Case file · Cosmic event
The comet song of monk Yungcheon
The Samguk yusa says a comet threatened the star Sim while Japanese raiders neared Silla, until the monk Yungcheon sang a hyangga that made both vanish.
594 CE · 35.83, 129.22 · status: legend
The account
The 'Comet Song' (Hyeseongga) is one of the 14 surviving Silla hyangga poems. Iryeon's 13th-century Samguk yusa places it under King Jinpyeong, when three hwarang youths abandoned a trip to the Diamond Mountains because of the omen.
The sceptical view
The story frames a real kind of event, a comet read as an omen, inside later Buddhist storytelling; the exact year is not recoverable.