Temple story · Traditional attribution
Sinhyo and the Crane Feather
Iryeon, Samguk yusa
Samguk yusa, fascicle 3, 'Pagodas and Images': 'The Five Kinds of Holy Beings of Woljeongsa on Odaesan'
The monks laid the feather in the gap where a panel of the robe was missing, and it fit exactly; it was not a feather but cloth.
According to an old record kept at Woljeongsa, Sinhyo of Gongju, a devoted son whose mother would eat nothing without meat, went out to find meat for her and shot at five cranes he saw on the road, and one of them, it is said, dropped a single feather as they flew off. When he covered his eyes with the feather and looked at people, every one of them looked like a beast, so he got no meat and instead, it is said, cut flesh from his own thigh to serve his mother. Later he left home and gave his house to be a temple; taking the words of an old woman he met on the road as guidance from Gwaneum, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, he settled at the foot of Odaesan on the spot where Jajang had first built a hut, the site of today's Woljeongsa. One day five monks came and asked him where the panel of robe he had brought was, telling him it was the very feather he looked at people through; when they laid the feather in the gap of the robe, it fit exactly, and it was not a feather but cloth. Only after they parted, the story goes, did Sinhyo realize that the five monks had been manifestations of the five kinds of holy beings. The Samguk yusa counts the temple's nine-story stone pagoda, along with the five kinds of holy beings, among its sacred traces, but the records do not say whether the Goryeo-period octagonal nine-story pagoda now standing in front of the main hall is that same pagoda.