Ichadon

Ichadon was a member of the Silla aristocracy who served King Beopheung as a sain, a trusted attendant close to the king. A ninth-century text by the monk Ilnyeom, quoted in the Samguk yusa, gives his family name as Bak and names his grandfather as Ajinjong, a son of Seupbo galmunwang, the father of King Jijeung; a stele text by Kim Yonghaeng instead traces him through his father Gilseung and grandfather Gonghan to King Heulhae. He died young, at 22 according to the first text and 26 according to the second.

He is remembered for a single act. When the king's wish to promote Buddhism met fierce resistance from the nobility, Ichadon offered to be executed as a way to break the deadlock. Tradition holds that miracles at his death overwhelmed his opponents and that Silla officially accepted Buddhism as a result. For this reason he is often called the first Buddhist martyr of Korea.

His name appears in several forms. Ichadon (異次頓) and Yeomchok (厭髑) are thought to be two ways of writing the same native Silla name with Chinese characters, one by sound and one by meaning; Iryeon, the compiler of the Samguk yusa, explains that the native word written icha or icheo was translated by the character yeom (厭, ‘dislike’), while the final syllable was only a grammatical ending. This kind of double writing is typical of early Korean names recorded before the invention of the Korean alphabet.

Buddhism reached the Korean peninsula from China in the fourth century. In 372 the Former Qin ruler Fu Jian sent the monk Sundo with images and scriptures to King Sosurim of Goguryeo, and in 384 the monk Marananta arrived in Baekje by way of Eastern Jin China. In both kingdoms the royal houses adopted the new faith early, and it helped them build centralised states with shared rituals and literate clergy.

Silla, in the southeast of the peninsula, was more isolated and more conservative. Stories tell of monks from Goguryeo, such as Mukhoja and Ado, who came to Silla in the fifth century and taught in secret or with limited success. Silla's government was still shaped by a council of powerful lineages from its six districts, and those nobles were attached to the native cults of sacred groves, mountains and ancestors.

King Beopheung, whose posthumous name means ‘raising the Dharma’, set out to strengthen royal authority. In 520 he promulgated a law code and prescribed official dress according to rank, and in 532 he annexed Geumgwan Gaya; in 536 Silla adopted its first reign era name. Accepting Buddhism, a religion associated with powerful kings across Asia, fitted this programme, but it required the nobles' consent.

The surviving accounts tell the story differently. In the Samguk sagi, the king wishes to promote Buddhism but his ministers object. Ichadon asks to be executed to settle their objections. When the king consults them, they reject the monks’ shaven heads, strange clothes and unfamiliar teachings, and Ichadon argues that only when there are extraordinary people can there be extraordinary deeds. Only as he faces execution does he predict that, if the Buddha has supernatural power, something strange will happen after his death. When he is beheaded his blood spurts out white like milk, and the ministers no longer speak against Buddhist practice.

The Samguk yusa, compiled by the monk Iryeon in the late thirteenth century, quotes several older versions. In the ninth-century text by the monk Ilnyeom, the king and Ichadon agree on a plan: the king assembles his ministers, demands to know who has delayed the temple he ordered, and then condemns Ichadon. In a ‘local tradition’ (hyangjeon) quoted by Iryeon and in the Haedong goseung jeon, Ichadon is executed for having passed on a false royal order to build a temple in the Cheongyeongnim, a sacred grove. At his execution white milk springs up from his neck, the sky darkens and flowers rain down; in the hyangjeon and the Haedong goseung jeon his head also flies away and lands on Geumgangsan, a mountain north of the capital. The nobles are terrified and accept the faith.

All versions agree on the core: a conflict between the king and the nobility, a young official who deliberately sacrifices himself, and a miracle of white blood. They disagree on the date: the Samguk yusa, quoting a Silla annal, places his death in 527, the fourteenth year of Beopheung’s reign; the Samguk sagi records it under 528; and the Haedong goseung jeon gives 529.

Early sixth-century Silla was not yet a fully centralised monarchy. Important decisions were taken with the agreement of leading aristocrats, who met in a council later known as the hwabaek, and the king was in many ways the first among powerful lineages rather than an absolute ruler. The Uljin Bongpyeong stele of 524 records an affair deliberated on and settled by Silla’s ruling elite of the six districts, evidence of collective participation in government.

