578 henrik h. sørensen
is the same Song gaoseng zhuan account that has served as the basis for
Iryŏng’s stories, but of course with different names and dates.
As it is, there are no Silla records of Milbon or Hyet’ŏng, no sur-
viving scriptures that bear their names, nor anything that a person
trained in textual criticism will be able to accept as viable historical
fact. It is not utterly impossible that there could have been such thau-
maturgical monks as Milbon, who might have functioned at the Silla
court during the first half of the seventh century, but there is noth-
ing with which we can possibly substantiate him as a historical fig-
ure, much less gain insight into whatever Esoteric Buddhist teaching
he might have taught. A Korean scholar has postulated a connection
between the Esoteric Buddhist feats of Milbon and the version of the
Bhaiṣajyaguru sūtra constituting the twelfth chapter of the apocryphal
Guanding jing (Consecration Scripture), which contains many
Esoteric Buddhist and Daoist elements (see Sŏ 1994b, 13–14). Had the
Consecration Scripture actually been in Korea at such an early time, it
might have added some degree of credibility to the Milbon tale. How-
ever, there is no historical evidence for this claim either.
The SGYS also contains a few passages on a monk by the name of
Myŏngnang (n.d.), who, like Milbon, is credited with the perfor-
mance of magic feats (HPC vol. 6, 356b–357a). Like Hyet’ŏng, he is
said to have gone to China, and later, the SGYS claims, he participated
in Silla’s struggle against the Tang invasion in the aftermath of the
war of unifying the Korean Peninsula. In connection with this event,
Myŏngnang is credited with conjuring up a storm said to have sunk
the invading Chinese fleet.^7 This is said to have been done through
a ritual that involved the “images of the spirits of the five directions
.”^8
Lastly, the SGYS mentions an Inwang toryang (Benev-
olent Kings’ Bodhimaṇḍa) supposedly sponsored by the Silla king
(^7) It is not unlikely that Iryŏn used the event of the sinking of the invading Mon-
golian fleet sent against Japan in 1274 by the “divine wind” (kamikaze) as a model
for this story. After all, this important historical event took place during his own
lifetime. 8
HPC vol. 6, 288a. The spirits of the five directions are the Red Rooster or Phoe-
nix of the South; the White Tiger of the West; Zhenwu, the Black Lord of the North
(symbolized by tortoise and snake); the Blue Dragon of the East; and the deity of the
Yellow Earth of the center. Despite their Daoistic sounding names, these deities had
been incorporated into Chinese Buddhism as early as the fourth century, whence the
tradition was carried to the Korean Peninsula.