구운몽: 돌다리 위의 여덟 선녀

Long ago, on Lotus Peak of Mount Heng in China, a great monk called Master Yukgwan built a temple and lived there. The master had hundreds of disciples, and the brightest and most handsome of them was twenty-year-old Seongjin. The master cherished Seongjin above all, and meant one day to pass all of his teachings on to him.

The Dragon King of Dongting Lake often came to hear the master teach, and one day the master decided to send Seongjin to the Dragon Palace to return the courtesy. The Dragon King welcomed Seongjin warmly, held a great feast, and offered him wine. A monk was not supposed to drink, but in the end Seongjin could not refuse the Dragon King, and he drank three cups.

Meanwhile, Lady Wei of the Southern Mountain had also sent eight fairies to pay her respects to the master. Their visit over, the eight fairies stopped on the way home to rest for a while on a stone bridge with a beautiful view. Seongjin, his face flushed from the wine, washed his face in a stream on his way back to Lotus Peak, and came to that very stone bridge.

The bridge was narrow, and with the eight fairies sitting across the path, Seongjin could not get by. When Seongjin politely asked them to make way, the fairies laughed and teased him: if he was a real monk, let him cross the water by magic. Seongjin smiled, broke off a branch of peach blossom, and tossed it down in front of the fairies.

At once its eight blossoms turned into eight shining pearls and rolled across the ground. Each fairy picked up a pearl, looked back at Seongjin with a smile, and rode the wind up into the sky. Seongjin stood for a long time, gazing blankly at the sky where the fairies had vanished.

Back at the temple, Seongjin told the master about his visit to the Dragon Palace, but said nothing of what had happened on the bridge. That night Seongjin lay down in his room, but the fairies' sweet voices and smiling faces kept coming back to him, and he could not sleep.

"A man who is born into this world should rise to high office, marry a beautiful wife, and enjoy wealth and glory, shouldn't he?" "And yet I must spend my whole life on this mountain, alone, doing nothing but chanting prayers." Seongjin tried hard to shake these thoughts off, but his heart was already running toward the pleasures of the world.