palace to live in the city, and a concubine named Chang was put in her place. King Sukchong had more trouble with the palace women than any other Korean king, and this particular story has passed into Korean folklore. The women were not only jealous of each other, but were involved with their family connections in the court factions. Kim Man-jung was again in disfavor, and in 1689 he was exiled to the island of Namhae off the south coast, near Yosu. He died there in 1692, before his faction could regain influence in Seoul. His mother had died while he was in exile and he never recovered from the loss.
However, in 1698 he was posthumously reinstated, and a few years later when Queen Chang was dismissed on the downfall of her party, he was officially given the honorific title of Munhyo—a name whose meaning honors his filial piety and his literary skill.
As with most personalities of the period, it is difficult to unravel from the records any reliable picture of his character. He is either praised or blamed, according to the political affiliations of the writer. However, it is clear that he was a man of unusually wide learning, interested in religion, music, mathematics, and astronomy as well as literature. His acquaintance with music is amply demonstrated by the subject matter of some of his poetry and also appears in the details of Kuunmong. His writings consist mostly of poetry and essays published, according to the custom of the time, in a collected edition after his death; and two novels: Kuunmong and Sa-ssi namjŏng ki (The Story of Lady Hsieh’s Dismissal). The latter, much shorter and slighter than Kuunmong, was written about 1689 or later. It is a story about concubinage which, although it is set in Ming China, is only too clearly a satire about King Sukchong’s home life.
The history of the text of Kuunmong is obscure. The tradition is consistent that Kim Man-jung wrote it to console his mother when he was first parted from her at the time of his exile to Sŏnch’ ŏn. He was then about fifty years old. There is no more reason to doubt this tradition than there is to believe the more elaborate form of it that says the book was completed in a single night. The finished work does not bear the marks of extempore writing.
Kim T’ae-jun in his pioneer work on old Korean fiction Chosŏn sosŏl sa, published in 1933, was the first to state that Kuunmong was written in Korean and later translated into Chinese. No evidence was adduced to prove this opinion, but it went unquestioned until Chŏng Kyu-bok in 1961 published the first serious study of the various editions, and came to the tentative conclusion that the Chinese text printed from woodblocks in Chŏnju in 1803 was the oldest and most authoritative extant version. All the Korean versions appeared to be translations from the Chinese, and it is known that Kim Man-jung’s mother, for whom the book was written, was devoted to Chinese literature. Furthermore, the book is full of formal documents—memorials to the throne, decrees, prayers and poems—and it is unlikely that these would have been written in Korean by a man of Kim Man-jung’s background and period.
There was, however, a lacuna in the argument for the priority of the Chinese text. The 1803 edition, though fuller than any of the Korean versions, lacked one important episode that some of them contained: the attractive description of the state of mind of Hsing-chen when he awakes from his dream at the end of the book. This discrepancy gained additional interest in that the ‘awakening passage’ was contained in J. S. Gale’s English translation, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, published in London in 1922. Gale’s book corresponded to no single known text. Scholars concluded that Gale must have translated from the Chinese with reference to a Korean version. In 1971 when I found among his papers in Montreal a note saying he had worked from a Chinese text and never seen a Korean text, it became clear that he had used a Chinese text other than the 1803 edition, and unknown to modern scholars.
Among my own books was a battered single volume from a two-volume woodblock Chinese edition of Kuunmong which I had found in an antique shop in Chŏnju in November 1970, in such poor condition that the shopkeeper had made me a present of it and I had not bothered to examine it. When I looked at it in the autumn of 1971 I discovered that it was printed at Naju in 1725 and contained the ‘awakening’ passage. Professor Chŏng had discovered a similar volume at Taegu in 1970, and An Ch’un-gŭn possesses another copy. The first volume of this woodblock edition has not been found, but four manuscripts of the whole text have been identified. Professor Chŏng published an article describing the 1725 text, which could then be identified as the basis of Gale’s translation.
