Monks, Medicine, and Miracles: Health and Healing in the

History of Korean Buddhism

Don Baker

Korean Studies, Volume 18, 1994, pp. 50-75 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.1994.0011

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/397898/summary

Access provided by Seoul National University (28 Sep 2017 20:56 GMT)
 Monks, Medicine, and Miracles:
Health and Healing in the History of
Korean Buddhism
Don Baker

Throughout Korean history, religion has gained much of its appeal from the sense of
control and the modicum of hope that it has been able to provide the afflicted. In early
Korea, before Koryö times, any religion had to show that healing was one of its powers
if it wished to be taken seriously as a religion. Early Korean, Chinese, and Japanese
sources indicate that the role of monks in fighting illness and death were a factor in the
spread of Buddhism throughout the Korean peninsula.
The astute observer of the religious history of modern Korea cannot help
but notice a significant connection among illness, healing, and religious
proselytizing.1 From Ch'oe Che-u's prophylactic incantation promising
protection from the epidemic ravaging Korea in 1860 to the dual roles of
physician and proselytizer played by early Christian missionaries, God
and medicine seem intimately intertwined.
Neither the founder of the Tonghak religion nor American Presbyte-
rians were the first on the Korean peninsula to notice that they could
enhance the persuasive power of their proselytizing by highlighting the
healing power of their religion. This fruitful link between disease and dei-
ties has been wielded by shamans and monks for centuries. The intimate
connection between Korean shamanism and healing has been frequently
noted and closely studied. The links among health, healing, and Buddhism
in Korea, however, have attracted less scholarly attention.
Yet Buddhism began with the recognition that disease is one of the
four great misfortunes that beset all human beings, along with birth, old
age, and death. Buddhists, of course, are not alone in recognizing that to
live is to suffer—no one goes through life without falling ill or feeling
pain at one time or another. That has been true ever since human beings
appeared on this planet of ours.
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES5 1

It has also been true from the beginning that those who fall ill or feel
pain have commonly sought help from those around them. Moreover, we
can safely hypothesize that some members of the first human communities
may have gradually acquired a reputation for having more success than
others in offering relief from the ravages of disease, either through blind
luck or through trial and error.
It is likely that whatever success these early healers achieved was
frequently attributed to their perceived privileged access to the invisible
realm of the gods, the ancestors, and other spirits. Since the causes of dis-
ease are often mysterious and invisible to those not privy to the discover-
ies of modern medical science, it is probable that the earliest explanations
of disease were at least partially religious, as were most of the earliest
remedies. If invisible forces caused disease, invisible forces had to be
either appeased or mobilized to cure or prevent disease. At least, that
appears to be the case on the Korean peninsula. Scholars who have studied
the prehistory of the peninsula assume that the first healers must have
included shamans, the only religious specialists on the peninsula until the
arrival of Buddhism in the fourth century.2
It is also generally assumed that shamans and shamanistic rituals
were not the only recourse against disease available to the first patients on
the peninsula. There was probably also some local vegetation that had
proved apparently efficacious, when ingested or applied, in preventing,
curing, or mitigating disease. In addition, there may have been incanta-
tions, special verbal formulas, that had come to be accepted as useful in
warding off those forces that cause disease, and there may have been
taboos, community recognition of situations or environments shown by
experience to be particularly risky. Shamanism, herbal concoctions, incan-
tations, and taboos were all primitive medical strategies, lacking a com-
prehensive and coherent theoretical framework to link them together. This
lack of a unifying theory undermined the consistency and clarity necessary
to inspire confidence that these various approaches to health and healing
would provide the prophylactic protection or therapeutic treatment they
were supposed to.
For a medical theory to be truly effective in easing the fear we all
have of disease, and of the pain and death that disease can bring, for it to
give us genuine hope that those diseases that threaten us can be overcome,
it must offer relief in four major areas. First of all, it must offer an expla-
nation for disease. It must identify the causes of illness, telling us why we
become sick. Second, it must tell us how to prevent disease from attack-
ing us and those we care for. Third, it must provide some practical advice
for overcoming disease if prevention fails and we, or our loved ones, are
afflicted. It must offer some specific methods of treating both the symp-
52BAKER

toms and the causes of disease. Fourth, it must provide a prognosis, a rela-
tively reliable prediction of the likely outcome of a particular affliction, so
that physical pain will not be unduly aggravated by uncertainty over what
is going to happen next. Explanation, prevention, treatment, and progno-
sis—those are the four features that make a medical theory persuasive, its
practitioners believable, and its strategies credible.
They are also four features that a comprehensive religious philoso-
phy can provide. Religion may be described as an attempt to control the
uncontrollable (through ritual), explain the unexplainable (through doc-
trine), and predict the unpredictable (through revelation). Disease and
death were clearly among the most uncontrollable, unexplainable, and un-
predictable phenomena of premodern life and therefore were both the sub-
ject of religious concern and the object of religious activities.
Shamanism obviously comes closer than incantations, taboos, or
herbal concoctions to providing a comprehensive religious philosophy that
can generate a persuasive medical strategy. For the shaman was a master
of ritual and often during the course of a ritual offered revelations that not
only identified the cause of an illness but also gave specific directions on
how to overcome it. However, the animistic beliefs underlying shamanis-
tic rituals and revelations lacked the clear definition and broad scope nec-
essary to qualify as doctrine. And only a highly articulated doctrinal base
could add to the systematic integration of religious assertions the richness
of factual detail necessary to produce a sophisticated religious medical
theory.
Religious philosophies resemble all other broad generalizations and
theories in that they gain their persuasive power by combining breadth
with depth. The greater the range of phenomena they encompass within
their explanatory framework, the more compelling the case for their
acceptance. However, they must not become so general and abstract that
they neglect the minute details of everyday life or they lose credibility.
This greater breadth combined with depth is what gives the more theoreti-
cally sophisticated religions an advantage over less doctrinally oriented
religions such as shamanism.
When Buddhism entered Korea, for example, it gained converts par-
tially because of the theoretical power of its doctrines and the persuasive-
ness of the explanations, predictions, and advice they generated. Buddhist
monks could explain pain, disease, and death both ontologically and med-
ically. They could explain suffering in general as an inescapable compo-
nent of the human condition. That, after all, was the Buddha's great
insight. But, because they also brought with them a detailed medical the-
ory constructed from Indian and Chinese elements, they could also explain
why specific diseases struck, could offer concrete advice for preventing or
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES53

curing those diseases, and could predict what course the disease would
most likely take, once they had identified it.
Indian and Chinese medicine, though differing in both origin and
approach, were often welded into one by the monk-healers who intro-
duced them to Korea. Buddhist missionaries drew on both traditions in
order to have as many weapons in their proselytizing arsenal as possible.
There was a strong tendency for Chinese medical terminology and con-
cepts to dominate medical discourse in Korea, but not to the exclusion of
Indian techniques and ideas.
There are common elements in both components of Buddhist medi-
cine in Korea. For example, both take a holistic approach to health and
healing, preferring to focus on the whole person rather than on specific
anatomical structures or physiological functions in isolation. They both
assume that harmonious interaction among the various parts and processes
of the body is a prerequisite for health, and that the loss of such physiolog-
ical harmony is often the primary cause of an illness. And they both link
mental states with physical states. They assume, for example, that a calm
and clear mind, undisturbed by excessive sensual desires, leads to a
healthy body. They also agree on the importance of preventive medicine,
arguing that the best medicine is the medicine that preserves health rather
than the one that attempts to restore it.
Nevertheless, there are significant differences between how the phy-
sicians of India conceptualized health and disease and how Chinese physi-
cians did so. Indians, for example, paid much more attention to the role of
the mind and consciousness. In fact, according to the traditional Indian
philosophical underpinnings of Buddhism, the body was basically a func-
tion of consciousness, created and sustained by an accumulation of input
from the phenomenal world in the storehouses of sensation that constitute
the living body.3 This has medical implications: since we create our own
bodies, we bring both health and illness on ourselves.
The priority Indians placed on consciousness underlay their belief in
reincarnation, the belief that when our bodies die our consciousness can
survive to live again in another body. This, too, has medical implications,
since in Indian medical theory it was assumed that some of the medical
problems encountered in this life were the result of improper or immoral
behavior in a previous life and also that ethical behavior in this life could
lead to a healthier body in the next life.
Because of its multilayer character, its concern for the interconnec-
tions of consciousness and body as well as for the interplay between this
and other lives, Indian medical theory was rich both as a theory and in
the range of healing techniques it could offer, supplying natural as well
as supernatural explanations and prescriptions. For example, Buddhist
54BAKER

