00-Infusing Korean Studies-Park-Religions of Korea-May 2018.pdf (original) (raw)

According to a survey on the religious landscape in Korea, about half of the total population of Korea (53.4%) declared practicing religion. This number has shown a steady increase since the Gallup Korea conducted a survey in this field in 1984. 1 In understanding religion, religious phenomena, and religious practices in Korea, we should consider that the concept and expression of religion is relatively new in Korean culture. In this context, at least two preliminary remarks need to be made before we begin our discussion on the religions in Korea. The first is about the term religion. The expression religion did not exist in the vocabulary of East Asian languages until the late 19 th century. One origin of the modern term religion (Kor, chonggyo; Jan. shūkyō) can be traced to a trade document between Japan and Germany signed in 1869, in which the European term religion was translated into Japanese language, which was adopted by Koreans. 2 This does not mean that what is denoted by the term religion in English language did not exist in East Asia before the adoption of the expression. Instead of religion, traditional Korean religions such as Confucianism and Buddhism (which we will discuss in this chapter) were called teachings (Kor. kyo) or school (Kor. ga). This also indicates that the commonly known distinction between philosophy and religion in Western tradition does not strictly apply to Korean religious and philosophical traditions. The second issue to consider is the scope of religious phenomena. Religion is frequently and sometimes uncritically identified with religion as an institution. Institutionalized (or organized) religion features religious texts (sacred books), religious structure (church or temples), religious group (priesthood and believers), and moral and ethical codes (precepts). Religion is also often considered to be about God. Most of the major religions in the world share these components of religion, but religious phenomena are not limited to them, nor is what we denote by each of the above categories as clear as we might think. Several suggestions have been made for a comprehensive understanding of religious phenomena. One such example is to expand our concept of religion, from a singular-form religion to its plural form, religions. The pluralization of religious tradition enables us to further expand the scope of religions so that we can consider what constitutes the religious. 3 This paradigm can be applied to other concepts that are associated with religion. For example, we can expand our investigation from the concept of God to plural gods and then to the concept of the sacred (or the holy); from churches/temples to the place of worship and to the concept of the sacred space; and from examining precepts of a particular religion to the relationship between the finite and the infinite, and then to the issue of construction of value systems in human life. This is a process of creating a generic form (e.g., the sacred) from the collection of particular phenomenon (e.g., God). This process is necessary in order to have a comprehensive understanding of different religious traditions without privileging one religious tradition. This is especially relevant to our attempt to understand and evaluate Korean religious traditions. More often than not, students in the West ask how either Buddhism or Confucianism can be called a religion when these traditions do not have concepts that match what they find in Western religious traditions. Before we attempt to answer these questions, we should understand that such questions arise because we set a specific religious tradition as a standard for other religious traditions. In our discussion of Korean religions, we will divide them into three groups for the sake of convenience: the first is indigenous religions (Shamanism); the second is foreign-origin religions that became Koreanized (Buddhism and Confucianism); and the third is new religions that emerged during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries (Tonghak and Won Buddhism).