The King with Donkey Ears

When the wind passes through a clump of bamboo, it makes a sound all its own.

It is not like the wind in a row of chinaberry trees, nor like the wind in a line of casuarinas. Bamboo stems are tall and hollow, and when one knocks against another they go tock, tock. The leaves are slender, and they brush together with a rustle, like someone whispering very fast. Standing beside a clump of bamboo late in the afternoon, many people share the same strange feeling. It seems the bamboo is not just making noise. It seems the bamboo is talking. It is saying something that almost becomes words, then melts away into the wind.

Korean people have a whole story to explain that sound. It begins with a king who really lived.

It happened in Silla, a very old kingdom in the southeast of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital stood right where the city of Gyeongju is today. The king in the story is Gyeongmun, the 48th king of Silla, who reigned from 861 to 875. That much is history. The rest is what older people still tell. More than 700 years ago, a monk sat down and wrote it into a book called the Samguk Yusa, so that it would not be lost. The book is a collection of stories and records about the three kingdoms of ancient Korea.

Before Gyeongmun became king, he was only a young man named Eungnyeom.

At 18, he was chosen to lead a band of young men of Silla called the hwarang. They were trained in both letters and arms, and they traveled all year round in every direction, climbing mountains, wading streams, stopping at one village after another.

In the year Eungnyeom turned 20, King Heonan held a feast in the palace and summoned him. The king asked a question that everyone who heard it thought they knew how to answer. He wanted to know what strange things the young man had seen in all his travels.

That question opened the door to every kind of boasting. He could have told of a tiger met on a mountain pass, of a storm far out at sea, of a temple hanging halfway up a cliff. The whole banquet hall that day was surely waiting to hear such things.

But the young man said that he had seen three people of fine character.

The king told him to describe them.

The first, he said, was a man who stood above others, yet humbly chose to sit in a lower seat. The second was enormously rich, yet dressed as simply as anyone. The third was born to power and rank, yet never used that power to frighten anyone.

So his three strange sights had no tiger in them, and no storm. There were only three people who had chosen to stand lower than the place they had every right to stand.

When he finished, the old king sat in silence for a while. Then, without his noticing, tears began to fall. He knew he had just met a truly good man.

Not long after, King Heonan fell gravely ill. He also had no son to take the throne, so he left a last decree naming Eungnyeom as his heir. So the young man who had once spoken of three good people came to the throne and became King Gyeongmun.

Here the story takes a turn no one could have expected.

Legend says that just after he became king, his ears suddenly began to grow. They grew and grew, until they looked exactly like a pair of donkey ears. A king with donkey ears is not a tale told only in Korea. Far away in Greece, people also tell of King Midas, who had ears just like these.

In the palace of Silla, nobody knew. The queen did not know. The attendants did not know. The officials who came to court every morning did not know either, because the king always wore a hat.

Only one person knew, and that was the man who made the king's hats.

In those days the king and his officials wore a special kind of cloth hat. To fit the head, it had to be measured, sewn and adjusted. Each time he measured or adjusted it, the hatmaker had to lift that hat from the king's head. So he was the only one who saw.

The first time he saw, his heart must have nearly stopped. But he did not make a sound. He bowed his head, finished measuring, sewed with care, and then asked leave to withdraw.

And he kept the secret for his whole life.

That must have been very hard. Over all those years, there must have been thousands of afternoons when he sat drinking tea with his neighbors. There must have been thousands of times when someone asked what he saw inside the palace. Each time, he only smiled and talked about something else. A thing so strange, and he swallowed it, swallowed it again and again, until his hair turned white.

Then he grew old. Then he fell gravely ill, and knew that he would soon be gone.

Perhaps what he feared most then was not death. What he feared was taking with him a sentence that had never once been spoken aloud.

So he forced himself up and, leaning on a stick, walked out of the village. He went to the bamboo grove behind a temple called Dorimsa. He went deep inside, then deeper still, to a place where he was sure no one was around. He glanced about once more to be certain. Then he turned to face the bamboo, took a long breath, and shouted the sentence he had kept in his heart for so many years.

Our king has donkey ears.

Once he had shouted it, he felt light all over. He went quietly home, and not long after, he died.

But the words stayed behind in the bamboo grove.

From that day on, whenever the wind blew past Dorimsa, the whole grove rustled out exactly one sentence. Our king has donkey ears. When the wind was strong, the bamboo said it loudly. When the wind was gentle, the bamboo said it softly. People passing by stopped short, listened closely, and went home to tell others. Before long, what only one man had known for years became something the whole region could hear.

When the king heard the news, he was sad. His was not the anger of an insulted man, but the sorrow of a man whose deepest shame had been laid bare.

He did not go looking for the hatmaker, because the hatmaker was already dead. He did not arrest anyone or punish anyone. He did only one very human thing. He had the whole bamboo grove cut down, and in its place he planted a different tree, the cornelian cherry.

The new trees went into the ground. The bamboo grove was no more.

Then one day the wind came back.

And the wind still spoke. Only this time the sentence was shorter. The new grove no longer said that the king had donkey ears. It only murmured a clipped little sentence.

Our king has long ears.

Dorimsa is gone now. The bamboo grove behind it is gone too. But bamboo grows everywhere, and the wind has never been willing to stand still.

So ever since, whenever people stand before a rustling clump of bamboo, they remember this story. The wind never quite manages to say a whole sentence clearly. It keeps trailing off, coming close to words and then melting away. Yet for generations people have believed that whatever is true will sooner or later find a way to be spoken. Sometimes it is through a person brave enough to say it. Sometimes it is only through a gust of wind passing a clump of bamboo.