monks could not only offer the general explanation that disease is a result
of life itself, in which suffering caused by inescapable change is itself
inescapable, but could also provide more specific explanations. Buddhist
sutras recognized the existence of 404 distinct ailments, each with its own
etiology.4 The fundamental physical cause of an illness was an imbalance,
either an excess or a shortage, in one or more of the four basic elements
(earth, wind, fire, and water) in the human body. This imbalance could be
caused by climatic conditions and seasonal environmental changes, by
lack of moderation in eating and drinking, by excessive meditation, by
spirits and demons, and by improper, inappropriate, or immoral behavior,
either in this life or in previous lives.5
Depending on the perceived cause of the disease, Buddhist monk-
healers could prescribe a variety of treatments. They might prescribe a
herbal medicine for someone suffering an excess of wind in the body, or
an improved diet for a patient suffering the consequences of immoderate
eating. Those suffering from the assaults of demons might be advised to
wear amulets and read aloud from Buddhist sutras, while those suffering
from improper behavior in a previous life might be advised to confess
their sins and show contrition.6
The prescriptions for preventing illness were similar to the prescrip-
tions for treating illness once it occurred. Buddhists who wished to remain
healthy were advised to lead a moral life, respect all life forms, avoid emo-
tional attachments to transient pleasures, eat, sleep, and meditate in mod-
eration, and keep a pure and calm mind, as well as to breathe properly.7
This is the advice Buddhists were advised to follow both to overcome ill-
ness and to keep from falling ill.
When it came to predicting the course of a disease, or the prospects
for its successful treatment, Buddhist monks could draw on the elaborate
theory and related terminology built up over centuries of healing in India
to offer both plausible and promising prognoses. Moreover, they could
reassure their patients that even if their illness proved fatal, there was
always hope that the merit gained through their present suffering would
lead to a better life next time around.
If they limited themselves to traditional Chinese medical theory,
Buddhist monks could offer no such hope, since reincarnation was not in
its repertoire of prognoses. Nor did Chinese medicine have much to say
about the role of consciousness in creating life or causing disease. In the
Chinese view, the human body, like everything else in the universe, was
created by qi, the vitalizing force that provides not only substance but also
animation for all life forms. Qi may be ethereal, but it is material nonethe-
less and thus provides a material basis for Chinese medical theory.
This focus on qi, cosmic material force, sharply distinguishes the
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES55

Chinese side of Buddhist medical theory from its Indian counterpart.

Another distinguishing feature is its functional orientation. Chinese physi-
cians recognized the existence of such organs as the heart, the lungs, the
kidneys, the liver, and the spleen, of course. However, in Chinese medical
theory these terms imply not so much the anatomical structures to which
their English names refer but rather the broader "visceral systems of func-
tion," viewed primarily in terms of their physiological functions.8
These functional organs, and the qi that forms and infuses them, are
affected more by a web of physiological interactions, and by their relation-
ships with various natural processes in the external physical environment,
than by anything that happens in the spiritual realm or in any past life. In
the world of Chinese medicine, health is determined primarily by material
factors and illness is best treated by material means.
Illness, according to this approach, normally results from a malfunc-
tion in the network of relationships. Distortions in the fundamental pro-
cesses of growth and decline, produced by disharmony among the five
basic modes of interaction symbolized by wood, fire, earth, metal, and
water, or, in broader terms, disharmony between passive yin and active
yang, leads to an unhealthy body. Specific symptoms in a patient indicated
to a physician at which specific junctures in the body's interactions this
disharmony was strongest and where, therefore, the proper circulation of
qi throughout the body was being obstructed.
Physicians working in the Chinese tradition relied on the feel of the
pulse, the look of the tongue, and other visual and aural clues in locating
the genesis of disharmony and ascertaining its seriousness. They would
then wield a variety of medical weaponry, from acupuncture and moxi-
bustion to purging or invigorating pharmaceutical compounds, in order
to restore harmonious functioning to those visceral systems that had
somehow become overactive or underactive and were no longer synchro-
nized with the rest of the body, and thus to restore the unimpeded move-
ment of qi.
Like Indian medicine, Chinese medicine assumed that proper diet
and a moderate lifestyle prevented disease. But unlike Indian medicine, it
did not assume that these measures would frequently be sufficient to cure
a disease once preventive measures had failed. Nor did traditional Chi-
nese medical manuals recommend many supernatural or spiritual thera-
peutic measures. Their preference was for physical means to cure physical
ailments.
Traditional Chinese medicine was equally practical in the prognoses
it suggested. Healers relying solely on Chinese medical theory could not
comfort the terminally afflicted with hope of another life after death. How-
ever, they could offer a plausible guess, based on their experience and the
56BAKER

experiences of their predecessors, as to the course of their patient's disease

and the efficacy of the treatment they prescribed.9
Despite this impressive arsenal of naturalistic explanations and pre-
scriptions available to them from both Chinese and Indian sources, in their
proselytizing zeal some of the first Buddhist monks on the Korean penin-
sula often resorted to more spectacular approaches to curing the sick in
order to call attention to the power their religion possessed. There is no
way to tell which diseases were afflicting the Korean people when Bud-
dhism first penetrated the peninsula, during the Three Kingdoms period.
Most of the references to disease in the Samguk sagi are brief mentions of
some vague pestilence attacking the population in the capital. The entry
for the seventh year in the reign of Koguryö's King Sosurim (377) is typi-
cal: "In October it did not snow. There was thunder. There was an epi-
demic among the people."10 The entries for later centuries are not much
different. Kim Pu-shik tells us that in May of the seventh year of Shilla
king Kyöngmun (867) "there was an epidemic in the capital. In August
there was a flood."11
When it is a member of the royal family, a court official, or some
other specific individual who is afflicted, rather than the people as a col-
lectivity, more information is given about the nature of the malady, but
usually only a little. In the Samguk yusa, for example, various people are
said to suffer from lesions, pain, general weakness, or simply "a disease,"
but such vague language makes it impossible to identify precisely which
diseases they had.12 In a few cases, as well as in some Japanese records
and in some Shilla medical texts preserved in Japan, we find enough infor-
mation about diseases on the peninsula to pinpoint which part of the body
they affected. Apparently, Koreans suffered from lung diseases (possibly
pneumonia or tuberculosis), skin troubles (boils, as well as pox diseases
such as smallpox and measles), stomach problems, fevers and chills, and
maybe even leprosy. However, we are not given enough information to be
any more specific than that.13
We know a lot more about the putative causes of those diseases than
we know about the diseases themselves. Broadly speaking, Koreans of
that time ascribed illness to a lack of harmony between the afflicted and
his or her surroundings. Surroundings deemed detrimental could be either
spiritual or material. Spirits of the lingering dead or other invisible beings
could cause illness, as could such material factors as lack of food,
improper diet, or a cold, damp, or excessively hot environment. Illness
was also sometimes explained as the result of a lack of harmony between
what was supposed to be done and what was actually done. In other words,
immoral or inappropriate behavior could engender illness.
The famous Ch'öyong story in the Samguk yusa, written by a Bud-
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES57

