Fifty Years of the American Dream (6)

A Historical Journey Through China, from Xi'an to Beijing

Eight years after my first visit to China in 1997, I had the chance to tour China's historic regions once more, this time with fellow Seoul National University alumni who shared an interest in history. On October 19, 2005, with a name tag prepared by the travel agency hanging around my neck, I finished immigration at Xi'an airport and stepped into the waiting lounge of the newly built, modern terminal, where a young ethnic-Korean Chinese man and woman greeted me and saw me into a car waiting outside. The atmosphere had changed beyond belief since September 1997, eight years earlier, when I had visited the pits of terracotta warriors and horses excavated around the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in Xi'an. My purpose in returning was to seek out the historic sites of China between Xi'an and Beijing and to look there for our own history.

The driver spoke no English, but the young woman spoke it with ease, and we chatted during the hour and a half it took to reach the Xi'an national museum. Along the boulevard leading into the city center, great sculptures of camels and caravans showed that the trade of Chang'an, the old capital of the Tang dynasty, is still alive today, fifteen hundred years later. The old city walls of Xi'an are well preserved, and the moat encircling them is still full of water. The walls are much smaller in scale than those of Seoul, but the gates on all four sides—east, west, south and north—are intact, and the grid plan of the city resembles that of our old city of Gyeongju or of Kyoto in Japan. For me, who studied architecture and urban planning, this 1,500-year-old city plan awakened a sense of history.

The oldest cities excavated anywhere in the world so far are the ruins of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Indus River valley of India. Around 4000 BC they already had artificial lakes for storing water inside their walls, broad streets for wheeled carts laid out along east–west and north–south axes, and a grid plan separating public facilities from residential districts. The pottery excavated there is also related to Silla pottery. These cities are said to have belonged to the Dravidians, the original native people of southern India, and the faces and eyes of the excavated figures, with their high cheekbones and upturned outer corners of the eyes, resemble East Asians and seem to be connected to us.

A Trip with Seoul National University Alumni

When I arrived at the Shaanxi History Museum, seventeen alumni of Seoul National University's College of Medicine and their families, led by our fellow alumnus Min Kyung-tak, arrived from their visit to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang and the Western Regions and joined me. The museum, completed in 1993 to house the relics of Shaanxi Province, is a modern building designed in the style of classical Chinese architecture. The artifacts, displayed by period—Zhou, Han, Qin, Tang—include bronzes, gold, silver and jade objects, murals, ceramic figures, coins, roof-end tiles and bronze mirrors: relics of what was once a brilliant center of world culture, which seemed to be waiting for endless historical and scholarly study. A mural from the tomb of the Tang prince Zhanghuai depicts the reception of envoys from friendly nations—Koreans from the east, Xiongnu from the north, Arabs from the west—and among them the Korean costume and the headdress adorned with bird feathers stood out in particular.

Our group soon went on to the Xi'an opera house. It is a modern dinner theater seating about 500, with the seats arranged on tiers. The stage, large enough for some fifty performers and equipped with every kind of apparatus, had sets and lighting as lavish and dazzling as a Las Vegas stage, with music, dance and acrobatics. The costumes of the flying celestial maidens seen in Chinese murals, and the instruments and melodies that boast a long historical tradition, were a sight to behold. Like the paintings I had seen a few days earlier at Kyujanggak on the Seoul National University campus at Gwanaksan, the gayageum, geomungo, flutes, gongs, kkwaenggwari, large and small drums, and the bells like those preserved at Seonggyungwan in Seoul—orchestral instruments of every kind—played a distinctive Eastern music that one cannot hear in modern music.

The next day our group arrived by train at Anyang, the old Sui capital east of Xi'an. This is the setting of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which we read as children; the stories of Guan Yu and Cao Cao came back fresh from distant memory. The peonies of Luoyang are famous, a product one could see everywhere, and even our hotel was called the Peony Grand Hotel. From the train, I saw the terrain of the Yellow River valley, where thick layers of loess had been eroded by floods over long ages into deeply furrowed gorges, and in them the shacks of poor farmers and the farmers plowing their fields. It reminded me of our Korean farmhouses after Liberation.

The Longmen Grottoes

Early on the morning of October 21, our group arrived at the Longmen Grottoes. Located on the banks of the Yi River west of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province south of the Yellow River, the Longmen Grottoes—a continuation of the Yungang Grottoes in Shanxi Province north of the Yellow River—are, together with the Dunhuang caves of Gansu Province, the three great grottoes of China. The Wei dynasty founded by the Xianbei people, after finishing the Yungang Grottoes at present-day Datong in Shanxi Province, moved its capital to Luoyang in AD 494 in order to rule the Han Chinese of the Central Plain south of the Yellow River. Because of an invasion by Baekje, the completion of the Yungang Grottoes was halted, and work began anew here at Longmen in 493. One can see from this how great the influence of Baekje and Goguryeo still was on Chinese history at that time. The Longmen Grottoes were completed in 523, through the Sui and Tang dynasties. Most of the caves are on the hill of Longmenshan on the west side of the Yi River, and on the hill east of the river are more caves, the Xiangshan Temple, and the tomb of the poet Bai Juyi.

Of the roughly 2,300 caves, about 1,400 date from the Tang dynasty. The largest of them, the Fengxian Temple cave, holds a seated rock-cut Vairocana Buddha, 17 meters high, carved together with four bodhisattvas on either side into a space 35 meters wide and 30 meters deep. The guardian figures on both sides look just like those of Seokguram in Gyeongju, and the face at the center is said to bear the likeness of Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang.

Among the caves, one caught my eye because of a record that it was made by monks who came from Silla on the Korean Peninsula. None is as refined or as well preserved as Seokguram in Gyeongju, but the architectural layout, with an antechamber leading to a rear chamber, had much in common with it, so here one can see the connection between the Buddhist cultures of Tang China and Unified Silla. That afternoon, when we stopped at the Temple of Guan Yu within the Luoyang ancient museum, I looked at an offering table set with eighty-one kinds of food and suddenly felt hungry. Soothing my hunger, we visited Wangcheng Park and the White Horse Temple, where we could glimpse the architectural styles of the Zhou and Han through the Sui and Tang. The surviving Korean timber architecture follows the styles of the Yuan or Qing dynasties, but these were ample materials for imagining the architecture of our Three Kingdoms period.

The next day, as we looked at the modern hydroelectric plant at Xiaolangdi, which dammed the Yellow River and was completed in 2003, the driving force of China's industrial development seemed to be boasting of its scale. We soon headed for the Shaolin Temple on Songshan. Songshan is the sacred peak among China's Five Great Mountains, positioned at the center in the scheme of yin-yang and the Five Elements (陰陽五行), a holy place of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism where emperors through the ages came to offer sacrifices. It is said that the Indian monk Bodhidharma came to this Shaolin Temple by the sea route and then up the waterway of the Yellow River. This is clearly different from the textbook history we learned, which said that Buddhism entered China by way of Southwest Asia.

