Korean Confucianism - 2. Korean Confucianism: A Short History

1. Early Korea

Korea has a long and rich tradition of Confucianism since its early historical period. Particularly during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), it strongly influenced Korean family, education, philosophy, religion, social and political systems, and daily ways of life. It is unclear precisely when Confucianism was introduced to Korea from China. Early Korea welcomed it together with the Chinese classics sometime around 108 BCE, when Han China established its colony at Lo-lang (Korean: Nangnang), a northwestern region of the Korean peninsula; Lo-lang was a district around modern P’yŏngyang in North Korea. The first use of the Confucian classics in the Korean peninsula took place in the Lo-lang period.

In the so-called Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE-668 CE),4 Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism were all officially accepted by the ruling class and later spread to the commoners. In fact, each of the three kingdoms supported Confucianism not only as an important part of Chinese learning but also as an institutional means of maintaining its aristocratic power and its socio-political order. In addition, Confucian ritualism was important in official court ceremonies, including the veneration of deceased kings and other leaders. The people of Silla, for example, learned Confucian values and put them into practice in their daily life. Its impact on Silla society indicates that even some leading Buddhist monks tried to incorporated certain Confucian moral teachings.5 The Silla people had the custom of a three-year mourning for the death of parents, one that originates from the Confucian rite system.6 Another good example of Confucian influence is Silla’s Hwarangdo (way of the flower youth), a quasi-religious and military academy for aristocratic sons that promoted the Confucian way of learning and self-cultivation.7 This academy was particularly important in welding Silla Korean society together, and the Confucian teaching of loyalty, its cohesive force, facilitated Silla not only to maintain the authority of the throne but also to unify two neighboring kingdoms.

In the Unified Silla period (668-935), Confucianism began to rival Buddhism. In the eighth and ninth centuries, many Korean students went to Tang China and studied Confucianism at its national academy. Still, Confucianism was studied mainly in Buddhist temples and monasteries, the academic and religious centers of Unified Silla Korea. Meanwhile, Confucian scholars promoted it as an alternative system of learning and political ideology for building a bureaucratic state in which they and their followers could prosper under state patronage. The establishment of the state examination system clearly reflects Unified Silla’s decision to do so as the basis of selecting government officials.

2. The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Koryŏ Period

On the whole, Confucianism was not important to everyone in the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla periods. It played a subordinate role to the traditional ideas maintained by noble families and hereditary aristocrats, as well as by the Buddhist tradition. Not until the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the late thirteenth century, did the Confucian tradition begin to exert more and stronger impact on Korean thought, religion, socio-political systems, and ways of life.

In the Koryŏ dynasty (918-1392), King Kwangjong (949-975), for example, imitated Tang China in order to appoint many Confucian scholars as officials. The civil service examination system consisted of three major groups of examinations: composition, classics, and miscellaneous. During the Unified Silla period the criteria for selecting government officials tended to privilege the members of hereditary aristocratic families. However, the Koryŏ people of local elite groups had their opportunities to advance into the central bureaucracy. It was therefore possible for more young men to become government officials in Koryŏ Korea.

Meanwhile, Confucian scholars became interested in capturing the political power of the central government by urging that Confucianism be fully established as the state ideology. King Sŏngjong organized the national Confucian academy (Kukchagam) which quickly led to establishing Koryŏ’s educational system on the basis of Confucian learning. He also sent Confucian scholars to the countryside in order to establish regional schools known as Hyanggyo and to teach students in local areas.8 Such an educational system, despite its high cost, expanded to produce a new elite class of scholar-officials. Many of the Koryŏ scholars also travelled to Song China and studied the new form of Confucianism known as the ChengZhu school.9 This brought Song Neo-Confucianism to Korea from the late thirteenth century.

From the late Koryŏ period onward, the ChengZhu school in Korea began to receive strong support from the new class of scholar-officials. In the late fourteenth century, Neo-Confucian scholar-officials, especially Chŏng Mongju (1337-1392) and others, began to institute the state education system at the Sŏnggyun’gwan while attacking the Buddhist institutions. They strongly supported the Sŏnggyun’gwan as the national center for Confucian education.10 In the Chosŏn dynasty, it produced many eminent Neo-Confucians, including Yi T’oegye (1501-1570) and Yi Yulgok (1536-1584), and continued to serve as the most important center for education, scholarship, and political influence in Korea up until 1910.