Religion was part of this balance. The native cults of Silla, centred on sacred groves, mountains, heaven and royal ancestors, were tied to particular places and lineages. A universal religion introduced and sponsored by the king threatened to shift religious authority to the throne and to a new class of monks who owed their position to royal patronage. Buddhism also brought its own ideas of kingship, in which a righteous ruler protects the Dharma and is protected by it in turn.

The Samguk sagi presents the ministers’ objections in religious terms. Modern interpretations also connect the conflict with royal authority and with the temple planned in the Cheongyeongnim grove. The surviving accounts, however, do not establish the individual nobles’ motives or a specific dispute over temple land and labour.

Ichadon's position as a sain is important here. As a close personal servant of the king, and a member of a noble family, he stood between the throne and the aristocracy. His willingness to take the blame allowed the king to pursue his goal without openly defeating the council, a pattern that the Samguk yusa version makes explicit.

The first fruit of the new policy was Heungnyunsa, built in the Cheongyeongnim grove where, according to tradition, earlier missionaries had already tried to build a temple. The work, resumed after his death, was completed in the second month of 544 under King Jinheung, who named it Daewang Heungnyunsa and allowed ordinary people to become monks and nuns that year. Separately, the Samguk yusa preserves a tradition that Beopheung took monastic dress and lived at Heungnyunsa, while noting confusion over royal Buddhist names. Since Beopheung died in 540, this account cannot simply be placed after the temple’s completion in 544. Its main hall later held images of the ‘Ten Sages’ of Silla Buddhism, Ichadon among them.

Building a temple in a sacred grove was a powerful symbol. It placed the new royal religion on ground that belonged to the old cults. In the following decades Silla built the huge Hwangnyongsa temple in the heart of the capital, sent monks to study in China, and developed a doctrine that Silla itself was a land where Buddhas had lived in the distant past.

Beopheung and his queen are also said to have become monk and nun at the end of their lives. Within a century Buddhism was woven into Silla's ideas of kingship, its education of young aristocrats and its diplomacy, and after the unification wars it produced masterpieces such as Bulguksa and Seokguram in Gyeongju.

In the early ninth century Silla Buddhists formed a society to honour Ichadon, and a text written for it by the monk Ilnyeom is summarised in the Samguk yusa: it says that in 817 the national overseer of monks, Hyeryung, and others restored Ichadon’s tomb and set up a great stone. The most important object linked to him is a six-sided granite pillar, 106 cm high, which stood at Baengnyulsa, a temple on a hill north of Gyeongju. Its inscription begins with a date in 818, and most scholars now date the pillar to 818, seeing 817 as the year the monument was decided on.

One face of the pillar carries a relief carving of the martyrdom: a beheaded figure with a stream rising from the neck, flowers falling from the sky and the ground drawn in wave-like lines as if it were shaking. The other five faces carry a badly weathered inscription, of which only part can be read with confidence. It tells of the king’s wish to spread Buddhism, his secret plan with Yeomchok (Ichadon) and the execution, and says that white milk spurted one jang from his neck while flowers rained from heaven and the earth shook, matching the written histories.

The pillar was moved from the temple site in 1914 and is now in the Gyeongju National Museum. It is one of the few pictorial representations of a historical event to survive from Silla, and it shows that Ichadon was already the object of organised devotion long before the surviving histories were written.

In southern China, Emperor Wu of Liang (r. 502–549) was an important Buddhist patron who built monasteries, lectured on scriptures and several times renounced the world and entered a monastery. In 521 Silla sent an envoy to Liang; the Liang shu records that the mission came with Baekje’s, showing Baekje’s role as an intermediary in this contact.

King Muryeong of Baekje died in 523. His brick tomb at Gongju reflects southern Chinese tomb architecture and Baekje’s close cultural exchanges with China. His son King Seong moved the capital to Sabi in 538 and, according to Japanese chronicles, sent Buddhist images and scriptures to the Yamato court, dated to 538 or 552. Buddhism in Japan then faced its own struggle between clans: in 587 the pro-Buddhist Soga destroyed the anti-Buddhist Mononobe no Moriya, and from 588 Soga no Umako built Asuka-dera (Hōkōji). Silla and Japan both show a pattern in which accepting Buddhism was bound up with power struggles at court.

