Haeinsa and the Tripitaka Koreana

More than 80,000 wooden blocks.

A number like that slips straight past the ear, so it helps to count it out. It would mean counting one block every second, without stopping, without a break for water or a meal, without closing an eye for even a minute. Counting like that would take more than 22 hours. A count that began early one morning would reach the last block only near dawn the next day. And that is only the counting. Not one character read, not one stroke carved.

Those 80,000 blocks do not sit in a concrete warehouse with air conditioning. They rest in a few low wooden buildings on the slope of a mountain.

The mountain is called Gaya, in Hapcheon County in the south of Korea. On it stands a temple founded in the year 802, in the Silla period. Its name is Haeinsa. The temple sits deep in the forest of a national park, where the wind keeps climbing up along the valley.

The story of the blocks begins more than 700 years ago, when the Goryeo dynasty was in danger. In the most troubled years, the court decided on something that sounds strange at first. It had the complete Buddhist scriptures carved into wood, character by character, in reverse, so that paper pressed onto the blocks would print the text. Today the blocks are known as the Tripitaka Koreana, a Korean collection of the Buddhist scriptures. People at the time believed that once the work was done, the country would be protected.

The carving took more than ten years, around the middle of the 13th century. A child born in the very year the first carver set a blade to the wood would have been more than ten years old on the day the last block was finished.

But before the blade came an even longer stage, and that stage is the hardest to believe.

The wood chosen was wild cherry and wild pear. Once the trees were felled, the wood was not carved right away. It was soaked in seawater. It soaked for about three years. After three years lying still in salt water, the grain had given up its sap and lost its stubborn habit of shrinking. Once lifted out, the wood was boiled in salt water. Then it was left in the shade, where the wind dried it very slowly until it was completely dry. Only after all of that would a block stay free of warping and cracks in the years to come.

Three years of waiting, just so a block of wood would be calm enough to take the writing.

Each block is about 70 centimeters long, about as thin as a cutting board, and weighs around three or four kilograms. Both faces are covered with Chinese characters, with no blank space left. Added together, those more than 80,000 blocks carry more than 52 million characters.

Here is a small calculation, just for fun. Suppose one very skilled carver sat from morning to night and carved 30 characters a day. At that pace, carving all 52 million characters would take nearly 5,000 years.

So this could not have been the work of one person. It was the work of a great many people, sitting side by side, season after season, each at a corner of a bench, each with a share of the work.

And here is the strange part. Yet the blocks show no trace of that crowd. The writing on the first block and the writing on the last are so alike that a single hand might have written them all. Much later, the famous calligrapher Kim Jeong-hui looked at them and said that this writing did not look like the hand of an ordinary mortal. The characters here are beautiful and accurate to a degree rarely seen anywhere.

Once the carving was done, a second question came, and it was harder than the first. Where would the blocks be kept?

Wood is fragile. Damp makes it mold, too much dryness makes it crack, and termites and woodworm turn it to dust. Yet the buildings raised in the 15th century to hold these blocks have kept all that wood through season after season of rain and sun. They are called Janggyeong Panjeon, and they have done it without a single machine or a single electric wire.

The secret lies in the windows. This is the best part, and anyone standing in front of the buildings can see it with their own eyes.

Each wall has two rows of slatted wooden windows, one row up high and one row down low. What makes them special is that the two rows are not the same size. On the front, the lower windows are about four times as large as the upper ones. On the back, the builders turned it around, and the upper row is the larger one.

One small mismatch like that, and the result is remarkable. Wind rising from the valley meets the first wall and is drawn in through the large openings. It flows along the shelves of wood and leaves through the wall on the other side. Nobody presses a button. Nobody turns anything. The building simply breathes, day after day.

Underfoot there is one more layer of protection. The floor is clay, and beneath the clay the builders laid salt, charcoal and lime in thick layers. These rest on a granite foundation, so that water drains away quickly. In the rainy season, those layers draw some of the moisture out of the air. In the dry winter, they give the moisture back. The whole building is like a living thing that adjusts its own breathing to the seasons.

The result has been put to the test. More than 700 years after the carving, paper pressed onto the blocks still prints the characters sharp and clean, without a blur.

In 1995, the storage buildings were added to the World Heritage List. Twelve years later, it was the turn of the blocks inside. They were inscribed in the Memory of the World, UNESCO's program for documentary heritage. The house and the treasure it protects were both recognized.

Vietnam has woodblocks too. Among them are those of Vĩnh Nghiêm Pagoda and those of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. Both have been recognized as documentary heritage. They too are blocks of wood carved with reversed characters, and they too have come down through many generations and survived.

More than 80,000 wooden blocks. By now, that number is no longer just a number.

It is three years of seawater for every single block. It is more than ten years of heads bent over the bench. It is countless hands whose names no one remembers now, writing so alike that later generations imagined a single person had sat and written it all.

In the small courtyard in front of those buildings on Mount Gaya, there is no sound of machines. There is only the wind rising from the valley. It slips in through the low windows, passes across 80,000 blocks of wood lying quiet on their shelves, and leaves softly through the windows on the other side. It has done exactly that for hundreds of years, and tomorrow morning it will do it again.