3. Neo-Confucianism in the Early Chosŭn Dynasty

Instead of his duty to fight the Ming Chinese forces in 1388, General Yi Sŏnggye withdrew his army from the Yalu River and marched toward the Koryŏ capital to seize political power. This led to the beginning of the Yi Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910). Liberal scholar-officials, such as Chŏng Tojŏn (1342-1398)11 and Kwŏn Kŭn (1352-1409), supported Yi’s claims of the legitimacy of the new dynasty.

In a period of dynastic and ideological transition, Neo-Confucianism enabled General Yi to begin the Chosŏn dynasty as King T’aejo (r. 1392-1398), thereby enabling Korean Neo-Confucians to establish Song Neo-Confucianism as the new state religion and ideology in Korea. The new ChengZhu school from China offered them enough hope of creating a new political order out of the corrupt old society but also an ethical and religious system of thought that provided a refreshing set of goals and methods in order to legitimize the new dynasty. Among Yi’s leading supporters was Chŏng Tojŏn who assisted his ascent to power. For the new elite class, this meant a renewed commitment to the Confucian tradition which was considered to be the new intellectual and spiritual guide for scholar-officials to sustain a bureaucratic state.

4. Neo-Confucian Education and State Examination System

With the establishment and spread of Neo-Confucianism, the state examination system– which was put into effect in Koryŏ as a way of recruiting government officials–took on a more central role in the Chosŏn dynasty. The Neo-Confucian literati devised a system of administrative law infused with the moral and political ideals of Confucianism. They constituted the yangban gentry class representing the two privileged orders of civil and military officials.12 Social classes of literati and commoners were separated according to birth and lineage. The elite class enjoyed their educational, social and political privileges as means of becoming government officials through the civil-service examination system or by the merit of their ancestors to the state. By the eighteenth century, almost all levels of the whole society became transformed into what Kim Haboush calls a Confucian normative society.13 Many elite families and Confucian bureaucrats began to compete in power struggle. Indeed, Neo-Confucianism may have played a powerful role in generating an elite gentry society and a highly bureaucratic tradition; this has been the most popular area in current scholarship on traditional Korean history, society, and politics, one that need not be rehearsed here.14

From the early fifteenth century, Confucian education thus became a primary gateway to personal and family success. The literary licentiate examination system15 was based on skills in composing Chinese literary works such as poetry, documentary prose, and problem essays. The texts used in the examinations included the Five Classics, Four Books, Neo-Confucian commentaries, histories, etc. Hence, the government concentrated its efforts on developing its public academies, which was significant for scholar-officials in establishing a thoroughly Confucian society on the basis of the state examination and education systems. In Chapters 5 and 6 we shall explore the influence of this tradition on today’s Korea.

These academies also served as the important local centers for Confucian scholarship through which many retired scholars were able to make a significant progress in the development of Neo-Confucianism from the middle of the sixteenth century on. During this period, the most glorious period in the history of Korean Confucianism, many eminent thinkers emerged, including Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok. The following section briefly goes over this historical period.

5. The Golden Age of Sŏngnihak in Sixteenth-Century Korea

So Kyŏngdŏk (pen name, Hwadam; 1489-1546), Yi Hwang (pen name, T’oegye), and Yi I (pen name, Yulgok) are known as the “Three Masters” of Korean Neo-Confucianism, who determined the unique patterns of its “philosophy of human nature and principle” (sŏngnihak).16 Hwadam dedicated himself to the study of Song Chinese Neo-Confucianism and became the first Korean scholar to have formulated a philosophy of material force (kihak). Yi Hwang is commonly known by his literary (pen) name, T’oegye. He developed a highly sophisticated system of metaphysics, ethics and spirituality in many significant works he compiled during his fifties and sixties.17 Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok are often mentioned together as the two greatest minds of Chosŏn Korea. Yulgok was a great scholar as well as a distinguished politician and reformer.18 He advocated Confucian principles to improve the contemporary political, economic, social, and military institutions of the Chosŏn dynasty.

Followers of the Yŏngnam school became associated with T’oegye’s “school of the primacy of principle” (churip’a), whereas Yulgok’s disciples and their followers established “the school of the primacy of ki” (chugip’a). Beginning in the late sixteenth century, these two schools of thought emerged within the Korean Sŏngnihak, and they eventually began to criticize each other. Each school underwent further development for three more centuries in the hands of successive thinkers. Chapter 3 discusses Hwadam, T’oegye, Yulgok, and others in detail.