Professor Chŏng’s continued investigations led him to examine manuscript copies of the Chinese texts more closely than had been done before. He has classified them in three groups, two typified by the 1725 and 1803 woodblock texts, the third distinguished by the fact that the title of the first chapters, which in the woodblock edition begins with Yŏnhwa-bong, ‘Lotus peak’, in this group of manuscripts begins with Nojon, ‘an old monk’.
The 1725 text is superior to the 1803 text, but both have misprints and errors of various kinds, and lack whole sentences of the Nojon text. The Nojon text is therefore probably the original, but it exists only in manuscript and no modern edition has yet been published.
The various Korean vernacular versions can all now be shown to have been translated from the Chinese. Three are of greater importance than the others: one in Seoul National University library, one in the possession of Professor Yi Ka-wŏn, and a translation of the Chinese Nojon text known to Professor Chŏng. The Seoul National University text is an abbreviated translation of the Nojon text, and the manuscript probably dates from the second part of the nineteenth century. Professor Yi’s copy is a more recent version, partly dependent on the Seoul National University text, but also related to a metal type Korean version, the Pangmun edition of 1917. The Yi Ka-wŏn text was published in an annotated edition by its owner in 1955; the Seoul National University text was not published until late in 1972.
When I made the first draft of my translation in 1968-9 I used the Yi Ka-wŏn text, supplementing its obvious shortcomings from the only longer version then available, the 1803 Chinese text. I have now, however, made further amendments and additions in the light of the Seoul National University text since published. If a critical edition of the Nojon Chinese text were available, the ideal course would obviously be to make a translation based on that text—but I see little benefit to be derived from waiting for that possibility. The history of the text is a story of attrition, and the best we can do for the time being is to supply the deficiencies of the shorter texts while making sometimes arbitrary decisions about those loci where the texts are at variance with each other. The differences are all in matters of detail, chiefly in details of dialogue.
The Chinese text is divided into sixteen unequal parts, each entitled with a Chinese couplet, after the style of Chinese novels. These sixteen chapters are sometimes ill-adapted to the structure of the work, so I have ignored them and made an entirely new division into sections which I believe will give a better picture of the real shape of the book. It is composed of the description of a long dream with a prologue and an epilogue. There are several dreams within the dream, but they are incidental rather than structural. The thread of the story is simple and chronologically continuous.
The prologue tells how a Buddhist monk came to transmigrate into a brilliant young Confucian scholar, and the epilogue tells how he becomes a monk again. The bulk of the story is the ‘dream’ of the successful career of his Confucian manifestation. The dream itself falls roughly into two halves. In the first half the hero meets eight women, and in the second half he marries them. The women are met in different places, and the changes of locality, with a different woman as the center of interest in each place, give the first half of the book a lively variety. This episodic narrative is bound together by the involved story of his relations with the girl (Ch’iung-pei) to whom he is formally espoused, and the problem posed by the emperor’s demand that he should marry the princess Lan-yang.
The second half of the dream is an account of happiness and honor after the winning of glory and success. In contrast to the first half, there is little movement, but much conversation. Such psychological interest as the characters evoke is developed in this section, where the personalities of the women become more distinct. The problems which the narrator has set himself to solve in the first half have been settled, particularly the problem of the imperial command and faithfulness to a marriage contract. The less interesting problem of precedence between the princess of the line and the adoptive princess takes up some of the story; and the author allows himself two set pieces: the hunting picnic (owing much to Tu Fu’s poetry) and the wine punishment scene. Finally there is the best piece of reflective writing in the book when the old man and his eight consorts play the flute in the twilight on a hilltop. The reprise of elements from the earlier part of the book is used to unify the whole work.
After the vigorous narrative quality and taut dialogue of the first part of the book, the later sections move more slowly. But they have a proper function. The point of the story demands that the hero should be more than successful; he must enjoy all the fruits of success. The main events of the plot cover only four years of the prime of his youth. The remaining years of life—till he grows grey-headed—are compressed into a few pages. This again might look so disproportionate that the story could perhaps have better ended when the hero had won all possible worldly honors. However, the ideal of blessedness in Kim Man-jung’s day was an old age lived out in peace and plenty, and without such a long slow evening of life the impact of the story would have been weakened.
