King Munmu as dragon protector

At a Glance

• Central figures: King Munmu of Silla, the monarch who unified the Three Kingdoms; his son King Sinmun; the monk Jigui; and the great dragon of the East Sea.
• Setting: The kingdom of Silla on the Korean peninsula, late seventh century, recorded in the Samguk Yusa and Samguk Sagi.
• The turn: On his deathbed, Munmu ordered that his body be cremated and his remains scattered in the East Sea, declaring he would become a dragon to protect Silla from Japanese invasion.
• The outcome: His ashes were placed on a great rock in the sea, and a dragon was seen in the waters near it; his son Sinmun later received from the dragon a bamboo flute capable of calming storms, repelling enemies, and curing disease.
• The legacy: The underwater tomb rock, called Daewangam - Great King’s Rock - still stands off the coast near Gyeongju, and the flute Manpasikjeok became one of the three great treasures of Silla.

Munmu had spent thirty years at war. He fought Baekje. He fought Goguryeo. He fought the Tang Chinese who had helped him conquer the peninsula and then refused to leave. By the summer of 681, Silla held the land from the Taedong River to the southern coasts, and Munmu held nothing. His body was failing. He could not eat. The physicians brought medicines from the mountain monasteries, and none of them worked.

He called his ministers close and told them what he wanted done with his body when it was finished. No royal tomb. No great mound packed with gold crowns and jade ornaments. Burn the body. Take the ashes to the East Sea and scatter them over the water. He would become a sea dragon - a yong - and he would guard the coastline against the waegu, the Japanese pirates whose ships came every season to burn and steal.

The Cremation at Pirigol

The king died on the first day of the seventh month. His son, who would rule as King Sinmun, followed the instructions exactly. The body was carried to Pirigol, a place near the coast, and cremated according to Buddhist rites. The monk Jigui chanted the sutras. The fire burned all night.

In the morning, they gathered what remained and carried the ashes down to the water. A small rocky islet sat in the shallows of the East Sea, close enough to the shore that a strong man could wade to it at low tide, far enough out that waves broke against it on three sides. They placed the ashes there, on the rock, in the water. The tide came in and covered it. The tide went out and the rock stood bare and dark, sea foam running off its surface.

The ministers returned to the capital at Gyeongju. Within days, fishermen reported seeing a great dragon in the waters near the rock. It moved slowly through the current, they said, circling the islet as if keeping watch. Its scales were dark. Its eyes were clear. It did not attack any boat.

Sinmun’s Troubles

Sinmun took the throne, but the kingdom he inherited was not at peace. Former Baekje and Goguryeo nobles resisted Silla rule. The Tang border remained tense. Pirates continued to raid the eastern coast. In 682, barely a year into his reign, Sinmun received a report from a coastal official: a small island had appeared in the East Sea near Gameunsa Temple, and it seemed to be drifting toward the shore.

The official wrote that a strange bamboo grew on the island. During the day it split into two stalks; at night it merged back into one. Wind and rain accompanied its movement. Sinmun did not know what to make of this. He sent the astronomer Kim Chungjil to investigate.

Kim Chungjil went to the coast and came back with his report. On the island there was indeed a single bamboo stalk that split and rejoined. But more than this - in the water beside the rock called Daewangam, a dragon had surfaced and presented itself.

The Dragon and the Bamboo

Sinmun went to the coast himself. He set up a temporary pavilion on the shore near Igyon Terrace, overlooking the sea. He waited. The dragon rose from the water - not monstrous, not violent, but deliberate, surfacing the way a whale does, with weight and patience.

The king asked the dragon what it wanted.

The dragon - which the king understood to be his father - told him to cut the bamboo from the island and make a flute from it. When the flute was played, enemy soldiers would retreat, diseases would be cured, droughts would end, floods would subside, and the winds and waves would calm. The dragon gave him also a black jade belt, and then sank back beneath the surface.

Sinmun sent men to the island. They cut the bamboo. The sea turned rough as they did it, and did not calm until they had left. The king returned to Gyeongju with the bamboo and had it fashioned into a flute. He named it Manpasikjeok - “the flute that calms ten thousand waves.”

The Flute That Calms Ten Thousand Waves

The records say it worked. When Japanese ships appeared on the horizon and the flute was played from the shore, the winds turned against the invaders and their fleet scattered. When plague struck a district and the flute was played, the sick recovered. When drought hardened the fields and the flute was played, rain came.

Sinmun kept the flute in the treasury at Wolseong Palace. It was counted among the three sacred treasures of Silla, alongside the jade belt and the cheonsa okcdae - the heavenly girdle. Later kings played it in times of crisis. How long it survived, the records do not say. Silla itself lasted until 935, and the flute disappears from the histories before the kingdom does.

Daewangam

The rock remains. It sits in the shallow water off the coast near Gyeongju, in what is now South Korea’s North Gyeongsang Province. Tourists visit it. The water around it is cold and clear, and the rock is dark volcanic stone, pitted by centuries of salt and tide. Gameunsa Temple - the temple Sinmun built nearby in his father’s honor, its name meaning “Temple of Gratitude for Grace from the Sea” - survived only as foundation stones until partial reconstruction in the modern era.

Fishermen in the area still call the rock Daewangam. They do not claim to have seen a dragon. But the name holds - Great King’s Rock - and the story behind it is specific: a king who had spent his life fighting asked that his death be useful, too. He wanted no gold-filled tomb. He wanted to keep working.

The waves break over the rock at high tide and pull back at low tide, and the rock is still there, exactly where the ashes were placed thirteen hundred years ago, exactly at the edge of the water, between the kingdom he built and the sea he chose to guard.