“The collective 'I' comes before or prior to the individual 'I', and the individual 'I' make sense only in the context of community to which it belongs to as a web of relations”
Halla Kim is Professor of Philosophy at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. His work straddles a number of philosophical traditions, with many articles on Kant, Fichte and other figures in German idealism, modern Jewish thought, and the subject of our discussion today, the history of philosophy in Korea. Beginning with the prehistory of Korean philosophy in shamanistic thought, Professor Kim explores the influence of Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, and the peculiarly Korean interpretations of major global philosophical currents up to the present day. This journey includes the great Korean thinkers Wŏnhyo and Jinul, as well as lesser known modern figures like the Christian-born Budhist nun philosopher Kim Iryŏp and others. As always, the interview concludes with a wordlist and suggestions for further reading
I wanted to begin by asking you a question that really struck me when I was reading through your article on Korean Philosophy article on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, namely the two tendencies of Korean philosophy towards on the one hand a remarkable internationalism that interacts with so many of the other interesting currents of East Asian philosophy, from Indian Buddhism to Chinese Confucianism and Japanese Zen on the one hand, and on the other the incredibly unique and specific aspects of Korean philosophy. The first question I wanted to ask is whether it is possible to locate some of these unique aspects of Korean philosophy in the uniqueness of the Korean language. I think it's our first language isolate that we've been studying on this series – is there anything in particular about the Korean language which can either serve as a challenge or an advantage for doing philosophy in Korean?
As you point out, the Korean language is rather unique. It's not related to Chinese at all, even though Korean traditional philosophy has at many points been under the influence of Chinese philosophy. Obviously, as Koreans made extensive use of the classical Chinese language for philosophy in the Korean Peninsula, Chinese-transmitted forms of thought were influential on the Korean philosophical lexicon by way of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. But in the middle of this important development, or rather transformation of the Korean spirituality from the concrete thinking manifested in native shamanism, we can still see that Korean philosophy largely retains originary forms of thought, patterns, or structural habits in thinking. For example, Korean has a term for 'heavenly authority', which we call Haneul-nim, and it is naturally developed into a god of heaven, or change in as we speak. And then this one is well preserved in the Korean tradition, and then even incorporated into the formation, the formation myth of the national region and stuff like that. We call the original ancestor god Dangun, meaning 'heavenly god'. So there's a tradition of the worship of heaven in Korea that is very distinctive to all stages of Korean philosophy. That has been actively incorporated into Korean thinking even after Buddhism and Confucianism were introduced to the peninsula as well.
For example, during the medieval kingdom of Korea, heavenly worship was incorporated into Buddhism and so on, as well as the later Confucian state of Joseon, in which people sometimes express their view about heaven in terms of the Confucian language. This is a trend that you can still find among Korean Neo-Confucians. And also modern Korean philosophical thinking is very strongly influenced by this kind of mentality and spirituality.
Fantastic. And I suppose you've already started to mention a little of bit what I wanted to explore next, namely the historical origins of philosophical thinking in Korea. You begin your SEP article, with an account of philosophical shamanism in Korea, and characterise this as being in some sense ‘before philosophy’. But insofar as you've so included it in your story of the development of philosophy in Korea, it must occupy a kind of interesting role in that it's kind of ‘laying the ground’ for philosophy proper. What's kind of the significance of this early form of thought for the later development of philosophy in Korean?
I see Korean shamanism as basically a form of nature worship, in that everything in nature is considered holy and sacred - such that we should not mess with it - and that nature is governed by supernatural beings whilst we are natural beings. This suggests that there should be a medium between us, natural beings, and the supernatural beings, or gods, so to speak. And then this is mediated by what we call shaman or mu in Korean. So the shaman is a kind of medium between the ordinary world of natural things and the supernatural world of gods, and they perform rituals and other activities, communal activities to mediate these two different worlds to bring us happiness and even healing.
Feather Pavillion, Naejangsan National Park
This kind of nature worship has been well preserved in our concept of nature in the field of aesthetics, for example, Korean art, architecture and music. Korean music tries to conform to the rhythm of nature and then try to minimize the way that we humans interfere with nature: minimally, if possible. So a Korean garden, for example, tries to conform to the natural environment as much as possible, unlike other forms of architecture. For example, in contrast with the Japanese art of landscaping, Korean gardens are a natural reflection of the beauty that surrounds us. There is minimal manipulation of natural environment in the way that you see in other forms of culture – nature worship is the basic philosophy of the foundation for philosophy in the Korean tradition and this is also reflected in the Korean language and also culture. That's how I see the relation between the pre-philosophical shamanistic background and the fully fledged philosophical thinking in Korea.