The real theme of the book is in its title. It describes the life of a man who achieves all the earthly bliss that can be attained. Nothing ever seriously spoils the happiness of his existence. Yet at the end of the book it all turns out to be a dream, not because it could not happen, but because even though it should happen, it would be of no real value. Kim Man-jung does not say that because the life of man is painful and cruel, it is worthless and must be transcended. He says that even at its impossibly ideal best it would be no more than a dream. The tradition about the writing of the story is significant. His mother was to be offered the consolations of philosophy, not merely diverted by the romance. In spite of the chequered career of her son, he had tasted success, and both he and she enjoyed the pleasures of poetry. Nevertheless, the bitterness of exile did not mean less or more than the success. Life is a spring afternoon’s dream.
There is a tradition in Korean Buddhism which accords with the later additions to the famous Chinese ‘Ox-herding pictures’. In the end the ascetic who has achieved Buddhahood is able to return to the market-place and live unperturbed in the ordinary world. The same theme can be found in those Christian writers who assert that the negative way of asceticism can be perfected in a world-accepting, positive view. Kuunmong is not far from this concept, because while it says clearly that all life is a dream, it does not reject the dream. At the end of the book the parable of Chuang-tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly is quoted and there is a suspicion that the dream may not have been unreal. Yet, whether it should be interpreted as unreal or not, the writing and the interest of the novel are mostly centerd in the delights of the hero’s loves and life in the imperial world. It is a Buddhist novel, but it is not by any means a simple presentation of a via negativa, a theology of escape.
Three religions are described in the book and they are described as they existed in China rather than as they have ever existed in Korea. The manners are purely Confucian; most of the mythology has the exotic mysticism of Taoism; and the underlying thought is Buddhist. However, it was the normal habit of Korean storytellers to set their tales in China. The choice of the T’ang period would also be most natural, because it was regarded as the golden age not only of Chinese culture, but of world culture.
The consistency of the setting is remarkable. The geography is right: the story starts in the region a little south of modern Shanghai, and the journeys are rational. The historical background too is reasonable. The only anachronisms occur in a few of the literary allusions made by the characters. The story is set in the earlier part of the ninth century, when very old men could recall the Emperor Hsüan Tsung (reigned 713-736), and less than a century after a rebellion put down by the Emperor Te Tsung (reigned 780-805). The rebel Ch’ou Shih-liang is mentioned. He flourished in the first half of the ninth century. The trouble in the commanderies of Ho-pei could be identified with any one of a number of such events, and the Tibetan war refers to T’ang’s prolonged struggle with the T’u-fan, who were the fore-runners of modern Tibet. The T’u-fan empire finally disintegrated from 842 onwards. Its last important war with the T’ang ended in 821 in the reign of the T’u-fan King Ral-pa-chen. The title given for the Tibetan king in the novel, Tsen-po, was used by more than one ruler of Tibet, and does not indicate an historical personage any more than the T’ang emperor of the story can be identified with an historical emperor. However, the official government titles are convincing: the period background has been carefully created without introducing real people.
Throughout the book fantasy is blended into a story that is entirely credible. Given only a modicum of faith in the powers of Buddhist adepts, one can accept the whole thing. The eldritch battle with the fish hordes occurs only in the dream within the dream. Some doubts about the real origin of the two girls, Niao-yen and Ling-po, are who the only preternatural elements in the tale, and even they can easily be explained away.
However, one cannot claim that Kuunmong is in any sense a precursor of realistic literature. The importance of what we should call coincidence, but Koreans call inyŏn, is basic to the whole concept of the novel. Without it the story would lose its point. I have usually translated inyŏn as ‘karma’. Strictly speaking inyŏn and karma are different. Inyŏn is a translation of the Sanskrit hetupratyaya and means causality, while karma means deeds and their ethical effects in character, especially in relation to transmigration. However, both the colloquial English use of ‘karma’ and the colloquial Korean use of inyŏn tend to confuse the two concepts, and for the purposes of this novel the words are practically interchangeable.
