Korea

High on the slope of Mount Toham above the old Silla capital of Gyeongju, behind a wooden gate and a pane of protective glass, a granite Buddha sits in a round chamber built of carved stone blocks. He faces east, towards the sea, where the sun rises. Around him, carved in relief on the walls, stand bodhisattvas, disciples, guardian kings and a many-headed Avalokiteśvara. The grotto of Seokguram was begun in 751 by a minister of the kingdom of Unified Silla, and finished by the royal court in 774. It is one of the masterpieces of Buddhist art in East Asia. A few kilometres away, in villages and apartment blocks of modern Korea, women called mudang still perform the ecstatic rituals of a religion far older than the Buddha's arrival, dancing, singing, and speaking in the voices of the dead. Korean religion is layered like that: shamanism at the base, Buddhism and Confucianism laid over it, then Christianity and a string of new religions, and all of them still alive.

Foundations: the bear, the tiger and the son of heaven

The oldest Korean religious monuments are the dolmens: stone tables of the Bronze Age (roughly 1000–300 BCE), built by the tens of thousands across the peninsula, among the densest concentrations in the world. The sites of Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa, with more than a thousand dolmens between them, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They were tombs and perhaps markers of lineage and land; what rites were held at them is unknown.

Korea's national founding myth is written down much later, in the Samguk yusa ("Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms"), compiled around 1281 by the Buddhist monk Iryeon. It tells how Hwanung, son of the heavenly lord Hwanin, descended to a sacred tree on a mountain with three thousand followers and the ministers of wind, rain and clouds. A bear and a tiger begged to become human; he gave them mugwort and garlic and told them to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days. The tiger gave up; the bear became a woman, and her son by Hwanung was Dangun, who founded the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon. Tradition dates the founding to 2333 BCE, and South Korea celebrates it as National Foundation Day on 3 October. The myth is a religious charter of descent from heaven; its date and the figure of Dangun are not historical in any documentary sense.

Musok: the religion of the mudang

Korea's indigenous religion, usually called musok or muism, centres on the mu or mudang, ritual specialists who are almost all women. Two main types are distinguished:

• Spirit-descended shamans (sinbyeong, kangshinmu), usually from the central and northern regions, who became shamans after a "spirit illness", a crisis of physical and mental suffering that is cured only by accepting initiation. They are possessed by gods and speak in their voices.
• Hereditary shamans (sesseummu), more common in the south, who inherit the role in their families and perform rites without possession.

The central ritual is the gut: an elaborate, sometimes all-night performance with drums, cymbals, costumes, food offerings and dance, in which the mudang invites gods, ancestors and spirits, lets them speak, entertains them and sends them away satisfied. There are gut to heal the sick, to bless a household or a business, to protect a fishing village, and above all to guide the dead: the ssitgimgut of the southwest "cleanses" a soul, and the jinogwigut leads it to the other world, where in the chanted epic the abandoned princess Bari became the first shaman by bringing back the water of life for her parents. The gods of musok are many: the mountain gods (sansin), shown as an old man with a tiger; house gods; generals and kings of Korean history; the smallpox spirit; and the restless dead. Villages set up carved wooden guardian posts (jangseung) and bird-topped poles (sotdae) at their entrances, and kept shrines to the local tutelary god (seonangdang).

Musok has often been despised. Confucian officials of the Joseon dynasty treated it as vulgar superstition; the Japanese colonial government (1910–1945) harassed and regulated shamans as backward and unhygienic; and in the 1970s the South Korean government's New Village Movement (Saemaul) campaigned against "superstition", and many village shrines, posts and poles were destroyed. Yet mudang continued to be consulted in crises, often by the same people who looked down on them, and since the 1970s several gut have been protected as national intangible heritage. The Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut, a rite for the wind goddess and the sea, was inscribed on UNESCO's list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Buddhism comes to the Three Kingdoms

Buddhism reached Korea from China in the fourth century, during the Three Kingdoms period. The official date for Goguryeo in the north is 372, when a monk named Sundo arrived from the Former Qin court with scriptures and images; Baekje in the southwest received it in 384. The southeastern kingdom of Silla resisted. The Samguk yusa tells how the courtier Ichadon, a Buddhist, arranged his own execution in 527 to overcome the aristocracy's opposition: when he was beheaded, the tradition says, his blood flowed white as milk, the sky darkened and flowers rained down, and the king was able to adopt Buddhism.

