The Korean Tradition of Religion, Society, and Ethics

A Comparative and Historical Self-understanding and Looking Beyond

Chai-sik Chung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315442303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

By making Korea a central part of comparative history of East Asian religion and society, this book traces the evolution of Korean religion from the oldest representation to that of the current day by utilizing wide-ranging interdisciplinary and comparative resources.

This book presents a holistic view of the enduring religious tradition of Korea and its cultural and social significance within the wider horizons of modern and globalizing changes. Reflecting nearly five decades of the author's work on the subject, it presents an understanding of the main current in Korean religion and social thought throughout history. It then goes on to examine discourses on values and morality involving the relationship between religion and society, in particular the human meaning of economy and society, which is one of the most central and practical problems in the contemporary world with global relevance beyond Korea and Asia.

Addressing the overview of the Korean religious tradition in the context of its impact on the making of modern society and economy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Religious Studies, Korean Studies and Asian Studies.

1
Tracing the roots of Korean religious tradition

The mythical world of primordial tradition

The narratives about the primordial common memories and beliefs of the Korean people who inhabited the Korean Peninsula and a sizeable section of southern Manchuria are represented in the primordial legends of ancient kings such as Tongmyŏng 東明聖王 (Ko Chumong 高朱蒙, r. 37–19 BCE) of the kingdom of Koguryŏ 高句麗 (37 BCE–668 CE) as well as the legend of Pak Hyŏkkŏse 朴赫居世 (r. 57 BCE–4 CE) of the kingdom of Silla 新羅 (57 BCE–935 CE). These myths tell us how humans experienced their selfhood standing over against the threats of the brevity and the uncertainty of human life and how they came to feel a tremendous need for meaning, permanence, and strength in a transitory, lonely, and perilous world. Gripped by an overwhelming sense of anxiety, these ancestors searched for a frame of reference to understand the world and ways to cope with their finite existential realities. Through these myths we can have a glimpse of how in a variety of ways communal life emerged from the experience of life in the pack organized and led by the leadership of a ruler. The primordial memories range from mythic explanations of the births of rulers and the origins of clans and tribal kingdoms to accounts of such human matters as marriage, family, childbirth, and death. Their prime motifs – birth, observance of taboos, metamorphosis, success, and failure – provide the rationale for the particular worldviews and values of Korean society. Participation in the cosmic order through prescribed rituals as defined by these myths, in turn, provided avenues for people to act out their wishes, fears, and frustrations. These collective social memories based on common experiences and their periodic ritualistic reenactments served as the foundations of social cohesion of the earliest community.

When faced with the tremendous powers present in the world of nature that stood against them, these primordial ancestors understood the powers of nature in personalized way, assuming that every energizing force experienced in life was animated by a spirit. They understood that through cajolery, flattering, and pleasing the animating spirits they could influence the supernatural powers to respond to their need and help them to survive. Eventually they postulated a male deity who ruled the sky and related to the earth. And they came to believe that it is possible for this ruler of heaven or heavenly spirit (Hanŭllim 하늘님 or Hanŭnim 하느님) to come to the people while they simultaneously get nearer to Heaven, reaching toward it through bodily acting, as in prayer, offering, and dancing out their ardent wish (much’ŏn 舞天), to attain specific goals – rain, harvest, progeny, and health. Thus, it was vulnerable humans who constructed the supernatural powers that they experienced as “other”; it was not a divine being who revealed the self.¹

The experience of Heaven was neither a solitary event nor mere spectatorship, but rather one in which the whole body participated as well as an occasion for the entire community to gather periodically for communal partaking in the sacred objects for supplication and thanksgiving. For sheer survival in primitive times it was necessary for frightened and vulnerable people to live in family groups and later in larger and more complex tribal bands, hunting, foraging for food, and caring for each other. Breaking from the monotonous and tiring everyday routines of hunting, fishing, and gathering herbs the whole community drew together for days on end to participate in a religious ceremony. During the ritual everyone indulged night and day in eating, drinking, singing, chanting, and dancing together, carried away by hŭng 興 or sinpparam 신바람/신빠람 (a collective, ecstatic outpouring of intense emotion). They believed that drumming a welcome rhythm for dancing to Heaven would be a sacred way to enter the trance state to meet the spirits in another world, communicating with them and invoking them so as to attain desired goals in the real world. The religious rituals of singing, rhythmic beating of drum, and dancing (yŏnggo 迎鼓) also made up a spiritual medium par excellence to strengthen the moral fabric and social solidarity, enabling people to be one with their fellow members of the community in empathetic and ecstatic harmony and companionship.

