Click here return to the Hualin main page.
Click here return to the Hualin E-Journal Vol 8.1 Table of Contents page.
Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.1 (2025): 302–307; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.01.09
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Asia-European Exchanges Mediated through Buddhism, Buddhism and Medicine: New Perspectives)
Gregory Evon. Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Cambria Sinophone World Series. Amhert: Cambria Press, 2023. 209 pp.
Richard D. MCBRIDE II
Brigham Young University
richard_mcbride@byu.edu
In recent years, scholars of Korean Buddhism in Korea and the West have been revisiting the history of the religion in the Chosŏn period (1392–1910). Although several English-language studies have been published in journals on both seminal and provocative topics, hitherto, no monograph length studies have been published aside from annotated translations of primary sources. In Korea, however, over the course of at least the last two decades, numerous monographs have reevaluated the history of Buddhism in the Chosŏn period. Most have focused on the somewhat ambiguous but generally positive view of the religion espoused by members of the royal Yi family in their personal lives (e.g. King T’aejo 太祖 [r. 1392– 1398], King Sejong 世宗 [r. 1418–1450], King Sejo 世祖 [r. 1455– 1468], etc.), and the persistence and evolution of religious faith and practice, the monastic order, and the religion’s administrative structure, despite the wholesale persecution of the Buddhist church by the Chosŏn state.
Gregory Evon’s Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), while being the first monograph to be published in English on the topic of Buddhism under the Chosŏn, approaches the place of Buddhism in Chosŏn society from a more nuanced perspective. Evon is primarily a scholar of Korean literature from the Chosŏn period, and he crafts his engaging historical narrative as background to explain why a respected Confucian official and politician of the late seventeenth-century, Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692), would compose an unabashedly pro-Buddhist novel, Lady Sa’s Journey to the South (Kor. Sassi namjŏng ki 謝氏南征記). This novel was initially written in the Korean script during the final three years of his life in exile and translated into literary Sinitic by his grandnephew Kim Ch’unt’aek 金春澤 (1670–1717). Kim Manjung is more usually remembered for composing A Dream of Nine Clouds (Kuunmong 九雲夢), which he wrote to comfort his mother while he was in exile. Evon makes a strong case that Lady Sa’s Journey to the South was written to convince Confucians that a Buddhist-Confucian symbiosis in Korean society is wholesome and actually necessary to save the Confucian social order from falling into chaos. In addition, it promoted worship of a version of the White-Robed Guanyin 白衣觀音 that had circulated in the late Ming period (1368–1644).
…
About the Author: Richard D. McBride II (Ph.D. UCLA, 2001) is Professor of Korean Studies and Buddhist Studies and Department Chair of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaŏm Synthesis in Silla Korea (2008), Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (2017), Aspiring to Enlightenment: Pure Land Buddhism in Silla Korea (2020), and The Three Kingdoms of Korea (2024). He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on Korean and Chinese Buddhism and early Korean history.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
