The document generally known as the Kyunyŏ-jŏn, or Account of the Life of Kyunyŏ[1]was written during the winter of 1074-5 by a Koryŏ court official named Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng. It is a brief, episodic account of the life of the early Koryŏ monk Kyunyŏ (923-973), to whom Hyŏngnyŏn ascribes a key role in the propagation of Korean Hwaŏm (Hua Yen) Buddhism in Koryŏ, and as such it takes its place in the broad genre of Koryŏ Buddhist biographic/hagiographic works that have survived on contemporary inscriptions, in sections of longer works such as the Samguk yusa (mid-thirteenth century), and in whole works such as the Haedong kosŭng-jŏn (1215).
Kyunyŏ is the earliest Hwaŏm figure whose writings have largely been preserved. Unlike Wŏnhyo and Ŭisang, whose works have only survived in fragments, it is possible to gain a reasonably broad grasp of the range of Kyunyŏ’s doctrinal concerns through his writings. The Kyunyŏ-jŏn therefore has particular significance, since it permits these writings to be set against a personal, social and historical background.
Kyunyŏ’s biographer was a court official and a scholar, and thus his grasp of secular events was strong. However his prime purpose was not, of course, simply to relate such events. His aim was to give an account of the life of Kyunyŏ, in such a manner as to demonstrate the spiritual authority of the monk whom he claims as the most significant and influential Buddhist of the Hwaŏm school to have lived under the Koryŏ dynasty to date. The resulting hagiographic dimension not only provides a nonpareil picture of the norms and standards of the medieval Korean Buddhist organization, but also of the close nexus between state and religious affairs in early Koryŏ, a topic on which the secular histories are almost entirely silent.
Furthermore, this is a picture that emerges not only directly through the narrative of Hyŏngnyŏn himself but also through the lengthy and eloquent essay written by Ch’oe Haenggwi, a contemporary of Kyunyŏ, which Hyŏngnyŏn has incorporated into his text, and in which Ch’oe, too, highly appraises the achievements of Kyunyŏ. Ch’oe Haenggwi’s essay comprises one of two significant incorporations in Hyŏngnyŏn’s work, the other being a cycle of eleven songs with accompanying preface, composed by Kyunyŏ himself. It is the presence of these songs, composed in the Korean language, and written in the Korean hyangch’al script that gives the Kyunyŏ-jŏn immense significance as a source for early Korean language and literature studies, such that these aspects have exercised a near monopoly on attention paid to the Kyunyŏ-jŏn since its rediscovery in the early 1920s. This significance arises not only because these songs represent eleven of a total corpus of only twenty-five short songs that have survived from pre-fourteenth century Korea, but also because the integrity of their text contrasts strongly with the many doubts that surround that of the texts of the other fourteen songs, all of which have been preserved in the Samguk yusa.
Moreover, Kyunyŏ’s songs come with supporting Chinese texts to aid the deciphering of the hyangch’al script, for not only were the songs themselves based directly and closely on what was probably the most widely disseminated and popularly known Hua Yen text of this era, the Bhadracarīpraṇidhāna or Commitment to Virtuous Practice, but also the essential purpose of Ch’oe Haenggwi’s essay in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn is to provide renderings of Kyunyŏ’s songs into the Chinese shih poetic form.
In his essay, Ch’oe Haenggwi praises Kyunyŏ highly as a composer of such secular songs on Buddhist themes. In so doing, he elaborates considerably on the literary tradition of which Kyunyŏ’s songs were a part, and in addition to preserving the names of otherwise unknown leading practitioners of the Korean lyrical song form ka from preceding centuries, his text is also important as the source of a number of literary allusions and descriptions that have helped to define with greater precision aspects of form and style in Silla and early Koryŏ songs. Futher, in more general terms, Ch’oe’s work is important for the world-view it contains of a tenth-century Koryŏ man of letters writing about, and comparing his own country’s literature with that of China, a country he was deeply familiar with,[2] several hundred years before the era when the predominance of Neo-Confucianism in Korea drastically altered the terms of such comparisons.
The Kyunyŏ-jŏn is also valuable for the light it sheds on aspects of contemporary Korean history. Hyŏngnyŏn was writing in a time when the Koryŏ court was absorbed in two especially significant affairs of state—the resumption of full relations with Sung China, and the completion of a century-long process of accumulating a definitively complete library of extant Buddhist writings. His indirect reflections of these two interrelated concerns are therefore a valuable addition to the otherwise sparse Korean sources for this period. Secondly, he is writing about the life of a monk intimately connected with affairs of state during the 950s, a decade of immense significance for the evolution of the Koryŏ state. This is likewise a period about which very little is known outside of the dynastic histories, and Hyŏngnyŏn’s work is thus a valuable supplement.