After Silla unified most of the peninsula in the 660s, Buddhism became its state religion and a great scholarly tradition. Wŏnhyo (617–686), who, a famous story says, gave up a journey to China after drinking water in the night from what turned out to be a skull and realizing that "all is mind", wrote commentaries on scores of sutras and sought to reconcile the schools. Ŭisang (625–702) brought the Hwaeom (Chinese Huayan) teaching of the interpenetration of all things, and summarized it in a poem of 210 characters laid out as a winding seal. Temples such as Bulguksa ("Temple of the Buddha Land"), built in its present form from 751, were designed as images of the Buddha's pure land on earth.

Under the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) Buddhism was at its height of wealth and influence. When the Mongols invaded, the court had the whole Buddhist canon carved on woodblocks as an act of merit to repel them. The Tripitaka Koreana, 81,258 double-sided blocks carved between 1237 and 1248 after an earlier set was burned, is kept at Haeinsa temple in storage halls so well ventilated that the blocks have survived nearly eight centuries; both are inscribed by UNESCO. The monk Jinul (1158–1210) shaped the Seon (Zen) tradition that dominates Korean Buddhism today, teaching "sudden awakening, gradual cultivation"; the largest order, the Jogye, traces itself to him.

Confucian Korea

The Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) made Neo-Confucianism, in the form taught by the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi, the ideology of the state. Buddhism was pushed out of the cities and its monasteries reduced; monks were barred from the capital for long periods. What replaced it at the centre of religious life was ritual toward ancestors. The jesa rites, with food offerings before ancestral tablets on death anniversaries and holidays, were performed in every yangban household and spread through all classes, and the great royal ancestral shrine in Seoul, Jongmyo, still holds its annual rite with court music. Korean scholars such as Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Yi I (Yulgok) debated the relation of principle (li) and material force (gi) in human nature with great subtlety. In 1443 King Sejong had a new alphabet devised, Hangul, promulgated in 1446 as Hunminjeongeum, "the correct sounds for instructing the people"; its designers explained its vowels in cosmological terms.

Christianity and the new religions

Catholicism came to Korea not by missionaries but through books. Korean scholars read Chinese Catholic works in the eighteenth century, and in 1784 Yi Seung-hun, baptized in Beijing, returned to found a community run entirely by lay people. The state saw it as subversive, above all when converts refused ancestral rites: in 1791 a Catholic who had burned his mother's ancestral tablets was executed. Persecutions in 1801, 1839, 1846 and 1866 killed thousands. In 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized 103 Korean martyrs in Seoul. Protestant missionaries arrived from the 1880s and grew into one of the most dynamic churches in the world.

Korea also produced its own religions. In 1860 a scholar named Choe Je-u, after an experience of the Lord of Heaven, founded Donghak, "Eastern Learning", to answer the "Western Learning" of Catholicism. It taught that the Lord of Heaven dwells in every person; Choe was executed in 1864, and in 1894 his followers led a great peasant uprising. Its successor is Cheondogyo, "the Way of Heaven". Other new religions include Won Buddhism (1916), Jeungsan movements, and the Unification Church founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1954 (see ch35).

Religion in Korea today

South Korea is one of the least and most religious societies in the world at once. In the 2015 census, 56% of the population said they had no religion; 20% were Protestant, 16% Buddhist and 8% Catholic. Megachurches in Seoul hold hundreds of thousands of members, and many temples are active; yet most people follow no organized religion, while many still hold ancestral rites and consult fortune-tellers and shamans at moments of crisis. North Korea officially guarantees freedom of religion but in practice severely restricts it; its state ideology gives the ruling Kim family a quasi-religious status.