dhist monk, is one example of belief in disease-causing spirits, although

the plague spirit in that particular story was more interested in sleep-
ing with Ch'öyong's wife than with spreading disease.14 The Samguk sagi
adds tales of spiteful spirits exacting revenge on those who had harmed
them. Koguryö king Yuri (putative dates 19 b.c.-a.d. 18), for example, fell
ill when the spirits of two men he had executed hastily out of anger
avenged that injustice from beyond the grave.15
Behavior that violates physiological, psychological, or ethical norms
was also thought to result in illness or even death. The Pulüigyöng (Sutra
of Buddhist Medicine), a text probably available to Koreans in the Shilla
era, pointed out that illness can result from "immoderate eating, . . . exces-
sive exertion, . . . anger and vexation, . . . [and] immoderate sexual cravings,"
for example.16 And the Samguk yusa provides an example from Chinese
history of a rebel general, Tuo Badao, who brought illness upon himself by
the way he acted. Tuo ordered his soldiers to attack a Buddhist monk who
appeared at the gates of his headquarters. The monk was uninjured, but
Tuo ended up "confined to his bed with a high fever."17
Koreans knew, however, that even if their behavior was appropriate
and the spirits were benign, they could still fall ill. Both the Chinese and
the Indian explanations of health and sickness, discussed earlier, had
reached Korea by the Three Kingdoms period. They taught Koreans that
illness was often a natural manifestation of a disequilibrium among bodily
organs that should be cooperating harmoniously.
Koreans learned of the Indian view not only through such explicitly
medical texts as the Pulüigyöng, but through more general works such as
the Kümgwangmyönggyöng (Sutra of Golden Radiance).18 The Chinese
version of medical theory was introduced through such books as the
Hwangje naegyöng (Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic).19 Monks not only
preached both approaches to health and healing, but practiced them both
as well.20 The more religious theory and techniques of Indian medicine
were used to supplement rather than contradict the more mundane princi-
ples and practices of Chinese medicine. They were kept in reserve for
those occasions when Chinese medicine failed.
A Shilla text that survives only in bits and pieces in the 984 Japanese
compilation Ishimpö [Core medical prescriptions] is an example of such
eclecticism. The Shilla Pöpsa pang [Prescriptions of a Shilla Buddhist
monk] would appear from its title to have been written by Shilla Buddhist
monks. However, its prescriptions are a mixture of Chinese herb medicine
and Buddhist healing practices. It, along with the Paekche shinjip pang
[New collection of Paekche prescriptions], which survives only in its cita-
tions in the Ishimpö, is the most detailed description we have of specific
medical practices in pre-Koryö times.21
58BAKER

In addition to the information we can glean from those fragments of

Shilla medical guides, we also know which texts court physicians relied
on, at least in Unified Shilla. According to the Samguk sagi, in 692 King
Hyoso (692-720) established a medical office staffed with two physicians.
Those physicians were to base their medical practice on seven basic
sources: the Ponchogyöng (Classic of Pharmacology), the Kapülgyöng
(Classic of Proper Ordering), the Somungyong (Classic of Pure Ques-
tions), the Ch 'imgyöng (Classic of Acupuncture), the Maeggyöng (Classic
of the Pulse), the Myöngdanggyöng (Classic of the Hall of Light), and the
Nangyöng (Classic of Difficult Issues). These works are all within the
classical Chinese medical tradition of acupunctural and herbal treatment
based on correlations among the five basic modes of interaction (wood,
fire, earth, metal, and water), physiological processes, and the external
physical environment.22 This was formal medicine for the literate elite and
for the court. Informal medicine, both for the elite and for the people in
general, had a much broader repertoire of therapeutic techniques and heal-
ing practices, such as exorcisms and incantations.
Buddhist monks, missionaries as well as native Koreans, were
among the practitioners of this informal medicine. They occasionally took
on the role of priest-physician for three main reasons. First of all, medicine
was part of the package of advanced civilization they brought from China,
just as their Buddhist religion was. Their strategy was no different from
that of Christian missionaries centuries later who build hospitals to show
both the moral and the material superiority of Christian civilization.
Second, by engaging in healing, monks would meet Korean expecta-
tions of what religions should do. After all, the only religion that preceded
them on the peninsula was the shamanistic folk religion, which took heal-
ing as one of its primary functions. Those religions with the most persua-
sive power are those that come closest to meeting the most important
needs of their target audience. In a recent survey of South Korean atti-
tudes, respondents were asked to identify the most important thing in life.
More people (19.8 percent) said health than anything else (money was sec-
ond, at 16.7 percent).23 If we may extrapolate from 1983 back more than a
millennium—admittedly a risky exercise—health was also important to
Koreans in the Three Kingdoms and Unified Shilla periods. Monks who
could heal would therefore be guaranteed a large, and probably receptive,
audience.
Third, Buddhist monks knew that healing could do more than simply
attract attention to their overall message. It could also impress their audi-
ence with the power of their deity. To replace shamanism as the dominant
religious presence on the peninsula, and to gain acceptance alongside
practitioners of more traditional Chinese medicine, Buddhist monks had to
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES59

show that not only could they heal, they could heal diseases no other heal-
ers could; they had to show that their methods, and the spirits supporting
them, were more powerful. Not just efficacy but superiority was essential
to the use of healing as a missionary strategy.
Theoretical superiority in easing fear of disease, by presenting more
plausible and powerful etiologies, offering more specific and sophisticated
prescriptions for the prevention and treatment of disease, and providing
reasonable and explicit prognoses, was, of course, important in gaining
Buddhist healers a hearing. But theory alone was not enough to convince
the targets of Buddhist proselytizing to accept Buddhism. Buddhist monk-
healers also had to show that their theories worked in practice. In other
words, they had to actually cure diseases, particularly diseases that had
proved intractable to other approaches. According to the Samguk yusa,
that is precisely what some of the first Buddhist monks on the penin-
sula did.
There is some confusion in the records available to us about the first
Buddhist missionary to Shilla.24 Even Iryön (1206-1289), author of the
Samguk yusa, is not sure whether Mukhoja and Ado are the same person
or two different individuals. For our purposes, who he is or who they are is
less important than the story told about both Mukhoja and Ado that they
first gained attention for their Buddhist message by healing the daughter
of the king, after both shamans and medicine had failed to cure her.25 One
reported result of that successful example of Buddhist healing was the first
Buddhist monastery in Shilla, Hüngnyun Temple, built by the grateful
father ofthat once sickly princess.26 According to Iryön, the association of
Hüngnyun Temple with healing remained strong even in his day: the soy
sauce produced there was said to have healing properties, particularly if
one applied it to a wound while listening to the temple bells.27
The power to heal was not limited to the first Buddhist missionaries
to Korea. The hagiographies of Wöngwang (d. 630) and Wönhyo (617-
686) also include accounts of their drawing on the power of Buddhism to
heal otherwise incurable diseases. Wöngwang, better known for suppos-
edly authoring the five maxims popularly believed to have been the guid-
ing principles of the hwarang, also cured his king of some indeterminate
illness after physicians had tried and failed: "While expounding the texts
and lecturing on the truth, he succeeded in gaining the king's faith. At the
first watch, the king and his courtiers saw that the master's head was as
golden as the disk of the sun. The king's illness was immediately cured."28
The story of Wönhyo's involvement with healing is more indirect
and apocryphal. A Song-dynasty account of the lives of famous Tang era
monks relates the story of a queen of Korea who fell ill, whereupon a sha-
man declared she could be cured only by medicine from abroad. But when
60BAKER

die king sent one of his men by ship to obtain such medicine in China, he
was stopped in the middle of the Yellow Sea by the Dragon King. The
Dragon King informed the envoy that the queen could be cured only if
Wönhyo wrote a commentary on the Kümgang sanmei kyöng (Book of
Adamantine Absorption) and then gave a lecture to the court on that sutra.
The Dragon King then presented the envoy with a copy of that healing
sutra to carry back to Korea.29 One obvious point of this story is that Bud-
dhism can heal in situations where both shamanism and Chinese medi-
cines are ineffective.
A similar point is made in a similarly unreliable account of healing
by another Shilla monk, Hyet'ong. The Samguk yusa claims that this
monk, while studying at a monastery in China, cured the daughter of the
Chinese emperor by expelling the dragon that had been causing her ill-
ness. The serpent fled to Korea, so Hyet'ong had to return there to tame it.
Not only did he succeed in stopping the dangerous beast from bothering
human beings, Hyet'ong also cured both a Shilla king and a Shilla prin-
cess by uttering certain incantations. (While in China, Hyet'ong had
learned the incantations of esoteric Buddhism.)30
Another Buddhist monk skilled in the healing practices of esoteric
Buddhism was Milbon. Milbon, we are told by the Samguk yusa, once
healed Queen Söndök (632-647) of Shilla by reading from the JM-
sagyöng (Sutra of the Buddha of Healing) and then throwing a magical
staff that pierced the hearts of both a fox and an old monk, the two crea-
tures responsible for the Queen's illness. On yet another occasion, Milbon
showed that not all Buddhist healers were equal. After both a shaman and
a monk had failed to rid Kim Yangdo of a host of spirits afflicting him,
Milbon was summoned. He proceeded to defeat those troublesome spirits,
curing Kim of his life-threatening illness.31
It is unlikely that these stories of miraculous healing by Buddhist
monks bear a very close relationship to reality. They may not even date
back to the precise time they are said to have occurred. However, though
the earliest written accounts of these stories appear in the Koryö dynasty,
most of them probably reflect an oral tradition with roots in Shilla. They
hint at a powerful link between healing and proselytizing in early Korean
Buddhist history. Moreover, we have other concrete evidence of a ten-
dency for Buddhist monks to don medical robes, particularly in the Shilla
kingdom, where Buddhism was struggling for acceptance against espe-
cially strong resistance from believers in the power of local shamanistic
spirits. We find that evidence both in the remnants of Shilla medical texts
surviving in Japan, as well as in pre-Koryö sculptures of Yaksa yörae (the
Buddha of Healing).
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES61

