Korean Buddhism

• 1. Introduction

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  Korean Buddhism arrived on the Korean peninsula in 372 CE, carried by a monk named Sundo from the northern Chinese state of Former Qin. He brought texts and statues to the court of King Sosurim of Goguryeo, and within a generation, the royal family and their subjects had accepted his teachings. What followed was not simply the transplanting of a foreign faith. Koreans took a tradition that had traveled thousands of miles from India through Central Asia and China, and remade it into something distinctly their own. How did a religion associated with monks and mountains become the state ideology of medieval Korean kingdoms, then survive centuries of suppression, then help repel a foreign army? And what kind of intellectual tradition produces a philosopher who drinks from a skull by accident and finds enlightenment in the experience?

• 2. The Three Kingdoms Receive the Dharma

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  Sundo's arrival in Goguryeo in 372 came about eight hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha. The existing religion was shamanism, and mountains were understood as the dwelling places of spirits. That overlap mattered. Because Buddhism was not seen as conflicting with nature worship, shamanic adherents allowed the two traditions to blend. The mountains once home to spirits became the sites of Buddhist temples.

  The other two kingdoms followed in sequence. In 384, an Indian monk named Marananta reached the southwestern kingdom of Baekje, where the royal family received his teachings. King Asin of Baekje declared that people should believe in Buddhism and seek happiness. A century and a half later, in 527, the faith reached the southeastern kingdom of Silla by a more dramatic route. A court official named Ichadon announced his conversion to King Beopheung of Silla and was beheaded for it. The legend holds that milk poured from the wound instead of blood. Paintings of this martyrdom are in the temple at Haeinsa, and a stone monument honors him at the Gyeongju National Museum.

  Monks from each kingdom did not simply receive teachings and stop. The Baekje monk Gyeomik traveled to Central India in 526 via the southern sea route to study Sanskrit and the Vinaya. He returned with a collection of texts and the Indian monk Paedalta, then translated the scriptures into seventy-two volumes. His work in establishing the Gyeyul school predated its Chinese counterpart by roughly a century, earning him recognition as the father of Vinaya studies in Korea.

• 3. Wonhyo and the Skull

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  Wonhyo was among the most consequential scholars to emerge from the Silla period, and his philosophy grew from a legend that is equal parts mundane and startling. He set out for China with a close friend named Uisang to study Buddhism at its source. Partway through the journey, Wonhyo woke in the night deeply thirsty and found a container of cool water. He drank and went back to sleep. In the morning he saw that the container was a human skull. The realization struck him: enlightenment depended on the mind, not on travel to a distant country. He turned back.

  Uisang continued. He studied in Chang'an for twenty years under Huayan patriarchs Zhiyan and Fazang, then returned to Korea carrying Hwaeom Buddhism. He also offered his master a poem written in the shape of a seal that geometrically represents infinity, containing the essence of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

  Wonhyo's own path was unconventional. He renounced his formal religious life, married a princess for a period, and had a son with her. He wrote treatises whose philosophy centered on the unity and interrelatedness of all things. That approach fed directly into what became called Tongbulgyo, meaning interpenetrated Buddhism, a Korean synthesis that sought to harmonize disputes among scholars through a principle called hwajaeng. Wonhyo's commentaries shaped the thought of the Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang, and a commentary by another Korean monk, Woncheuk, on the Samdhinirmocana-sutra carried influence into Tibetan Buddhism. The ideas that Wonhyo developed at home, without ever reaching China, traveled the world.

• 4. The Tripitaka and the Goryeo State

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  During the Goryeo period, which ran from 918 to 1392, Buddhism functioned as the religion of the state. The Seon school, which emphasized meditation, competed with the older scholastic schools known by the term gyo, meaning learning or study. The tension between these traditions was one of the defining intellectual struggles of the era.

  The monk Jinul, who lived from 1158 to 1210, became the central figure in resolving it. He found the sangha in a state of corruption, with Buddhist institutions increasingly entangled in secular affairs including fortune-telling and prayers for success in worldly endeavors. His response was to found a new community of disciplined practitioners deep in the mountains at Songgwangsa on Mt. Jogye. His solution to the meditation-versus-study debate was to declare that the two were not opposites. Drawing on the work of Chinese master Guifeng Zongmi and the Linji master Dahui Zonggao, Jinul formulated a dictum of sudden enlightenment followed by gradual practice. From Dahui Zonggao he also adopted the hwadu method of meditation, which remains the main practice in Korean Seon today.

  The Goryeo period also produced one of the great artifacts of East Asian Buddhism. A woodblock edition of the Tripitaka, later known as the Tripitaka Koreana, was produced in two editions. The first was completed between 1210 and 1231 and destroyed when the Mongols attacked in 1232. The second, completed between 1214 and 1259, survives at Haeinsa in Gyeongsang and served as the standard version of the Tripitaka in East Asia for nearly seven hundred years.

