REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 325the taxes are all the same, but the kyol varies in accordance with the fertility of
the land."37
Yu felt that by using the kyong-mu system of measurement there was no fear
that cultivated land might be hidden from the eye of the tax registrar, even though
some mistakes in accounting or bookkeeping might be made if the officials did
not maintain surveillance. Under the kyol system. however, while the tax
account ledgers might be easier to keep because the amount of tax was easy to
grasp, it would be far more difficult to maintain surveillance over false regis-
tration or illegal exemption of land. Because of the complexity of the varying
kyol units, it was impossible for ordinary people to comprehend the method of
registration and check the deceit and falsification of the local clerks. "This is
why there is no place that does not have the evils of bribery, improper requests,
illicit exemptions, and fraud, and in the end taxes are not levied equitably."
Because the grades of kyat were supposed to be determined on the basis of an
estimate of uniform production per kyol, false or erroneous registration required
a massive effort to correct because changing the grade of a kyii/ of land meant
either increasing or decreasing the land area assigned to it, which thcn required
a total resurvey and resetting of boundaries of all other land parcels in the area.^38
Yu compared the kycing and kyol systems to the traditional Confucian
dichotomies of essence and function (ch 'e/yong), root and branch (pon/mal); "If
you calculate the total by making clear the root, then the numbers will all be
before your eyes and the function [or practical utility, yong] will reside in it. If
you hold on to the branch and apply it to the matter of drawing land boundaries,
then the basic land will be in confusion and there will be no way to investigate
and rectify it."39
He felt that the complexity was so great that even a sage would not be able
to rectify the inequalities present in even one myon (a subdistrict or county), let
alone correct the situation for the entire nation. "How much less so considering
that there are thousands or ten thousands of [land units] in a my6n, and the offi-
cials in charge are not necessarily sages?"40
Yu believcd that if men were left to themselves, greed, competition, profit-
seeking, and confusion would produce gross inequality in the distribution of
wealth. Wealth and poverty were not simply the fault of the land system; they
were also caused by the diligence or laziness of men, unanticipated natural dis-
asters, or the luck of the natural fertility of the land. The sage's task was "noth-
ing more than making equal [che] what can be made equal and striving to do
what can be done right," but in the absence of sages, Koreans could replace the
kyol with the kyong as a means of "making the people equal [k\'unminl."41 Yu
suggested that even if contemporary Koreans failed to restore the ancient well-
field system in its ancient form, they could at least settle for the adoption ofthe
ky6ng-myo method of linear measurment.^42 And he eited Chu Hsi's treatise on
the recti !lcation or land boundaries (Kyonggyejang) to show that Chu had made
the samc argument: "Thus in China, even though they did not carry out the well-