Statues of Yaksa yörae, sometimes appearing as Yaksa posai (the

Bodhisattva of Healing), are material manifestations of the link between
Buddhism and healing. His very name, Yaksa [master of medicine], is a
verbal nod to that linkage, just as his symbol—a medicine bowl in his left
hand—is a visual sign that healing was one of Buddhism's functions.
Yaksa was not the only healing figure in Buddhism. Among the faces of
the eleven-headed statue of the bodhisattva Kwanüm in the Sökkuram
grotto is the one, common to statues of that particular bodhisattva, that
expresses compassion for those who experience pain.32 The Samguk yusa
also relates one episode of possible healing by Kwanüm.33 The Maitreya
(Mirük) Buddha is another Buddhist figure to which the ill may go for
relief.34 But it is Yaksa yörae who was the most explicit, and the most pop-
ular, representation of the healing power of Buddhism.35
It is therefore significant that there are seventeen Shilla Yaksa stat-
ues in the National Museum in Seoul, along with two more attributed to
the Three Kingdoms Period. Mun Myöng-dae, in his inventory of Bud-
dhist sculpture in South Korea, found seven more Yaksa statues that could
be definitely dated to the Shilla period and another twenty-four of undeter-
mined date.36 Yaksa clearly was not the most popular figure in Shilla Bud-
dhism. There are a lot more Maitreya, Amitabha, and Kwanüm statues.
And they are mentioned in the Samguk yusa a lot more than Yaksa is.37 But
the existence of at least twenty-six statues of the Buddha of Healing that
date back before the fall of Shilla, and the possible existence of twenty-
four more, suggests that healing was a significant, though not a dominant,
thread in the fabric of early Korean Buddhism, particularly Shilla Bud-
dhism, and that any survey of healing practices in early Korea that
excluded Buddhism would be incomplete.
A hiker around Kyôngju's South Mountain or around Mount Pal-
gong near Taegu can also find ample evidence of the popularity of the
Buddha of Healing in the last centuries of the Shilla dynasty.38 The latter
mountain, for example, features not only a large Buddha of Healing
carved into a rock on the main East Peak, over 1100 meters above sea
level, but also a much larger Yaksa, called the Horsehair-Hat Rock Bud-
dha for the shape of his headgear, carved out of stone at the top of Kwan
Peak. Both statues date to Unified Shilla.39
Of course, statues alone do not prove that Shilla Koreans actually
prayed to Yaksa yörae for relief from the ravages of disease. For stronger
evidence that the Buddha of Healing played a role in actual medical prac-
tice, we turn to the Shilla Pöpsa pang, briefly noted earlier. There we are
given a prayer to intone (while facing east, the realm of Yaksa) before
swallowing medicine:
62BAKER

I bow before the Buddha of Healing [Yaksa], who resides in the East in the
land of Deep Blue Radiance, and before the bodhisattvas the King of Healers and the
Supreme Healer, the Great Physician Jüvaka, and the child of the Himalayas, asking
that they graciously bestow on me that medicine which eliminates all disease [agada]
in order to cure the illness that afflicts me now and expel all noxious vapors, helping all
the organs in my body work together in harmony and the blood in my veins and arteries
run smoothly and strongly, so that my entire body will be hale and hearty, my time on
this earth will be extended, and in all my comings and goings, whether sitting up or
lying down, I will be protected in this life.40
We also find in the Yaksa sutra itself—the same sutra supposedly
used by Milbon to weaken disease-causing demons—not only promises of
both prevention and healing, but also some specific prophylactic and cura-
tive techniques.
By Shilla times there were at least three Chinese-language transla-
tions of the Yaksagyong available—those by Dharmagupta, Xuanzang, and
Yijing, dating to the seventh and early eighth centuries. All three appear in
the Koryö Tripitaka, but they were certainly known to Koreans much ear-
lier.41 T'aehyôn, a Shilla monk, wrote a study of this sutra, so at least the
version he used, the Xuanzang translation, was available during Unified
Shilla.42
There are some differences among the various versions, but all three
contain variants of the twelve vows of Yaksa, for which this Buddha of
Healing is best known.43 Of particular interest to those who have fallen ill
or suffer infirmity are the Buddha Master of Healing's vows six and seven.
In the Yijing version, they read as follows:
Sixth Great Vow: I vow that when I attain enlightenment in a future age, if there
are any sentient beings whose sense faculties are incomplete, who are ugly, stupid,
rheumatic, deaf, blind, mute, bent, lame, hunchbacked, leprous, insane, bound and con-
strained by the sufferings of all sorts of diseases—if such persons hear my name and
with utmost sincerity call it out and hold it in their minds, then they will all receive that
which is auspicious and glorious, and they will be cured ofall disease.
Seventh Great Vow: I vow that when I attain enlightenment in a future age, if
there are any sentient beings . . . who are sick with disease and have neither medicine
nor physician—if they should hear my name for but a fleeting moment, they will be
cured ofall diseases.1^
In fulfillment of those vows to heal the afflicted, this sutra contains
some concrete advice on how to go about preventing or overcoming dis-
ease. The Yijing version, for example, provides five mystic formulas that,
chanted by a believer, will provide protection against future illness as well
as heal diseases already contracted.45 And there are rituals, even one for
raising people from the dead, or at least, in the translation of one sym-
pathetic scholar, awakening them from a coma.46 As part of that death-
defying ritual, those who want to have their nearly departed "regain [his]
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES63

original vitality as if waking from a dream" are told they must, among
other things, "read and recite this sutra forty-nine times. Light forty-nine
lamps and make images of the Tathagatas, seven in all, placing seven
lamps before each image. . . . You should release forty-nine living creatures.
By doing these things, you will be able to repel misery and suffering, and
the sick person will not be in the grasp of negative spirits."47
This medicinal undercurrent of Korean Buddhism faded from prom-
inence with the fall of the Shilla kingdom in the tenth century but it did not
disappear entirely. There are no accounts of miraculous healing in the
biographies of prominent monks of the Koryö and Chosön dynasties,
which followed Shilla.48 Buddhism had become so entrenched that it no
longer needed the dramatic proselytizing impact of leading monks curing
incurable diseases by reciting a sutra or sacred formula. However, Yaksa
yörae and his sutra continued to appeal to a least some practicing Korean
Buddhists.
Artists, for example, continued to sculpt the Buddha of Healing
throughout the Koryö and Chosön dynasties.49 Moreover, prayer halls to
house those statues of Yaksa yörae continued to be built at prominent tem-
ples. Songgwang Temple in South Cholla has a Yaksa Hall [Hall of the
Buddha of Healing], built in 1637 and repaired in 1751. Chöndüng Temple
on Kanghwa Island also has a Yaksa Hall, built in the seventeenth century,
to cite just two examples. New sculptural evidence of the persistence of
faith in the power of the Buddha of Healing has appeared as recently as
1992, when a new statue of the Buddha of Healing rising thirty meters
above the ground (the actual statue is seventeen meters high and sits on a
pedestal thirteen meters high), said to be the tallest Buddha of Healing in
Asia, was erected at Tonghwa Temple on Mount Palgong. Built to ease the
pain of a divided nation, this T'ongil Yaksa yörae taebul is evidence that
today, for some of the Buddhist faithful, Yaksa yörae is still important.
More dynamic evidence can be found in several Buddhist temples
around the peninsula on the eighth day of every month. That is the day
designated for the Yaksajae, the formal ritual for praying to the Buddha of
Healing. One temple that holds such a ritual every month is Pongguk Tem-
ple in Seoul. Established in 1395 as Yaksa Temple [the temple of the Bud-
dha of Healing] by Muhak, the monk who served as adviser to the founder
of the Chosön dynasty, Pongguk Temple remains true to its original
name.50 The central figure in the main hall is Yaksa yörae and not, as is
usually the case, Sakyamuni. A Yaksajae I witnessed on 8 June 1992 took
place directly in front of this statue of the Buddha of Healing.
At least fifty people were in attendance at that midday weekday
ritual, mostly women middle-aged and older. The presiding monks began
the service by chanting the Ch'önsugyöng, a prayer to the bodhisattva
64BAKER