The Shaolin Martial Arts Academy

In the Shaolin Temple's Pagoda Forest, among its 230 pagodas and stupas, a few are Tibetan-style stupas, which caught the eye. The tradition of the monks of old, who trained in martial arts as part of their spiritual discipline, has grown so that Shaolin on Songshan is now a world-famous martial arts training town. Martial arts schools have been established from elementary school up through university, with some 5,000 enrolled students from countries all over the world, and some 50,000 trainees live in the town and practice martial arts. I could see records of Korean taekwondo practitioners and entertainers who had come from Korea and visited here.

Our group moved to the airport at Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, and late that night arrived at Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province. Shanxi is bounded by Shandong Province to the east, the Yellow River to the south and west, and the Great Wall to the north; it is said to have originally been the land of the Xiongnu. As their blood mixed with that of the Han Chinese settled on the Central Plain south of the Yellow River, many beauties were born, including Yang Guifei. It is the same in America, where we live, with the beauties born of Asian and Western parents. Via overland routes and waterways it became a center of Chinese trade, and because it was a political center that ruled both North and South China, the tombs of kings such as Yao, Shun and Yu are here, and the Wei, Jin and Tang dynasties are said to have been founded here.

The next day we visited the residences of Taiyuan's wealthy merchant families—the Kong, Chang, Yang, Cao, Wang and Qiao families, among others. The residential compounds where the rich families who built modern China's economy and their descendants once lived are now well preserved as museums. Our group stopped at the Qiao Family Compound, where we toured the location where the Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern was shot, and grew familiar with the customs and relics of daily life.

The Jinci Temple, a World Cultural Heritage

In the afternoon we arrived at Jinci, a representative temple of Chinese Taoism. It is a temple where a statue of a goddess is worshipped in the Hall of the Holy Mother, as a symbol of ancient China's matriarchal society. To the right of the entrance stands a bell pavilion and to the left a drum pavilion; across the water, at the corners of the offering hall, stand four bronze figures erected in the Song dynasty (the time of Goryeo in Korea). Behind it, the Offering Hall is a designated cultural-heritage timber building that preserves the style of the Tang and Song dynasties well. Here one can see the architectural style that preceded our Goryeo period.

Past the Offering Hall there is a stone bridge, just as in our Korean Buddhist temple compounds, and it too is a designated cultural treasure. Across the stone bridge, in the main hall, the Hall of the Holy Mother, the goddess is enshrined as a Taoist mountain spirit; its timber structure also has something in common with the architectural style of Muryangsujeon Hall of Buseoksa Temple in Yeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, and it too is a designated cultural treasure. Jinci is truly an important cultural-heritage temple of China. West of Jinci is the Buddhist temple Wuzedian, built for the repose of the soul of Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang. In front of its seven-story brick pagoda is the Maitreya Hall enshrining the Budai monk, and in the galleries on both sides in front of it the Tripitaka is carved on stone tablets. This contrasts with our Tripitaka Koreana at Haeinsa, carved on wooden blocks.

East–West History I Learned for the First Time

The next day our group moved to Wutaishan, the headquarters of Chinese Buddhism. One hundred and eight Buddhist temples were built there, and Wutaishan is said to have served as the headquarters of world Buddhism. The Tibetan-style stupa at the center of the White Pagoda Temple is a structure 75 meters high, piercing the sky. Shuxiang Temple enshrines Manjusri Bodhisattva seated on a lion, preaching the Dharma. There are records that when Shakyamuni was preaching in India, Manjusri was already preaching at Wutaishan in China. And there are records, in China and in India alike, that Greek kings came to India and China, shaved their heads and trained as Buddhist monks, and then returned to the Mediterranean.

The brick dome and arch composition of Xiantong Temple is also unusual, and the small golden hall behind it is larger and more beautiful than the Golden Hall that is a national treasure of Japan. Woljeongsa Temple on Odaesan in Korea also appears to have been modeled on the Chinese original. After touring Wutaishan, as our bus crossed the Hengshan range toward Datong, I saw that many Chinese still live, without names or dates of birth, in loess cave dwellings called yaodong ("dream caves"). The yellow dust that rises here every April is said to cross the Shandong Peninsula and the Yellow Sea and reach all the way to the Korean Peninsula.

When the rains come in November, farming begins. The mule, born of a male horse and a female donkey, is strong and gentle and provides much of the labor for life here. They are said to be unable to reproduce on their own. Crossing the Hengshan pass, we arrived at Yingxian, the Liao capital located on the plain that spreads wide beyond it. The Hanging Temple, built 1,400 years ago in the Northern Wei period, is said to be here, in the hometown of Yang Guifei. North of Yingxian lies Datong, and the Great Wall and its beacon towers came into view in many places. It is the region with the largest coal reserves in China, and the Yunü River flowing through the city center has shrunk to a small stream because so much of its water is drawn off by the surrounding coal mines. We stopped at the Temple of the Three Religions, hanging on a cliff 50 meters high, looked down over the wilderness, and soon unpacked at our hotel.

The Yungang Grottoes

The next morning we visited the Yungang Grottoes on the outskirts of Datong. Around the time Buddhism from India came over the Tibetan mountains and entered Wutaishan by sea, the Indian art of cave carving (the Ajanta caves) appeared in the Chinese grottoes of the Northern Wei period—and that is the Yungang Grottoes. One can see that the Buddhist sculpture and architectural style are similar to those of Baekje culture. The timber architectural style depicted in the carvings has much in common with Horyuji and Yakushiji, which were carried from Baekje to the Nara region of Japan.

In the elephant figures of Cave 9, one can see a vivid, unaltered form of Eastern Indian Buddhism transmitted by sea without passing through the Western Regions. The figures of Hindu gods carved at the entrance of Cave 8 show the characteristic fusion, from the time Buddhism first began in the Ganges basin, with Chinese Taoism and Indian Hinduism. The Western view of history that we were taught said that Buddhist sculpture came from Greek culture. Here I was able to confirm that this was political education, by which Europe, having invaded and occupied Asia, dressed up the superiority of the white race.

On the last day, October 27, our group set out at dawn by bus from Datong on the expressway straight to Beijing, pushed through air thick with coal dust, and arrived at Beijing airport on time. I could see the political intention of present-day China, since the Jiang Zemin government, to set its policy as a Buddhist nation, keeping its distance from the Christian culture of Europe and America and checking the incursion of Islam from the Arab countries. Expressway construction was in full swing for the 2008 Olympics, and compared with my visit eight years before, there were fewer bicycles on the roads and many more cars. But the lack of traffic order, with pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, buses and trucks all mixed together, was the same as ever.

I spent my childhood, from age four to eight, in Fushun, Manchuria. When I visited Xi'an, Beijing, Guilin and Shanghai in September 1997, half a century later, China had not changed much. Visiting again this October, I saw China's enormous changes and the development of its social environment. While studying the development of East Asian culture and the cultural-historical relations among Korea, China and Japan, I felt how very lacking the knowledge we had been taught was. I feel an urge to send much encouragement to the young next generation for the work that lies ahead of them. Thanking once again our fellow alumnus Min Kyung-tak, who arranged the trip, I close this record of a happy journey here.

