Buddhas and Ancestors by Juhn Y. Ahn

Author:Juhn Y. Ahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

CONCLUSION

The assumptions about wealth and religion that guided the early Koryŏ elite were no longer current by the end of the dynasty. Wealth was just wealth, and religion was something else. The architects of the new Chosŏn state wanted to keep it that way. Based on the futile dream of establishing stronger state control over alienable and taxable resources like land and labor, reformists within the late Koryŏ officialdom who would go on to hold high posts in the new Chosŏn government drafted legislation that would allow the state to keep wealth and religion (or, more specifically, Buddhism) apart. In 1390, new legislation was enacted to require the office-holding class to rebuild its identity around the practice of Confucian-style ancestor worship at the ancestral hall or family shrine. More legislation supporting this effort passed in the early fifteenth century. The state had two expectations after this legislation was enacted. First, it expected to be able to claim authority and control over moral values. Second, it also expected to be able to keep inheritance, that is, alienable and taxable resources, away from an unregulated spiritual marketplace (i.e., Buddhism). As part of this effort to build a wall between religion and wealth, the Chosŏn kings issued royal orders to try to regulate the number of monasteries in well-populated areas. The less contact the better.

These measures did not amount to a suppression of Buddhism as some claim, but it did allow the state to push Buddhism into the margins of public authority in Korea. Buddhism and especially the monasteries that had once been officially recognized as “places of aid and remedy” (pibo chi so) could, in other words, no longer make the state’s presence known to the public through their power to convert wealth into salvation, protection, and aid. This prerogative was to belong only to the state and its central bureaucracy. These efforts began to accelerate and become visibly more intense during the reign of Wang Yo, or King Kongyang, the last monarch to sit on the Koryŏ throne.1 These efforts took the form of a heated debate. At its heart was the issue of the value of restoring Yŏnbok-sa, a Buddhist monastery in the capital.

On February 14, 1390, a monk by the name of Pŏbye from the grand Sŏn monastery Yǒnbok-sa had an audience with King Kongyang. During his audience with the king, Pŏbye made a point of mentioning that Yǒnbok-sa’s five-story wooden stupa had fallen into disrepair.2 He then encouraged the king to restore the stupa as well as the monastery’s three ponds and nine wells, which had also been left in ruins for quite some time. The restorations, Pŏbye promised the king, would “bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom and its people.” The king was delighted. He wished to seize the opportunity to prove himself a worthy monarch, so he named two trusted senior officers in the five military commands, Sim Inbong and Kwŏn Wan, assistant directors of the directorate for construction (chosŏng togam), to oversee the restoration of Yǒnbok-sa and its dilapidated stupa.

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