Kwanüm, along with the congregation. The service also included a thirty-
minute segment in which the monks led the worshippers in bowing and
chanting "Yaksa yörae pul" over and over. The two-hour ritual, which also
included the reading of the names and addresses of all who had contrib-
uted to the service or who had special requests to make, was followed by
an hour-long sermon by a visiting monk, who said nothing about Yaksa
yörae or healing.
Yaksajae are also held monthly at Shilsang Temple, one of the origi-
nal nine mountain temples of meditative Buddhism on the peninsula. The
iron statue of a seated Yaksa yörae in the temple's Yaksa Hall has drawn
particular attention since it was reported to have sweated and emitted rays
of light in 1985 and 1986, when the temple was threatened by talk of a
dam that would have flooded the valley in which it stands (those plans
have since been canceled).51 When I visited Shilsang Temple on 1 May
1993, there were over three hundred votive candles burning in Yaksa Hall,
evidence that worship of Yaksa yörae was alive there even on days with no
Yaksajae.
Yaksa yörae is not the only manifestation of the Buddha worshipped
at Pongguk, Shilsang, and other temples where Yaksajae are held. There
are also regular monthly rituals for the bodhisattvas Kwanüm and Chijang.
But the survival, if not the flourishing, of Yaksa worship at some of
Korea's better-known temples shows that healing and the search for relief
from the threat of disease remain a vital part of Korean Buddhism today,
as they have been for centuries, ever since Buddhism first arrived on the
peninsula.
Healing also remains an important part of the one religion that has
survived on the peninsula longer than Buddhism. That is why, in his other
manifestation, as the Yaksa posai (Bodhisattva of Healing), the Buddha of
Healing has become a popular figure in shamanism as well. Along
Chongno, across from Chongmyo in central Seoul, are "miscellaneous
goods shops" that supply shamans with the tools of their trade. Included
among the wares are plastic Bodhisattva of Healing statues. These golden-
hued statues are not normally seen in temples, since they are associated
with those fortune tellers who call themselves practitioners of Buddhism,
but are not recognized as such by any of the major Buddhist denomina-
tions. (Yaksa yörae statues are often white rather than bronze.) Yaksa posai
has also lent his name to some of the shamans who specialize in counsel-
ing the unhealthy, and is a familiar and respected enough figure that a sha-
man's shrine at the entrance to Kuksa Shrine, the center of shamanism in
Seoul, advertises itself as Yaksa Hermitage, the hermitage of the Buddha
of Healing.52
The Yaksa posai of shamanism is far removed from the Yaksa yörae
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES65

of the Yaksagyöng, the primary textual source for information on

the Buddha of Healing and his powers. That sutra is not much in evidence
at shaman shrines or even in many places where more orthodox statues of
Yaksa yörae are enshrined. However, it has survived, and not only in the
Koryö Tripitaka.
Volume 9 of the Sökpo sangjöl (Episodes from the Life of the Bud-
dha), the first piece of prose ever written in hangül, is basically a Korean-
language version of the less esoteric Xuanzang Yaksa sutra.53 Since the
Sökpo sangjöl was compiled by the prince who later reigned as King Sejo
(1455-1468), and was written under the direction of King Sejong (1418—
1450), it is clear that Yaksa was not seen in the fifteenth century as a minor
Buddhist figure, nor was his sutra regarded as some insignificant, periph-
eral text.
King Sejong had his crown prince translate that sutra into Korean in
honor of his queen, who had recently died. He did so out of hope that the
vernacular publication of that sacred text would earn merit for his queen
and win bliss for her in the next life.54 Despite the anti-Buddhist rhetoric
that accompanied the founding of the Chosön dynasty, Sejong obviously
maintained some residue of faith in Buddhism, and in Yaksa yörae.
There is further evidence as well for continued belief in the healing
power of Buddhism in the early years of the new dynasty. In the second
year of Sejong's reign, for example, when the queen was suffering from an
earlier illness, the king dispatched his father-in-law to a Buddhist temple
to pray to Yaksa yörae for her recovery.55 And on at least two occasions,
when there was an outbreak of illness among his subjects, Sejong dis-
patched monks along with physicians to treat the afflicted.56 However,
nowhere in the official accounts of his reign, or anywhere else in the offi-
cial records of the dynasty as a whole, for that matter, are there reports of
any Buddhist monks healing in as spectacular a fashion as they were
reported to have done when Shilla kings sat on the throne.
Nor do there appear to be any more official reprints of the Yak-
sagyöng in the nearly four and half centuries of Confucian government
that followed the reign of King Sejo. That sutra did continue to be read
and revered, however, and there were private printings of the Chinese-lan-
guage version. Seoul National University's Kyujanggak library contains
three such texts, all printed from woodblocks by devout Buddhists rather
than government officials.
The oldest Yaksagyöng in the Kyujanggak collection was printed in
1607, the year Ho Chun's medical encyclopedia, the Tongüi pogam, was
published to help Korea cope with the major health problems facing it
following the Hideyoshi invasions. The other two copies were printed
in 1867, not long after Ch'oe Che-u, founder of the Tonghak religion,
66BAKER

received revelations of a verbal formula offering protection from an

epidemic then raging throughout the peninsula.
In contrast with the fifteenth-century Sökpo sangjöl translation,
which enjoyed royal sponsorship, the 1607 and the 1867 printings were
sponsored primarily by women, both nuns and laywomen. This suggests
that by the second half of the male-dominated Chosön dynasty, support for
Buddhism and respect for its power to heal had shifted toward the periph-
ery and away from the center of society.
The 1867 edition, produced at Yujöl Temple on Kümgang Mountain,
also shows that Buddhists felt their approach to health and healing was
being challenged even on the periphery by Taoist books imported from
China. In a note added at the end of the sutra, the nun Sangyon noted that
she had had the sutra reprinted because she was alarmed by the spread of
such books as the Sutra of the Big Dipper and Obtaining Longevity,
which, she said, were being mistaken for authentic Buddhist texts.57 She
also pointed out that ignorance of that sutra had led people to wear good-
luck charms instead of relying on the more efficacious mystic formulas the
Buddha of Healing taught.
She did not mention that other materials imported from China were
promoting respect for Yaksa yörae, though the Buddha of Healing
depicted in those materials was not the benevolent healer seen in the sutra.
A Chinese booklet available in Korea from the early sixteenth century
warned that there were ten manifestations of Buddhahood, who each had
their own special days of the month when they had to be honored by hav-
ing their names chanted; those failing to so honor them would face dire
consequences. For example, those who did not chant the name of the
Yaksa yurigwang Buddha (Yaksa yörae) two thousand times on the eighth
of every month would go either to the hell of immersion in urine and dung,
according to one source, or to the hell of immersion in boiling water,
according to another. And those who forgot to chant the names of his two
assistants, the bodhisattvas Supreme Healer and King of Healing, on the
twenty-ninth of every month would fall into either the hell in which one
was subject to constant grinding or the hell in which one had to walk on
beds of nails. There were even pictures of the tortures awaiting those who
neglected their chanting.58
Yaksa yörae, the Yaksagyöng, and the entire corpus of religious
approaches to health and healing that have for centuries been part of Bud-
dhist tradition in Korea maintain an ambiguous presence in Korean Bud-
dhism today. In the main temple of the Chogye denomination, to which the
vast majority of Buddhist clergy and laity belong, there is no Yaksa Hall or
statue of Yaksa yörae. In another major temple, Popchu Temple at Songni
Mountain, known for its large outdoor statue of Maitreya, a Chosa Hall (a
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES67

