Past Life Story

In the twelfth year of King Yeongjo, you were born into a jungin family. Your father served as a painter at the Dohwaseo, the Bureau of Painting, and your mother was skilled in embroidery. The home you were born into was always filled with the scent of ink and pigment. Your first toy was a small brush. By three, you drew your first flower upon paper. By five, a bird. By seven, a person. Your father did not at first praise your paintings. He only said, "Skill is easy. Putting heart into it is hard." You never forgot those words for the rest of your life. At thirteen you became a student at the Dohwaseo. There you learned true painting for the first time. Landscapes, portraits, birds and flowers—each had its own discipline. Yet within that discipline, to place one's own soul was the true art. From dawn until night you painted. At twenty you became a court painter. Your first task was to paint the uigwe, the royal protocols. Royal processions, royal weddings—all of these you recorded with your own hand. They were not mere paintings but history. You did not neglect a single point. In your twenty-eighth year, you received the chance to paint a royal portrait. To paint the king's likeness was the highest honor a painter could receive. You sat before the king. He looked at you long and said, "Do not fear. Paint." That day you saw the true face of the king—not the face of one who held power, but the face of a single man worried about his people. Your portrait was later enshrined at the Jongmyo. Around thirty, you met a woman. She taught embroidery at the same Dohwaseo. The two of you were companions on the same path, and lovers. You wed, and two children were born. The first resembled you, loving paintings. The second resembled their mother, learning embroidery. In your fortieth year, you received a great commission—a folding screen for the king's sixtieth birthday, a painting of the Ten Symbols of Longevity. For one full year you devoted yourself to that single work. Crane, pine, turtle, rock, deer, cloud, water, mountain, mushroom of immortality, sun—all came alive at the tip of your brush. The king gazed at the screen long in silence, and at last spoke. "You have painted my whole life." In your fiftieth year, your hand began to tremble. To a painter, a trembling hand was almost a death sentence. Yet you did not stop. With trembling hand you painted your last work—a single landscape. It was the sum of every mountain and water you had seen across a lifetime. In an autumn of your fifty-fourth year, you took up the brush in your studio for the last time. That day you painted a single plum blossom. Unable to finish, you set down the brush and slept. You did not wake again. When your fellow painters found you the next day, the unfinished plum bloomed upon the paper as though alive. Your paintings were later enshrined in museums. Your children continued the path of painters, and one of their descendants became a renowned master of late Joseon. You departed, but your brush passed to the next generation, and to the next. A soul dwells at the tip of the brush—that was the work of your life. That a single painting could hold the heart of a single person, you proved through the whole of your living.