So I wanted to now talk about how some of those foundational ideas, the bedrock of Korean philosophy begins to be expressed in contact with some of the great global philosophical traditions. Maybe we could begin with Buddhism. This is going to be one of the overlaps with many of the other languages that we've discussed and you mentioned one of the particularly important figures in this early development of Buddhist thought in Korea is Wŏnhyo 元曉 (617–680). You mentioned him as being perhaps the first great philosopher of Korean Buddhism. So could you just tell us maybe a bit about Wŏnhyo and why his ideas are so important?
That's a very sensible question. Wŏnhyo was a citizen of the kingdom of Silla, an ancient kingdom in the Korean Peninsula which accepted Buddhism only 90 years before he began to write, so Buddhism was a new religious and philosophical movement in the Kingdom of Silla. Yet he came up with a most elaborate, sophisticated system of Buddhist metaphysics. When you visit Korea, there are so many Buddhist temples named after Wŏnhyo: when you visit a temple, when you take a road, so many are named after Wŏnhyo – you can see that he is a kind of a national hero.
But you asked about the philosophical important of his thought. If you take a look at the great systems of thought in the world, Islam takes Quran as the major sacred book, and Christianity takes the Bible as a major text, and the same with Judaism and other major spiritual movements. But in Buddhism, there is no one single text, there are simply many sutras. So when Buddhism was first imported into Korea, people were confused: this sutra says this, this sutra says that, one Buddhist text says this, others say different things. People asked themselves: what should I follow? Buddhism arrived with so many different, seemingly different strain of thoughts. Wŏnhyo’s genius was to conceive this different, seemingly different strains of thought into one harmonious whole, with a focus on what it calls the 'One Mind', Ilsim Korea.
And then, for example, if I may pick two major competing theories within Buddhism, take the School of Emptiness (Madhyamaka), most distinctively expressed by the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna's view, the viewthat everything is empty, empty of self-nature, without independent existence. That's Nagarjuna's philosophy, imported from India via China and then finally settling in Korea. Another major school was the Consciousness Only School (Yogachara), namely the idea that the whole phenomena world is an expression of the human consciousness.
Map of Korean Peninsula during Joseon dynasty
Wŏnhyo’s genius was to combine and synthesize this to transfer thought and then come up with all-encompassing system of thought under the leading idea of 'One Mind'. So 'One Mind' can be viewed as comprehending both of these two different diverse elements. So the phenomenal world may be your expression of our consciousness, especially the 'Storehouse Consciousness', which is a kind of CPU for the human mind. But underling this phenomenal world lies the true reality called emptiness or nothingness. Wŏnhyo was able to come up with a synthesis into a single harmonious whole, meaning that he is sometimes he is called the natural master of harmonization.
So his primary importance is synthesizing so many of different seemingly contradictory aspects of the Buddhist tradition as it had come to Korea. It is fascinating that you're saying that he's doing this at such an early stage in the development of Buddhism in Korea, immediately seizing on this question and trying to think about how it all fits together. I was fascinated by something you wrote where you said that it's not only the Buddhist ideas that he's interested in thinking together, but that he also pays attention to some other East Asian philosophy of that era that he engages with Taoists, that he engages with the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.
That's right. He was very advanced in his studies, enough to be able to be generous and be able to accommodate different veterans of all equally non-Buddhist ideas such as Taoism, Taoism represented by Laozi and Zhuangzi. And he sometimes used the term ‘Tao’ to describe the Buddhist reality of nothingness. It is very important to him that reality is ineffable he likes the opening chapter of the Zhuangzi on ‘the equality, or unity, of all things’. You see that in Wŏnhyo’s scheme that I elaborated earlier, the different levels of realty are systematized and unified by means of fundamental concept of ‘one mind’ in which you see the equality among different things including Emptiness and Consciousness and so on and so forth. So that's how he was able to use the language of Taoism to express his mature Buddhist thought. He tried to pay tribute, pay respect to the other forms of thought without abandoning the fundamental theses of Buddhism. That's what his genius consists in, I think.
Well, that's fascinating because I wonder whether we can use that as a comparison case with another great Korean philosopher. I'd like to move us forward many hundreds of years to the philosopher perhaps the central figure in the history of Korean philosophy: Jinul. I was wondering, how does he compare to Wŏnhyo as a religious and philosophical figure: what his role is in the establishment of what you mentioned earlier is Sŏn or better known as Zen philosophy?
