in the footsteps of Prof Wang

Even on the Monday evening conclusion of a busy weekend conference, even delivered his remarks remotely, Prof Gungwu Wang commanded a rapt audience for the Tang Prize lecture at the Asian edition of the Association for Asian Studies conference in Daegu, Korea. He spoke about his two books, Home is Not Here, and Home is Where We Are, and addressed fraught questions of identities, national, civilisational and more intimate. Prof Jean Oi of Stanford was his interlocutor, asking probing questions, particularly about the fate of Hongkong. The title of his speech referred to the question of why he never took Singapore citizenship, despite his long years of residence here: "One Identity Too Many".

Upaasana Suresh and I were proud and happy to be displaying the two “Home” books at the NUS Press booth throughout the conference. I had noted one passage in Home is Where We Are when I first read the manuscript some years earlier. It was his description of his first visit to Korea:

The best was yet to come. After visiting Pusan, the port closest to Japan, and the south coast where Admiral Yi Sun-shin defeated the Japanese navy in the 16th century, I was taken inland to the Kaya mountains where the Haeinsa is located. This has been the home for over 600 years of the thousands of wooden printing blocks used to print the Korean Tripitaka. They are the oldest surviving printing blocks of the Buddhist scriptures anywhere in the world, and are so well preserved that they were, at the time I visited, still being used to print new copies of the texts. I saw the printing being done of several sets of the Tripitaka, which were to be presented to the counties that provided the United Nations troops to defend the south from northern invasion during the Korean War.

I was greatly moved by the deep sense of the past that prevailed in that whole valley and was sorry that our stop was so brief.

Somehow I was aware of the Haeinsa story before this, and I used an image of the temple to illustrate a lecture I give to interns every year joining the Singapore Book Publishers Association (SBPA) annual programme. But after reading this passage in Prof’s manuscript, I knew I would have to visit the site as soon as I could. Post-COVID, that opportunity came my way with the Daegu conference. How apt that Prof Wang was part of the experience (even if virtually).

We had worked through the weekend, so I had a day off coming. The morning after the close of the conference I took the metro across town to find the bus to the Mt Gaya National Park. "Hurry up, hurry up" said the ajooma behind the ticket counter, giving me a scolding I chose to interpret as kindly. I made the bus with a minute to spare.

The temple certainly did not disappoint. It was far enough, and uphill enough, from the small town at the end of the bus line to make me feel like I earned some merit from the hike. How nice it was to share part of it with two other AAS-ers, Patricia Sieber and Alia Goehr. The mountain streams in the area were in full flow, given the rainstorms of the previous days; they flow down to join the Nakdonggang which winds its way through this southeastern quadrant of South Korea before flowing through Busan. The outcroppings of Bulgaksa granite gave plenty of drama to the landscape.

But more dramatic than the peaks and outcrops was the temporality here. The woodblocks underwent exquisite preparations before being carved in the earlier 13th century, to give as long a life as possible to the wisdom of the Buddhist scriptures. Some 150 years later this temple site was chosen as a place that was ideal as a refuge, up a remote mountain valley. Here the woodblocks were kept safe from Japanese invaders (more than once), American bombers and North Korean troops who apparently liked the idea of turning the temple into a military base.

The halls were designed with great care to create the right conditions for long-term preservation of the blocks. Even today no one has seriously proposed that the woodblocks be moved to the sort of climate-controlled sealed storage that contemporary archives take as best practice. When you are looking at preserving something for millenia, don't choose storage that depends on regular electrical power.

I don't think today's society is very good at the sort of thinking that created and even today nurtures Haeinsa. I'm not sure I trust the long-termists and effective altruists who have taken it on themselves to do our thinking about these things. It was just a few years after its completion for the Svalbard seedbank to flood, as the permafrost melted. Give me historians and Buddhist monks.

I was greatly moved by the deep sense of the past that prevailed in that whole valley and was sorry that our stop was so brief.