• 5. Five Centuries of Suppression

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  In 1388, a general named Yi Seonggye carried out a coup and established the Joseon dynasty in 1392 with the backing of a Neo-Confucian movement. For the next five hundred years, Korean Buddhism operated under conditions of active repression. The number of Buddhist monasteries fell from several hundred to thirty-six. Limits were imposed on the number of clergy, on the land temples could hold, and on the ages at which a person could join the sangha. Monks and nuns were eventually prohibited from entering cities. Buddhist funerals and even begging were outlawed.

  The exception came through war. When Japanese forces invaded between 1592 and 1598, the government was too weakened by internal conflict to mount a strong defense. Seon monks organized themselves into guerrilla units. The movement, called the righteous monks or uisa, eventually encompassed several thousand fighters led by a Seon master named Seosan Hyujeong, who was born in 1520 and died in 1604. Seosan was not only a military leader but the author of important religious texts, a student of Wonhyo and Jinul's legacy, and the figure from whom most major streams of modern Korean Seon trace their lineage. His four principal disciples, Yu Jeong, Eongi, Taeneung, and Ilseon, all served under him during the war and each carried on his teachings afterward.

  One earlier interruption to Joseon's anti-Buddhist policy came from within the court. Queen Munjeong, a devout Buddhist, took control of the government in place of her young son Myeongjong during his reign from 1545 to 1567 and immediately repealed many anti-Buddhist measures. She held deep respect for the monk Bou, who was born in 1515 and died in 1565, and installed him as the head of the Seon school.

• 6. Colonial Rupture and Modern Division

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  Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 restructured Korean Buddhism from the outside. The Temple Ordinance of 1911 dismantled the collective management of temples by the sangha and replaced it with a Japanese-style system in which abbots appointed by the Governor-General received private ownership of temple property. Monks aligned with pro-Japanese factions began to marry and have children, importing a practice that was common in Japanese Buddhism but foreign to the Korean celibate tradition. In 1920 the ordinance was revised again, reorganizing temple administration under thirty-one main temples with headquarters at what is now Jogyesa. Japanese authorities also had artworks from Korean temples shipped to Japan; negotiations for their repatriation remain ongoing.

  After Korea's liberation in 1945, the division between married priests who had run temples during the occupation and celibate monks who had not became the central conflict in South Korean Buddhism. President Syngman Rhee, who took office in the 1950s, campaigned against what he called Japanized Buddhists, widening the rupture. Disputes over temple control turned physical. Monks belonging to the celibate faction threatened to kill themselves rather than yield ground.

  The formal split came in 1970. Korean Buddhism divided into two distinct orders: the fully celibate Jogye Order, which changed its ceremonial robe from red to brown to mark the distinction, and the Taego Order, which allowed both celibate and married clergy and retained the traditional red kasa. Both orders continue to use the Dharmaguptaka Pratimoksha, the lineage of monastic vows originating in China and Vietnam. The Taego Order alone maintains the full traditional Korean Buddhist ritual tradition, including the Yeongsanjae and other ritual dance forms.

• 7. Persecution and Revival in South Korea

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  From 27 to the 31st of October 1980, under President Chun Doo-hwan, government forces raided major Buddhist temples across South Korea, including the Jogye Order's headquarters at Jogyesa in Seoul. The raids were framed as anti-government investigations. Fifty-five monks were arrested, many others were interrogated and tortured, and the abbot of Naksansa died from the treatment he received. None of those investigated were ever formally charged, though many were sent to reeducation camps. For the rest of the decade, Buddhist institutions were kept under surveillance and members were prosecuted on accusations of supporting communism.

  The experience of that period radicalized a generation. A movement called Minjung Buddhism, meaning Buddhism for the masses, emerged as a direct response. It emphasized ordinary people's daily concerns and positioned itself against aggressive Protestant missionary activity, which had grown considerably since the 1950s by capitalizing on divisions within the Buddhist community.

  The antagonism did not fade. Acts of vandalism against temples, statues, and murals continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In one incident, a minister used a microphone cable as a weapon to destroy paintings and a statue at a temple. In 1990, shortly after the Buddhist Broadcasting System launched an FM radio station, young men vandalized the station's sound facilities and caused roughly two hundred thousand US dollars in damage. As recently as October 2010, students from a Christian school in Seoul posted a video expressing hope that a Buddhist temple would be destroyed.

  By the mid-1980s and into the following decades, Buddhism in South Korea expanded through media and education. Two major Buddhist media networks operate in the country: BTN Buddhist Television Network and the Buddhist Broadcasting System. Buddhist organizations are affiliated with or operate three universities, twenty-six schools, and sixteen seminaries.