⑥ The Life and Death of Admiral Yi from the Perspective of Momcheolhak

I run two blogs: "The Story of Admiral Yi Sun-sin as I Met Him", the Korean original of this blog, and another called "Momcheolhak: A Conversation with the Body" (both in Korean). When I first started the two, I thought each blog would deal with completely different things.

A few days ago I wrote a piece titled "What Is Momcheolhak?" — momcheolhak meaning, literally, "the philosophy of the body."

In it I wrote that only when a conversation that begins in the body widens out to one's neighbors, to society, and at last to the universe, can the word "philosophy" be attached to it.

👉 Related post (in Korean): What Is Momcheolhak?

After writing that piece, for some reason, the story of Admiral Yi Sun-sin — the commander who saved Joseon at sea during the Imjin War — kept coming back to me.

Why did he go out of his way to fight a battle he did not have to fight, and die?

When I first tried writing an answer to this question, something — two percent — was missing from it.

I had known Admiral Yi only through stories and statistics; from the point of view of momcheolhak, it was not enough.

That is why I want to write this piece.

The Man Who Gave Away His Clothes

On the 23rd day of the first month of 1596, Admiral Yi wrote in the Nanjung Ilgi, his war diary:

"In the morning I gave clothes to seventeen soldiers who had none, and gave each of them one more set as a spare."

That seventeen soldiers were shivering in the cold without a single set of clothes — he recorded it himself, as a number. And he gave them not one set, but two.

That autumn, while touring Jeolla Province, he took off the clothes he was wearing and gave them to a man named Yi Jung-ik, who had told him of his hardship (Nanjung Ilgi, the 13th day of the 9th lunar month, 1596).

The Man Who Wailed, Calling Out a Name

In 1594, when famine and plague swept through the Joseon navy, more than two hundred bodies piled up in the camp in a single day.

"I gathered and buried the bodies of two hundred and seventeen who died of disease," he wrote. And he also wrote this:

"It was so dreadful I could not bear to hear of it."

In the fourth month of that year, Eo Yeong-dam, an assistant commander who had guided the fleet through the waterways at the Battles of Okpo and Sacheon and at the great Battle of Hansan Island, died of the plague. Admiral Yi wrote:

"How can I put my grief into words!"

A man who, while holding the post of Supreme Naval Commander of the Three Provinces, counted the exact number of the dead and wrote it in his own diary. A man who did not turn away from the suffering of his people but felt their pain along with them. A man who wailed at the death of Eo Yeong-dam. Can you not feel Admiral Yi's heart as a human being?

Admiral Yi, Who Hurt More Than Anyone

Admiral Yi's pain was not merely as great as the pain of an ordinary soldier.

His pain may have been lonelier and more agonizing than theirs.

In the year Jeongyu, 1597, he was unjustly imprisoned, released, and sent off to serve as a common soldier in disgrace — and on that road he received word of his mother's death.

He wrote, "I ran out, beat my chest and leapt about in grief; even the sun in the sky looked dark."

In the tenth month of the same year, not long after his victory at the Battle of Myeongnyang, word came that his family home in Asan had suffered a reprisal by the Japanese army. Defending the house, his twenty-year-old third son, Myeon, had been cut down and killed. The night before the news arrived, he dreamed that his son was embracing him. The next day he received the letter and wrote:

"How can Heaven be so unkind?" "My heart dropped, and I let out a loud wail." "It would be right for me to die and for you to live. Yet you have died and I live. How can things be so wrong?" "Getting through a single night is like getting through a year."

He lost his mother, lost his son, and himself lay sick for weeks at a time. Admiral Yi was a man who lived through this war with his body, in pain, more than anyone.

And So He Could Not Stop

At this point, I came to think this.

Because his own pain hurt so much, was healing the pain of the people — which looked even greater than his own — not more urgent to him?

In 1598, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Japanese ruler who had launched the invasion, died, and the Japanese army wanted to withdraw. The war was as good as over. Had he simply let the retreating enemy go, no one would have blamed him. His body had endured seven years; he had every right.

But he did not want to end half-heartedly the war that had taken his mother, his son, the soldiers who had not a single set of clothes, and the comrade whose name he had cried out. If he let the enemy go alive, this pain would one day repeat itself.

And so he had no choice but to begin a battle he did not need to fight.

He pursued the enemy as far as the sea off Noryang.

At dawn on the 19th day of the eleventh lunar month of 1598, while fighting a chaotic battle until daybreak against the enemy who had fled into Gwaneumpo Bay, he was struck by a bullet and fell.

And it is said that his last words were these:

"The battle is urgent. Do not tell anyone that I have died."

A Life and Death That Did Not End in the Body

In "What Is Momcheolhak?" I wrote this:

"Only when it begins in the body but does not end in the body can the word 'philosophy' be attached to the body."

Admiral Yi's death proves this sentence exactly. Beginning with the frozen bodies of soldiers without clothes, with the name of Eo Yeong-dam, with the pain in his own body at losing his mother and son, he finally reached the point of giving his whole body away. With that death the seven-year war ended, and Joseon, its people, and the next generation survived.

This is how I understand Admiral Yi's death:

Only one who has endured his own pain to the end can throw his body down before the pain of others.

The actor Choi Min-sik, who gave a powerful performance as Admiral Yi in the film The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Myeongnyang), is said to have had this question while playing the role:

"When I was offered the role and was acting it, I felt the weight of that loneliness. There was no one, around him. Even the king, instead, slandered him as a traitor and tried to kill him...
What could have been the driving force that let him fight a battle like that?
Did he really hold out on loyalty alone?
It's the picture of a human being who endured those cruel years and still led the war to victory, a human being...
It got so bad that I wished he'd at least appear in my dreams...
'Why did you fight like that? They all abandoned you, General.'
I remember being caught up in a kind of delusion, just wanting to get even a feeling of that."

👉 Watch the interview with Choi Min-sik (in Korean)

As a fan of the actor Choi Min-sik, I would like to offer this piece as my answer.

👉 Next post: ⑦ Before the Tomb of Won Gyun

— Momcheolhak