By Mark Peterson
This article is in the series of "tribute" articles I've written lately. This time the person I want to honor is Na Gap-ju, my classic Chinese tutor who taught me Chinese for about five years when I was living, studying, and working in Korea.
I was reminded of him on my recent trip to Korea when I met a young scholar, a Ph.D. candidate, Shin Chae-yong, who works part-time as a translator of classic Chinese. This was greatly encouraging to me because I feared that, with the death of the older generation that had learned Chinese in the traditional way, the art would be lost. I'm pleased that the skill of reading the classics is still alive.
The great scholar and teacher of classic Chinese, who taught me, was a gentleman who was taught in the old village schools and who memorized virtually all of the Chinese classics. His name was Na Gap-ju and he lived most of his life in a rural area near Gwangju, but who, late in life came to Seoul and became a tutor and teacher of the Chinese classics.
He came to Seoul at the suggestion of my unofficial Korean-resident graduate school adviser ―Song June-ho. Prof. Song lived in Jeonju and when I needed a classic Chinese tutor to help me decipher documents I wanted to translate for my PhD dissertation I asked him if he knew an appropriate person to recommend. He recommended Na.
Na was a classically trained scholar ― he memorized texts and was tutored first in village schools. In the Joseon Kingdom, with some carry-over into the twentieth century, students would study first in village schools, where a village elder, maybe one who had passed an exam, or at least had tried to pass an exam, would teach the youth of the village. After the village school, if students were successful, they would study at the county level "hyanggyo" or at one of the "private academies", the "seowon." The best of those schools were "Four Schools" in Seoul, and the apex was the Seonggyungwan ― the predecessor of today's Sungkyunkwan University.
Na, born in about 1915 was an heir to this scholastic tradition. He memorized texts ― and I'm not sure but what he might have committed to memory the corpus of the Chinese Classics ― the saseo, samgyeong (the four books and the three classics).
My interest was less philosophical than historical, and social history at that. I read jokbo (Korean genealogies), munjip (collections of and individuals scholarly writing), hojeok (household registers), and the Sillok (the annals of the Joseon dynasty.
The Sillok, literally, the "true record," was a faithful abridgement of discussion with the king on a variety of subjects on which the king would render opinions and judgments. At times, as I was reading the discussion on a topic of my interest, I would suddenly come upon a passage that somehow didn't seem to fit. It wasn't a normal part of the dialog with the king. It didn't make sense.
I'd take the passage to Na, and invariably, he would recognize it and tell me that it was something being quoted from the classics, maybe from the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of History, the Spring and Autumn Annals, or Mencius, or one of the other classics. He'd tell me the name of the book the quotation was from and I'd ask where in the book, and he would invariably say something like, "Oh, somewhere toward the beginning, like chapter three or so, halfway through the chapter." And I'd look it up, and he was exactly right. Every time. He had the whole classic corpus memorized!
That was the method of learning in the Joseon dynasty. The objective was to pass the test in order to get a government position ― the only source of wealth, prestige, and power. (And not much has changed in the educational system ― it's still focused on memory skills.) And Na was about the last of his breed, and I have worried that Korea has lost something it will never regain.
But fortunately, my hope in maintaining some contact with the learning contained in the Chinese classics has been restored in that the younger generation does have scholars who can read, understand and transmit the ancient wisdom to the current generation.
I am pleased to report that we have not lost scholars who can read and write and understand classical Chinese. Shin hasn't memorized the corpus, but he understands it and reads it like one would handle any foreign language. The use of Chinese characters, once ubiquitous in Korea on signs and newspapers and books, is seldom seen today. But we have scholars that can read the Classics, of which I'm am very happy to report.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
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I was reminded of him on my recent trip to Korea when I met a young scholar, a Ph.D. candidate, Shin Chae-yong, who works part-time as a translator of classic Chinese. This was greatly encouraging to me because I feared that, with the death of the older generation that had learned Chinese in the traditional way, the art would be lost. I'm pleased that the skill of reading the classics is still alive.
The great scholar and teacher of classic Chinese, who taught me, was a gentleman who was taught in the old village schools and who memorized virtually all of the Chinese classics. His name was Na Gap-ju and he lived most of his life in a rural area near Gwangju, but who, late in life came to Seoul and became a tutor and teacher of the Chinese classics.
He came to Seoul at the suggestion of my unofficial Korean-resident graduate school adviser ―Song June-ho. Prof. Song lived in Jeonju and when I needed a classic Chinese tutor to help me decipher documents I wanted to translate for my PhD dissertation I asked him if he knew an appropriate person to recommend. He recommended Na.
Na was a classically trained scholar ― he memorized texts and was tutored first in village schools. In the Joseon Kingdom, with some carry-over into the twentieth century, students would study first in village schools, where a village elder, maybe one who had passed an exam, or at least had tried to pass an exam, would teach the youth of the village. After the village school, if students were successful, they would study at the county level "hyanggyo" or at one of the "private academies", the "seowon." The best of those schools were "Four Schools" in Seoul, and the apex was the Seonggyungwan ― the predecessor of today's Sungkyunkwan University.
Na, born in about 1915 was an heir to this scholastic tradition. He memorized texts ― and I'm not sure but what he might have committed to memory the corpus of the Chinese Classics ― the saseo, samgyeong (the four books and the three classics).
My interest was less philosophical than historical, and social history at that. I read jokbo (Korean genealogies), munjip (collections of and individuals scholarly writing), hojeok (household registers), and the Sillok (the annals of the Joseon dynasty.
The Sillok, literally, the "true record," was a faithful abridgement of discussion with the king on a variety of subjects on which the king would render opinions and judgments. At times, as I was reading the discussion on a topic of my interest, I would suddenly come upon a passage that somehow didn't seem to fit. It wasn't a normal part of the dialog with the king. It didn't make sense.
I'd take the passage to Na, and invariably, he would recognize it and tell me that it was something being quoted from the classics, maybe from the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of History, the Spring and Autumn Annals, or Mencius, or one of the other classics. He'd tell me the name of the book the quotation was from and I'd ask where in the book, and he would invariably say something like, "Oh, somewhere toward the beginning, like chapter three or so, halfway through the chapter." And I'd look it up, and he was exactly right. Every time. He had the whole classic corpus memorized!
That was the method of learning in the Joseon dynasty. The objective was to pass the test in order to get a government position ― the only source of wealth, prestige, and power. (And not much has changed in the educational system ― it's still focused on memory skills.) And Na was about the last of his breed, and I have worried that Korea has lost something it will never regain.
But fortunately, my hope in maintaining some contact with the learning contained in the Chinese classics has been restored in that the younger generation does have scholars who can read, understand and transmit the ancient wisdom to the current generation.
I am pleased to report that we have not lost scholars who can read and write and understand classical Chinese. Shin hasn't memorized the corpus, but he understands it and reads it like one would handle any foreign language. The use of Chinese characters, once ubiquitous in Korea on signs and newspapers and books, is seldom seen today. But we have scholars that can read the Classics, of which I'm am very happy to report.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
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