The Nine Hundred and Ninety-Ninth Buddha: Hwang Sok-yong's Jang Gil-san and the Trouble with Waiting for a Saviour

 Behind a locked iron gate in Greyfriars Kirkyard, a few hundred yards from where I am writing this, lies a patch of ground with rather more to answer for than its modest size suggests. The plaque calls it the Covenanters' Prison. In the summer of 1679, following their defeat at Bothwell Bridge, something over a thousand Presbyterian rebels were herded into this open field and left there, under guard, for more than four months, each man allowed four ounces of bread a day. Two hundred and fifty-seven of them were eventually put aboard a ship bound for the American colonies as indentured labour; the ship went down off Orkney, and only forty-eight came ashore alive. Their crime, in the eyes of the Crown, had been to insist that no earthly king could sit as head of Christ's church. No king but Christ, as the slogan of the age had it. I walk past that gate most weeks. This year, for reasons that will become clear, I have started stopping.

 The reason is a piece of research that carried me, by a route I certainly did not plan, from seventeenth-century Scotland to seventeenth-century Korea. It began with a single line in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, buried in the twenty-third year of King Sukjong's reign: 1697, as it happens, a mere eighteen years after Bothwell Bridge.

 The king, addressing his own interrogators, is on record complaining that a certain "geukjeok" (a bandit of the first rank) named Jang Gil-san had been roaming the northern provinces for a decade without being caught, and that a recent attempt to surround him near Yangdeok had failed ignominiously. That is very nearly the whole of the historical record. No birth date survives, no death date, no confirmed likeness: only a name that irritated a king enough to be written down. For two and a half centuries Jang Gil-san remained exactly that: a footnote, filed alongside Hong Gil-dong and Im Kkeok-jeong in Korea's unofficial trinity of legendary outlaws. Then, in 1974, a young novelist named Hwang Sok-yong got hold of the court interrogation transcripts that a historian named Jeong Seok-jong had been quietly excavating, and decided the footnote deserved rather more than a footnote's worth of attention.

 One curiosity, before I go further. The term the Annals actually uses, geukjeok (劇賊), has traditionally been read as "a bandit who was once an actor," on the strength of one character that can also mean "drama"; scholars now agree the reading is simply wrong. It means nothing more theatrical than "a serious, large-scale bandit." Korea's popular imagination has spent three centuries enjoying a bandit-turned-performer who appears, on the evidence, to be at least partly the invention of a mistranslation that got away from its translators. In my line of work, I find that oddly comforting.

 Whatever its origins, Hwang's novel became one of the genuine phenomena of modern Korean publishing: serialised in the Hankook Ilbo across an almost unbelievable 2,092 instalments between July 1974 and July 1984, and issued in ten volumes on first publication. Changbi, the current publisher, puts lifetime sales at over three million copies; a 2013 survey published by the Herald Business put the figure closer to four and a half million. Either number places Jang Gil-san among the best-selling works of serious literature Korea has produced, and it takes its seat, deservedly, alongside Park Kyung-ni's Land and Cho Jung-rae's Taebaek Mountains in the small company of vast historical novels that South Korean readers still treat, without irony, as something close to national scripture. Critics have long singled out the prose itself for particular praise: a rich, regionally inflected vernacular that later commentators have called one of the fullest deployments of the Korean language attempted by any modern novelist, the sort of writing, I am assured by friends better qualified than I am to judge, that repays reading purely for the pleasure of the sentences, quite apart from where they are going.

 What Hwang built on that single indignant sentence in the Annals is, structurally, an outlaw epic in the old international mould: Korea's answer to Robin Hood, if Robin Hood had been given ten volumes, a cast of several hundred, and rather less interest in archery than in the mechanics of feudal exploitation. Jang Gil-san is born to a fugitive slave woman and raised among itinerant performers, which places him, in the brutal shorthand of Joseon's caste system, among the "eight base classes," the very floor of a hierarchy that had a floor for almost everyone. He gathers the dispossessed (runaway slaves, itinerant traders, disgraced clerks, wandering monks) into a forest brotherhood, the Nongnimdang, and sets about the practical business of overturning a social order that had, by any reasonable measure, earned its overturning. It does not work. It was never, on reflection, entirely meant to.