With my own hands I designed and left to the citizens of Dayton countless buildings, including the Korean War Veterans Memorial Park, the Dayton VA hospital building, the Reibold Building downtown, the Yankee Trace golf clubhouse, the Dayton Dragons ballpark, the Warren County building and more. I donated the schematic design for a Korean cultural center that the Korean Association of Chicago needed, and in 2004 we moved to Newport Beach in Southern California.

Retiring and Moving to Southern California

One day in February, while in Ohio the cold wind was still blowing flurries of snow, here in Southern California I saw a hawk fly off somewhere from our backyard with a small twig in its beak. A family of rabbits welcomed us to the backyard; they came every night, acting as if they owned the place, paying us no mind as they grazed the grass and stole the vegetables we were growing for ourselves in the garden. Then, from the time a pair of hawks began flying over the canyon, the rabbits were not seen again. One day in March, a hawk perched on our chimney with a field mouse in its talons, while six crows cawed noisily and clamored to harass it. The bravest of them flew close over the hawk's head as if urging it to leave at once, but the hawk sat resting without budging, then spread its broad wings and flew off at its leisure.

I ran out with the telescope my younger brother had brought me as a gift, set it up on the table, and searched every inch around the pine trees across the canyon. When I saw a mother hawk feeding three chicks, I could not hide my joy, like a child, and shouted for my wife to come out and see. The mother bird had brown feathers with black spots and a fearsome look, but the chicks were small as baby chickens, in white down, and their faces, beaks opened wide enough to split as they took food from their mother, were so marvelous and cute.

From then on, going out to the backyard every day to look through the telescope became part of my daily routine. I showed them to friends who visited, too, and now they felt like members of my own household. On evenings when the mother bird was nowhere to be seen, I worried that something had happened to her and fretted that the chicks would go hungry. On rainy, windy nights I sometimes fell asleep imagining the family of four huddled together, the mother's talons gripping the branch, pressed close against the pine. In the late spring of Southern California, in April, the mornings are thick with fog and the sun comes out only in the afternoon so that one can see across the canyon, and there were times I waited for it anxiously.

When, high in the cobalt Southern California sky, the mother bird and the male flew together, conversing in the peculiar cries hawks have and dancing on high, I enjoyed the boundless beauty of nature along with the birds, my heart soaring endlessly high with them. Then I would suddenly go into the house and call my wife out, and we would sit together watching the pair of dancing birds, and look in on the chicks waiting in the nest.

After the male bird saw the mother home and vanished somewhere, the mother would tend to her chicks and then leave again and again to catch food. When she came back with food in her beak and fed the chicks, I shared in their joy, and I saw in that mother's love alone the generative power by which living things exist on this earth in this vast universe. Is it not because the Creator gave that power to mothers, and with the help of fathers they bear and raise their children, that we are living in this world?

By the end of April, the three hawk siblings had already grown a great deal. Many black spots had appeared within their white down, and feathers had grown on their wings, so they practiced flapping. The way they waited their turn when their mother shared out the food was completely different from eagle chicks. Eagle chicks begin the struggle for survival from infancy, fighting one another to get food from their mother—a ruthless family—and compared with them, the friendship of the three hawk siblings waiting their turns was truly beautiful.

In May the chicks' bodies grew so large that the nest became cramped, and I worried that one of them might be pushed out and fall. But when the mother bird prepared the nest for her three chicks, it must surely have been the providence of nature, surpassing human wisdom. When they relieved themselves, they would lift their skirts, as it were, turn their rumps out of the nest, and without fail shoot out a stream like a water pistol that painted the pine branches below white. I mimicked the motion with my own body, and my wife and I laughed together. When there was the noise of grass being mowed beneath the pine, the mother watched the source of the sound and guarded the nest, tense, while the chicks were merely, heedlessly busy.

By mid-May the chicks had already grown as big as their mother; their white down and black spots had all turned brown, and taking on the proper look of fearsome hawks, they spread their broad wings and began practicing flight within the nest. At times their feet lifted slightly into the air. Again they practiced in order, taking turns, so their wings never collided and none was pushed out of the nest.
In late May, on the day we returned after being away from home for a few days, it was clear that the eldest and the mother had already departed on the journey they had been waiting for, and only the second and third remained. Since there was still food left in the nest, the two shared it amicably, and I sensed that this time it was the day for the second to leave. At first the second flapped over to a pine branch a little way from the nest. But it kept looking down, again and again, afraid of falling to the ground far below, and unable to hide its fear, only flapped its wings and then returned to the nest.

After a long while, the second flew up again onto the same branch, a little higher. This time it moved carefully toward the tip of a slightly higher branch, half walking and half flying. The third came out after it, looking worried, climbed onto the next branch, and watched only the second with a pitiful expression, as if saying, don't go. The second reached the end of the branch and now, as if truly preparing to leave, looked upward, spread its wings wide, and seemed to make up its mind. At last the second did the thing it had to do for the first time since it was born into this world. It flew off, soaring high into the sky.

Ah! I, born the second of six siblings, watching the second one leave, saw again with deep emotion the joy of my own life. Yet at the same time I worried about the third, left all alone. After the second left, it returned alone to the nest. The next day at dawn, when I came out to the yard and sat before the telescope looking for the third, only an empty nest remained in my eyes.

No matter how I searched around the pine, the stillness of the quiet dawn emptied my heart, and the hollow feeling, as if a whole year had passed, was just like the day three years before when our youngest daughter graduated from college and left home. Tears welled in my eyes. Whether it was the joy of a new start or the sorrow of parting, whether a beginning or an end, it was a moment of passing through one of the changes of our lives.

A Retirement Busy Once Again

Because I had been thinking about what I would do since three years before I retired, time still went by busily. I often drove to far-off LA, more than an hour on the freeway from home, as if dropping in on a neighbor, to attend gatherings of writers. I began to make an effort to create literary works the way I had created works of architecture. I began writing poetry in high school, but it was hard to find time to write while studying and playing sports, and during my years as a student abroad I was too busy learning English to write the poetry I loved. Still, whenever I happened to write something and show it to others, it would appear in a newspaper or magazine, so it seems I never stopped and kept at it.

When I am writing poetry, steeped in poetic inspiration, my feelings overflow in a world of imagination, and I sometimes fall into a rapture, wandering among joy, sorrow, anger and ecstasy. Because there is joy when my thoughts and feelings reach others and move them, I came to feel that I cannot but write poetry. In the midst of busy life, when a subject for a poem comes to mind, I jot it down at once on a memo pad and keep it in my pocket, and when I sit down at the computer I begin writing right away.

