Simcheong's filial devotion

At a Glance

• Central figures: Simcheong, a blind man’s only daughter; Sim Hakgyu, her father, blind since birth; the monks of Mongeun Temple; a company of sea merchants bound for the Indang Sea.
• Setting: A poor village in Korea, the Indang Sea, and the Dragon King’s underwater palace; drawn from the pansori narrative tradition, specifically the Simcheongga.
• The turn: Sim Hakgyu promises three hundred seok of rice to Mongeun Temple in exchange for his sight, a debt he cannot pay; Simcheong sells herself to the sea merchants as a sacrifice to the Dragon King.
• The outcome: Simcheong is thrown into the Indang Sea but is received by the Dragon King, who sends her back to the world inside a lotus flower; the emperor finds her, makes her his queen, and she is reunited with her father, whose eyes open at last.
• The legacy: Simcheong became the exemplar of hyo - filial piety - in Korean tradition, and her story has been performed for centuries in pansori as the Simcheongga, one of the five surviving masterwork narratives.

Sim Hakgyu had been blind from the day he was born. His wife died giving him a daughter, and he raised the girl alone - or rather, the girl raised him. Simcheong, barely old enough to walk, learned to beg milk from the village women so her father could eat. By the time she was fifteen, she cooked his rice, mended his clothes, washed his feet, and led him by the hand along the raised paths between the paddies. Neighbors said Sim Hakgyu’s daughter was the most devoted child in the province. Sim Hakgyu said nothing. He knew what it cost her.

The Promise at Mongeun Temple

One afternoon, while Simcheong was out washing clothes in the stream, Sim Hakgyu walked alone. He misjudged the edge of a ditch and fell in. The water was not deep, but he could not climb out - his hands slipped on the mud, and his knees buckled. He called for help. Nobody came.

A monk from Mongeun Temple pulled him out.

The monk brushed the mud from Sim Hakgyu’s jacket and asked after his situation. When Sim Hakgyu told him - blind since birth, wife dead, one daughter, no money - the monk said that the Buddha of Mongeun Temple was known to grant sight to the sightless, but only if three hundred seok of rice were offered at the altar.

Three hundred seok. Sim Hakgyu could not have gathered three seok in a year. But he was wet, and cold, and humiliated, and the monk’s voice was so certain. He promised. He said the words: three hundred seok of rice, offered to the Buddha.

The monk recorded the pledge and left.

When Simcheong came home and found her father shaking, he told her everything. He wept and said he had been a fool. Simcheong did not scold him. She set water to boil, dried his clothes, and said she would find a way.

The Sea Merchants

Word traveled. A company of merchants who traded across the Indang Sea heard about a girl looking for three hundred seok of rice. They came to the village and made their offer.

The Indang Sea was dangerous. Storms sank ships. The merchants believed that offering a young woman to the Dragon King - Yongwang - would calm the waters and guarantee safe passage. They would pay three hundred seok of rice, delivered to Mongeun Temple in her name.

Simcheong agreed the same day.

She did not tell her father what she had sold. She told him the rice had been arranged through the kindness of a benefactor. For the weeks before the merchants’ departure, she cooked for him, mended every garment he owned, and arranged with a neighbor woman to look after him. She pressed dried fish into jars and stored them where his hands could find them.

The morning she left, she told him she was going to visit a relative. He reached for her hand and held it. She let him hold it for a long time. Then she pulled away and walked to the harbor.

The Indang Sea

The ship sailed for days. The merchants were not cruel to her. They gave her a clean place to sleep and did not make her work. Some of them could not look at her.

When the ship reached the place in the Indang Sea where the water turned dark and the swells rose, the merchants told her it was time.

Simcheong took off her outer skirt. She stood at the prow in her white inner garment. She looked once toward the east, toward the shore she could no longer see, toward the village where her father sat waiting for a relative who would never arrive.

She closed her eyes and jumped.

The sea closed over her. The merchants watched the place where she had gone in. The water smoothed. The wind dropped. The ship sailed on.

The Dragon King’s Palace

Simcheong did not drown. The water carried her down, and she opened her eyes to a palace of coral and jade beneath the waves. The Dragon King - Yongwang - sat on a throne of nacre, and his attendants were fish in court robes and turtles wearing official hats.

The Dragon King knew who she was. He told her that her hyo - her filial devotion - had reached even the bottom of the sea. He would not keep her. He placed her inside a great lotus blossom and sent the flower up through the water to the surface of the Indang Sea.

The lotus floated for days, enormous, closed, drifting on the current until it washed against the shore near the emperor’s palace.

The Lotus and the Emperor

The emperor’s attendants found the flower and brought it to him. It was larger than any lotus anyone had seen - taller than a man when it stood on its stem. The emperor had it placed in a stone basin in the palace garden.

That night the lotus opened, and Simcheong stepped out.

The emperor, astonished, asked her name and her story. She told him everything - her blind father, the debt, the sea. He made her his queen.

But Simcheong could not stop thinking of her father. She asked the emperor for one thing: a great feast, and an invitation sent to every blind person in the kingdom. The emperor granted it.

They came from every province - blind beggars, blind farmers, blind monks, blind widows. Hundreds of them, led by children and dogs, filling the palace courtyard. Simcheong watched from behind a screen as each one entered. She searched for her father’s face among them.

Sim Hakgyu’s Eyes

He came last. He was thinner than she remembered. His clothes were patched wrong - a woman who did not know him had done the mending. He shuffled in, led by a boy who left him standing alone in the courtyard.

Simcheong stepped out from behind the screen.

Father.

Sim Hakgyu’s head turned toward her voice. His mouth opened. His hands came up.

Simcheong? Simcheong?

He reached for her, and his eyes opened. For the first time in his life, he saw. He saw the courtyard, the palace walls, the sky above them. He saw his daughter’s face.

He fell to his knees. Simcheong knelt beside him. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Around them, the blind guests stood listening, and the courtyard was very quiet, and the lotus in the stone basin had not closed.