While it is not really surprising that scholars in the modern era should have tended to approach the Kyunyŏ-jŏn almost exclusively in terms of the light that the contributions of Kyunyŏ and Ch’oe Haenggwi can shed on early Korean language and literature, this has inevitably led to some significant methodological shortcomings. For example, more than fifty years were to pass from its rediscovery in 1921 until the first reasonably comprehensive treatment of Kyunyŏ’s life and works began to appear,[3] and the Kyunyŏ-jŏn has not yet been properly analysed as a document in its own right, despite the obvious importance a consideration of the whole might have for a proper consideration of its parts. The motives of Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng, the circumstances in which he wrote his work, and the Buddhist aspects of the work thus remain subjects almost entirely untreated, or even uncommented upon.
In sum, a methodology analysing the nature of the document and the doctrine it expresses as the logical point of departure from which to approach the enormously valuable information it contains has been slow to emerge. This present work seeks to redress this by examining the Kyunyŏ-jŏn as a document first, and then evaluating its literary works and references accordingly.
Little is known about the author of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn. It is not even entirely clear whether his family name was Hyŏk or Hyŏngnyŏn, for both names appear to have been current, albeit highly uncommon, in eleventh-century Koryŏ,[4] and it is not possible to link him with any known clans or families by either name. The fact that he refers to himself as simply “Chŏng” at one point in the document suggests that his family name was in fact Hyŏngnyŏn, for the omission of the family name is a conventional form of literary reference elsewhere in the document, and hence if his family name were just Hyŏk, he would have referred to himself as “Yŏnjŏng”.
Nothing at all is known about Hyŏngnyŏn beyond what might be gleaned from the Kyunyŏ-jŏn itself, and from two brief notices in the Koryŏ-sa. In the first of these notices, it is recorded for the 11th month 1100 that “Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng went to Liao and presented (the Liao Court with) goods from Koryŏ.” (KS 11.24B.3). Five years later, in November 1105, the Koryŏ-sa records Hyŏngnyŏn’s appointment as Superintendent Examiner of the Scholars of the Chang-ak Pavilion (KS 12.17A.2). Since the Koryŏ-sa does not elaborate on this position, nor does it carry notices of any other incumbents to it, it is difficult to judge the significance of this appointment beyond the fact that it must have been a position of some significance to warrant mention. Before conversion into a chapel in 1126 (KS 15.23B.6), the Chang-ak Pavilion is frequently mentioned in Hyŏngnyŏn’s time as a location for official banquets, and it seems probable from the title of Hyŏngnyŏn’s position that activities relating to the civil service examination were also carried on there, for which he may have been some type of chief adjudicator.
Taken together, these two references present Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng as a person of high official standing and of recognized scholarship. Little can be added to this from his hand in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn some twenty-five years earlier, beyond that he was a layman, already the holder of a chinsa degree in 1075, and already able enough in letters to be the recipient of a commission from a monk of senior rank to write the biography of a person regarded in influential official quarters as the most significant Hwaŏm teacher yet produced by the dynasty.
In his foreword, Hyŏngnyŏn gives two reasons for undertaking to write an account of Kyunyŏ’s life. He refers to some unspecified dissatisfaction, which he says he shares, with a recent work of a Palace Chronicler, Kang Yuhyŏn, on Kyunyŏ on the grounds that “it omitted many things”, and implies that this led to his being approached by the Great Master Ch’ang’un to arrange an attested record of Kyunyŏ’s life in biographic form. Since Kang’s work is now lost, and since nothing else is known of Ch’ang’un, their respective attitudes to Kyunyŏ can only be guessed at.
The work that resulted consists of ten chapters, bracketed by a Foreword and an Afterword. It is twenty-eight pages long, each page containing eleven lines with a variable number of characters on each full line, usually twenty to twenty-three. The division into ten chapters was itself a stylistic device, invoking the special significance that the number ten had for the Hua Yen school as a symbol of completeness, and Hyŏngnyŏn would certainly have been aware of the example of the ten-chapter biography of Fa-tsang by Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn (857-?),[5] to mention just one such work, in ordering his own work in this way.