It is said that at first one begins writing because one feels one would die otherwise, and that as one keeps writing, one comes to share emotion with readers and thus to have influence. One takes on a social role in which one must write. When I had written about a hundred poems this way, I met in LA Mr. Shin Sei-hoon, a former president and chairman of the Korean Writers' Association. Ten of my poems, including "Korean Air Bibimbap," were published in the spring 2011 issue of Jayu Munhak (Free Literature), and I at last made my debut as a poet in the Korean literary world.

After that, when I had written about two hundred poems, I met Mr. Hong Seung-ju, a master who is the one and only person in the Korean literary world to be poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and critic all at once. After reading my poems, he urged me to publish a collection, and on June 15, 2013, I published a book of poems. Since my youth, friends I played sports with had given me the nickname Chuho (秋虎), "Autumn Tiger," because I was born in the Year of the Tiger (1938) in autumn (September). And recalling Mudeungsan, where I grew up, I named the collection Autumn Tiger of Mudeungsan.

Meanwhile, because I also had an interest in studying history, I wrote historical essays as "eyes for seeing a new world" and created the e-book "yongwanchoi.com." Mr. Han Sang-yeol, an eminent critic in the Korean literary world and publisher and editor of Essay Forêt, published my essay "A Dog Story from America" in its spring 1911 issue as a new-writer award winner, and so I made my debut in the Korean literary world as an essayist as well.

My Wife's Korean American Family Counseling Center

From 2009 my wife began volunteering in running the Korean American Family Service Center in Southern California. From then on, she entrusted me with the responsibility of holding "Sarangbang Geulsaemteo" (the Sarangbang Writing Spring), a gathering of Koreans in Southern California who write. I began to burn with a late-blooming passion for literature. We have met every Wednesday to study literature so as to write poems, essays, fiction and life memoirs well. We invite eminent lecturers for guidance, and members unfold the literary dreams they could not fulfill when young because of the busyness of immigrant life.

Among the members, some came to the counseling center to file for divorce, became members of Geulsaemteo, threw themselves into writing, and found a happy home again. A ninety-three-year-old man who had been living only to wait for the day of his death found hope in life again after joining Geulsaemteo, and wrote down his life experiences and published a book. One member began writing poetry beside her husband's grave after losing him and published a collection of poems. Another member recalls that if she had not written, she would have separated from the husband she hated like an enemy, and confesses that she is now happy with her children. It has become a gathering where people sublimate into writing the han and sorrow they have suffered through immigrant life, recover themselves and find joy again. Marking its fifth anniversary this year, some twenty members have made their debuts in the Korean literary world as poets, essayists and novelists.

While my wife counseled people on family and health problems at the center, I could see the many kinds of situations faced by retired households like ours. When a sudden change comes into a life that has been carried on the same way every day, it can become a crisis of failure or an opportunity for success. When a husband who has devoted himself all his life to his job to support his family reaches retirement age, the couple meets a new environment, as if newly born.

A couple who have just retired come to the family counseling center and pour out their grievances. The authority of the husband, who led the household amid the fierce struggle for survival, falls to the ground, and the devoted affection of the wife who has stood by him through the hard years begins to waver. Quarrels lead to emotional explosions and finally even to domestic violence, sometimes playing out the tragedy of a collapse into late-life divorce.

In counseling, once the two have poured out the grievances they had endured, hidden and piled up from before retirement until today, their anger seems to ease a little, and they make another appointment and go home. There is no knockout or win on points, but it becomes an occasion to understand the other's situation, and gradually communication begins. As they progress from negative thoughts to a positive attitude, they find a stable path again. At such times the children, who had been anxiously worrying on the sidelines, can at last breathe a sigh of relief. Isn't a man's retirement a transformation from the "outside person" into an "inside person" and a grandfather, and a woman's retirement a transformation from the position of mother into a grandmother who cares for her husband's health and for her still-living parents and thinks of her grandchildren?

Health Problems

Another change is the health problems that come with age. Three years after I retired, liver cancer was discovered. Fortunately a medication developed since 1985 has slowed its progression, but a complete cure would be a miracle. According to research by a world-renowned cancer specialist, what patients cured of cancer have in common is a character that does not fear death. Patients who lost themselves in worry did not last two months before leaving this world, but people who transcend death, keep hope and love their neighbors work the astonishing miracle of overcoming even cancer. If a husband who has retired from a life centered on work and the outside world joins hearts with his wife, now sharing the housework and doing community service together, they will be able to enjoy the rest of their lives in better health.

Human lifespans keep growing longer. According to U.S. Social Security statistics, a person who retires in good health at 65 lives on average another 17.5 years. On the other hand, a person who falls into a sense of loss upon retirement, as if all authority and honor were gone, lives on average only three or four more years. A person who wisely manages his own assets and government benefits, chooses healthy food, keeps exercising body and brain without cease, and lives diligently with gratitude for the abilities he has been given will lead a life that triumphs over the challenge of the hundred-year age. How many great people have left great footprints even in their seventies and eighties!

But with the population explosion and accelerating environmental pollution, clean environments keep shrinking. It seems we must take better care of ourselves, so as to become elders who protect and enjoy nature, live healthily without burdening those around us, and at the proper time give up our places to the young people growing up and depart. Just as a flower is most beautiful before it withers, and the twilight glows brightest before it fades, I hope that all of us may have such lives.

I have made unceasing efforts to learn how the history of Korea's traditional architecture and its cultural history are connected with the culture of East Asia, and what place they hold within world cultural history. I have made field trips to Japan four times and to China four times, and I have traveled to and studied Southeast Asia—India, Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere. Among these, I would like to share my travel accounts of Angkor Wat, India and Nepal.

The Ruins of Angkor Wat, One of the Seven Wonders of the World

Cambodia borders Vietnam to the east and Thailand to the west, countries that together form the Malay Peninsula. To the south it forms one geographical chain with the island nations of Indonesia. Historically these lands were influenced by both India and China, but compared with the Vietnamese, who look like East Asians, the Cambodians looked more of Indian descent, and I felt from their skin color that they were southern people living close to the equator. The Mekong River flows through the middle of Cambodia, and beside it lies the huge Tonle Sap lake; at the northern end of the lake are gathered the cultural ruins of the Khmer Empire (790–1350 AD), one of the seven wonders of the world.

After a six-hour direct flight from Incheon Airport, I arrived at Siem Reap airport, finished the entry procedures, met the group waiting outside to welcome me, and soon checked into the hotel. The atmosphere of the city reminded me of the Korean economy of the 1950s. There was no public transportation, so bicycles and motorcycles filled the main roads, and now and then one could see Korean restaurants. The number of tourists visiting the region's thirty-nine Hindu/Buddhist temples and palace ruins, built around the eleventh century, grows every year, and tourism is developing into a national enterprise.

Of the thirty-nine sites, the greatest number of ruins are concentrated in seven areas: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bakong, Banteay Srei, the Bayon, Preah Khan and Ta Prohm. Explaining these temples and palaces in historical order, I will record my impressions from the tour and try to write an account of my travels that may help spark the interest of those who visit here in the future.