The extreme youthfulness of the hero at the time of his major exploits so disturbed Gale that he added a few years to the ages of all the characters. I have translated the figures as they stand in the Korean text and if the impression given by my translation errs at all, it probably errs by making the characters appear to be too old, because the Korean and Chinese way of reckoning ages describes a person as being one or two years older than he would be according to the modern western reckoning. The idea of very young lovers ought not to worry anyone. In Korea’s other famous romance, Ch’unhyang chŏn, the ages of the protagonists are very much the same as in Kuunmong, and so are those of Pao-yü and his friends in the great Dream of the Red Chamber of Ch’ing China. Nor should it be forgotten that Shakespeare’s Juliet was only fourteen years old.
The material which Kim Man-jung drew together in his story can be found in many other stories in China and Korea. It is often difficult to identify the origin of an episode in Korean literature because of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of fixing the dates at which the majority of Korean romances were written. It is enough here to remark that there is another Korean story, of roughly similar date to Kuunmong, about a man with six concubines; that the theme of the succubus, or the woman disguised as a succubus, is a very common one and much older than Kuunmong; that the story of a lad meeting a girl by disguising himself as a female musician and playing the Phoenix Song can be found elsewhere; and that the theme of the Dragon King and his daughter is an ancient one, traceable eventually to Indian Buddhist sources; that many details derive from the classic Chinese tales, Ying-ying chuan (or Hsi-hsiang chi), San-kuo-chih yen-i, and Hsi yu chi.
The title of the book, Kuunmong, means literally ‘nine-cloud-dream’. Chinese and Korean novels whose three-syllable names end with the character meng (Korean mong), meaning ‘dream’, are legion. In nearly every case the dream means human life. Later Korean novels written in Chinese include Ongnu-mong (Dream of the Jade Chamber), Ongnin-mong (Dream of the Jade Gryphon), Yŏnnu-mong (Dream of the Lotus Chamber) and Ch’ŏngnu-mong (Dream of the Green Chamber). In Chinese literature the style has a history going back to Yang- chou-meng (Dream of Yang-chou) of the T’ang period and the Yüan-yang-meng (Dream of Mandarin Ducks) of the Ming dynasty. Among the Korean titles, Ongnu-mong shows the greatest resemblance to Kuunmong, because it tells of a complex romance set in the context of a preface and epilogue in heaven. It is longer than Kuunmong, but much inferior to it.
The preface and epilogue set in heaven or elsewhere is a pattern also well-tried in Chinese fiction. It can be found in Hsi yu chi, one of the ‘three great novels of China’ familiar to the English-speaking world through Arthur Waley’s version, Monkey. There is an even closer resemblance to the story of Kuunmong in Hung-lou-meng, the Dream of the Red Chamber, which is not only one of the greatest Chinese novels but one of the great novels of the world. There the young hero Pao-yü, like Kuunmong's Hsing-chen, goes off at the end with his mysterious teacher. However, there can be little or no direct connection between the two books. The Ch’ing novel is of quite a different character from the Korean story, the religious element is much lower- keyed, and Hung-lou-meng was written seventy-five years later than Kuunmong.
The cloud in the title is often understood to be an adjective describing the dream, but in view of the significance of the idea of the dream in novel titles of this genre, such an adjective would be otiose. On the other hand, the cloud as a symbol of the insignificance of human life is to be found in the Analects of Confucius, and in Buddhist usage the word ‘cloud’ can mean a devotee, especially a wandering monk. Since the ‘nine’ of the title unquestionably refers to the nine chief characters who transmigrate from the life of Buddhist devotees to the dream of worldly life, it seems best to take the word ‘cloud’ as a substantive and understand the title as ‘a dream of nine clouds’.