The work opens with Hyŏngnyŏn’s brief Foreword, in which he announces the significance of Kyunyŏ in a series of three parallel sentences which place him alongside Nāgārjuna (second century A.D.), who is credited by tradition as being the one who put the Hua Yen teachings into circulation, and Ŭisang (625-702), who was the First Patriarch of the Hwaŏm school. As for Kyunyŏ, it is claimed that it was due to him that Hwaŏm teachings first became widespread in Koryŏ. Hyŏngnyŏn then explains briefly how he came to write his work, and the Foreword concludes with a list of the ten chapter headings for the work.
Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are a mildly hagiographical account of Kyunyŏ’s birth, early life and entry into temple life respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with his early activities as a monk, and also provide an extensive listing of his discourses and formal writings. Chapter 6 relates four incidents by which he rose to prominence under King Kwangjong (949- 975), and Chapter 7 is almost wholly given over to the incorporation of Kyunyŏ’s eleven-song cycle on the Bhadracarīprcnidhāna, along with a brief preface also composed by Kyunyŏ in the p’ien-wen style. A note in the text at the conclusion of the songs states that the songs were not included in Hyŏngnyŏn’s original work.
Chapter 8 introduces the incorporation of Ch'oe Haenggwi’s work, which consists of his eleven poetic renderings of Kyunyŏ’s songs into Chinese, along with a lengthy and lyrical introductory essay in which he extols the virtues of Kyunyŏ and his songs. Although at times the poems follow Kyunyŏ’s songs closely, points of divergence are such that they cannot properly be termed translations. They accord well with Ch’oe’s stated aim of making the content of Kyunyŏ’s songs better known “to the east and to the west” (KYJ 10B.4).
In Chaper 9, Hyŏngnyŏn again gives emphasis to Kyunyŏ’s spiritual authority with two anecdotes in which Kyunyŏ bests both political enemies and malevolent spirits. Chapter 10 briefly records Kyunyŏ’s death and an attendant miraculous story. The chapter also has what seems to be an addendum covering miscellaneous aspects of Kyunyŏ’s personal abilities and career as a monk. The work then concludes with a brief, eulogistic Afterword.
It is, of course, striking—and somewhat ironic—that someone, presumably Hyŏngnyŏn himself, omitted from the original text of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn the very feature that gives the work its chief claim to modern fame—Kyunyŏ’s songs. At the same time, the note in Chapter 7 of the text referring to this omission indicates that the text of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn passed through a subsequent editing process, and this in turn leads us to a consideration of the modern textual traditions of the work.
In its time, the Kyunyŏ-jŏn appears to have been highly appraised, for it was included in the Tripitaka Koreana (hereafter TK) as an appendix (K 1510b) to Kyunyŏ’s Sŏk hwaŏm-gyo pun’gi wŏnt’ong ch’o (K 1510a), from where it emerged to gain the attention of modern scholars in the early 1920s.
There is no direct evidence as to when the Kyunyŏ-jŏn text was in fact entered into the TK. The TK as a whole was carved between 1237 and 1251, and the colophons to the four Kyunyŏ works contained in. it (K 1507, K 1508, K 1509, and K 1510a) record that these works were carved in 1250-51.[6] It would therefore seem that this was a logical time for the Kyunyŏ-jŏn to have been carved as well, and certainly the integrity of the text argues that it assumed its present form at an early stage of its life, for it is remarkably free of the textual ambiguities and corruptions that are associated with repeated manual copying. Thus a possible re-editing to include Kyunyŏ’s songs may have occurred at this point, but in any case, the insertion of the songs into the text must have occurred at an early date—and hence the Kyunyŏ-jŏn must also have assumed its final form at an early date—since the hyangch’al system of transcription employed by Kyunyŏ began to die out as the Koryŏ period progressed, and appears to have been all but dead by the fourteenth century.[7] No point would thus have been served by their specific inclusion at a later time than this.[8]
The rediscovery of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn is, briefly, a tale of two texts. In 1921, a Japanese amateur scholar, Ariga Keitarō included a document titled Wŏnt’ong yangjung taesa Kyunyŏ-jŏn in his work on Korean village shrines titled Shijū shichi shiin. In this form, the Kyunyŏ-jŏn came to the attention of the Japanese scholar Ogura Shimpei, who was chiefly interested in the eleven hyangch’al songs contained in the work. Ogura recorded that he asked Ariga about the origin of the text but was unable to obtain a clear answer. However, shortly afterwards he learnt that the original source of Ariga’s text was the TK, and there he found the same work but under the title of Taehwaŏm sujwa wŏnt'ong yangjung taesa Kyunyŏ-jŏn. Comparison with Ariga’s text then revealed the latter’s text to be a somewhat corrupted copy of the TK text, and so Ogura used the TK version as the source for his landmark study on Old Korean songs Kyōka oyobi ridoku no kenkyū.[9]
Since then, the Ariga text has been progressively set aside in favour of the TK text, but since the Ariga text was the first to be published, and since it appeared in some widely circulated early editions of basic source materials for Korean history such as the 1928 Chŏson sahak-hoe edition of the Samguk yusa, the influence of this text has continued to be felt. This may well continue to be the case, because the late Yang Chudong used the Ariga text in his Koga yŏn’gu (1942), a work that continues to be the most widely-consulted source for interpretations of the songs, while in Western languages, Lee (1958-9) mirrors Yang’s usage.