Sŏn or Zen simply means meditation. So it's a kind of meditation Buddhism, focusing on direct insight into the reality of the mind and the universe. There is an emphasis on the direct grasp of the cosmic reality on the part of Jinul, the great Sŏn Master in the medieval Kingdom of Korea. He lived in the 11th century right before the Mongol invasion. His contribution was a tireless reformation of the existing Buddhist order. At the time he was active Buddhism had become the established ideology in the medieval Korean kingdom and naturally with this we see a lot of corruptions and degeneration both in theory and practice.
Jinul noticed this degeneration and determined to reform the Korean Buddhist order. In this sense you can compare him to Martin Luther in Germany. He was a tireless reformer. His view was that via in-depth study of Buddhist sutras which is called Gyo or doctrinal studies is completely compatible with sitting meditation, namely Zen or Sŏn in Korean. So we are talking about the view of Buddhism in which Buddha's word can be compared to the doctrine or doctrinal studies, and Buddha's mind can be compared to the Sun or the meditation. So Buddha's position can be expressed either by way of Gyo or the doctrinal studies or by meditation. These are not two separate things. The essence of Jinul’s Buddhism is the emphasis on non-duality, non-duality of these two things. Reality is, non-dual, reality is one. Philosophy is concerned with the one uniform reality and doctrinal study and on the one hand meditation, not understood as a binary operation but it's two different expression of the one the same reality which he happens to call 'Buddha-nature', the underlying nature of human beings.
That has raised many, many questions. I am interested in what you were saying about this idea of Buddha mind or Buddha-nature as being the one underlying unity to all things, because this theme of monism has come up a couple of times in the history of Korean philosophy. Do you think this is a general tendency that we can trace back to very early Korean shamanic ideas, this idea of a basic underlying unity or monism?
Yes, that's right. And I certainly think that Jinul is a fundamentally Buddhist in that regard: what we call the phenomenal world and the underlying real world are not two but one and then in that regard he agrees with earlier, I don't know, but the interesting thing is that despite his emphasis on the meditational aspect of philosophical activity or spiritual life, he doesn't denounce the careful study of sutras at all. I mean final truth in Buddhism must be obtained by means of direct, non-conceptual, non-linguistic grasp of reality. No question about that. This direct, non-conceptual, non-linguistic grasp of reality is what you need to achieve by way of meditation. The question is: what kind of meditation? Hwadu consists of puzzle-like phrases that you can meditate on while doing sitting meditation. You then try to come on with an ultimate truth. After all, on this view reality is non-conceptual. You come to the ultimate truth by way of this puzzle-like statement, puzzle-like phrases. So that's the ultimate method but it doesn't neglect, doesn't denounce the careful study of the sutras for the purposes of an initial awakening to the reality, we have to resort, we as human beings, as a finite human being, we have to resort to some study of the sutras and stuff like that, but it can only leads to an initial awakening.
Would this be something a little bit like Wittgenstein’s ladder where he talks at the end of the Tractatus about his propositions being like the ladder that we climb up on, and once we're at the top and we can see how things really are, we can throw the ladder away.
I never studied Wittgenstein’s analogy, but carefully in comparison with some of the things it might be very relevant to tell you're now that you're saying it. So yes, yes, you need to use the step on the ladder to achieve a certain level of the vision of reality but once you are over it, once you are done with it, you have to kick the ladder away and then try to resort to non-conceptual means, which is nothing other than meditation. So that's the that's the final position that Jinul offers. So I think analogy may be apposite in that regard.
There's a PhD thesis for somebody to write in there, I'm sure.
Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Jusanji Pond, Cheongsong
II – Relational Ontology
I thought now we might turn to some particular terms of philosophical art in Korean. We wanted to look at philosophy in the Korean language and one of the terms that I was particularly interested in was the notion of mu or 'nothing'. It's obviously a very important term in all kinds of Buddhist philosophy in its various languages and it seemed that mu is can be a translation of the Sanskrit term of ‘śūnyatā’ or emptiness, right? So I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how this term is used, how it serves as a translation of earlier Buddhist ideas and maybe how it's used in a particular philosophical context.
