Page:Korean folk tales- imps, ghosts and fairies (IA koreanfolktalesi00impaiala).pdf/45



[—The Yol-ryok Keui-sul, one of Korea's noted histories, says of Cheung Puk-chang that he was pure in purpose and without selfish ambition. He was superior to all others in his marvellous gifts. For him to read a book once was to know it by heart. There was nothing that he could not understand—astronomy, geology, music, medicine, mathematics, fortune-telling and Chinese characters, which he knew by intuition and not from study.

He followed his father in the train of the envoy to Peking, and there talked to all the strange peoples whom he met without any preparation. They all wondered at him and called him "The Mystery." He knew, too, the meaning of the calls of birds and beasts; and while he lived in the mountains he could see and tell what people were doing in the distant valley, indicating what was going on in each house, which, upon investigation, was found in each case to be true. He was a Taoist, and received strange revelations.