Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/482

 ists, the women are nearly all Buddhists, or at least devotees of one or other of those forms of superstition into which Buddhism has merged itself in the peninsula. What would have become of Buddhism and the monasteries if it had not been for the queens of the present dynasty ? Even the last twenty years give abundant evidence of its potent power in the female breast. It is the mothers who mould the children's minds; and every boy's and girl's mind is saturated with Buddhistic or semi-Buddhistic ideas long before the Thousand Character Classic is put into his hands. The imagination and fancy have become enthralled, and, while it is true that in time the boy will be ridiculed into professing contempt for Buddhism, the girl clings to it with a tenacity born of sixteen hundred years of inherited tendency. It is, of course, a modified Buddhism. The basic fetichism and animism which the Korean inherits from untold antiquity has become so thoroughly mixed with his Buddhism that we can hardly tell where the one leaves off and the other begins. We are speaking now of the common folk-tales and not the written literature of the country. The formal writings of the past five centuries are Confucian, and the models have been those of the Chinese sage; but they are not for the mass of the people, and they mean even less to the common crowd than Shakespeare and Milton mean to the average Englishman or American.

I must mention one more reason for the survival of the Buddhist element in Korean folk-tales ; that is, its localising tendency. The story plays about some special spot; it clings to its own hallowed locus, and without this it would lose force, just as the story of William Tell or King Arthur or Evangeline would suffer if made general as to locality. It is because the Korean can lead you to a mountain-side and say, " Here is where Muhak the monk stood when he pronounced the fatal words that foretold the great invasion," or show you the very tree, now centuries old, that Tosan planted - it is because of these definite local elements that these tales are anchored so firmly in the Korean consciousness. Any Confucian story might have occurred