hall for honoring predecessor monks) now stands where a map outside the
temple gate says a Yaksa Hall should be. And when Tongguk University,
the major Buddhist university in Korea, decided to open a medical school
a little over a decade ago, it established a curriculum identical to that of
any other Korean school of Oriental medicine, except that it required stu-
dents to take a couple of classes on Buddhist culture. That school teaches
secular Chinese medicine, not Indian medicine. The Yaksagyöng and other
traditional religious medical strategies, such as mystic formulas, are
ignored in the classroom.
Yet, at the same Popchu Temple that has banished Yaksa yörae from
the main temple complex (a statue of the Buddha of Healing remains at an
affiliated hermitage nearby), there is a small bookstore that as of spring
1993 stocked both hardcover and paperback editions of the Yaksagyöng,
containing both the original Chinese (with hangül alongside each charac-
ter to aid in reading it aloud) and a modern Korean translation. That partic-
ular edition, of the more esoteric Yijing version, was published as recently
as 1992.59 And it is not the only modern version available. In 1986, not
long after the first reports that its statue of Yaksa yörae had been emitting
sweat and rays of light, Shilsang Temple published a Korean translation of
the shorter Xuanzang version, interspersed with a hangül pronunciation
guide to the original text .60
The introductions to these modern editions of the Yaksagyöng care-
fully avoid any mention of Yaksa yörae's Bodhisattva twin, so popular
among shamans. Nor do they draw any attention to the mystic formulas
contained in that sutra. The Buddha of Healing, as they portray him, is pri-
marily a compassionate provider of hope and consolation to the afflicted,
not a miracle worker.
Herein lies the ambiguity of religion as a medical strategy in modern
Korea. Mainstream religious organizations, and that includes most Bud-
dhist denominations in Korea, want to project a public persona compatible
with the modern world and its preference for rationality and disdain for
superstition. That is why there is a tendency, both in academic studies of
Korean Buddhism as well as in the religion's attempts to mold its public
image, to focus on outstanding monks, such as Wönhyo (617-686) and
Chinul (1158-1210), who made significant contributions to sophisticated
philosophical and doctrinal development. Buddhism in Korea is usually
presented to modern audiences as a religion concerned primarily with doc-
trinal study and meditative practices.
Yet religious organizations, like all other organizations, must meet
the needs and expectations of their clientele. The Buddhist faithful in
Korea expect their religion to offer them practical tools for dealing with
the problems they encounter in their daily life. Many of them are impa-
68BAKER

tient, and when they or their loved ones are ill they want more than the
pious platitudes that suffering is an unavoidable part of life or that the
Buddha is compassionate and sympathizes with them in their pain. They
want to be told specific remedies that offer immediate relief or at least a
better chance to conquer their disease in the near future. If Buddhist clergy
cannot provide such consoling advice, they will turn to others who can,
such as a Yaksa posai or some other shaman.
Moreover, to retain the legitimacy conferred by the patina of tradi-
tion, Korean Buddhism cannot deny its own past. The Yaksagyöng, for all
its supernatural elements, has been part of the orthodox Buddhist canon
for well over a thousand years. And the worship of Yaksa yörae has been a
significant part of Korean Buddhism from at least the late seventh or the
early eight century.61 Moreover, the reports of the first monks on the pen-
insula engaging in displays of miraculous healing are inseparable strands
of a glorious history that gives Buddhism some of its appeal in Korea even
today.
If it is to continue to be a viable and vibrant religious force in mod-
ern Korea, therefore, Buddhism must preserve a creative tension between
the need to offer hope to the afflicted and to be true to its traditions, on the
one hand, and the need to present a rational face to an increasingly secular
world in which the natural and the familiar are often more persuasive than
the supernatural and the miraculous. In addition, as a large and highly
visible religious organization, Korean Buddhism today must maintain
both consistency in its teachings and activities and a hierarchical ordering
of its ranks if it is to function effectively as a unified organization. Yet
miraculous healing is by its very nature inconsistent, unpredictable, and
uncontrolled.
When Buddhism first penetrated the peninsula, miracles were neces-
sary to gain the attention of the population. Charismatic monks wielding
supernatural healing powers were a key factor in helping Buddhism estab-
lish superiority over shamanism. However, once Buddhism was solidly
established, such unpredictability became disruptive; spectacular displays
of supernatural power were no longer necessary. It became more important
to make Buddhist practice routine rather than unusual and to make Bud-
dhist teachings comprehensible rather than mysterious, so that Buddhism
could become a normal part of everyday life and Buddhists themselves
could be accepted as ordinary members of society.
Yet such normalization cannot proceed so far that a religion comes to
deny any possibility of transcending the limitations of the mundane world.
After all, it is the claim of religion that it can predict the unpredictable,
control the uncontrollable, and explain the unexplainable that sets it apart
and gives it such appeal. Once past its initial proselytizing phase, Bud-
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES69

dhism in Korea had to ensure that while it downplayed the miraculous it

did not also deny the possibility of occasional miracles.
This need for organized Buddhism to regularize and contain Bud-
dhist healing, to make it appear less mysterious, and to bring it under the
control of the clerical hierarchy has also manifested itself in the recent his-
tory of Korean Buddhism. A case in point is the career of Taeheng sünim,
an ordained nun of the Chogye denomination who runs the Han maüm
sonwon, an organization catering primarily to Buddhist laity. As of 1990,
the organization maintained six meditation centers in Korea and four in
the U.S., in addition to its headquarters in Anyang, just outside Seoul.
With over 20,000 disciples, Taeheng sünim is considered an important and
respected figure in mainstream Korean Buddhism. Yet she once was a
wandering hermit who spoke to animals and cured hundreds of people by
the mere power of her presence.62 As a young nun, Taeheng sünim spent
ten years on her own, rejected by the Buddhist establishment.63 It was dur-
ing that time that she gained a reputation for miraculous healing. Her fol-
lowers say that she has cured over a thousand people.64 Some are so
impressed that they believe she may be the incarnation of the Buddha of
Healing.65
However, since she has been brought under the umbrella of the
Chogye denomination, she downplays her power to heal, saying "miracles
don't exist." She tells her followers not to look to others for help but to
look inward instead, toward the Buddha nature that exists within each and
every one of us. "When we are sick, he [the Buddha nature within us]
becomes the Bodhisattva of Medicine who cures our disease."66 There are
no published accounts of Taeheng sünim or her followers talking with ani-
mals recently, and any healing that occurs in her presence these days is
ascribed, in orthodox terms, to the power of the One Mind (a term she uses
for the interrelatedness of everything) rather than to any special power she
personally possesses.67
The ambiguity of the relationship of mainstream Buddhism to reli-
gious healing is reflected throughout her writings. On the one hand, she
seems to offer freedom from disease to all who follow the Buddhist path
she outlines. For example, she tells her followers, "I cannot understand
those who have followed the Buddha's teachings and yet never stopped
taking medicines. I have never been ill, because I have been living entrust-
ing my life to the Ju In Gong [the Buddha nature within]."68 On the other
hand, she teaches that "suffering is our friend who leads us on the path to
understanding. Those who understand the Buddhadharma [the phenome-
nal world] know it is unnecessary to pray for good fortune," implying that
her followers should not ask her to cure their diseases.69
That same ambiguity is reflected in her life, and in her relationship
70BAKER

with established Buddhism. She gained fame as a healer, and it was pres-
sure from followers impressed by her healing power that convinced the
Chogye hierarchy to grant her an institutional base. Now that she is a
highly visible ordained nun within the Chogye denomination, however,
she is presented more as a teacher than as a healer. Her power to heal is not
denied, but it is no longer the primary focus of the attention she receives.
The same can be said of Buddhism in Korea in general. Buddhism's
power to heal, and historical accounts of such miraculous healings, is not
denied, but ever since the fall of the Shilla dynasty, talk of such power has
gradually retreated into the background in writings about Korean Bud-
dhism and by Korean Buddhists.
Yet Buddhism's ability to address questions of health and healing, to
promise some relief from the uncertainty, the pain, and even the terror dis-
ease and illness bring, was a significant factor, though certainly not the
only or even the most important one, in Buddhism's successful penetration
of the Korean peninsula. Moreover, healing has remained ever since a
powerful undercurrent in the flow of Korean Buddhist history. The hope
Buddhism offers the afflicted, through Yaksa yörae, the Yaksagyöng, and
other religious medical strategies, has been an element, though again not
the most important one, in the resilience and continued vitality of Bud-
dhism in Korean religious culture.
Why then has the role of Buddhism in the Korean search for health
and healing received so little scholarly attention? Any survey of Korean
religion in general, or of Korean Buddhism in particular, that overlooks
Yaksa worship and other manifestations of Buddhist concern for healing
risks simplifying the complex fabric that is Korean religiosity, depriving it
of its full richness, complexity, and vigor. Yet that is precisely the risk
scholars and popular authors alike have taken.
Perhaps one explanation for this slighting of religion as a medical
strategy lies in the way religion is defined. Though political and social his-
tory has recently broadened its scope from an exclusive concern with the
ruling elite toward a popular history that looks also at the lives and con-
cerns of those they ruled, the religious history of Korea remains focused
on those few who preach and preside over rituals, rather than on the many
for whom sermons are given and for whom rituals are performed.
This preliminary examination of Buddhist approaches to healing
suggests that Korean Buddhism may have been too narrowly defined.
What is Korean Buddhism, after all? Is it primarily monastic doctrine or
does it include popular practice? Is Korean Buddhism to be defined only
by what monks do and say? Should not the beliefs and practices of the
laity, who make up the vast majority of Korean Buddhists, also be
included in a description of Buddhism in Korea, even if they vary greatly
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES7 1