The communal celebration in singing, eating, drinking, and dancing together, as described above, may be common to primordial communities throughout the world. But these primal expressions have perennially been the way Koreans release their essential psychic energy, distinguishing them as a very emotive, artistic, and lyrical people who exuberantly manifest their celebrated artistic sensibilities in the forms of music, films, and dance the world over. Behind the so-called latest Korean artistic currents (Hallyu 韓流) and pop culture crazes, such as Korean TV dramas, films, and dances, and their well-known penchant for singing, dancing, and drinking whenever they get together (as manifested in ubiquitous noraebang singing rooms, nightclubs, and drinking bars), I presume, are the persistent remnants of the primordial religious habits, temperament, or disposition of the ancient Koreans.

As Robert N. Bellah commented about Durkheim’s analysis of “the social implications of primitive religion,” the French sociologist’s fundamental insight that “the ritual life does reinforce the solidarity of the society,” uniting people into a single community, “still seems to be largely acceptable.”² At the climax of the rituals the members of the community also experienced themselves filled with amazing energy greatly beyond their ordinary capacity, thus finding themselves capable of toiling in the fields with reinvigorated strength and surviving in the most adverse circumstances with confidence. Again, this is reminiscent of Durkheim’s narrative and theorization of the sacred festive gathering, or a corroboree, among the Australian Aborigines during the earlier stage of human evolution.³

The various periodic communal festivals in which they partook ranged from Ch’ŏn’gun 天君 (literally, Heavenly Prince, or shaman-king, who leads an assembly for the cult of Heaven in Mahan 馬韓) to such cults of Heaven as Much’ŏn (literally, “dancing to heaven,” which was a harvest festival in the tenth lunar month in Ye 濊). Besides these, similar ritual activities included Sodo 蘇塗 (religious ceremonies to serve gods in a sanctuary where fugitives were free from arrest in the Samhan 三韓); Yŏnggo (or festivals to invoke heavenly spirits by beating the drum in Puyŏ 夫餘); and Tongmaeng-je 東盟祭 (assembly of people for the cult of Heaven in Koguryŏ, which was celebrated in the tenth month). According to Yi Nŭng-hwa 李能和 (1868–1945), a leading pioneer scholar of Korean religious history, these rituals of Neolithic people were all remnants of the Korean foundation myth of Tan’gun 檀君 to be described below.⁴

Early Koreans essentially knew only a single whole community inhabiting in an all-inclusive, living cosmic order forming a close triad with Heaven and earth. Theirs was a single-dimensional, ritual community that was characterized by the absence of distinction between human and celestial powers or between secular and spiritual communion.⁵ This was really the oldest form of the native religion of a nation of gatherers and farmers living off relatively fruitful land, passable rivers, and low mountains (as contrasted to a society of nomadic herders of cattle and hunters or a maritime society fit for fishing, trade, and expedition on the high seas). An outstanding feature of this stable religion of farmers and gatherers was a unitary and holistic worldview that affirmed a basic continuum between the natural, human, and godly worlds. Another noticeable feature of the religion was its intense attachment to specific stable localities and kinship. Thus the distinctions between good and evil, body and spirit, and physical and spiritual worlds were absent in the holistic world where life was continuous and fully integrated. Since, in the thoroughly this-worldly view, the phenomenal world itself was absolutely all that there was, there was no transcendent world that existed beyond the phenomenal world. If anything, even Heaven or celestial powers existed for humans, not the other way around.⁶

This particular form of early Korean religion has generally been called Musok 巫俗 (an emic, native term meaning “shamanic customs,” which otherwise came to be known as “shamanism” in the generic, etic classification of such a religion). One could object to or question the widely used term, Musok, out of self-conscious defense of the uniqueness of Korean tradition of “Mu 巫,” distinguishing it from the term, Musok, which allegedly smacks of adulteration because of its diffuseness with ordinary customs and social life. On the other hand, however, such an objection could be counter-argued that, after all, Mu has been widely diffused in the Korean way of life and that it has been devoid of common features of historic religions such as institutional apparatus, creeds, and so on.⁷