In the time of Indravarman I and Jayavarman III (877 AD) of the Angkor kingdom, temples and palaces were built in the area east of Angkor, including Bakong. The Bakong pyramid is a stepped stone tomb like the Tomb of the General of Goguryeo, with stairways at the center of each of its four sides rising five tiers; at the center of the top tier stands a single tower with its door opening to the east, again crowned with a five-tiered roof.

It is clear that the concept of four-directional space seen in the Four Guardian Deities (the Blue Dragon, Red Phoenix, White Tiger and Black Tortoise) of Goguryeo tomb architecture is connected with the architecture here, and just as there are five elements in Goguryeo's thought of yin-yang and the Five Elements, the meaning of a five-tiered structure is included. Just as the structure of Seokguram faces east toward the rising sun, all the shrines and temples at Angkor face east; only the temple of Angkor Wat faces west. The Preah Ko temple here is the first temple built in this architectural style, and its towers were built as spaces where monks practiced, like our Korean hermitages. Built as brick pagodas before stone construction had come here, coated on the outside with plaster and wrapped in rich carving, they appear to show great influence from Indian sculpture.

Sitting in the tour bus and watching the people go by, I saw that most were on motorcycles carrying two people off to earn their living. There were romantic young couples on dates, too, but the sight of three generations, a family of five, clinging together precariously atop two small wheels seemed like a whole family riding along the very last edge of the struggle for survival.

The Temple of Banteay Srei

It sits about 20 kilometers north of Angkor, near the slopes of Mount Kulen. Entering the outer gate from the east, one follows a long balustrade to the main gate of the inner enclosure, and inside one sees the temple surrounded on all four sides by artificial ponds. Building artificial lakes around city walls, palaces or temples is a way of isolating and protecting them from the world, an architectural style seen both in Korea and throughout Southeast Asia.

The Banteay Srei temple was built in the time of Jayavarman V (967 AD), and its red sandstone gives it a warm and distinctive atmosphere. It is richly decorated with carvings of Hindu legends. Three towers stand on a three-tiered pyramid, the tower roofs are five-tiered structures, and each level forms an axis running from the east gate to the west gate, balanced left and right. In the stone windows on both sides of the front, five small columns are carved like the joints of bamboo. Mysterious inscriptions are recorded on the doorposts, lintels and beneath the beams, and in deep relief one can see carvings of cloud-like vine leaves and the many forms of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Just like Goguryeo's thought of yin and yang, Hinduism has the lingam, symbol of the male, and the yoni, symbol of the female, and one can see symbolic representations of the sexual organs as rituals of nature religion praying for the multiplication of descendants. The lingam is round and connected with heaven, and the yoni is square and connected with the earth.

The Hindu trinity consists of Brahma, the creator of the universe; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the god of destruction and creation. The god most worshipped in the religious rites of the Khmer Empire was Shiva. He was also the god who granted the great power that guaranteed victory amid the continual wars of that era's history. There are beautiful carvings of bare-breasted goddesses and of fish, turtles and crocodiles showing a maritime culture, yet also figures riding oxen and horses, showing that agricultural and nomadic cultures had already merged. Looking at this historical content, I see the image of how Buddhist culture, already globalized in our Unified Silla, reached its peak and carried on into the culture of the Goryeo period. The carvings on the temple walls looked remarkable, with fingers seeming to bend backward and ankles sharply bent, the movement placing both knees in a straight line with the hips.

The temple of Angkor Wat is Cambodia's most important cultural treasure and the representative treasure among the cultural relics counted as the seven wonders of the world. It is a huge temple complex completed under Jayavarman VI (1080 AD), after the Khmer Empire established its capital at Angkor, and because native Cambodians performed religious rites there until very recently, it is the best preserved. It became known to Europe from the seventeenth century, and to the world after Cambodia became a French colony in 1907. At a recent UNESCO meeting held in Japan it was designated a World Heritage site, and restoration work has been repeated several times with the support of the French and Japanese governments.

Angkor Wat is the only temple complex that faces west. It is surrounded on all sides by an artificial lake, and the long balustrades on both sides of the causeway crossing the water into the sacred precinct are made as the bodies of nine-headed cobras. Two lions guard the entrance. Crossing the water to the main gate, one finds the entrance opening in three gates, and like Gwanghwamun in Seoul, the large gate in the center is called the King's Gate. Passing through the gate and climbing steep stairs, one reaches the first level of the three-tiered pyramid, which is also called the level of the secular world.

Architectural Style

The stone relief carving surrounding the whole sacred precinct is divided into eight sections: on the two west walls the victories of the king are carved. On the two south walls are the records of dynastic history and depictions of hell and heaven. The two east walls show the war of the seas and the triumph of the god Vishnu. The two north walls are carvings celebrating the victories of Krishna and the devas. Following Hindu legend, they are the world's foremost sculptural treasure, where one can see at a glance the history, daily life, wars and myths of the twelfth-century Khmer Empire.

The story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of our Buddhist legend, also appears in the carvings here. In the process by which Vishnu restores the order of the universe, there is a part resembling Darwin's theory of evolution. Life begins in the form of a fish, turns into a turtle, becomes a pig moving on four legs, and then a man with the body of a lion appears. Inexhaustibly contained here are fascinating artistic expressions in which one can compare the imagination sensed through human intuition, handed down to the eleventh century, with the scientific way of thinking of the twenty-first.

Passing through the gate, there are four courtyards divided by cross-shaped passages, with library buildings visible on both sides, giving the impression of Korean palace architecture, where the Left State Councillor and Right State Councillor were placed on either side. Past the courtyards one climbs steep stairs again, through three open gates, to the second level of the pyramid. This is the level of monks and nobles, and here too library buildings stand on both sides. The third stairway finally reaches the third level of the pyramid, the level of the heavenly gods, which the king and high priest climbed on foot to receive the god. Vishnu's place is in the central tower, passages connect in all four directions, and there are four sacred pools, with steps leading down into the water so that the king and high priest could wash their bodies in the holy water.

As a whole it is built as a three-tiered pyramid structure: on the level of the heavenly gods stands the largest central tower, and smaller towers were built, so that five towers in all form the top of the pyramid. The tops of the towers are five-tiered roofs. In the place where the image of Vishnu once stood, a Buddha image now sits, and the temple is used as a Buddhist temple. The magnificent scale of the architecture, felt from outside, is matched within by splendid carved decoration; the original colors of the buildings have faded, but imagining the brilliant scene of the king and high priest receiving the god, one can experience with deep emotion how the science, art and religion of that time in human history formed a trinity. The western view of Angkor Wat reflected in the lake in the late afternoon, as the sun set, made me feel as if I had left the earth and come to some faraway star—just as I had felt when I first visited Paris and saw the Eiffel Tower reflected in the river.