Yes, that's a very important question. The term mu or emptiness, comes from the original Sanskrit term śūnyatā as you point out. The origin of the term can be found in the historical Buddha himself, but most vividly expressed in the philosophy of Madhyamaka offered by Nagarjuna in India in the second century AD. And in that regard, the term should be understood as a kind of principle of Buddhist causation. I mean, it's literally translated as ‘dependent origination’ – nothing arises by itself, it must arise because of prior causes and conditions. Present conditions will give rise to a future phenomenon as well. The whole world is a network of causes and contingent. And where you cannot find any permanent fixed self-independent entities. Nothing is completely independent of itself. It's a kind of visual reality as co-arising. So it represents a relational ontology as opposed to, say, a Cartesian substance ontology.
I mean, Descartes came up with this idea of self-independent, abiding, permanent substance, that can exist without any properties. But according to this Buddhist intuition, that cannot be the case. Everything is interconnected in a web of co-origination. Even the ‘Buddha mind’ that we are familiar with is an expression of this continuous series of fleeting events. Nothing is forever according to this intuition. We are all part of this continuously flowing stream of reality. So it represents a relational ontology as opposed to substance ontology prevalent in Western metaphysics. Indeed, much of East Asian philosophy - not only Buddhism, but also Neo-Confucianism - evolved out of this intuition. Influence not exclusively, but also about develop it the main notion, for example, the notion of principle, li, under the influence of Buddhism. So you can see the importance of this idea all over in East Asian philosophical tradition.
When you say a relational ontology, you contrasted it with the Cartesian way of viewing things. Is the idea there that whereas an ontology of substance is involves different types of ‘stuff’ which are out there in the world, which just contingently happen to stand in particular relations to each other, maybe the relation of ‘being to the left’ or ‘being to the right', or maybe in the relation of ‘causing an effect’, or ‘being before’, or 'being after'. The idea is not so much that in a relational ontology that you have stuff that happens to stand in relations, but that you have relations first and foremost. And that all of the 'stuff' comes after: it's not that you have A and B and A is before B, but you have the relation of something being before and something being after, and only secondarily, you have particular things that are related. Is that a fair description?
Excellent. I think you said it right. The idea is that you don't have entities or substances first, entities or substances that can be divested of any properties, and then be made to stand in relations to each other and so on and so forth. Rather you have the relations first things in relation things that are not possible without already being in relation to each other. So this is expressed in the Korean tradition of emphasizing community-oriented thought patterns as opposed to individual-oriented thought patterns in the West, for example.
Traditional Korean Hanok Buildings
And then in the Korean language in terms of saying 'my mother' is so and so 'my teacher', my pencil, sometimes 'my pet', we say ‘our’. For Koreans, we don't say ‘my mother’, we say ‘our mother’, say ‘us’. You can see that the language reflects this kind of relational structure, this relational reality, because here our or Uri in Korean represents a collective 'I'. The collective 'I' comes before or prior to the individual 'I' and the individual 'I' make sense only in the context of community to which it belongs to as a web of relations. So that's how the Korean language reflects this vision of reality. We are nothing without the community to which we belong. The Korean ethical tradition, the Korean spiritual tradition is centred around this notion of togetherness, a close-knit community or society.
Fascinating. And it's so interesting how this general metaphysical picture of how things hang together, something as fundamental as an ontology of relation versus an ontology of substance can have its reflection in grammar, in the grammar of social relations. It would be really interesting to compare with some of the other interviews we've had where we've had Professor Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo talk about something similar in the case of Dholuo in East African naming traditions. I wanted to come back before thinking about some of these very large-scale comparisons to another school of thought that you mentioned earlier which is a major player in the history of Korean philosophy, namely Neo-Confucianism. Now you mentioned before in the case of Wŏnhyo that he didn't see any important conflict between Buddhism and Taoist ideas that were coming from China. Was there any difference in the case of Neo-Confucian ideas? How did they appear on the scene of Korean philosophy? How were they synthesized into this already very diverse picture, did they stand in more of a conflict with existing ideas?
Philosophically, Neo-Confucianism is the outcome of a very active and dynamic interaction between many schools of thought including Buddhism, Taoism and classical Confucianism. But the fundamental insight offered by Neo-Confucianism is the view that the whole world is an expression of the underlying principle of Li. This Li permeates all things in the world, is the universal, if I may borrow Western philosophical jargon, and it is exemplified in the different things of the world. So we human beings have our own principle, human nature, and animals have their own nature, animal nature, and so on and so forth. And the ultimate principle governing the whole universe is sometimes called Taiji or Taegeuk in Korean. So that's sometimes translates as ‘supreme ultimate’. So we can say that ‘supreme ultimate’ is the mother of all principles governing the whole universe and then these are exemplified in different things in nature. It is a cosmic principle, governing the whole universe but it's also an ethical principle that governs the relationship among human beings. So the traditional Confucian virtues of virtues of filial piety or righteousness or humanity are all expression of this fundamental principle in the context of human society of course.
