Past Life Story

In the fifth year of King Jeongjo, you were born into a commoner family. Your father was a traveling peddler, and your mother spread a small mat in the village market. From your earliest days, your hands always held coins, and your ears were full of voices haggling. That was your lullaby. By five, you knew every merchant in the market. By seven, you had learned to count coins. Your mother said to you, "Trust weighs more than gold." You did not fully understand those words as a child, but watching coins pass from hand to hand at your mother's mat, you sensed dimly what they meant. In your thirteenth year, you set out on the road for the first time, following your father. With a small bundle on your back—from Hanyang to Chungcheong, from Chungcheong to Gyeongsang. On that road you saw people. The arrogance of wealthy yangban, the deep sighs of poor farmers, the silence of mountain temples, the rough hands of fishermen by the river. All of it became your learning. At twenty, you carried your own bundle. No longer your father's shadow. In your first deal, you took a great loss. Greed had run ahead. That night at the inn, you remembered your mother's words. "Trust weighs more than gold." From the next deal onward, you were honest. Slowly, slowly, yet firmly. At twenty-five, you met a young woman, the daughter of a stall-keeper at one market. To this woman who had once smiled at the sight of your bundle, your heart was given. Two years of careful courtship, and at last you wed. Your bundle grew heavier, but your steps grew lighter. At thirty, you opened a small shop. From peddler, you became a gakju, a wholesaler-innkeeper. Yet you did not sit only in your shop. Half of each month you were still upon the road, half of each month you met people in the shop. "If you forget people, you are not a merchant"—that was your creed. In your fortieth year, a great famine struck. While other merchants raised their prices, you lowered yours instead. "Now is the time to show trust," you said. That year you took heavy losses, but from the next year, your shop became the most crowded place in Hanyang. At fifty, you had become wealthy. Yet your clothes were still the hemp of commoners, and your table was still barley rice. You told your children, "Wealth is light. Only trust is heavy." All three of your children inscribed those words upon their hearts. In your fifty-eighth year, you set out on your last road. As always, with a bundle on your back. You arrived at a small village and slept at the inn, and on the morning after, you did not wake. When the innkeeper opened your bundle, inside were a single account book and a thick wad of paper, dense with the names of people you had helped in every village. To your funeral came not only people of Hanyang but people from all eight provinces. Those with whom you had traded, those you had helped, those who had met you even once. They spoke with one voice. "That man kept his promises." You lived your whole life upon the road. Yet you never lost your way. The single word your mother had taught—trust weighs more than gold—was your compass.