from what their monks tell them to believe and do? Too often the worship
of Yaksa yörae and other Buddhist practices more concerned with immedi-
ate benefits than with distant enlightenment are dismissed, by monks and
scholars alike, as superstitious intrusions into true Buddhism, despite their
roots in the sutras.
Those monks who in this modern age still sell copies of the Yak-
sagyöng or preside over Yaksajae will, if questioned, often add a caveat
that the claims of healing found in that sutra are to be taken metaphori-
cally, that the medicine Buddhism offers is the spiritual medicine that
leads to truth and enlightenment. Yet many of the laity purchasing those
books and bowing, chanting, and praying before those statues of Yaksa
yörae appear to take the Buddhist promise of healing literally.
If those "superstitious" practices have been part of Korean Bud-
dhism for over a thousand years, do they not also merit recognition as part
of Korean Buddhism? Cannot the definition of Buddhism be broad enough
to encompass both the monk's search for understanding and enlightenment
and the layperson's search for health and happiness?
If the answer to both questions is yes, may not that broadened defini-
tion of Buddhism provide a better explanation of the continued vitality of
Buddhism in Korean culture than the traditional emphasis on monks, doc-
trine, and meditation has done? It may be that there is not only a signifi-
cant connection among illness, healing, and religious proselytizing, as we
saw in the first centuries of Buddhism in Korea, but there may also be a
significant connection among illness, healing, and the survival of Buddhist
symbols, beliefs, and values in Korea's villages for over a millennium.
It may have been Buddhism's power to explain the unexplainable,
control the uncontrollable, and predict the unpredictable through its
sophisticated philosophical and psychological doctrines that explains its
continued appeal to monks and some intellectuals in the centuries follow-
ing the fall of Shilla. They probably also appreciated the peace of mind
they could gain through its meditative techniques.
In peasant homes, where the vast majority of Koreans have lived for
most of Korean history, however, it was more likely Buddhism's promise
to explain the unexplainable, control the uncontrollable, and predict the
unpredictable through prayer, ritual, and mystic incantations that kept
interest in Buddhism alive. Some of the most unexplainable, uncontrolla-
ble, and unpredictable experiences in peasant lives were their encounters
with disease and death. Yaksa yörae and his Yaksagyöng, as well as other
Buddhist medical strategies, offered them hope in dealing with such
unpleasantness and uncertainty in life. That is probably the reason faith in
the Buddha of Healing survived despite the doctrinal and meditative focus
of institutional Buddhism in Korea from the tenth century on. And the sur-
72BAKER

vivai of that faith in the healing power of Buddhism is probably a major

reason Buddhism has remained a popular religion on the peninsula for
well over a thousand years.
Buddhism has more than survived. It has thrived in Korea's villages,
becoming an integral part of the folk religion. It has done so because it
addressed some of the basic needs of those who lived in those villages.
The first Koreans to accept Buddhism did so partially because it offered
tools for fighting illness and death. Many among their descendants turned
to Buddhism for the same reason. The Buddha of Healing might not seem
a major presence in Korean Buddhism, compared with Maitreya, Kwa-
nüm, or Sakyamuni. Yet he remains a potent symbol of one source of Bud-
dhism's continued appeal to the people of Korea, and suggests why Bud-
dhism continues to be such an important part of Korean life, history, and
culture.

NOTES

1 . The research for this article was made possible by a serial grant from the
Korean-American Educational Commission (Fulbright), which funded three separate
research trips to Seoul, in the spring of 1992 and the spring and fall of 1993. An anon-
ymous reader provided useful comments on the paper as it was presented at the First
Pacific Basin International Conference on Korean Studies, held in Honolulu in the
summer of 1992. 1 have taken those comments into consideration in revising the paper
for publication. Any errors of interpretation or fact in this article are, of course, solely
my responsibility.
2.The most informed speculations about how the earliest inhabitants of the
Korean peninsula may have conceived of disease and healing appear in Miki Sakae,
Chosen igakushi oyobi shippeishi [History of medicine and disease in Korea] (Osaka:
privately printed, 1962), part 2, pp. 3-^4-; and Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk uihaksa [History of
medicine in Korea] (Seoul: Tamgudang, 1981), pp. 6-28.
3.Shin Chöng-gyun, Pulgyo wa üihak [Buddhism and medicine] (Seoul: Tong-
guk University Press, 1983), p. 43.
4.Ibid., p. 59; Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History ofIdeas (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 141.
5.Shin Chöng-gyun, Pulgyo wa üihak, pp. 58-93; Unschuld, Medicine in
China, p. 143.
6.Unschuld, Medicine in China, p. 143; Shin Chöng-gyun, Pulgyo wa üihak,
pp. 22,94-97, 117-122.
7.Shin Chöng-gyun, Pulgyo wa üihak, pp. 97-116.
8.Nathan Sivin suggested that translation. He talks of pulmonary, hepatic, car-
diac, splenetic, and renal systems instead of lungs, livers, hearts, spleens, and kidneys.
Nathan Sivin, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: Center for
Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1987), pp. 68, 124-133.
9.For more on Chinese medical theory, see Unschuld, Medicine in China; and
Dominique and Marie-Joseph Hoizey, A History of Chinese Medicine, trans, by Paul
Bailey (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993).
10.Samguk sagi (Seoul: Kwangjosa, 1976), p. 312.
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES73

11.Ibid., p. 319. More examples from the same edition of the Samguk sagi can
be found on pp. 18, 21, 22, 37, 38, 55, 58, 162, 176, 198, 202, 217, 298, 329, 343, 393,
409, 412, 436, 437. These same examples are cited in Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 2,
pp. 1-3.
12.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük (Seoul: T'ongnamu, 1992), pp. 1001—
1002.
13.Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 2, pp. 4-6; Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa, pp.
99-101.
14.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 51; Iryön, Samguk Yusa: Legends and
History of the Three Kingdoms ofAncient Korea, trans, by Tae-Hung Ha and Grafton
K. Mintz (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1972), p. 127.
15.Samguk sagi, p. 249; Yi Pu-yöng, "Illness and Healing in the Three King-
doms Period: A Symbolic Interpretation," Korea Journal 21 (December 1981): 9.
16.An English translation of that text is available in Unschuld, Medicine in
China, pp. 309-314. Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa, p. 73, lists the Pulüigyöng among
nine Buddhist healing texts from China that he thinks had been brought into Korea by
Shilla times. Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 1, p. 39, provides an even longer list of Bud-
dhist works containing information on medical theory and healing practices. These
works, included in the Koryö Tripitaka, were probably known to Koreans for centuries
before that Tripitaka was compiled.
17.Samguk yusa, pp. 184-185; Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, "Samguk
yusa chöngbon," p. 71 ; Peter H. Lee, trans., Lives ofEminent Korean Monks: The Hae-
dong Kosüng Chön (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 42—43.
18.Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa, pp. 40, 73.
19.Ibid., pp. 29-36.
20.Ibid., p. 78.
21.Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 1, pp. 21-23; Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa,
pp. 48^19, 74-77.
22.Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa, pp. 65-69, briefly describes each work.
23.Shim Jae-ryong, "Modernity and Religiosity of Korean People Today,"
Seoul Journal ofKorean Studies 4 (1991): 173.
24.Peter Lee provides a brief survey of the various theories about who Ado was
in Lives ofEminent Korean Monks, p. 6.
25.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, pp. 69-71; Samguk yusa, pp. 179-182;
Lee, Lives ofEminent Korean Monks, pp. 50-56.
26.Lee, Lives ofEminent Korean Monks, p. 62.
27.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 127; Samguk yusa, p. 358.
28.Translation from Lee, Lives of Eminent Korean Monks, p. 80. Also see
Samguk yusa, p. 283; Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 103.
29.Sung kao-seng chuan (Taipei: Wen-chin, 1987), pp. 78-79; Robert E.
Buswell, Jr., 77ie Formation of Ch'an Ideology in China and Korea (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1989), pp. 43^4-8; Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 1, p. 40.
30.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 120; Samgukyusa, pp. 333-337; Miki,
Chosen igakushi, part 1, p. 40.
31.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 119; Samgukyusa, pp. 331-332. More
on Hyet'ong, Milbon, and esoteric Buddhism in Shilla Korea can be found in Kim
Chae-gyöng, "Shilla üi Milgyo suyong kwa kü sönggyök," in Shilla mit'a chöngt'o
sasang yöngu, ed. by Pulgyosa hakhoe (Seoul: Minjoksa, 1988), pp. 287-317; Ko Ik-
jin, Hanguk kodae Pulgyo sasangsa (Seoul: Tongguk University Press, 1989), pp. 383-
467.
74BAKER