The closer historical setting for Ichadon's story lies in East Asia. Buddhism had reached Goguryeo and Baekje from China before Silla's court formally accepted it, and the Silla king could look to those neighbouring kingdoms as examples of royal patronage. The sources for Ichadon's death describe resistance among Silla nobles to Beopheung's support for the new religion. That conflict at Silla's own court, rather than events in distant empires that happened at about the same time, explains the place of his martyrdom in Korean tradition.

All the written narratives of Ichadon were composed long after the event. The Samguk sagi (1145) says its account is based on the Gyerim japjeon of the Silla writer Kim Daemun (active c. 700), and notes that Kim Yonghaeng’s stele text for the monk Ado tells it differently. The Haedong goseung jeon (1215), a collection of biographies of eminent Korean monks by Gakhun, and the Samguk yusa (late 13th century) by Iryeon add further material, including the ninth-century text of the society that honoured Ichadon.

The oldest physical evidence is the pillar of about 818. Its inscription and relief show that the core of the story, including the white milk, was fixed by then. What cannot be recovered is what happened in the 520s in detail. The miraculous elements belong to a well-known genre of Buddhist hagiography, and historians generally distinguish between the likely historical kernel, an execution connected with the royal decision to support Buddhism, and the legendary layers.

A comparable miracle appears in the Chinese Fu fazang yinyuan zhuan (‘Account of the transmission of the Dharma treasury’): the monk Siṃha is beheaded by a hostile king of Kashmir (Jibin), and milk instead of blood flows from his neck. Such parallels give a basis for studying the literary background of Ichadon’s legend.

A religious reading: within Korean Buddhism, Ichadon is a martyr whose selfless act opened the way for the Dharma in Silla. This reading stresses his faith and the miracles as signs of truth. It is the perspective of the Samguk yusa and of the ninth-century society that honoured him, and it is still alive in Korean Buddhist commemoration today.

A political reading: many modern historians, especially in Korea, read the episode as a struggle between a king seeking to centralise power and a council of aristocrats defending their privileges. In this view, Buddhism offered an ideology of a universal ruler above the clans, and the nobles' resistance was about power as much as belief. Evidence cited includes Beopheung's law code of 520, the court dress regulations, the annexation of Gaya and the fact that the first temple was built on the nobles' sacred ground. Religious concerns and political interests may both have mattered.

A text-critical reading compares the different versions preserved in the pillar, the Samguk sagi, the Haedong goseung jeon and the Samguk yusa. Because later compilers also quoted older materials, a detail’s appearance in a later compilation does not by itself show when it originated; the ninth-century pillar already tells of a plan agreed between the king and Ichadon. This approach does not deny the event but treats the narratives as evidence of how later Silla and Goryeo Buddhists remembered their origins.

On chronology, the records disagree: 527 in the Samguk yusa and in Kim Busik’s own stele for the monk Uicheon, 528 in the Samguk sagi and in Choe Chiwon’s stele for Jijeung, and 529 in the Haedong goseung jeon. Some historians separate the martyrdom from the formal recognition: Lee Ki-baik, for example, dated real recognition to 535, when work on Heungnyunsa began, and others stress the gradual creation of a Buddhist order under Beopheung. Comparisons across East Asia are also debated: the conflict in Japan between the pro-Buddhist Soga and the anti-Buddhist Mononobe, which ended in 587, is often set beside Silla’s case, but how closely the two resemble each other depends on how one reads both sets of sources.

Silla's adoption of Buddhism, whatever its exact date and form, shaped Korean civilisation for more than a thousand years. Buddhist temples, sculpture, printing and scholarship flourished through Unified Silla and Goryeo, and Buddhist monuments in Gyeongju are included in two separate UNESCO World Heritage properties: the Gyeongju Historic Areas, and Seokguram Grotto and Bulguksa Temple.

Ichadon is still commemorated in Gyeongju. At the modern Heungnyunsa, portraits of the Ten Sages of Silla, Ichadon among them, are enshrined in the main hall, and a six-sided commemorative stone pillar stands in the courtyard.

For historians, the case of Ichadon is a valuable example of how a religion enters a society: not simply by the spread of ideas, but through negotiation between rulers, elites and older beliefs, and through stories that later generations tell to explain why their world changed.