 The novel's epilogue is set at Unjusa, a real temple in South Jeolla famous for its unfinished field of stone Buddhas, and it is here that Hwang plays his best card. A prophecy circulates among the faithful: raise a thousand Buddha statues in a single night, and the world itself will turn over. Through the small hours the villagers work in a kind of collective fever, and by the time the sky begins to pale they have set nine hundred and ninety-nine of them upright. Only the great reclining Buddha remains: the largest figure of all, lying on its back, waiting to be raised as the last and finest of the thousand. As the ropes tighten and the crowd strains together, one exhausted man, unable to bear the final effort, cries out that dawn has already broken. It has not. But the lie does its work all the same; the collective nerve breaks with it, the crowd scatters, and the reclining Buddha is left exactly where it has lain for three hundred years since, one statue short of a miracle.

 It is, I think, the most honest ending a revolutionary novel has ever given itself. The world does not fail to turn over because the people lack a leader. Jang Gil-san himself is elsewhere at the crucial moment, which is rather the point. It fails to turn over because one frightened man, at the very last second, cannot hold his nerve, and because nine hundred and ninety-eight of his neighbours, having done everything asked of them, are undone by his single sentence. Salvation, in other words, was never waiting on a chosen man. It was waiting on everybody staying put for one more minute.

 This is, as it happens, more or less what the men held in that field beside Greyfriars had concluded some three hundred years earlier, on the other side of the planet, at almost exactly the same historical moment. The Covenant they had signed made no provision for a saviour-king; its entire, dangerous premise was that sovereignty belonged to Christ alone, and that any mortal who claimed otherwise, however anointed, however popular, was to be refused. By 1697, the very year Sukjong's magistrates were failing to catch their own Gil-san, Scotland's Presbyterians had secured that principle at the cost of the men who had once frozen and starved a few hundred yards from where I now sit. Two societies with almost nothing else in common arrived, within the same handful of decades, at an identical and rather uncomfortable conclusion: that entrusting the future to one exceptional man is not merely unwise but, when it fails, a kind of theft from everyone who did their own part.

 I raise this now, and not merely for the pleasure of an obscure comparison, because Korea in 2026 seems to me to be conducting a rather public experiment in the same question. This is the country's first year of local elections since the martial-law crisis of December 2024 and the long constitutional convulsion that followed it, and one recent Gallup poll asked voters, in the plainest possible terms, which political figure they would like to see lead the country next. The single most common answer, given by more than half of those surveyed, was no one in particular. I mention no names here, and take no side; the figures alone seem to me worth sitting with. A society that has just watched the machinery of a single strong executive turn briefly and alarmingly against itself is not obviously wrong to feel, for a while, that it would rather not hand the future to anybody in particular either. Commentators here worry, not unreasonably, about what rushes into that kind of vacuum when the usual parties fail to fill it. It is, on the evidence of both 1697 and 1679, a very old worry indeed.

 I do not think Jang Gil-san offers anyone a programme for government; it would be a poor sort of novel if it did. What it offers, three hundred years on, is a warning worth taking seriously precisely because it refuses to be comforting. The thousandth Buddha never rose because the crowd trusted one man's voice, a false one as it turned out, over its own nine hundred and ninety-nine hands' worth of evidence to the contrary. Whatever else 2026 asks of the societies living through it, that particular lesson seems to me to have lost none of its force. I walk past Greyfriars again on my way home most evenings now, and I find myself wondering less about kings than about how many of us it actually takes to raise a stone.

 A note on reading it for yourself, if I have persuaded you to try: no complete English translation of Jang Gil-san yet exists, which strikes me as one of the stranger gaps in the Anglophone shelf of Korean literature, given how comfortably several of Hwang's other novels have made that crossing. For now, the original, all ten volumes of it, remains a closed room to those of us without the Korean to open the door ourselves. I am told the door is worth the trouble.

Recommended Resources

☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Jang Gil-san, 10-volume set, Aladin Bookstore

'Ex Oriente, Lux.'

— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh

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