This weekend was the Lotus Lantern Festival in Insa Dong, Seoul. It was awesome. I learned so much, including that a Korean text called the Jikji, is the oldest printed text from a metaloid printing block. It's was made one hundred years prior to Gutenberg's Bible. I was so shocked. After having acquired a Bachelor of Arts in English, I assumed I had been told the histroy (or what we knew thus far) of printing. Oh, how wrong I was.

The Jikji "contains excerpts from teachings of the most revered Buddhist monks (Korean) throughout generations" (paraphrased, Wikipedia "Jikji"). Alongside this stunning text is the Tripitaka Koreana, considered to be the most comprehensive Buddhist canon. Containing over 52 million characters, every one carved by hand in a back breaking process that is awe inspiring. The characters are not Korean which are (comparably simple) but are rather Chinese. The woodblocks are maintained in a single facility in a temple in the mountains in South Gyeonsang province (which I will be making a trip to see!). As if the sheer amount of characters wasn't impressive enough, or that it's hand carved, or that it's still preserved, let's just talk about the fact that has NO KNOWN ERRORS! Or that it was produced during a war. OR that before going to work, the people working on it would bow one to three times for each character. (You guys do the math....3x52million).

I'll be posting an article I found about Korean printing soon, I just needed to share this awesome story (I mean awesome by its dictionary definition not its colloquial one). I feel slightly jipped having not learning about it it my linguistics classes.