Some prominent pioneers in Korean historical studies variously identified the native cult with Sin’gyo 神敎 (Teaching of the gods, Yi Nŭng-hwa), Purugyo 부루교 (Teaching of the bright sunny land, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn 崔南善), Sudu 수두 or Sodo (the dwelling place of the god of light, Sin Ch’ae-ho 申采浩), and the ŏl 얼 (soul or spirit of the nation, Chŏng In-bo 鄭寅普).⁸ Although lacking a precise and exclusive name and historical authenticity, these terms bring to mind archetypical indigenous elements of the Korean popular religion on which the three teachings from China – Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism – were grafted, yielding thereafter a variety of hybrid types. But none of the imported religions would fundamentally alter or do away with the roots of Korean religious life. For this reason, it was especially Yi Nŭng-hwa and Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–1957) who promoted self-consciously the study of native Korean shamanism, mythology, and folklore as an essential means of understanding the uniqueness of Korean religious culture and society and their historical transformations, setting them apart from both the Chinese and Japanese cases. Since the mid-1920s, when they initiated such a movement to rediscover and appreciate the indigenous popular culture, the prevailing sentiment of the time was to denigrate shamanism and mythology as superstitious, backward, and undeserving of serious study.⁹

The myth of Tan’gun

The earliest form of religion was a form of theism that assumed that it is personal spirits that animate every living force experienced in life. These spirits, whether benevolent or malevolent, were assumed to have selfhood, possessing supernatural power. They were deemed to be personally concerned with people’s particular area of life and to be capable of responding to human needs. Particularly interesting of this earliest form of religion is the myth of Tan’gun, the legendary founder of Korea. This foundational myth defines the “Korean-ness” of Korea and represents the prototype of the cultural patterns and values embedded in the deep deposit of culture underlying Korean personality and society.

This primordial myth, presumably developed by gradual accretion throughout the generations, has been handed down by oral tradition, in the forms of folklore, legend, or popular religion, as distinguished from both authentic history and from sheer fiction. Later it was rediscovered, recollected, and recorded by the Buddhist monk Iryŏn (1206–1289 一然) in the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 (literally, The Remembrances of Things Remaining from the Three Kingdoms of Koguryŏ, Paekche 百濟 [18 BCE–660 CE], and Silla). Presumably the monk intended to enhance a sense of Korean ethnic identity and confirm racial origin under Mongol domination through the historical compendium. Replete with shamanistic and Buddhist overtones, the oldest surviving record of historical incidents, legends, and folklore provides us with a particularly rich source of information about the mythic origins of the Korean people, their way of life, worldviews, and normative values. The foundational myth is thus an imagined, mythical heritage remembered and handed down from generation to generation; and so the myth may have nothing to do with veritable historical truth, although it is at the same time an integral part of Korean cultural self-understanding. In 1948 the newly founded government of the Republic of Korea turned to the myth to revive Koreans’ ethnic national self-awareness, making Tan’gun’s birthday a national holiday.

In 2333 BCE, Hwanung 桓雄, the stepson of the god of Heaven Hwanin 桓因 (or Hanŭnim 하느님, the supreme deity in Korean belief system), settled in a sacred spot under a sacred tree atop Mount T’aebaek 太白; and he named it the “gods’ dwelling place.” This was a time when people believed that gods could descend from the heavens and dwell among people on earth. This chief of divine descent, who had a superhuman power, brought with him three heavenly seals (that ultimately stood for the authority of the heavenly son, presumably a sword, a jewel, and a mirror) and 3,000 followers. Probably the heavenly seals also symbolized the attributes of Heaven in terms of which the divine chieftain was to rule the earth – not through brute power but by dint of a reasoned heavenly principle that befits Heaven’s intents. Having a concern for the welfare of humans and convinced that the above-mentioned “gods’ dwelling place” is a place quite suited to “benefi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Tracing the roots of Korean religious tradition
• 2 The configuration of the religious tradition
• 3 The patterns of cultural interaction
• 4 Economy and society: notes on Max Weber, Korea, and Asia
• 5 The economic ethic of Asian religions
• Conclusion: the challenge of a religious and social ethical breakthrough in Korea
• References
• Index