The oldest book printed with metal movable type has been discovered in Korea, eclipsing the former record holder, the Jikji of 1377. The new discovery is dated from 1239 and is called the “Jeungdoga,” or “Hymn of Enlightenment.”
The full name is the “Nammyeongcheon Hwasang Songjeungdoga,” meaning the “Hymn of Enlightenment of the Monk Nammyeongcheon.” We don’t know much about the monk who is credited with this book and his song in praise of reaching enlightenment, but we are learning more about Korea’s printing history, which dates back to the 13th century — fully two hundred years earlier than Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455.
We have an indication of early movable type printing in the records of Yi Gyubo (1168-1241), a famous poet, writer and government official of the Goryeo Dynasty (935-1392). Yi Gyubo wrote that metal movable type was used to print a work of Confucian principles in 1234, an easy date to remember, called “The Ritual Texts of Ancient and Current Time for Auspicious Governance.” It’s interesting to note that this earliest of texts was Confucian in nature whereas the other notable early texts were Buddhist.
Heretofore, the oldest text has been recognized at the “Jikji,” or in full, “Baegun Hwasang Chorok Buljo Jikji Simche Yojeol” or “The Monk Baegun’s Anthology of the Teachings of the Buddha on the Direct Pointing to the Essence of the Mind.” Clearly, it is a Buddhist text that exists only as a text marked as “volume two” and kept in the National Library of France. It was purchased by a French diplomat stationed in Korea in the late 19th and early 20th century — Victor Collin de Plancy (1853–1922). He acquired about 300 volumes of Korean works that are held in France. His legacy is both praised and criticized — for helping to preserve important texts but removing them from Korea. It is assumed that it is his own rather casual handwriting on the cover of the Jikji that says it is the oldest known book produced with metal movable type.
Now, comes on the scene a challenger. Not the Confucian text that Yi Gyubo wrote of, but another Buddhist text, “Hymn of Enlightenment.” It has been hiding under our noses, more or less in that, the text printed with metal movable type, is associated with five other editions produced by wooden plate printing. More commonly called wooden block printing, this technique is heralded long and mightily in Korea with such examples as the 80,000 Wood Blocks for printing the Koreana Tripitika famously stored at Haeinsa Temple in the Daegu area.
In the West, we think of Gutenberg’s printing as a great innovation and a more advanced form of printing. However, in Korea, wooden block printing was considered much more important. If a work were to have only a few copies — Yi Gyubo referred to 28 copies being printed of the 1234 text — then metal movable type was preferred. But if the text were to be widely circulated it would be printed on wooden plates or blocks. The issue being that metal movable type moved! That is, the individual fonts were not held in a tight frame as was Gutenberg’s and after only four printing runs, they tell me, the font would need to be resettled to keep the jiggled fonts from becoming illegible.
Thus it was common in the Goryeo period to print a text in metal movable type and have a run of a few dozen, but thereafter, if there was high demand for the book, it would be carved onto wooden blocks where hundreds of copies could be printed. And the plates could be preserved so that one hundred years, later, one thousand years later, another book or multiple books could be printed.
The discovery of the Jeungdoga was made by an engineer and a specialist in early printing, Yu Woo-shik. A specialist in modern printing, he was asked to verify that one of the texts heretofore listed with the other woodblock editions was indeed printed with metal movable type. The ink, the paper and the shape of the letters all confirm that one edition was different from the others, that, indeed, it was printed with metal fonts. One key factor is the ink. Ink for a wooden block is water-based ink, like that used when writing with a brush. But ink for metal fonts needs to be oil-based, to hold to the surface of the metal.
Yu has run into a hailstorm of opposition to his findings. So much is “invested” in the Jikji, such as its UNESCO designation as a “Memory of the World” in 2011. The next step in verification of the printing technology is going to be a fluoroscopic analysis available at Stanford University. He is waiting for government approval to take the book to California for further analysis. In the meantime, it looks like Korea has one more mark in the history of scholarly development, another “first” in the history of the world.
Mark Peterson ([email protected]) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
This post was originally published on here
