the accounts of milbon, hyet’ong and myÖngnang 279
zhuan (Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks) compiled
by the Chinese monk Daoxuan (596–667).^15
Monks from the Three Kingdoms (Koguryö, Paekche, Silla) also
undertook the long and perilous journey to India.^16 The Paekche monk
Kyömik (6th century) was the rst Korean monk who is known
to have traveled to India.^17 Of the three kingdoms, Silla especially
took an interest in the journey to India. As James Huntley Grayson
points out:
It is an interesting fact that in I-tsing’s (635–713) Ta T’ang hsi-yü ch’iu-fa
kao-sêng ch’uan [sic] (Biographies of Eminent Monks of T’ang Who Sought
the Dharma in the Western Regions), fully one-sixth of the biographies
are about monks from Silla. This is an astounding gure considering the
disparity in the size of the population of T’ang and Silla, and consider-
ing how recently Silla had become a civilized state. I-tsing records the
name of only one monk from Koguryö, and there are no mentions of
Japanese monks who completed the journey.^18In spite of the great activity of the early Korean monks, no primary
sources compiled during the Three Kingdoms and the Uni ed Silla have
come down to us. For the study of early Korean Buddhism, we have to
rely on three traditional Korean historical sources compiled centuries
later, in the Koryö dynasty (918–1392): the Samguk sagi
(Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms), Samguk yusa
(Bequeathed Matters of the Three Kingdoms) and Haedong kosng chön
(Biographies of Eminent Monks of Korea).
The Samguk sagi was compiled around 1145 in imitation of the
Confucian-oriented Chinese dynastic history and deals with the history
of the Three Kingdoms.^19 Since the author Kim Pusik himself was a
Confucian scholar, his work contains little data relating to Buddhism.
On the other hand, the Samguk yusa was compiled by the monk
Iryön (1206–1289) around 1285 and contains for the most part
Buddhist legends and stories. Whereas the Samguk sagi stands for the
of cial view of the Koryö Dynasty on the history of the Three King-
doms, the Samguk yusa, based on material from popular sources, takes a
(^15) See T.2060.50.523c1–524b4 for Wöngwang; T.2060.50.639a8–640a8 for
Chajang.
(^16) See Grayson 1980, pp. 57–60.
(^17) See Grayson 1989, p. 40; Best 1991, pp. 152–178.
(^18) See Grayson 1989, pp. 49–50.
(^19) On the Samguk sagi, see Kim T. 1976, pp. 11–17; Kim H. 1983, p. 29.