6. Practical Learning and Reform Confucianism in the 18th and 19th Centuries

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Practical Learning (sirhak) was a leading Confucian school in Korea. It is complex in origin but an important and influential school of thought. Sirhak scholars extended their inquiries to various practical areas such as government administration, economics, history, mathematics, geography, agriculture, literature, and Western religion and science.19 In general, however, they shared a common, reformist nature: the Confucian vision of how an orderly and prosperous society based on an ideal government could be achieved and maintained successfully.

The Korean scholar Yi Ŭlho suggested that it is not wrong to call the Sirhak school a kind of “reform Confucianism,” for it reaffirmed the fundamental Confucian teaching of self-cultivation and good government. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most Sirhak thinkers criticized the orthodox Sŏngnihak as an “abstract,” “impractical,” “non-reformist” learning. Yi Ik (pen name, Sŏngho; 1681-1763) and his later follower, Chŏng Yagyong (pen name, Tasan; 1762-1836), argued that the Korean Sŏngnihak failed to comprehend the fundamental Confucian ideas and values concerned with socio-political and economic matters. Defining the term sirhak in the context of promoting the daily lives of people, they made a clear-cut distinction between traditional Neo-Confucianism and themselves.

Undoubtedly, the Sirhak school was influenced by various existing ideas, approaches and concerns. In a historically dynamic and pluralistic setting, it tried to synthesize them, and its reformist, egalitarian and utilitarian spirit was different from the orthodox Sŏngnihak school. But it did not have a purely original foundation outside the Confucian tradition because its philosophical and ethical unfolding was essentially related to the study of Confucian classics, Neo-Confucian thought, and practical aspects. The Sirhak school began as “learning for governing the country,” insofar as its essence pertains to the Confucian tradition of learning, self-cultivation, and government administration. Chapter 3 discusses its greatest scholar, Chŏng Tasan, in detail.

7. Early Twentieth-Century Reformers

In addressing social and political problems in the early twentieth century, Korean reformers charged that the collapse of the nation was due to the dominance of the orthodox Sŏngnihak school which was suited for “empty” theoretical study only. For them, it was therefore necessary to renovate Confucianism by promoting the Wang Yangming school, a rival Neo-Confucian tradition that developed in Ming China, by criticizing the ChengZhu school. Wang’s emphasis on actual moral practice was said to be far more important than Zhu Xi’s teaching of rational knowledge. When the Yi Chosŏn dynasty was about to collapse and become a colony of Japan, some leading reformers also preached the doctrine “the innate ability to do good,” the slogan of “practical action,” and reformist progress in the spirit of Wang Yangming’s teaching.20

The spirit of Wang’s philosophy had a profound impact on a new group of Korean modernists such as like Pak Ŭnsik (1859-1926) who advocated national independence when the penetration of Japanese and Western influence began to threaten Korea’s sovereignty. Pak was also a famous historian who emphasized a sense of patriotic pride and respect. In his major historical works,21 he attacked Japanese policies of aggression and also provided a kind of spiritual support for the independence movement. For him, the collapse of the nation was due to the Sŏngnihak school’s failure to reform itself. In his essay on “saving and renovating Confucianism,” Pak argued that to make people happy again, Korea should promote only the Wang Yangming school as “people’s Confucianism” in order to preserve happiness and peace in the world. He maintained that any knowledge one may acquire through the Sŏngnihak school is “without practical usefulness” in daily life. As I discussed elsewhere (Chung 1992a), although the Wang Yangming school did not enjoy full development in the Chosŏn dynasty, it played an important role in Korea’s modern intellectual history by exerting a strong influence on the development of the new Sirhak school and the rise of modern Korean reformers in the early twentieth century.

To conclude this chapter, we need to note that for many centuries in Korea, Confucianism has been an intellectual discourse, a code of family values, and a system of social ethics, as well as a political ideology. It has also developed and preserved its spiritual teaching and ritual tradition. And yet, it differs from other religious or philosophical traditions because it continues to integrate these aspects of Confucian culture in today’s Korea, including learning, moral education, family values and ancestral rites, social hierarchy and harmony, political leadership, and cultural identity. In Chapters 5-9, we discuss these aspects of Korean Confucianism and their modern changes.