358 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
courts of Silla and Paekche, and later Koryo, were commissioning carved
wooden images and gilded bronze ones, often of colossal height. By Koryo
times, temple complexes featured installations of bodhisattvas surrounded by
attendants, and images were also painted on silk scrolls. It was all irresistible.
Confucianism, at first, could hardly compete, as court culture embraced Bud-
dhism’s cosmology and aesthetic.
Buddhist philosophy had changed in East Asia. In India, Buddhist monks
focused their efforts on achieving nonexistence at death, blinking out of exis-
tence, or if that failed, tumbling from lifetime to lifetime in this samsaric world.
But in East Asia, the Pure Land provided a compromise with older Confucian
and ancestor worship ideas; there was no confusion of coming into a new life
alongside your own descendants from a previous one. You could be reborn into
the Pure Land.
Where and what the Pure Land was—and how to get there—was a topic
that took effort for monks to work out and explain to their followers. With
Maitreya, the Pure Land was to come, as we have seen, and perhaps it would
be here in Silla or Paekche. During Koryo dynasty, there were new approaches
and new favorite bodhisattvas. Kyunyo (923–973) was one of these Koryo-era
monks. It wasn’t a matter of the state preparing a place for the Pure Land to be
established, instead it was an individual effort (Kim 2015). According to Kyu-
nyo, if you seriously aspire to reach Enlightenment, you must reach out to
Avalokiteshvara by engaging in contemplative visualization. And then, when
you offer worship before the Buddha, every mote of dust becomes a Buddha-
land. When you chant “I take refuge in the Buddha” you become one and the
same with the buddhas you worship. The defiled land you inhabit is changed
into a Pure Land by the power of your effort. “The Pure Land of the Lotus
Storehouse Realm becomes my body itself ” (Kim 2015:72). The emphasis is
on one’s own spiritual effort in reaching out to the Bodhisattva, with whom
you are joined in Buddhahood.
By Late Koryo, times were more troubled; the invasion by the Mongols
established the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), which ruled all of China as well as
the Korean peninsula after protracted resistance from Koryo forces. People felt
the need for deliverance that Avalokiteshvara could provide. A fourteenth-cen-
tury monk named Ch’ewon was teaching a more bodhisattva-powered path to
the Pure Land, one that doesn’t appear to be located in one’s “own five-foot
body” but in some more distant place: the abode of Avalokiteshvara is in the
thirteenth level of the Lotus Storehouse Realm above the Saha World System
(according to the Sutra of Ten-thousand Armed and Thousand-eyed Bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara). People were taught simply to chant his name, and the loving
Bodhisattva would hear the sound and hang down over living beings just as the
moon illuminates and appears in all the waters of the earth, which the suppli-
cant can easily sense (Kim 2015). Once one has been freed from delusion, one
discards one’s body and the Buddhas of the 10 directions come and take you by
the hand and in the space of an instant you are reborn in the Pure Land.