Yuletide
  • Yuletide blog
  • About Me
  • Links
  • List of All Posts

Post-323: The Reinvigoration of Korean Buddhism in the late 1800s (Sem Vermeersch)

12/10/2015

0 Comments

 
"Christianity is foreign to Korea; Buddhism is native; it's a shame that Christians have so much power in today's Korea while Buddhism, Koreans' ancestral faith, is so relatively weak..."

I imagine that many foreign observers of today's Korea have had thoughts like this. Yet these same people, if they have been to Korea, will notice a distinct lack of temples in the cities. They big temples, and the old ones, are all hidden away in the mountains. Why is this? (Jared Way, whom I consider to be a kind of amateur expert on Buddhism in his own right, pointed this out to me.)

A recognized expert on Korean Buddhism, Sem Vermeersch, was interviewed and had some surprising remarks relevant to this issue, which suggest that the impression people have (noted above in italics) may be rather misguided. Buddhism was marginal in Korea for centuries, with monks even banned from entering any city. (Explaining why the great temples of Korea are never in cities.)

It seems that Korean Buddhism was marginal in the 1800s and then totally reinvigorated by Japanese contact. Just as Korean Christianity owes it all to the White missionary families who started showing up in the 1880s, Korean Buddhism owes, in perhaps comparable measure, to the Meiji Japanese. Both Korean Christianity and Korean Buddhism are products of the period of cultural shock by which a semi-medieval Chosun Dynasty stumbled its way into the modern world (yanked and shoved along the way).

Here is the relevant part of interview, transcribed by me:
Picture
Picture
Professor Sem Vermeersch
.
Read More
Interviewer: It seems many Korean Buddhists actually welcomed, in a sense, Japanese involvement [in Korean affairs in the late 1800s] because Japanese authorities forced Korean authorities to open up the cities, again, to the Buddhists.

Professor Sem Vermeersch (Seoul National University): Yes, that's right. [...] [From the 1600s-1800s in Korea,] Buddhism was tolerated. No one would confiscate their property. This didn't happen anymore [after the suppressions of the 1400s-1500s]. Buddhism was left to its own devices but they were allowed to exist. Temples were taxed. They had to pay heavy taxes but they could at least maintain themselves. In the late 19th century, very slowly foreigners began to seep into the country. Of course, the Japanese were the most prominent of these. We all know the story of how Catholicism came to Korea, how Western missionaries started coming in the 1890s, but actually as soon as the treaty between Korea and Japan was inked in 1876, the year after already the Japanese opened a Buddhist temple in Busan. I think it was 1877. So very quickly, the Japanese were here to spread their own forms of Buddhism. Initially, they cooperated very well with the Korean Buddhist monks. There's a very famous example of a Japanese Buddhist monk who "lobbied" the Korean government to overturn the ban on Buddhist monks entering the cities. That was, I think, in 1895. King Kojong allowed monks to open temples in Seoul and to go into the cities as monks. Before that, if they wanted to enter the city they had to dress up, disguise themselves, as something different. So in 1895, Buddhist monks were allowed to enter the cities, and that allowed them to spread "Dharma" again among the people. So initially they looked up, very much, to these Japanese monks.

Interviewer: They ended a four hundred year ban, so --

Professor Sem Vermseersch: Exactly.

Interviewer: That's quite something.

Professor Sem Vermseersch: So they were very grateful, actually. Not only that, but they also saw that Japanese Buddhist monks, apparently, had a lot of influence, lots of financial means, that they apparently had a very strong position in their own country, so Korean Buddhist monks basically wanted to follow the Japanese model, and learn about other cultures through these Japanese Buddhist monks. There is the famous case of the leader of Korean Buddhism at the beginning of the colonial period, 1909 or 1910. He made a secret pact with the Japanese that Japanese and Korean Buddhism would merge. [...] Up to that point, there was a lot of goodwill amongst Korean Buddhists towards the Japanese, but when it became known that he had made this secret pact...There was a huge uproar.

[From Korea and the World podcast, recorded December 2014] [22:25-26:10]
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    About

    Welcome. This is a place I write things that may or may not be of interest. Thanks.

    See here for more.


    Search this site:

    List of All Posts
    List of all posts
    Subscribe via email:

    Subscribe to the Feed:

    Enter email address to subscribe to daily updates:



    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013


    Contact by Email
    Yuletide5142 at y@hoo.com


    Picture
    Me

    I thank you for
    stopping by
    this quiet corner
    of the Internet.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.