Buddhism—Korea

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Korean Buddhism Summary

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Buddhism—Korea

Buddhism has a sixteen-hundred-year history in Korea. Contemporary Korean Buddhism is distinguished from Chinese Buddhism by the importance it assigns to meditation, and from Japanese Buddhism by its relative lack of strong sectarian divisions.

History

Buddhism first arrived on the peninsula three centuries before the peninsula was brought under the control of one Korean government in 668 CE. Buddhism reached Korea from China and Central Asia and, according to traditional histories, was adopted by the rulers of the northern kingdom of Koguryo in 372 CE, the southwestern kingdom of Paekche in 384 CE, and southeastern kingdom of Shilla in 527 CE.

In the beginning, Buddhism in Korea was a religion for the elite, accepted by government officials as a tool for centralizing authority and as a way to overcome the decentralizing influence of the folk religion of Korea, with its multitude of local deities. By the seventh century, however, various buddhas and bodhisattvas had joined the pantheon of spirits worshiped by peasants, and commoners added temples to the sacred sites they frequented to pray for supernatural intervention in their lives.

Despite the popular appropriation of Buddhist deities and rituals, institutional Buddhism continued to be utilized by governments on the peninsula to reinforce their authority over the general population. When the Shilla kingdom defeated Koguryo and Paekche near the end of the seventh century, it dispatched monks to temples in the countryside to serve as ecclesiastical reminders of Shilla hegemony. The Koryo dynasty, which replaced Shilla early in 936, further institutionalized the role of the Buddhist clergy as an extension of state power by instituting state examinations for monks to parallel the civil service examinations for government officials. Even the Neo-Confucian Choson dynasty (1392–1910), which replaced the Koryo dynasty and demoted Buddhism from its privileged status as the official state religion, assigned warrior monks to state-built temples in strategic locations near the capital and around the country.

In the twentieth century, soon after the Japanese empire absorbed the Choson dynasty in 1910, the Japanese restructured Korean Buddhism, which never formally recognized married Buddhist clergy prior to the twentieth century, by challenging the traditional Korean insistence on clerical celibacy and reserving positions of ecclesiastical authority for married monks. When the Japanese were forced out of Korea in 1945, the anti-Japanese Syngman Rhee government that arose in South Korea reversed the Japanese policy and began expelling married monks from major temples and replacing them with the few monks who had remained celibate and thus faithful to Korean tradition. In North Korea, however, the Japanese tradition of married monks remained the norm for those few hundred monks who manage the approximately fifty temples that were allowed to remain open to support the claim by the North Korean government that it respects religious freedom.

An Eclectic Nonsectarianism

The dominant Buddhist influence in both North and South Korea is the Mahayana. The same sacred texts and the same sacred personalities that are found in the rest of East Asia are also found in Korea. The Lotus Sutra (the best known Mahayana scripture in East Asia and the main text of the Chinese Tiantai school) has been an important doctrinal guide for Koreans since at least the sixth century, and the Flower Garland Sutra (the main text of the Chinese Huayan school) since the seventh. There is evidence of Pure Land Buddhism and the worship of Amitabha Buddha as well as worship of Maitreya (the future buddha), as early as the first decades of the seventh century. The bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Guanyin) has also been an important object of devotion in Korea for over a thousand years. Esoteric Buddhism has been on the peninsula so long that the world's oldest printed dharani (secret incantations), from the middle of the eighth century, was found in Korea. Meditative Buddhism established its first temples in Korea less than a century later, in the early ninth century.

Buddha Statue at Popchusa Temple in Taejon, South Korea. (CHRIS LISLE/CORBIS)

Korean Buddhism, however, is not an exact copy of Buddhism in China or Japan. Koreans proudly claim that Korean Buddhism is less sectarian than Buddhism in Japan and less dominated by Pure Land rituals than Buddhism in China. Monastic Buddhism in Korea is primarily meditative Buddhism erected on a foundation built from years of doctrinal study and reinforced by Pure Land practices. Korean Buddhists see nothing incongruous in demanding that meditative monks receive rigorous academic training in Buddhist philosophy or in erecting a hall for the recitation of Amitabha Buddha's name within the grounds of a monastery dedicated to the study of doctrine. Koreans trace this eclecticism to the influence of two influential monks, Wonhyo (617–686 CE) of the Shilla dynasty and Chinul (1158–1210), of the Koryo dynasty.

Wonhyo is famous both as a philosopher and as a preacher. He wrote over two hundred works analyzing and harmonizing the arguments of the various competing schools of Buddhist philosophy in China. When he was not writing scholarly treatises, he wandered through the villages of Korea, preaching to illiterate peasants the Pure Land tradition of reciting the name of the Amitabha Buddha. Five centuries later, Chinul bridged the gap between sutra-oriented and meditation-oriented traditions that had divided Koryo Buddhism. Chinul believed that a lengthy and intensive study of the Buddhist sutras was an essential preparation for successful meditative practice. He insisted that monks and nuns had to be well versed in the verbal teachings of Buddhist tradition before they could move beyond them into the nonverbal realm of meditation. Chinul's two-step approach to the pursuit of enlightenment, along with Wonhyo's acceptance of Pure Land chanting, has become the dominant model for Buddhist practice on the peninsula. As the twentieth century drew to a close, nearly 9 million South Koreans, almost one out of five of those living in the Republic of Korea, called themselves Buddhist.

The Twenty-First Century

The Chogye order, the largest denomination in Korea in the twenty-first century, shares with the T'aego order, the second largest, the mutual acceptance of doctrinal, meditative, and Pure Land traditions. The only major difference between the two denominations, which together claim the allegiance of the vast majority of Korean Buddhists is that the T'aego order allows its clerics to marry while the Chogye order insists on celibacy. The Chogye and the T'aego orders, though they are the products of a relatively recent split between the 6,500 clerics who were married in 1945 and the 500 who remained celibate despite Japanese pressure, nevertheless represent continuity with the centuries of nonsectarian Buddhism oriented toward monastic life. Won Buddhism, a third order that was founded in 1916, shares the traditional eclecticism but within a modern, lay-oriented approach. Founded by Pak Chung-bin (1891–1943), Won Buddhism is often identified as a new religion because it replaces Buddhist statues with a simple painted circle, and replaces the traditional sutras with sermons by its founder that reformulate Buddhist doctrines in modern language.

Though at the beginning of the twenty-first century only 9 million Koreans, around one out of five of those living in the South Korea, called themselves Buddhist, most Koreans recognize that Buddhism is an integral part of Korean culture. Over 70 percent of the designated national cultural treasures in South Korea are Buddhist in origin. When Koreans want a break from the hustle and bustle of urban life, they visit Buddhist temples in the mountains. Buddhist images and sounds are often used to provide a traditional backdrop for contemporary movies and television programs. Sixteen hundred years after it was imported

from central Asia and China, Buddhism has become Korean.