The Golden Age of the Khmer Empire

Under Jayavarman VII (1181 AD), the temples and palaces of Angkor Thom were built. Jayavarman VII, who grew up watching Jayavarman VI build Angkor Wat, prepared the large-scale city plan of Angkor Thom and brought about the golden age of Khmer imperial history. He built huge artificial lakes east and west of the walled city of Angkor Thom to store water against the dry season that came every year and against changes in climate, and the excavated earth was used for building foundations. In the middle of the lake he built the Mebon temple, where water burials were performed. The square walled city of Angkor Thom covers an area ten times that of Angkor Wat, with the Bayon temple set at its exact center. In front of the south gate, 108 giant deity figures, seated holding the body of a nine-headed cobra at their waists, are lined up on both sides, making a spectacular sight.

At the city gate, the gateway stands beneath a corbel arch, the building technique of our Three Kingdoms period, and above the gate are carvings of four great faces looking east, west, south and north. At each of the four corners, three elephant heads with three trunks like columns support the faces. The Terrace of the Elephants, northeast of the Bayon temple, was the place where the army returning victorious from war, singing songs of triumph, was received, and the carvings on its walls show the majesty of the king. I went to the place where the king stood and waved his hand, and waved my own hand in the empty air there. In my ears I seemed to hear a thunderous roar filling the square, with majestic music and brilliant colors shaking the atmosphere, and I felt flocks of doves flying up into the sky.

The Bayon temple, located at the exact center of the walled city of Angkor Thom, has a three-tiered square plan with the largest tower placed on a circular plan at the center of the level of the heavenly gods. I see here something in common with the concept of our Seokguram, whose plan is square in front and round behind, the square defining the human world and the circle the world of the gods. Thirty-seven towers stand there, and on every tower the face of the Buddha looks east, west, south and north. It is said there were originally forty-nine towers, or as many as the fifty-four gods seated on the bridge at the entrance of Angkor Thom. It is so narrow and there are so many faces that it is easy to get lost in the jungle of towers, and one experiences the mysterious feeling of being surrounded by the faces of the gods.

The whole outer perimeter was built as a gallery, and like Angkor Wat, carved walls surround the entire temple. The content of the carvings is similar to that of Angkor Wat, but the Bayon's carvings are double, made up of outer carved walls and inner carved walls, so their content is even richer. Most of the carvings show scenes of war, and among them Chinese soldiers with different hairstyles and short ears take part in the fighting; Chinese also appear inside the palace, which reminded me that in our history Tang soldiers came in the Silla period and Yuan soldiers in the Goryeo period.

Most are foot soldiers armed with spears and shields, and the commanding king or general sits on a large saddle mounted on an elephant. The commanding officers, as seen in the film Ben-Hur, ride horse-drawn chariots while directing the battle, and it was unusual that a small-bodied groom sits on the horse holding the reins. Livestock are sometimes mixed in as the soldiers advance or march, and scenes of actual combat, killing the enemy, also appear. There are figures of sailors on ships, and the bows of the ships carved as dragon heads are the same shape as the head of the turtle ship of Yi Sun-sin, governor of Jeolla in our Joseon period.

On the north wall one sees the gods Vishnu and Shiva within the palace, scenes of nature, and the life of the king and nobles. The carved narrative, beginning on the southern part of the east wall, proceeds clockwise around the whole building and ends on the northern part of the east wall with the king's funeral. Together with the carved walls of Angkor Wat, these carvings are the quintessence of sculpture, unique in the world in recording history, a backdrop against which one feels history come alive.

One can feel the hardships of being king of an empire and ruling the world. When drought brought famine, the starving people had to seize grain from neighboring countries to survive. If they were robbed by a neighboring country, they died too, so whether they had or had not, there was war. Political enemies within always circled nearby looking for their chance, loyal and treacherous subjects fought without end, jealousy followed love, and discontent followed contentment. That is why the king could not live without the help of the heavenly gods.

The Religions of East Asia

Going out the north gate of the city of Angkor Thom, one finds the Preah Khan temple. Jayavarman VII, seeing that the temple of Angkor Wat already stood outside the south gate, built the Preah Khan temple outside the north gate. It is a huge Buddhist temple and was at one time a Buddhist university where more than 1,000 monks practiced and the doctrines of Buddhism were taught. Taoism, the nature religion of East Asia, grew into a scientific religion of the heavens that studied the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the solar system, and it was transmitted even to the Maya civilization of the American continent. But Hinduism, the nature religion of South Asia, remained with its three great concepts of creation, preservation and change in nature and did not develop anew, whereas Mahayana Buddhism had ample content for Jayavarman VII to promote it as the state religion.

Among the many carvings, one often sees, as at the Terrace of the Elephants in Angkor Thom, figures with human bodies, demon faces and animal feet, and in many places they catch the eye holding up the sky and holding up the temple structures. There are dancing girls holding up the buildings, so that the temple looks as if it were built in heaven. The image of Vishnu lying on his side atop the body of a four-legged dragon is the same as the reclining Buddha in Buddhist temples, a fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is the same phenomenon as the fusion of East Asian Confucianism into our Korean Buddhism.

The last of the seven areas I have described in historical order is the Ta Prohm temple. Records say that at one time 79,640 people lived gathered in and around the temple, producing natural medicines and distributing them to the royal palace and 106 hospitals. It is known as a temple built by Jayavarman VII in 1186 for his mother. Because it was hidden in a forest of giant trees, during the excavation of the temple buildings in the nineteenth century the roots of silk-cotton trees and strangler figs were found wrapped around the buildings, and they had no choice but to leave them as they were. The buildings and tree roots, mingled together, have instead given it the most romantic atmosphere of all the Angkor sites, and it is also known as the filming location of a famous Hollywood movie.

The kings of the empire built great walls and temples because peace was maintained as long as they always supplied the common people with work and provided them with houses and food. But they could not withstand great natural disasters, and the Khmer Empire fell in 1431; the capital was moved to Phnom Penh, and after a 400-year war with Thailand it was conquered. Since then Cambodia has lived in poverty as a weak nation between Thailand and Vietnam. While touring the floating people who live on boats on Tonle Sap lake, we passed a place where several boats woven of straw, shaped like houses where families live, were gathered together. Boats woven of straw and built in the shape of houses can also be seen in the old customs of Jeju Island, where they are called straw boats. Since they can also be seen in the coastal life of the Maya culture of Central America and the Inca culture of South America, I felt once again that over the long ages of world history there was a time when continents were in close exchange by means of unsinkable straw boats.

Since the Song dynasty, the buildings of East Asia were all timber structures, so their remains could not be preserved. Because research on Southeast Asian culture is lacking, there is an error in modern people's education in world history, which sees European culture as having developed ahead of East Asian culture. Emphasizing that East and West within world history must be illuminated anew on equal terms and studied fairly, I end here my account of the culture of the Khmer Empire, one of the seven wonders of the world.

A Trip to India

India: a country where the rich who decorate their houses with gold and silver live mixed together with the poor who, come evening, search for a place to relieve themselves. The place where our group first set foot in India was Mumbai (Bombay), the home of the film Slumdog Millionaire, which swept the Academy Awards in 2008.