The residual influence of the Ariga text is discernible today in two basic points. These are the specific issue of whether the name of the author of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn is Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng (TK text) or Saryŏn Chŏng (Ariga text) and the more general issue of the reliability of the two texts. There is little to be gained by debating these points here beyond what has been said above, for it would essentially be an anachronistic debate traversing ground already well covered by Yang Chaeyŏn (1959). The TK text is clearly reliable and substantially free of corruptions, but the same may not be said of the Ariga text.[10] Even if one did not have the corroborating evidence of the Koryŏ-sa that a Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng was alive and active in court activities at the time the Kyunyŏ-jŏn was written, one would in any case be obliged to accept the TK text as authoritative, and accept that the first character in his name is Hyŏk and not Sa.
But if little is known about Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng and, for that matter, the other people who influenced the content of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn either directly or indirectly, rather more can be said on the question of Hyŏngnyŏn’s motives in writing the work. Although he does not state these beyond his brief reference to dissatisfaction in Hwaŏm circles with the previous work by Kang Yuhyŏn, a number of features in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn indicate strongly that his commission was to write an account of Kyunyŏ’s life with a non-Korean readership in mind—no doubt principally Sung but also Liao and Japanese. Reference has been made to such features in the footnotes to the translation, but the main points are drawn together here for the sake of clarity. They are:
a) The omission of Kyunyŏ’s songs from Hyŏngnyŏn’s original account.
As already indicated, a note in the text states that Kyunyŏ’s songs were not included in the original account, and it would appear most likely that they were incorporated at the time when the Kyunyŏ-jŏn was being prepared for entry into the TK. It would have made little sense for a Korean writing in the late eleventh century, when hyangch’al was still current, to deny them to Korean readers, but it would have made rather more sense to simply give Kyunyŏ’s p’ien-wen preface to them and omit the ensuing songs if the text were meant for a non-Korean readership for whom hyangch’al would have been incomprehensible. It would also follow that the motivation for reincorporating the songs arose when the Kyunyŏ-jŏn was being prepared for entry into the TK as a supplement to Kyunyŏ’s works in what was now essentially a domestic Korean context.
b) The inclusion of Ch’oe Haenggwi’s work.
Ch’oe’s work comprises almost one-third of the total length of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn and yet, its essential character as an explanation of his purpose in composing shih based on Kyunyŏ’s songs is only marginally relevant to the life of Kyunyŏ. On the other hand, its poems and their p’ien-wen preface with its major theme of linguistic barriers to mutual communication between Korea and China would be very relevant to those seeking to better acquaint other people with the significance of Kyunyŏ within the Korean Hwaŏm tradition.
c) The nature of the notes inserted in the text.
There are a total of twelve notes inserted into the text of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn, and reference has already been made to the note that refers to the omission of the songs from the original text. The remaining eleven notes are of a different nature in that they seek to explain points of language, script, or else further identify specific Korean references such as place names or official titles. Here it is apparent that, taken collectively, the notes are designed to explain matters that would be familiar to literate Koreans but possibly puzzling to non-Koreans. There is no way of knowing, of course, whether the eleven explanatory notes formed part of the original document or whether they were inserted at the same time as the songs—in which case they might just be explaining points that might have become obscure to Koreans in the interim—but since this interim probably only amounted to the one hundred and eighty years or so between Hyŏngnyŏn’s writing of the work and its entry into the TK, it is unlikely that so many points would have become obscure so quickly, and hence it is highly likely that the eleven notes, or most of them, were part of the original text.