32.Rhi Ki-yong, "Silla Buddhism: Its Special Features," in Introduction ofBud-

dhism to Korea: New Cultural Patterns, ed. by Lewis Lancaster and C. S. Yu (Berkeley:
Asian Humanities Press, 1989), pp. 195-196.
33.Kim Yong-ok, Samguk yusa indük, p. 124; Samguk yusa, pp. 347-348.
34.Lewis Lancaster, "Maitreya in Korea," in Maitreya, the Future Buddha, ed.
by Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), pp. 143, 147.
35.For detailed information on Yaksa yörae, see Yi Chong-ik, "Chungsaeng üi
ap'üm salmül ttarasö—Yaksa yörae," Pulgyo sasang 3 (1984): 225-231; Leonard
Zwilling, "On Bhaisajyagura and His Cult," in Studies in the History ofBuddhism, ed.
by A.K.Narain (New Delhi: B.R.Publishing, 1980), pp. 413^121; Raoul Birnbaum,
The Healing Buddha (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979). Birnbaum discusses the signifi-
cance of Kwanüm as well as Yaksa yörae in the Buddhist search for longer life in his
"Seeking Longevity in Chinese Buddhism: Long Life Deities and Their Symbolism,"
Journal of Chinese Religions 13-14(FaIl 1985-86): 143-176.
36.Mun Myöng-dae, Hanguk chogaksa (Seoul: Yölhwadang, 1984), pp. 296-
369.
37.Kim Yong-mi, "T'ongil Shilla shidae amit'a shinang üi yöksa-jök söng-
gyök," in Shilla mit'a chöngt'o sasang yöngu, p. 127.
38.Some of the statues of Yaksa yörae on Kyöngju's South Mountain are dis-
cussed in Yun Kyöng-nyöl, Kyôngju Namsan (Seoul: Taewönsa, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 84-
87, and vol. 2, pp. 55-56, 98-100.
39.The Buddha of Healing on Kwan Peak is still actively worshipped, as I
found out on 17 June 1993, when I joined a group of Buddhist faithful who hiked to
that summit, over 850 meters above sea level. There is a large concrete plaza for wor-
shippers in front of the statue, and several people occupied it that day, bowing and
reciting the name of the Buddha of Healing. Next to the statue are some two thousand
votive candles, hundreds of which were burning.
40.Kim Tu-jong, Hanguk üihaksa, p. 75; Miki, Chosen igakushi, part 1, p. 21;
Kim Chae-gyöng, "Shilla üi Milgyo suyong kwa sönggyök," p. 314 n. 50.
41.Koryö Taejanggyöng, vol. 10, pp. 1341-1366. On the various versions avail-
able to Koreans, see Ko Ik-jin, Hanguk kodae Pulgyo sasangsa, pp. 394—399.
42.T'aehyön, "Yaksa ponwöngyöng kojökki," in Hanguk Pulgyo chönsö
(Seoul: Tongguk University Press, 1979-80), vol. 3, pp. 409^418.
43.Koryö Taejanggyöng, vol. 10, pp. 1341, 1347, 1358-1359.
44.Translation by Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha, p. 193; emphasis added.
45.Zwilling, "On Bhaisajyagura and His Cult," pp. 417^418; Birnbaum, The
Healing Buddha, p. 92.
46.Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha, pp. 86-87.
47.Translation by Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha, pp. 204-205; original in
Koryö Taejanggyöng, vol. 10, p. 1362.
48.See, for example, the biographies in Pömhae, Tongsa yölchön, trans, by Kim
Ryun-se (Seoul: Kwangjewön, 1992).
49.Mun Myöng-dae, Hanguk chogaksa, has located four Yaksa statues that can
confidently be attributed to Koryö and nine to which he gives a Chosön-era date. Some
of those sculptures retain religious as well as artistic significance. A mid-Koryö Yaksa
statue in an artificial grotto just outside the main complex of Kap Temple on Kyeryong
Mountain was clearly still being actively worshipped when I visited it on 24 May 1993.
There were lit votive candles in front of the statue, along with gifts of candy for the
Healing Buddha and a 10,000-wön note. Petitioners had also left around the grotto
MONKS, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES75

those little piles of stones that, in Korea's folk tradition, signify that individuals have
prayed or made wishes there.
50.See the note on Pongguk Temple in Donald Clark and lames Grayson,
Discovering Seoul (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, 1986), pp. 201-202.
51.Yaksa yurigwang yörae ponwön kongdökkyöng (Namwon, North Cholla:
Shilsang Temple, 1986), pp. 76-77.
52.For more on shamans as bodhisattvas, see Kim T'ae-gon, Hanguk mingan
shinang yöngu (Seoul: Chimmundang, 1987), p. 267. It is not unusual even in more
orthodox Buddhism for a living person to be called a bodhisattva. In fact, the usual
appellation for a devout Buddhist laywoman is posallim, the honorific form of the
Korean word for bodhisattva.
53.Yökchu Sökpo sangjöl volumes 6, 9, 11, reprint edition (Seoul: King Sejong
Memorial Society, 1991), vol. 9, pp. 99-179.
54.Han U-kün, Yugyo chöngch'i wa Pulgyo: Komal choch'o taebulgyo shi-
ch'aek (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1993), p. 174.
55.Ibid., p. 107.
56.Ibid., pp. 107, 136.
57.For the importation and reception of these books in Chosön Korea, see Kim
Nak-p'il, "Chosön hugi mingan Togyo üi yulli sasang," in Hanguk Togyo üi hyöndae-
jök chomyöng, ed. by Hanguk Togyo sasang yönguhoe (Seoul: Asea munhwasa, 1992),
pp. 355-372.
58.Kim Chöng-hüi, "Pöppul chakpöp üi shiwang tosang," in Proceedings of the
Annual Convention of the Korean Historical Association, May 21-22, 1993 (Seoul,
1993), pp. 588-599.
59.Yaksagyöng (Seoul: Kümnyunsa, 1992).
60.Yaksa yurigwang yörae ponwön kongdökgyöng (Namwön, North Cholla:
Shilsangsa, 1986).
61.As Yi Ki-yöng notes, if Yaksa had been important earlier, then Wönhyo,
who apparently wrote about everything Buddhist that was known to him, would surely
have written about the Yaksagyöng. Yi Ki-yöng, Hanguk Pulgyo yöngu (Seoul: Hanguk
Pulgyo yönguwön, 1982), p. 531.
62.For accounts of her communing with snakes, other wild creatures, and even
mushrooms, see Taeheng sünim, Teachings of the Heart (Occidental, Calif.: Dai Shin
Press, 1990), pp. 18-19, 55, 107.
63.See the biographical notes in Ibid., pp. 133-146.
64.Ibid., p. 99. For accounts of some of her first miracles, see pp. 138-1 39.
65.Ibid., p. 100.
66.Taeheng sünim, In Search ofthe Genuine I (Seoul: Lotus Flower Publishing,
1989), pp. 80-83.
67.Ibid., p. 10, for her definition of the One Mind. See Taeheng sünim, Teach-
ings of the Heart, pp. 55-56, for her statement that "these miracles are not the result of
my doing. They are the result of the One Mind."
68.Taeheng sünim, Living Free (Anyang, Kyönggi: Hammum Seon Center,
1990), p. 41.
69.Taeheng sünim, Teachings of the Heart, p. 18.