In any Chinese or Korean novel it is to be expected that the names of the characters and buildings will have symbolic meaning. Even the surnames are carefully chosen in Kuunmong. The hero as a monk is called Hsing-chen (Korean Sŏngjin), which means ‘true to the Buddha-nature’. When he transmigrates he joins the Yang family. Yang means ‘willow tree’ and is connected with the willows of the first set of poems in the story. The willow figures much in songs of love and parting and of the transience of human life. His mother’s surname is Liu (Yu), which is another character meaning a willow tree.
The first of the eight girls, Cheng Ch’iung-pei, has the surname that is the title of the most famous love songs of antiquity, the songs of Cheng in the Book of Songs. Her given name means ‘jewel’. The princess’s name is explained in the text as referring to the magic flute she plays on, and the titles by which these two are officially known, Ying-yang and Lan-yang, are royal names which mean ‘blossom’ and ‘orchid’ respectively. The blossom character carries an overtone of pride, and the orchid is a symbol of retirement: the names hint at the girls’ characters.
Ch’in Ts’ai-feng has the family name of a great emperor and her given name means ‘rainbow phoenix’. The Oriental phoenix is a splendid bird of sexual love and devotion, and is also a symbol of ability. Ts’ai-feng is the girl who is above all clever at verse-making; her slightly showy character is contrasted with that of Ch’un-yün, with whom she is usually paired in the story. Ch’un-yün means ‘spring cloud’—a less self-assured young lady, aptly named as a cloud, but with the character for spring carrying gentle and faintly erotic overtones.
The two professional dancing and singing girls have the type of name affected by such women. Kuei Ch’an-yüeh has a name full of moonbeams: her surname is the name of the cinnamon tree in the moon, associated with the ravishingly beautiful moon-maiden Heng-o, and her given name means simply ‘moonlight'. Ti Ching-hung has a surname which is also the name of a non-Chinese ‘barbarian’ tribe, evoking her entry into the story from the northeast borders; and her given name means ‘startled wildgoose’. She is the one who is an expert horsewoman and huntress, able to pass herself off as a boy, when she calls herself Po-luan, ‘white bird of love’—an intentional irony.
The two mysterious girls picked up on the Tibetan campaign are Chen Niao-yen, whose surname means ‘deep’, and whose given name means ‘wreath of mist’ (she is the one who comes through the air); and the daughter of the Dragon King is Po Ling-po, literally meaning ‘white waves’.
The name of the Buddhist monk who guides the hero at the beginning and end of the novel, Liu-ju, or Liu-kuan, is taken from the Diamond Sutra, and means the Six Illusions: a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a dew, and lightning. It is a key symbol of the novel, quoted in the mantra on the last page.
Even the names of the minor characters are carefully chosen, and there is studied appropriateness about the names of Shao-yu’s children, in the last chapter of the book, and the names of the various pavilions which figure in the story. In some cases the significance depends on an allusion which makes it practically impossible to translate the names succinctly, and I have interpolated explanatory phrases into the text.
Names are close to poetry in this context, and the poems that figure in the pages of Kuunmong, as in so many other stories from China, Korea and Japan, are an integral part of the work. The writing of poems was the ultimate sign of education and refinement, and was particularly appreciated when it was done on the basis of a set of rhyme characters and a subject proposed by someone else. The Kuunmong poems are all written in pure Chinese. They are in a variety of styles, some of them more rigid than others, but when there is a contest and a suggestion that one person’s poetry was better than another’s, then the fact is duly shown in the quality of the poems included in the text.
The consistency of the detail of the poems may reflect no more than Kim Man-jung’s passion for elegant verse composition, but it is one more index of the care with which Kuunmong is constructed. It comes from an aristocratic milieu, and a world-weary one, yet it is neither savage nor self-righteous. It points beyond the world, but does not deny its pleasures. The fact that the book is good entertainment does not detract from its transcendental values, but transforms what might have been a philosophical parable into a genuine work of creative literature.