I met my boss earlier this week (Wednesday, 7/23) at the National Museum of Korea, which I'd never been to before despite my two-plus decades in Seoul. The museum's external architecture has that 90s Yeouido aesthetic—gray, sleekly rectilinear-but-glassy, almost brutalist. The interior is divided up into spacious, high-traffic areas allowing you to walk from exhibit to exhibit. The exhibits themselves, as I discovered, were mostly of things like traditional art, sculpture, woodcraft, and even entire old-style buildings (e.g., a sarang-bang, a sort of parlor or reception area, mainly for men). The boss, who recently got his antiques-expert license, gave me a running narrative as we went from exhibit to exhibit. I added in what little commentary I could whenever we saw something religion-related, but even there, much that I saw was beyond me. Mostly, though, it was just me listening to the boss.
I got to the museum half an hour earlier than our appointed meeting time; traffic was terrible on the south side of the Han, but once my taxi crossed to the north, things got a lot better, and we made decent time. The driver was a bit of an idiot, though: another one of those people whose brain turns off whenever a foreigner speaks in clear Korean because he can't process that a foreigner might be speaking in Korean. I told him to go to the National Museum; he hesitated, then put his cell phone in my face and asked me to say the destination again. With the exact same clear pronunciation, I said, "National Museum" (called the "National Central Museum" in Korean), and the computer caught my meaning just fine—not a syllable out of place. Logically, if my pronunciation had been that horrible, the computer wouldn't have understood me, either. Conclusion: the cabbie was just an idiot. Or deaf. Or both. That was, though, the only real irritation I experienced that day.
The boss had had it in his head that there was some sort of special exhibit going on right now—something about old pottery (which he likes to collect). Frankly, I'm not sure we ever found the exhibit. He had also thought we might have to pay for tickets to go into that exhibit, but when he consulted with the ticket window, he was told we could just walk in for free. Like the Smithsonian in DC, the National Museum of Korea is mostly government-funded, but they do charge for certain special exhibitions, and as with other museums all over the world, there are gift shops, restaurants, and lots of other ways to grab a visitor's money.
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| Main entrance, and a shady area where I waited for the boss. See the large steps in the shadows? I sat there. |
The boss and I were supposed to meet at 11 a.m. I got to the museum at 10:30; the boss, who was driving from Suwon/Yongin, fought traffic and arrived close to 11:30. I don't know why he insists on driving; to me, cars make more sense if you live in a big country. But I know why I took a cab: I've suspected that, both times I got COVID, it may have had something to do with the subway's being a fookin' Petri dish, so I'm not all that partial to subways, especially around rush hour. Plus, I left early enough (9:45 a.m.) that I had a nice margin of error even with slow traffic. Plus, I needed the nap time, which is easier to snag in a taxi (especially when your driver is an uncommunicative idiot) than in a subway when you're forced to stand.
The boss arrived, talked to the person at the ticket window, and we went into Gallery 2.
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| There was this one special "Mana Moana" exhibit going on—about Polynesian culture, I think. |
Inside the museum:
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| stele-like Buddhist stonework, not far from the main entrance |
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| There was a group of kids sitting in a semicircle nearby, listening to a tour guide. |
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| Click to enlarge and read. Or: click, then right-click (open in new tab), then click again for full size. |
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| This pagoda dominated the main axis of the museum. You'll see that I took lots of pics of it. |
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| Up we go. |
We did happen upon a pottery exhibit, much to the boss's delight.
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I can't find a distinct head on this dragon. Is it that thing in the very middle of the design? If so, Korean dragon heads aren't usually shaped like that. They're distinctive, more like this.
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| One thing I noticed right away was the imperfection of the clay and stone artifacts. Very humanizing. |
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| taking the escalator up to the third floor |
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| This level of design complexity is almost Indian. Have you ever seen a Hindu temple? |
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| I just can't seem to look away. Is something Freudian going on? |
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I joked that this looked like "Buddhist conversation" since 회화 (different hanja: 會話) can mean "conversation." But the Chinese characters (繪畫) make clear that this 회화 refers to art. |
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| king of hell (explanation below) |
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| Click to enlarge, etc., etc. |
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| another king of hell |
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| explanation about this other king |
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| An arhat (나한/nahan) is a type of saint, normally associated with Theravada, not Mahayana. |
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| Explanation. In Chinese tradition the Buddha had 18 Lohan (nahan). In Korea, it's 16. |
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| Hell has a lot of kings. |
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| I know next to nothing about Korean Buddhist cosmology. |
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| same king (fifth), different depiction |
Buddhist hells function a lot like purgatory: a being in hell burns off its bad karma before continuing the samsaric cycle (samsara = painful wheel of existence; in Indian thinking, the goal is to get off the wheel, not to go to heaven or hell). Finding oneself in heaven can be almost as bad as being in hell: while in heaven, one becomes so lazily blissful that one again accumulates bad karma and can risk boomeranging back down into hell—a true example of how the Great Wheel loves you and wants to keep you forever chained to it. Of course, I'm being too anthropomorphic: this cosmology isn't about a supreme being sitting in judgment, punishing you for you sins or valuing you for who you are. No, in this system, you punish yourself through your own ignorance and stupidity. Again and again in the cycle until you either finally learn or you continue churning and churning forever. If, as the AI Joshua in "Wargames" concludes, the only way to win is not to play, that's your way out.