In the square where the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel had suffered a terrorist attack and the political and economic wounds had not yet healed, the huge arch called the Gateway of India looked several times larger than the Independence Gate in Seoul. The British army invaded India in 1877 and ruled it, and before the last British troops left in 1947, this gateway was erected to commemorate the square; I saw the shamefulness of calling it the Gateway of India rather than the Gate of the British Army.

Our group soon hired a boat and went to Elephanta Island, visible out in the sea. It was the day after we arrived on a seventeen-hour flight from Newark airport, but we felt no fatigue; our hearts were so excited by the sightseeing that the sea breeze felt all the more refreshing. We rode a toy train on Elephanta Island that had long since become a piece of junk, arrived at the foot of the stone steps, and climbing them, found waiting for us a Hindu cave temple from the Gupta dynasty (our Unified Silla period), where huge rock had been bored into as a mole digs into the earth to create brilliant sculptural art.

The Religions of India

India is the source of the religious culture of Buddhism, which began on the Ganges River in 600 BC and was spread through Asia, but within India itself Hinduism is now dominant. The Hinduism of this cave temple is, together with the Taoism of East Asia, the oldest form of religion that reveres nature. It is a polytheism that sees all things in nature as gods. Among them, the most important gods of Hinduism—Brahma, the god of creation; Vishnu, the god of peace and preservation; and Shiva, the god of destruction and rebirth—form a trinity. Of these three gods carved on the walls of the cave temple on Elephanta Island, Shiva's three faces, his two faces, and his dancing form are so real they seem alive and moving.

The next day we visited Aurangabad, which in Indian history was a strategic point on the Silk Road, where the silk trade connected eastward to Tang China and westward to Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Ajanta caves here preserve national treasures of Indian Buddhist art, and together with the sculptures and paintings of Hinduism and Jainism they are a great world cultural heritage. Together with China's three great Buddhist cave temples—Dunhuang, Yungang and Longmen—hundreds of Buddhist cave-carving architectures flourished across Southeast Asia for 1,000 years, beginning in the first century BC.

Seokguram in Gyeongju, built by the architect Kim Dae-seong in Unified Silla in the seventh century, is one of them, and it shows common features with the architectural style of the Ajanta caves and the Longmen Grottoes: a plan square in front and round behind, and a passage in the main chamber allowing one to circle around the statue of the Buddha. Our Seokguram has a square antechamber and a main chamber with a domed ceiling and a circular plan, and it is highly valued because its refinement and beauty have been preserved completely, without suffering damage from people of other religions. It is our world heritage, designated by UNESCO.

Our group each lay in curtained two-tier berths on an Indian night train and arrived the next day at Agra. In China and India, laborers who do hard work are called coolies, the same name as the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad in America. It seems to be the name the British used for Asian laborers. Unlike Black slaves, theirs was a relationship of contracted skilled labor for wages. Watching the coolies carry our luggage up and down the stairs, several pieces piled on their heads and hung from both shoulders, I felt as if I were looking at a Korean train station after Liberation in 1945.

The Taj Mahal

Agra is where the Taj Mahal stands, the most beautiful of the seven wonders of the world. The Mughal kingdom of India was founded under the influence of East Asian culture after the Mongol Empire of East Asia invaded northern India. This came about after Genghis Khan of Asia, in the twelfth century, unified the world into an empire stretching from Asia to Europe, with territory several times larger than the Roman Empire. For about 200 years, down to Genghis Khan's descendant Timur, the culture and civilization, science and technology of the East were transmitted to the West, and the nations of Europe awoke from the long sleep of the medieval Dark Ages; from the fifteenth century all the nations of the world began East–West trade. The modern history of humankind began at this time.

Around this time, Jahangir, the fourth king of the Mughal kingdom in northern India, delighted in building palaces and monuments. His son, the fifth king, Shah Jahan, following his father's example, completed the construction of Agra Fort and, in memory of his beloved queen, built the Taj Mahal in India's own architectural style combining the square and the circle. The whole building was built of white marble, with flowers, leaves and stems of roses, jasmine, lilies and more inlaid in the marble in red, green, blue and yellow, and its scale and beauty are without compare. Although he kept three hundred queens, he showed his thoughtfulness by adding memorial buildings of red brick for two other queens on the east and west. But in his last years he was confined for seven years in a prison within the fort by his son the king, and died there, and he was buried deep in the ground of the Taj Mahal beside his beloved wife. The son converted from Hinduism to Islam, and the power of the Mughal Empire began to decline. The palace of Agra Fort and the tomb of the Taj Mahal have become the face of India, places that everyone who comes to India visits.

The Khajuraho temples our group visited the next day were stone towers of the Chandela kingdom, built 600 years before the Taj Mahal. In the period corresponding to our Goryeo, Indian stone sculpture reached its height. The construction of the stone towers also took on a form unique to India; observing its characteristics, a high stone platform was built and the pyramidal body was raised on the platform. Climbing the stairs up onto the platform, one climbs stairs again to reach the tower's entrance. Visitors' worship stays in the antechamber, but in the main chamber the symbolic object is placed at the center, and a passage is provided so that the officiating priest can walk around it. Each of these four spaces is an independent structure, and the roofs were built as corbelled arch domes. The exterior tower structure, too, is in India's own architectural style, magnificent and delicate.

Images of Gods and Goddesses in Sexual Union

The images of some 600 gods and goddesses in sexual union carved on the middle band of the towers' exterior show eighty-four bodily postures and include the custom of intercourse with animals. The scenes marshaling dogs, pigs, horses, camels and elephants all the way into war show the content of Hindu scripture, similar to the carvings of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The art of these temples is the world-famous attraction of the city of Khajuraho, located in the very center of India, and one can see in it the intention of the kingdom at the time to increase its population with the help of the gods and so build up its labor force and national strength.

The next day our group arrived at Varanasi and went straight to the Deer Park, where Shakyamuni gave his first sermon, and followed in the footsteps of the source of Buddhism, the world religion of 600 BC. Buddhism, which had its golden age under the Ashoka dynasty in 300 BC, was transmitted to East Asia—China, Korea and Japan—and northward to Tibet and Mongolia, and to the west Christianity and Islam followed and were founded.

To see the Hindu evening festival on the Ganges, the whole group put on flower garlands, rode rickshaws (taxis pulled by people), and reached the night festival grounds by the river. It is a splendid festival in which the riverbank is lit up with Hindu songs and dances from boats. Pilgrims seeking the source of Hinduism, which began before Buddhism, number more than a million visitors every year, and in the organized festival proceedings, with bright lights and loudspeakers on the stage they worship and watch, lasting all through the night, I could feel a long history and tradition that does not waver despite the disorderly surroundings.

