In the Midas tale, whenever the south wind blew it carried the royal secret everywhere it went: “the King has donkey ears.” Just as a gentle wind spread the royal secret of King Midas to all of Phrygia, so has such a wind brought this story to the outside world beyond Asia Minor and across so many generations. As early as 1911, William Crooke stated, “I have been as yet unable to trace this much-travelled tale further east than India” (1911, 183). In fact, the tale has extended in its known eastern diffusion to Tibet, China, and Mongolia and to southeastern countries, such as Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The tale further extends to Korea, one of the most remote countries located at the far end of the Eastern Hemisphere.

How the Midas tale of Phrygia found itself in Silla still remains something of a mystery, even to folklorists and scholars of literature. It would be reasonable to assume that the two tales emerged spontaneously and independently. If that were the case, this would be an excellent demonstration of collective unconscious in general and archetypal theory in particular as proposed by Carl Jung. Buried deep within the human psyche, the tale may involve not only the shame of physical deformity but also a human desire to release tension by divulging a secret. However, this seems to hardly be the case for two reasons. First, there are other cultures that have no variants of the Midas tale. Second, some versions of the tale were created over a considerably wide time span.

It can be assumed therefore that the Midas tale and its variants are closely related to oral tradition. They might have been widespread, moving from mouth to mouth, until they were finally recorded in a written format. Most probably, the Phrygian tale spread to the Kingdom of Silla from Asia Minor via three main routes: (1) China, (2) India and Indianized states in Southeast Asia, and (3) Arab merchants. By the ninth century, China in general, and the Tang dynasty in particular, exerted the greatest cultural influence on her neighboring countries, particularly Silla—so much so that the word “Tang” (Dang) was virtually used as a synonym for China long after the dynasty had perished. No better illustration of this can be found than in the Korean vernacular word dangnagwi, meaning a donkey from the Tang dynasty. (Its prefix “dang” refers to the Tang dynasty while nagwi means an aboriginal donkey.) Aided by Tang’s military forces, Silla conquered the Kingdom of Baekje in 660 and the Kingdom of Goguryeo in 668, unifying the southern and middle portions of the Korean peninsula.

Probably the Phrygian tale, together with other cultural practices, might have been passed to Silla located at the southernmost parts of the Korean peninsula. Chinese cultural influences on Silla were far more extensive than has been generally recognized. Through the use of both land trade along the Silk Road and maritime trade, the Tang gained a variety of new technologies, cultural products, and contemporary artifacts. These could have included cultural contributions the Tang received from places like Turkey. From the Middle East, Asia Minor, and Central Asia, the Tang acquired new ideas in almost every aspect.

As a matter of fact, the same can be said of the arts, such as song, dances, and tales. In The Golden Peaches of Samarkand : A Study of Tang Exotics, Edward H. Schafer claims that there was a Turkic–Chinese dictionary available for serious scholars and students while Turkic folksongs gave inspiration to some Chinese poetry (1985, 28). The presence of the Korean version of the Midas tale in Silla at such a comparatively early date strongly suggests that a Chinese version must have existed. Géza Róheim points out that there exists a Chinese variant about the King of Black China located east of India. In this version, the king has the ears of an ass, and the barber boy knows the royal secret. Seriously ill, the barber finally whispers the secret into a tree, and a squirrel makes it known to the outside world. According to Róheim, some versions have a happy ending, and in other versions, the barber boy is punished with death (1930, 223). Incidentally, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior can be seen as a retelling of a Chinese version of the King Midas tale. The squirrel, in place of the barber or the tailor/hat-maker, also appears in the Mongolian version.

As far as the Midas tale is concerned, it might be better to seek its dissemination route in ancient India. Samguk Yusa describes an area on Korea’s southern coast called Garakguk in ancient times, and its tribes were known as Gaya. Back in AD 48, Princess Heo Hwang-ok (Yellow Jade), who would later become Queen Suro, traveled from the kingdom of Ayodhya in North India to Garakguk. Her parents, the king and queen, said to her, “Last night we had a dream, and in our dream we saw a god who said, ‘I have sent down Suro to be King of Garak, as Suro is a holy man. He is not yet married, so send your daughter to become his Queen.’ Then he ascended to heaven” (Iryeon 2006, 142). With the firm belief that a god had orchestrated the whole fate, Princess Heo set out on a boat, carrying gold, silver, a tea plant, and a stone which calmed the rough waters. Recently, archeologists have discovered a stone with two fish kissing each other, a symbol of the Kingdom of Gaya that is unique to the royal family in Ayodhya. This royal link provides further evidence that there were active commercial engagements between India and Garakguk—and, for that matter, the Kingdom of Silla as well—since the princess’s arrival in ancient Korea. However, scholars have questioned whether Princess Heo actually came from India. It is more likely that she came from one of the Indianized states in Southeast Asia at that time, most probably Champa.

One Korean visitor to India was Hyecho, a Buddhist monk from the Kingdom of Silla. On the advice of his Indian teachers in China, he set out for India in AD 723 to acquaint himself with the language and culture of the land of the Buddha. He wrote a travelogue of his journey to India in classic Chinese, Wang Ocheonchukguk-jeon (An Account of Travel to the Five Indian Kingdoms) . The work was long thought to be lost, but a fragment of the manuscript turned up among the Dunhuang manuscripts at the Mogao Caves in the early twentieth century. After arriving by sea in India, Hyecho headed to the Indian Kingdom of Magadha (present-day Bihar), then moved on to visit Kushinagar and Varanasi. However, his journey did not end there, and he continued north, where he visited Lumbini (present-day Nepal), Kashmir, and Islamic countries. Hyecho left India, following the Silk Road toward the west, via Agni or Karasahr, to China, where the account ends in AD 729. In addition to Hyecho, numerous eminent Silla monks made pilgrimages to India to learn about Buddhism. Among them was Wonhyo, one of the most important Buddhist philosophers of his time and a highly influential scholar whose works have had an impact on a wide array of philosophers and writers who came after him, not only in Korea but also in other East Asian countries.

It stands to reason that the Phrygian tale of King Midas might have been disseminated to Silla as part of Buddhist writings. Buddhist writings consist of many anecdotes, fables, and tales other than its sacred texts. The Jataka, for instance, is a huge collection of fables framed as previous incarnations of the Buddha, many of which either have parallels or derivatives in Western folklore and literature. Although the Jataka is not considered part of the canonical Buddhist scripture, it is very popular among the populace as well as among its believers. Each tale typically has a concise moral, and the entire collection is a browser’s delight. In India there are at least four variants of the Midas tale available. In fact, the significance of Buddhism and in particular Buddhist chapbooks in Chinese cannot be overemphasized because they contain Indian tales that became the source of many folktales which Koreans have assumed are “typically” Korean.

It is most likely, however, that the Midas tale was transmitted to the most remote kingdom of Silla by Arab traders. It was Muslim traders who first brought the name “Silla” to the world outside the traditional East Asian sphere. Geographers of the Arab and Persian world, notably Ibn Khordadbeh, left records about Silla. In one of the earliest surviving Arabic books of administrative geography entitled The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (ca. AD 846–847), he described the various peoples and provinces of the Abbasid Caliphate. The book also includes, along with maps, descriptions of the land, people and culture of the southern Asian coast as far as Brahmaputra, the Andaman Islands, the Malays...