Confucianism in Korea
CONFUCIANISM IN KOREA. While Confucianism did not achieve status as a dominant thought system in Korea until the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910), the introduction of the Confucian classics to the peninsula predates the common era. In the seventh century, the Silla government, at first a tribal federation, turned to Confucianism as a tool of centralization. In 651, the Royal Academy was established, in which officials, drawn from the aristocracy, were exposed to the Confucian classics. Furthermore, Confucian precepts found their way into aristocratic codes of behavior, even becoming incorporated into the rules of conduct for the hwarang, a knightly class instrumental in the Silla unification of the Korean Peninsula in 668.
Under the Unified Silla (668–935), Confucianism found a more fertile environment. Government examinations were instituted at the Royal Academy in 788 and close relations with Tang China led late in the dynasty to the rise of a group of scholars who were steeped in Confucian learning there, and who returned to Korea with a Confucian vision of government and a resolve to restore the deteriorating social order. An example is Ch'oe Ch'iwŏn (b. 857), who passed the Tang government examinations but returned hoping to end anarchic conditions in the provinces.
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