The Holy Land of India

At dawn the next morning, wearing disposable shoes prepared for us, we groped our way along the muddy dawn road, where the animal dung had not yet been cleared, and went back to the Ganges. We hired a boat again and, greeting the morning as the sun rose to the east across the river, watched the custom of Hindu believers cremating the bodies of family members by the river. The eldest son or eldest grandson, head shaved, serves as chief mourner at the funeral, and as we watched from afar, with the family looking on, the soul of the deceased vanishing in the black smoke blown away by the dawn wind, our hearts floated quietly on the waves of the Ganges.

Moving the boat upstream, we visited the site of the previous night's festival again. On the empty morning after the festival had vanished, the riverbank was crowded with people bathing in the river out of habit and with pilgrims. Because the water of the Ganges is holy water, we saw many people immersing themselves in it and praying. Farther upstream there were also many people doing laundry in the river. Most of the buildings along the river are temple buildings with long histories, and many were places where pilgrims and visitors stay. Because people are generous to beggars when visiting holy places, it is like a paradise for beggars: dozens of beggars sat in lines along the roadside waiting for alms, and from child beggars swarming about in disorderly bands to sick women, I saw the largest gathering of beggars in all my world travels. Varanasi is a city full of hidden Hindu mysteries, a city where Indian history and tradition are alive and stirring, a city that firmly keeps the look of ancient times, far removed from modern people's knowledge and common sense.

We arrived at the airport of New Delhi, India's capital and the last city of our trip to India. On the way to the hotel, it was a clean city comparable to any city in the world. But Old Delhi, which we visited after unpacking and which one might compare to Gangbuk in Seoul, had the same scenery of poor streets with abandoned children, cows and dogs that we had seen everywhere in India. City buses ran with their doors and windows open, and three-wheeled taxis with no doors or windows ran along with five or six people crammed into a space for three, raising clouds of dust.

On the last day of our trip to India, our group visited the National Museum. India's history was introduced beginning with the oldest cities in the world, excavated in the Indus River valley: the ruins of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Seeing a city plan from around 4000 BC, with artificial lakes for storing water inside the walls, broad streets for wheeled carts laid out along east–west and north–south axes, and public facilities separated from residential districts, I was reminded of the grid plans of Gyeongju, the capital of our Silla, and of Kyoto in Japan, a city of Baekje culture. The excavated pottery also appears related to Silla pottery. These cities are said to have belonged to the Dravidians, the original native people of southern India, and the faces and eyes of the excavated figures resemble East Asians, with high cheekbones and upturned outer corners of the eyes.

The portable timber temple displayed at the museum entrance is a structure recently made by the Dravidians of southern India, but it shows the long-standing characteristics of wood carving and timber architecture. When I consider that there was a timber culture before stone sculpture and stone architecture developed, and that there were earth-mound pyramid tombs in East Asia before stone pyramids were built, I feel a sense of duty to study anew the development and flow of human culture as we know it in our knowledge and common sense, and to establish the truth. Because the trip to India was truly fascinating and full of challenges, I close my account of India with thanks to Ms. Jung Su-ja of Asia Travel, who prepared the trip so well, to our guide Mr. Singh Sun-il, and to all twenty-six members who traveled with us.

A Trip to Nepal

Extending our trip to India, our group of twenty-seven arrived at Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, a country seated on the roof of the world. One could see the diligence of people who build villages on high ridges and in valleys and ride motorcycles back and forth to the city center, and their houses were clean, showing a quicker and more enterprising life than in India. Many of the people, too, looked to be of mixed Tibetan and Indian blood—the Tibetans being blood kin of our own people. I could understand the rumor that wealthy Indians hire Nepalis, who are more diligent than native Indians, as servants.

Our lodging was located on the Langtang highlands near the Himalayas, away from Kathmandu, and at night the sky seemed so close that all the stars might come pouring down. We lit a night fire of dry wood, sat around it passing wine glasses, sang and danced, and rejoiced as if we had left the busy world below and were seeing heaven, dancing shoulder to shoulder with the stars twinkling in the sky. At sunrise the next day, each time the sunlight reached one of the mountain peaks surrounding us like a folding screen, it revealed mysterious colors and a majestic form, and in our wonder we did not notice how cold the dawn wind was.

The next day we reached a Lamaist Buddhist temple up 365 steps and saw the architecture of the Buddha's hemispherical stupa temple, handed down since the fifth century, its sky screened by five-colored flags (symbols of sky, earth, water, fire, wind and field). The style of painting two large eyes on all four sides seems to have something in common with the Egyptian style of emphasizing the shape of the eye. Visitors are led around the stupa turning by hand small bells inscribed with the protective mantra Om Mani Padme Hum. Because many monkeys live there, it is known as the Monkey Temple, and it seems an environment in harmony with nature. Pitifully, one could not help sensing that its overflowing cultural heritage and historic relics had been abandoned under the pinch of poverty.

Annapurna

The next day we arrived at Pokhara, a city near Annapurna in the Himalayan highlands, chartered a small Yeti Airlines plane, and rose above Everest, the summit of the world. For an hour, peaks higher than 8,000 meters spread before our eyes; when the wind pushed the clouds past the plane's wings, stern mountain faces opened their eyes, looked at us and came toward us. How many mountaineers, trying to get close, were blocked by ice walls lashed by snowstorms and lost their lives, or turned back alive in tears? The dark blue triangular peak pierces the sky. As our wings brushed over the summit of Everest, looking down on the clouds and avalanche valleys, it was a moment when my heart swelled with the white snowflakes and I stood dazed, as if I had completely forgotten the ragged world below. Before my eyes a great black diamond shone with a mysterious light and smiled at us. How could one not smile at ourselves, passing by for a single moment as though forgetting the whole history of the universe and the earth?

The Annapurna valley, widely known as a trekking course for mountaineers, is as beautiful in its many colors as a carpet woven on a loom by Nepali women, and the trekkers are as happy as children walking on the hem of the Himalayas' skirt. Our group returned to Kathmandu and visited Durbar Square, once the site of the old Hanuman royal palace. The brick buildings topped with wooden roofs, and the wood carvings on the brackets under the eaves, are splendid Hindu art. They resemble our wooden three-story pagodas, making me think of how wooden three-story pagodas must have looked before the stone three-story pagodas of Buddhist temples, like Seokgatap at Bulguksa.

The statue of the goddess known as the wife of Shiva, god of destruction and creation, her body adorned with skulls and holding several skulls in her hands, made me feel a resemblance to the Maya culture of the Yucatán Peninsula in Central America, and the fact that Hinduism and Maya culture both used the number "0" makes one wonder whether it is mere coincidence. Some years ago, genetic genealogy announced that during the tens of thousands of years when Europe and the North American continent still lay beneath the ice of the Ice Age, the blood kin of our people on the Korean Peninsula reached the coasts of North and South America, and on the other hand carried on the great artery of humankind through Manchuria and Mongolia to Tibet. The cultures of Tibet and Nepal are close relatives of our Korean Buddhist culture, and here they let us see our own history anew. This trip, in which I felt my small body and life passing over the summit of Everest, was truly an experience to be remembered for a long time.

(The photos below are the author's photos and photos by Professor Hwang Man-ik.)