The believer's lens

For a mudang and her clients, the world is full of spirits: gods of the mountains and the house, ancestors, and the dead who have died unjustly or too young and cannot rest. Misfortune often has a spiritual cause, and the gut restores the relationships between the living and the dead. For a Korean Buddhist, the goal is awakening to one's own Buddha-nature, and the Seon tradition teaches that it is already present, to be realized through meditation and practice. For a Confucian, a good life is lived in right relationships, above all with parents and ancestors, whose remembrance through ritual is a moral duty. Korean Christians see their church's history as a story of faith sustained by martyrs and of the gospel spreading through the Korean people themselves. Many Koreans draw on more than one of these at once, and see no contradiction in it.

The skeptical lens

The historian notes, first, that the founding myth was written down more than three and a half thousand years after its supposed date, by a Buddhist monk in the thirteenth century, and that Dangun as a historical person and 2333 BCE as a date are not supported by evidence. The story has been used as a national symbol, especially under colonial rule and in the modern nationalism of both Koreas, and North Korea announced in 1993 that it had found Dangun's tomb and bones; that claim is not accepted by independent scholars.

Second, the idea that musok is a pure survival of an ancient Korean religion is too simple. Musok as we know it has absorbed Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian elements, and it has been shaped by centuries of stigma and by modern folklorists and heritage policy. The miracles told of Ichadon's martyrdom are hagiography.

Third, the psychologies of spirit illness and possession are real experiences, studied by anthropologists and psychiatrists. Whether they involve spirits is a religious question the evidence cannot settle; many studies describe spirit illness as a culturally shaped response to stress, especially among women in a patriarchal society.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The Taegeuk. The red and blue circle of the South Korean flag, the taegeuk ("supreme ultimate"), is the yin–yang of Neo-Confucian cosmology, surrounded by four of the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes: heaven, earth, water and fire. A national flag made from a diagram of the cosmos.
• Hangul's cosmology. The Hunminjeongeum Haerye (1446), the commentary to the new alphabet, explains its three basic vowel strokes as images of heaven (a dot), earth (a horizontal line) and humanity (a vertical line), and relates the consonants to the organs of speech and the five phases. It is documented, not a later legend: an alphabet designed with a theory of the universe.
• Ŭisang's seal. The Diagram of the Dharma Realm, a poem of 210 Chinese characters arranged in a single path that winds through a square and returns to its beginning, encodes the Hwaeom teaching that one contains all and all contains one.
• The mountain god and the tiger. In almost every Korean Buddhist temple a small shrine (sansingak) holds a painting of the mountain god, an old man seated with a tiger. It is a visible sign of the absorption of the old religion into Buddhism.
• The colours of the gut. Mudang change costume for each god: the red robes of generals, the white of the Buddhist-derived spirits, the colours of the five directions (obangsaek), with fans, bells and knives as attributes. Multi-coloured streamers and paper flowers make the ritual space.
• Guardian posts and bird poles. Jangseung, carved posts with fierce faces, often inscribed "Great General Under Heaven" and "Female General Under Earth", and sotdae, poles topped with wooden birds, marked village boundaries and linked earth and sky.
• The ancestral tablet. The wooden tablet bearing the name of the dead, before which jesa offerings are laid in a prescribed order, is the Confucian sign of the continuing presence of the ancestors.
• Seokguram's geometry. Scholars have proposed that the grotto was laid out on simple proportional units, and its Buddha is often said to face the sunrise at the winter solstice; both the alignment and the design principles are debated.

Connections

Korean Buddhism stands between the Mahayana of China (ch20) and Zen & Pure Land in Japan (ch54), to which Korean monks brought much of it; Baekje monks carried Buddhism to Japan, shaping early Shinto as well (ch25). Korean Neo-Confucianism develops the tradition of Confucianism & Daoism in ch12. Musok belongs with other shamanic traditions of northern Asia treated in Tibetan & Vajrayana Buddhism (ch53), and its possession rites with those of the African Diaspora Religions (ch40) and Pentecostalism (ch64), which has had great success in Korea. Korea's Catholic martyrs and Protestant boom are part of Pentecostalism & Global Christianity (ch64), and its new religions sit with the New Religious Movements (ch35) and Bahá'í & New Faiths (ch65). The founding myth of a son of heaven is a case for Sacred Kingship (ch49), and the princess Bari's descent for the dead a case for Journeys to the Underworld (ch47).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch71.html · a comparative library of the sacred.