In further support of this, one might compare the function of notes in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn and the Samguk yusa, where notes in the text of the latter also seek to explain obscurities, especially etymological obscurities, but where they are not used to anything like the same extent as they are in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn. As a ready example of the treatment of the same word occurring in both texts, one may cite the native Korean aesthetic term sa’noe and note that in the Kyunyŏ-jŏn it is accompanied by what is intended to be an etymological explanation, whereas in the Samguk yusa the term occurs several times in contexts that are far from explicit, but with no accompanying commentary or explanation.[11] Not to belabour the point too much, the notes in the text of the Kyunyŏ-jŏn seem far more exhaustive than in comparable texts, and hence the possibility is strong that they were designed for a non-Korean readership.
d) Hyŏngnyŏn’s description of the 953 Later Chou embassy to Koryŏ as a Sung embassy.
This is, of course, a clear impossibility since the Sung dynasty was not founded until 960. The anachronism might have been due to pure carelessness, but this is doubtful as Hyŏngnyŏn’s work gives every appearance of being careful and scholarly—as indeed one would expect from the known facts about his life that we considered above. Moreover, he gives a Later Chou reign-year date for the embassy’s visit in the same phrase in which he calls it a Sung embassy, and so one must conclude that the appellation is a deliberate one. In considering why, one must consider the effect achieved—namely, the glossing over of the fact that Koryŏ had relations with various Five Dynasty states during the T’ang-Sung interregnum (907-960), and since such a display of tact could have served no conceivable purpose within his own country, such a usage suggests that it was probably framed with the sensibilities of a Sung readership in mind.
e) Hyŏngnyŏn’s use of the reign-years T’ien-yu 17, 20 and 23.
This point is best prefaced with a brief consideration of the significance for Korea of reign-year appellations during the Five Dynasty Period.
After Silla adopted the T’ang calendar during the reign of King Kyŏngdŏk (742-65), the dating of Korean writings was carried out in accordance with the prevailing Chinese reign-year. During periods when an undisputed dynasty held sway, this was a straight-forward practice, but in times of interregnum, or of wavering Korean allegiance, the method of dating used could assume a political significance. This state of affairs is especially relevant to the Kyunyŏ-jŏn because Hyŏngnyŏn is for the most part writing about events that occurred during the Five Dynasties interregnum which, in Korean calendrical terms, lasted from the fall of T’ang in 907 (T’ien-yu 4) to the adoption of the Sung calendar in 963.
The two main sources for the calendrical policy of Silla and Koryŏ during the period 907 to 963 are contemporary inscriptions and the Koryŏ-sa (completed 1451). They differ from each other on quite a few dates, but it is to the contemporary inscriptions that one should refer to ascertain contemporary practice, whereas the Koryŏ-sa reflects a later, formal position, much altered by hindsight.
The evidence of the inscriptions is that Silla continued to use the T’ien-yu reign-years after the fall of T’ang, perhaps only as a device in the absence of any clear alternative. However, this practice began to cease with the establishment of the Later Liang dynasty in 915, and the general practice was to use the Liang calendar between about 915 and 925.[12] The Kyunyŏ-jŏn seems fairly clearly at odds with the style used on contemporary inscriptions, a situation that suggests that it is also employing politically-inspired hindsight, in this case to avoid drawing attention to the the fact that the Later Liang calendar had ever been adopted. Thus, Hyŏngnyŏn persists with the anachronistic T’ien-yu 14 for 917, the year of Kyunyŏ’s mother’s conception dream, T’ien-yu 17 for 920, the year Kyunyŏ’s sister was born, and T’ien-yu 20 for 923, the year Kyunyŏ himself was born. The use of these reign-years of course carries the political overtone of subsisting loyalty to a former vassal tie—in this case Silla-T’ang, an overtone very relevant for Koryŏ-Sung relations at the time Hyŏngnyŏn was writing.
f) Hyŏngnyŏn’s use of the reign-period Sungnyŏk.
The reign-period given at the conclusion of Ch’oe Haenggwi’s work is Sungnyŏk. The character for the precise year is almost entirely obliterated but the convention appears to be to accept it as the numeral eight, giving a date of 967. However, no other example of this reign-period—which literally means “[by the] Sung calendar”—exists in the extensive corpus of inscription material from this period, and there is no reason why the Chinese reign-period Ch’ien-te (963-68) should not have been employed if the date were really 967, for Koryŏ established formal relations with the new Sung dynasty in 963, and adopted its calendar.