So it's originally metaphysically syncretic, but politically the last dynasty of Joseon in Korean Peninsula arose in opposition to Buddhism, because political ideology wise they had to remove Buddhism as a political identity and replace its political system with a new ideology of new Confucianism. So Buddhism was highly suppressed in the last dynasty in Korean history, during the Joseon dynasty. So politics-wise, ideology-wise, the new Confucian order suppressed Buddhism very seriously, very heavily, very cruelly, but philosophically it was already an outcome of a synthesis among different trends of philosophical thought by way of its origin.
Well that's fascinating how you can have two philosophical schemes which in the abstract realm of ideas can seem to be such an interesting fit, that can speak to each other so well and yet in the political realm, the realm of ideology, can conflict so seriously. I was interested by a point that you made when you were talking about the basic metaphysics of Neo-Confucianism. You mentioned that using the term ‘universal’ was a way of imposing a western jargon on these ideas and I wonder, how and why is the term ‘universal’ inadequate for understanding the idea of Li?
Absolutely. It's a very potentially dangerous idea to make use of a Western concept to explain Eastern philosophical ideas, but if you are familiar with Western terms such as universal or substance, perhaps you can take advantage of them and then try to explain with the proviso that the analogy may break down. So it's a principle of Li that is the kind of ultimate norm of the universe as well as the society but it can be exemplified in various ways because of the its interaction with material force which we happen to call Ki in Korean and Chi in Chinese So Ki is fundamentally the particularising forces that make that provide the material aspect of things or relations but underlying this material aspect lies the immaterial or cosmic principle of Li that's the basic idea of Neo-Confucianism so human beings also exemplify this different ratio of Li and Ki and so that's the basic intuition but we don't want to say that this principle is exactly like Aristotelian 'form' or Plato's Ideas, you know it's more of a complementary element the relation between Li and Ki to tell the truth complementary not opposed. I mean it's not the relation between eidos and the prime matter in the case of Aristotle, it's more complementary so the reality and the manifested world of phenomenon are not two different expressions.
That is interesting because one of the purposes of doing these interviews on philosophy in languages that a less often studied as vehicles of philosophy is that instead of always having to interpret Korean philosophy in terms ‘universal’, ‘metaphysics’ or whatever, and that instead we might interpret Aristotle or Plato in terms of ideas you’ve introduced like ‘mu’, so that we potentially get a really fruitful cross-reading of these different ideas.
III - The 'New Woman' and the The Non-Existent God
In the time that we have left I would like to bring our story almost up to date to think about philosophy in modern Korea, as I was very interested by a couple of different aspects in the history of philosophy in Korea in the late 19th and early 20th century. The first is the writings of a female Korean philosopher the Buddhist nun Kim Iryŏp and her idea of sinyŏsŏng, or ‘the new woman’. Could you tell us a little bit about this idea and her philosophy more generally?
Absolutely, absolutely. In traditional Korean society, woman were highly oppressed and occupied an inferior position in society – not necessarily because of the Neo-Confucian framework - we can find excellent and eminent Neo-Confucian women philosophers even during the Joseon period and people are currently excavating the ideas of these excellent women philosophers, but in general the status of women in society was very low during the Joseon dynasty.
Kim Iryŏp was the main force or impetus behind the first feminist movement in modern Korea. She tried to reform society based on her view of women. She even issued or published a journal called ‘New Woman’ (shinyŏja) which was very important in the first half of the twentieth century. She promoted a radical new conception of love among women and opposed arranged marriage as was prevalent in traditional Korean society. Though she grew up as a Christian she later converted to Buddhism and came up with the idea of shinyŏja under the influence of a Buddhist notion of the self as in itself is nothing other than the boundary or the system of potentialities which can be realized fully to the its fullest extent, as activities in society. She was an active member of the Buddhist order and a writer of important philosophical essays - she was a pioneer in that regard and marks the beginning of an original feminist movement in Korea.