Now, an arhat is a saintly teacher, an enlightened being, generally talked about more in Theravada (Hinayana) Buddhism than in Mahayana Buddhism (the kind of Buddhism prevalent in East Asia and Vietnam; Theravada dominates the rest of Southeast Asia). In Mahayana, the saintly ideal is the bodhisattva. Imagine a large boat at a riverbank, ready to ferry beings over to the other side, to the shores of nirvana/bliss/full attainment/blowing out. Now imagine an enlightened being who, instead of eagerly stepping onto the boat to be whisked across, stops at the threshold to help others get onto the boat first. This is the bodhisattva ideal: to help others, to put others first, to live in service. This doesn't mean that the arhat, by contrast, is a selfish being: the arhat is a teaching being, also doing his/own service for other worldlings. These two Buddhist ideals aren't really that far apart.
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I wonder what makes this stone so significant.
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Google Translate offers this (with some editing; check my work, Korean experts):
"Stone Collected from the Namhan River, 2010 Song Seong-bun Addition, Gift of Song Sungmoon, 2010. This is a turquoise collected from the Namhan River, one of the largest turquoise-producing areas in Korea. In East Asia, it is considered a sacred being symbolizing eternity (or immortality) and has been revered and loved for a long time. During the Goryeo and Joseon Dynasties, people enjoyed nature by decorating gardens with oddly shaped stones, flowers, and trees. The Joseon painter Kang Hui-an (1417-1465) quoted the saying, “The energy of the earth gathers to become a field,” and reflected on the nature of grass, while the scholar Heo Mok (1595-1682) gave it the meaning of appreciation, saying that strange rocks remind people of the prehistoric times. In paintings, turquoise is a core element of landscape paintings, and it is depicted as a strange rock in a garden that appeals to literati. Its solid and unchanging characteristics are likened to a gentleman, and since the late Joseon Dynasty, many paintings of these strange rocks, standing alone, were drawn." |
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| I like the wabi-sabi aesthetic of the stone's display. |
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| This looks less like a painting and more like a carved wood-block print. Probably a painting, though. |
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| A Westerner would see this and go change his clothes behind it. |
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| So this was a portable screen used for royalty. |
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A Korean artist once told me about how the East Asian sense of perspective was originally less mathematical and more about creating layers of imagery, some in front of the others, to give the illusion of perspective. The boss noted that a common East Asian aesthetic was to de-accentuate human figures in favor of landscapes and plant/animal life. Reverence for nature. |
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| explanation |
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| Here's an exception, with people front and center. |
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| a closer look at the left scroll |
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| the right scroll |
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| Magpies are a common motif in Korean art. They're often paired with tigers. |
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I had to admire the accuracy of the grape leaves, which my brain registered before I saw the grapes themselves. In the house where I lived as a tween and teen, we had a grapevine in our back yard. |
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| Apparently, the work's title is just, "Grapes." |
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| It sucks that I can recognize only maybe five or so characters. |
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| The "handwriting" is in all different styles for each tile. |
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| This explanation applies to the photos below, not to the above images. |
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These look to be official stamps that served as seals and signatures, but they're not called dojang as would be true for artists: they're called injang. (I've seen in used on official documents to mean "signature.") |
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| Moveable type. Suck it, Gutenberg. |
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These pieces of moveable type are from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Johannes Gutenberg was a 15th-century figure, but Asians were using moveable type even before Gutenberg. |
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| This called to mind the Rosetta Stone for some weird reason. |
Finally, a pic of one of several vaulted spaces in the museum:
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| a lot of domed areas—here's one |
The boss and I meandered a bit, then we settled on having lunch in the museum's restaurant. We both had the cheapest item on the menu: simple bibimbap. No meat, nothing: just veggies. But it came with a small bowl of soup and several banchan sides, so I ate it despite the carbiness of the rice. And it was pretty good. At W15,000 a bowl, though, the bibimbap was being sold at American prices. Being an old man now, I can think back to the early 2000s, when I was taking intensive Korean courses at Korea University. In the Anam-dong neighborhood (close to where Mom was born), there was a bibimbap place that sold huge bowls of the rice dish for only W3,500—student prices. And it was great food, too. Ah, well. Inflation is just one of those constants of the universe.
The boss and I didn't have much to say to each other about his planned startup. According to him, he's got a business license now, but there are some paperwork-related snags. I'm still pulled in twenty different directions as I try to learn several disparate skills at the same time, and I'm only now getting to a point where I can start putting out product/content—that latest edited, honed-down* video being an example. It's going to be months, maybe years, before I get good at anything, but the only way to learn something new is by doing it, so I'll keep chugging at it no matter how slow I am.
In other news: I've dropped the HTML/CSS/JavaScript lessons with ChatGPT in favor of Spanish lessons. Like the Babbel app, ChatGPT thinks my Spanish is better than beginner level, which obviously isn't true, so I've told it to rein itself in and to give me simpler exercises since I'm missing a lot of the basics. I'd eventually like to be at a high-intermediate or even low-advanced level by the time I do the Camino in 2029 (assuming I live that long!). If I continue using ChatGPT for Spanish, this means I'll need to switch to doing everything on my phone since audio interface for language learners isn't a thing yet for iMac (and Windows?) desktops. Maybe in a couple of years, things will change. I'm almost starting to believe that Korea will get its wish and be able to send all of us foreign English instructors home so the nation's kids can be taught only by AI. This was just a risible dream only a few years ago.
Expect photos of my keto bibimbap later today. And maybe later this weekend, I'll have something more specific to say about my overall aims and efforts. Squarespace was a bust, but Substack (which I've been on since 2022-ish) and Shopify and Amazon are all showing promise. More on all of that later.
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*Please don't say "hone in on" when you mean "home in on." To hone is to sharpen.
