Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/484

 source do we derive so much information about the monasteries in the middle ages as we do from these same stories. While in Europe the monastery was the repository of learning and culture, to which the war-worn veteran retired to do penance for his sanguinary career, in Korea it was the school in which the young man learned the science of war as well.

Folk-lore shows the part that Buddhism has played in determining many other phases of Korean life as seen to-day. Take, for instance, the penal code. The punishments until lately inflicted upon criminals were evidently copied from the representations of the Buddhistic hell. Of course these originally emanated for man's imagination, and one might argue that the horrors of the Buddhist hell are borrowed from the system of punishments in vogue in Korea, were it not that the system was brought complete from India by way of China. The crystallisation of these inhumanities into religious forms has perpetuated the ancient and gruesome horrors, and prevented the advent of humaner forms of punishment commensurate with the general advance in civilisation.

Buddhistic stories have bred in the Korean a repugnance to taking the life of any animal. To make blood flow is beneath the dignity of any decent man, and though Buddhism has been politically under the ban for five centuries, the butcher has, until recently, been counted with the chilban, or " seven kinds," which include mountebanks, harlots, slaves and sorceresses. And yet this repugnance to taking life does not prevent the most revolting cruelty to animals of all kinds. Many other points might be cited to show how Buddhist lore has tended to perpetuate ideas that are not only outside the Confucian system but directly antagonistic thereto.

And this brings us to our next point, the antagonism between these two religions. During the whole of the Koryu dynasty (918-1392) a bitter fight was kept up between the adherents of these two cults. No one was then both a Buddhist and a Confucianist, as is quite common to-day. Sanguinary