Seoul, South Korea
It's so interesting that you mentioned that she was born a Christian and converted to Buddhism because the last set of ideas I wanted to ask you about is the philosophical-religious synthesis led by Tasŏk. From what I understand Tasŏk is this fascinating attempt to kind of blend traditions by identifying the aforementioned notion that we had of mu or ‘nothingness’ with the Abrahamic God. Now how did this work and what were the kind of motivations for developing this theory?
Aha that's a very interesting question! Tasŏk's original family was Liu and first name was Yu Yŏng-Mo – Tasŏk is a pen name. Korean philosophers usually went by their pen names. He was born and raised as a Confucian but later converted to Christianity – but to a highly indigenized, highly Koreanised form of Christianity. One reason for this is that he understood the Abrahamic God or Yahweh rather by means of the traditional notion of ‘heaven’, as I said before. So he has a notion of this conception of absolute being but this being was not the kind of Thomistic God of absolute independence. Rather it's an imminent God – in us and among us. Paradoxically he names it 'non-existing existing being'. There's no question he started with a Christian notion, but this highly Koreanised version, this imminent conception of God that we might characterise as a panentheistic notion of God so to speak, as opposed to the notion of God as the absolute other, a absolute transcendent God that is absolutely separate from the rest of us rest of the world. No that's not the that's not the kind of God that he espoused but rather he wanted to utilize traditional concept of mu, meaning nothingness and then incorporate it into the nature of God as an ineffable source of creation and being in the world. So that's how we came up with a notion of non-existing God.
Well it's fascinating then if the first particular figure we spoke about was Wŏnhyo with this incredible synthesis of so many different Buddhist ideas with Taoism all into one conceptual whole, and 1,300 years later we have somebody who's able to synthesize not only these earlier synthesis with Neo-Confucian ideas but with the Abrahamic faiths as well. Korean philosophy seems to have been characterized it has not so much by the splintering of different schools but by the attempt to integrate various different philosophical ideas into a unified whole. Do you think that seems like a fair characterization of Korean philosophy in general or at least a particular figure as we've picked?
I think that's very fair observation as far as Korean philosophical geography is concerned. They are not opposed to foreign ideas but rather willing to incorporate foreign ideas and then transform this heterogeneous element into their own tradition and heritage. If you visit a Buddhist temple in Korea yes there is a main worship hall there is a hall of medicine Buddha but it is easy to find a pavilion of shaman gods – and this in a Buddhist temple! They accepted these shaman gods into their temple and they worship them quite explicitly. You can see that they wanted to compromise with a native tradition even though Buddhism originated from foreign countries, and then come up with a unified whole without rejecting the various different elements. I think the same is true in the case of Confucianism, in the case of Koreanized form of Confucianism. I think they retained the elements of shamanism and also Buddhism as I point out the fundamental notion of Li originates from the Buddhist notion of Li which was developed during the Sui dynasty China for example. So there is this syncretic, synthetic element and the same is true of Korean Christianity as well because among Korean Christian pastors you see the same function that they perform just like ancient shamans: healing, prayer for our worldly needs, funeral services, etc. These are all elements that helped Christianity find a way into Korean society.
As I said, Korean society is a highly spiritual society, I would say about 25% of them are Christians, 25% of them are Buddhist, other are shamanistic and others non-believers – in North Korea one can find Marxist-Leninist thought, but nevertheless 100% of them are Confucian! It is a highly family oriented society, a highly community oriented society – very relational. God is conceived as a kind of father and we are conceived as a children of God in this scheme of things, and in North Korea society the dictator leader is conceived as a father figure, even at the level of personal cult you can see that they try to make use of the Confucian scheme of things, even at the level of politics. That's how they managed to maintain society despite the economic hardship and internal oppression. But that's a different subject of course.
Absolutely and I think there are so many of those different subjects that we would have been able to pick up and run with. I think maybe we'll have to do a Korean philosophy part two that goes over all of these figures that we have time to explore. But I think I'd like to conclude by saying that this last point really serves as such a lovely example and model of what we're trying to do with these interviews: to examine and develop a kind of synthesis of different philosophical ideas around the world - if we don't have the openness that Korean philosophy has traditionally showed to translation and syncretism then we really end up losing a lot - so much of what you've told me today has been so fascinating because of the creative incorporation the indigenization of what were initially foreign ideas and I would I hope perhaps that philosophers listening to this in America or the UK can start to do something similar in their own philosophical work with the Korean ideas you've suggested to us. Thank you so much Professor Kim!
Thank you too Jonathan, it has been a pleasure
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