Munju Rubbings Association
We are a small association of readers who walk between stones. We do not own the stones; we visit them, kneel, lay cloth, ink the cloth, and bring back impressions. The work is slow and faintly mournful. Below is the founding catalogue — twelve rubbings, taken between the spring of 2024 and the autumn of 2025, of objects that bear writing and that nobody at present is reading. We publish the rubbings as the negative of memory: white on black, the absence the cloth recorded.
The catalogue, in the order taken, runs as follows:
i. the lintel of Cheonbo-sa,
ii. the bell of Banryong-am,
iii. the salt-merchant’s grave-marker at Yeongdeok,
iv. the jangseung face at Anui ferry,
v. a sutra fragment, Munsu-am west wall,
vi. the bookplate of Yi Jae-mun,
vii. the wellstone at Ssangnim village,
viii. a milestone, Hwanghae-do,
ix. the bell-tongue of Bomun-sa,
x. an unsigned poet’s memorial at Andong,
xi. the sluice-gate inscription at Najin,
xii. the broken stele of an unnamed widow.
Each entry opens a single page; each page is one stone come back from the field.
The archive is not a museum. We add to it when we can, and we leave gaps when we cannot — the gap, like the rubbing, is part of the record. Visitors are welcome to read; the door is unlocked.
We found this stone above the eastern gate of Cheonbo-sa, a small temple in the upland fold of Namhae. The lintel is granite, lichen-darkened, set so low that a tall visitor must stoop. The five characters across its face read 慈悲不渝石 — compassion does not wear away the stone. The carving is shallow. Whoever set the chisel did not want to deepen the words; they trusted the cloth to find them.
We laid the cloth at first light. The rain had stopped an hour before and the granite was still damp; the ink took unevenly along the third character. We accepted this. The whole left half of 不 ghosted out, and we let it ghost. The temple keeper, a woman in her seventies, watched us from the courtyard and said nothing. When we were finished she gave us a cup of barley water and asked us to leave the cloth on the rock for an hour to dry. We did.
Of the carver, no record. Of the stone, no quarry. Of the temple, a 1936 land-survey note that calls it “a hermitage of two cells, fallen.” What is left is the lintel and these four words and a half. We publish the rubbing as we took it — the ghost included.