The only logical explanation appears to be that Sungnyŏk was being used as a replacement for the indigenous reign-year Ch’unp’ung which was current between 960 and 963. Such a replacement would carry the meaning “so-and-so year by the Sung calendar” and provide for Hyŏngnyŏn a simple, if unavoidably clumsy, solution to the dilemma of how to avoid outright forgery of a date in Ch’oe’s work while also avoiding the recalling of Koryŏ’s use of the indigenous Ch’unp’ung reign-period. Again, the only sensibilities that this device could be intended to cater for would be those of a Sung readership.
g) Hyŏngnyŏn’s comment that Kang Yuhyŏn’s work on Kyunyŏ “omitted many things”.
Hyŏngnyŏn states that he received his commission to write a new account of the life of Kyunyŏ because Hwaŏm believers were dissatisfied with a previous work of Kang Yuhyŏn which “omitted many things”. However, this explanation becomes hard to accept at face value if one assumes that both Kang and Hyŏngnyŏn were writing the same kind of work, for Kang’s work must have been impossibly brief if the spare, episodic Kyunyŏ-jŏn is to be taken as rectifying these omissions. Clearly, Hyŏngnyŏn’s explanation for his commission only makes sense if one assumes that different material reflecting different priorities was to be incorporated. Since Kang’s work is lost, a comparison of content is not possible. Hence it is difficult to take this point much further, other than to observe that a different sort of work to that of Kang Yuhyŏn’s must have been commissioned, and that where Hyŏngnyŏn’s work seems to differ from the generality of Silla/Koryŏ Buddhist hagio-biographies is in the incorporation of Ch’oe Haenggwi’s work, and in the amount of space devoted to Kyunyŏ’s writings—especially the provision of what appear to be exhaustive lists of Kyunyŏ’s discourses, treatises and commentaries. Again, this suggests that the work was consciously directed towards making known the ambit of his Korean Buddhist writings.
Taken together, the above factors point strongly towards a desire on the part of Hyŏngnyŏn and his mentors to address a biography of Kyunyŏ to a non-Korean, primarily Sung readership. This motivation, moreover, should, not be viewed in isolation, for it was almost certainly directly linked to two important and interrelated Koryŏ preoccupations at this time—the compilation of a Koryŏ Tripitaka and the re-establishment of relations with Sung.
Like its predecessor state Silla, Koryŏ was essentially founded upon a devout Buddhist ethic, and hence the collection and preservation of Buddhist texts was regarded as an activity of the highest purpose. Such activities were naturally influenced by similar activities in China, and it seems probable that the completion, under imperial auspices, of the first Chinese Tripitaka in 983 provided a strong motivation for Koryŏ to embark upon a similar project. Thus copies of the Chinese Tripitaka were transmitted to Koryŏ in 989 and 992 (KS 3.23A.9), and actual work began under the auspices of King Hyŏnjong in 1011.
It is not clear from the sources whether or not this work was actually completed during Hyŏnjong’s reign (1010-31) but, in any event, Koryŏ interest in collecting and preserving Buddhist texts remained intense in the decades that followed, culminating in the completion of what is usually termed the first Korean Tripitaka in 1087 (KS 10.11A.3, KS 10.11B.7). In fact, Koryŏ went one step further than traditional compilation with the completion of a second vast work, the Supplement to the Tripitaka compiled by Ŭich’ŏn, and completed in 1090. The particular significance of Ŭich’ŏn’s work for Hyŏngnyŏn was that it entailed an active campaign of seeking out treatises from foreign countries, with the final work comprising a total of 1,010 texts sought out from China, Liao, Japan and from within Koryŏ between the years 1073-90.[13] In other words, at the time that the Kyunyŏ-jŏn was being written, the Koryŏ court was actively soliciting such material from abroad.
Moreover, the Kyunyŏ-jŏn was written on the eve of the re-establishment of formal Koryŏ-Sung state relations after a hiatus of some decades. Koryŏ had initially broken its ties with Sung in 994 under Liao duress, although contact did not cease altogether until 1030. In the ensuing years, Koryŏ came to terms with its position under Liao, but when the initiative for a resumption of relations came from Sung, a concomi