Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/243

Rh and supplies all the material necessary for reputation as a traveler. Buddhism evidently found a home in these secluded mountains soon after its introduction into Korea, which Chinese and native records tell us occurred in the latter half of the fourth century after Christ. A Korean book—the Keum Kang San Record—states that Ch'ang-An-Sa was restored or rebuilt at the beginning of the sixth century, and at the monastery itself tradition dates the oldest relics from the T'ang period ( 618 to 907). At present upward of forty shrines, tended by three or four hundred monks, a few nuns, and a host of lay servitors, are scattered over the east and west slopes of the Diamond Mountains. The great majority of the monks are congregated at the four chief monasteries, and the nuns possess a small sanctuary or two where they find sufficient to do, apart from religious exercises, in weaving cotton and hempen garments and other womanly occupations. The monks, when not in residence at the monasteries, travel all over the country, alms-bowl in hand, chanting the canons of Buddha from door to door, soliciting subscriptions to the building of a new altar or for the repair of an old one, and begging from day to day the food and resting-place which are rarely denied them."

The route followed a rough torrent winding up the west slope to the water-shed—which is 4,200 feet above sea-level, and the highest point reached in the journey across Korea—and descended the eastern flank by a wild mountain-path. "The monastery of Ch’ang-An is superbly situated a little way up the west slope. The lofty hills which wall in the torrent on the north recede for a few hundred yards, and rejoin it again, leaving in the interval a semicircular space of level ground, upon which the temple is built. Nothing could be more effective than the deep-green setting of this half-circlet of hills, rising up like a rampart from the rear of the buildings, and rendered additionally pleasing to the eye by a symmetrical covering of leafy forest and shrub. In front, the water swishes and swirls through rough, tumbled granite blocks, here and there softening into a clear pool, and beyond this again towers a conical buttress of the Keum Kang San, thickly clothed with pines and tangled undergrowth for half its height. The peak possesses the characteristics of the range. Gaping seams and cracks split it vertically from the summit down until vegetation hides the rock, at sufficiently regular intervals to give one the impression of looking at the pipes of an immense organ. The topmost ribs are almost perpendicular, and gleam bare and blue in the evening sun; but lower down the cracks and ledges afford a precarious lodging to a few conifers and stunted oaks." The other mountains along the route occupy equally pretty situations. Soon after crossing the Keum Kang range, Mr. Campbell