고등학교 영어Ⅰ (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

In the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France in Paris lies a thin Korean book printed more than six centuries ago. Its full title, Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol, describes a collection of key Zen teachings selected by a Buddhist monk named Baegun. Experts regard the book as the oldest surviving book in the world printed with movable metal type. It was printed in 1377, more than seventy years before Gutenberg produced his famous Bible in Germany.

Baegun died in 1374, and three years later his disciples printed the collection that he had compiled. The work was meant to help young monks grasp the core of Zen. It was printed in two volumes, but only the second survives, with the first volume still lost.

Each character in the book was cast as a separate piece of metal. These pieces were arranged in a frame to form a page, with every piece carrying a single character. Once a page had been printed, the pieces could be removed from the frame and used again for other pages. On the last page appears a short note that records when, where, and how the book was printed. According to this note, printers at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju made the book with type cast from metal.

The book left Korea in the late nineteenth century. Victor Collin de Plancy, a French diplomat who served in Seoul, gathered hundreds of old Korean books, Jikji among them, and took them to France. The book was later sold to a collector, Henri Vever, who left it to the national library in his will. For decades, however, its importance was not widely recognized. In 1967, a Korean scholar named Park Byeong-seon joined the staff of the library. While sorting its old Korean materials, she came across Jikji and studied it closely.

In 1972, the International Book Year, the library put Jikji on display at an exhibition in Paris, with specialists from Korea and France recognizing the book's special place in the history of printing. One question remained, however: Where exactly had Heungdeok Temple stood? During the 1980s, construction work for new housing in Cheongju uncovered the remains of an old temple. Out of the soil came bronze objects bearing the name Heungdeok. These finds confirmed that the book had been printed at this very place. In 2001, UNESCO added Jikji to its Memory of the World Register. With its pages kept in Paris, far from the temple where it was made, this single volume still shows what Korean printers achieved in the fourteenth century.