[KS] Hananim

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

	To a large extent, problems involved in the relationship the term
Hananim and related forms to ancient Korean religious concepts are not
resolvable.  Against the widespread view that there was such a concept and
a word for it going back to the very beginnings of Korean religious
thought, the fact is that we have no textual attestatiom of such a word
until the 1880s or at most a few years earlier.  To the extent that the
issue turns on the beliefs of one religion or another it becomes a matter
of theology and faith, and historical criticism is beside the point if one
believes in the principle of the freedom of religion.  But as a matter of
historical and cultural criticism, it is at least relevant to examine
issues of methodology or the lack of it in approaching the question.  As
already noted on the list, Don Baker's article in The Review of Korean
Studies, 5/1 (June 2002) is a very useful guide through this thicket.
	One is certainly free to examine the earliest sources of Korean
history for the purpose of understanding as best we can what early Korean
beliefs were like.  And in those sources there is no lack of references to
heaven and various other matters of the divine to think about.  But to
suppose the existence of such a late-appearing word as "Hananim" already
in the mistiest beginnings of Korean life seems to me to go beyond the
line.  Timothy Lee seems to do that.  Not only does he seem to suggest
that the forms "han^unim" and "hananim" already existed in those times, he
goes on to give a fairly concrete definition for them in application to
Korea's highest antiquity.  He says: "Both

> hanÅ­nim and hananim did not initially have much to do with the notion
> of “one,” though such a notion may have been one of its more faint
> connotations.  The terms referred to what anthropologists call a high
> god—the god who is at the top of a hierarchy of gods—and had
> associations with the sky.  Thus in its original form, hananim hardly
> denotes a transcendent monotheistic deity.

The religious ideas implicit in this statement seem quite appropriate to
the ancient source materials, and I have no quibble with them.  It's
bringing the "hananim" terms into the statement that I disagree with.
	What we have to do, in my view, is to start with the earliest
forms we concretely know and see what we can deduce about them, and remove
all discussion of ancient Korean religious thought from the debate.
	The two forms hananim and han^unim seem to appear out of nowhere
in the first half of the 1880s, when the first Protestant project to
produce a Korean translation of the Bible began.  The Tonghak form of the
word, Hanullim, probably originated around the same time, though it is
possible that it goes back a little earlier.  The form Han^ollim, used in
the new religion Taejonggyo, appeared around the end of the first decade
of the 20th century.  All of these forms were used by their respective
supporters as the name of a transcendant monotheistic deity.
	Prior to the time of emergence of these forms, the Sino-Catholic
term "Ch'^onju" had been used by Catholics as the term for "God."  It had
been known in China since the late 16th century and in Korea at least by
1620.  It was actively discussed by scholars critical of the Catholics
during the 18th centuy, and propagated in an active religious way from
1784 on.  As Lee explained, the Protestant pioneer Horace B.  Underwood
had preferred this term to "Hananim," out of the conviction that the
latter had polytheistic connotations.  But Tonghak had also used
"Ch'^onju."  It appears in the writings of the founder, Ch'oe Che'u
(Su'un, 1820-1864), which date from the period 1860-1864 and are all in
Chinese.
	The meaning of "Ch'^onju" is transparent in the characters: "Lord
(or king, master, ruler, etc.) of Heaven," or "Heavenly Lord."  But the
important fact for Underwood, and apparently for Ch'oe Che'u earlier, was
that it was established in Korea as the name of God, as they understood
it. Ch'oe Che'u too preached the idea of one God only.
	Lawrence Driscoll, representing a long established interpretation,
stated in his posting that "Hananim" took its root from Korean hana,
"one." But Gary Rector considered that mistaken and argued that the root
was really han^ul, "heaven."  I'm in Rector's school.
	The reason I choose han^ul is because of the pre-existing use of
"Ch'^onju" by the Catholics and the Tonghaks.  The fact is that the
resulting form *Han^ulnim is made up of exactly the same semantic elements
as "Ch'^onju."  Rector interpreted "nim" as the common honorific suffix,
and it is that.  But it is also a long attested word for "king" or
"ruler," and appears as such in Middle Korean texts and in sijo and kasa
poetry from the 16th century on, and in orally transmitted sijo attributed
to known historical figures of much earlier periods.
	We can take the forms hanullim, han^unim, hananim, and han^ollim
as all derivable from <han^ul + nim>.  As for the more complicated forms,
the double -ll- is simply a transformation of -nl-, similarly to the name
"Silla" and the word "kollan," "difficult," and hundreds of other common
examples.  The simpler forms han^unim and hananim come from an alternative
Korean phonological rule to resolve the clash between joined l's and n's
(which Korean tongues and ears cannot abide): the "l" is dropped.  It's
just like in the present modifier form of the verb sal-, "to live," and
hundreds of similar examples.  One doesn't say saln^un, but san^un.  Thus
from *Han^ulnim we can get by regular Korean rules: Han^unim or Hananim.
	The difference between the different middle vowels of the two
forms arises from the fact that the vowel in the second syllable of Han^ul
was originally the now obsolete Middle Korean vowel called the "area a,"
or "lower a" (so called because it was written under the consonant rather
than to the right of it as with the "regular a").  "Arae a" in the first
syllable of words began to merge phonologically with "regular a" around
the end of 17th and the beginning of the 18th century.  But in the second
and later syllables and/or in suffixes the effect was more disorderly.
Usually it merged with the vowel ^u (the second to last vowel in the
present order of the alphabet.)  But it could also turn into a "regular
a."  Thus we can see two forms of the word for "heaven" in the late 19th
and early 20th century"-- han^ul and hanal.  Phonologically, these changes
were completed were pretty much complete by the end of the 18th century,
but in the script the old orthographies with the "area a" continued to be
used well into the 20th century.  They weren't effectively abolished until
the unified orthography rules of 1933.  Thus, in the period when the terms
hananim, etc., first appear, the "arae a" was still before the eyes of
readers.
	Insofar as the modern language is concerned, han^ul has become the
standard form and "hanal" would be considered old-fashioned or irregular.
But in the 1880s standarization was still far in the future.  Following
the trend, many Protestants now prefer the form "Han^unim," and for the
Catholics, who accepted the term only later, this is also the standard
form.  But of course "Hananim" is still preferred by many Protestants.
	In the Tonghak form the irregular transformation prevailed, and
the second vowel became ^u. But the final -m of Han^ullim seems to have
conditioned a rounding of ^u into u, giving us Hanullim.
	The ^o in the Taejonggyo term term for God, Han^ollim, cannot be
accounted for by ordinary Korean phonological rules.  It would appear that
the creators of this form either purposely changed the vowel so as to be
different from the Tonghak (now Ch'^ondogyo) form, or indulged in creative
word play to make the word also jibe with one of its important concepts,
"Han^ol," or "Korean Spirit," (or perhaps Korean mind or sensibility).  If
that is the case, they would have been opting either to depart from the
concept "heaven" or meld it into other tenets of the religion.

	What can be drawn from all this?  My conclusions are two.  The
first is that all the modern forms of Hananim, etc. are inventions of
around the time that they first appear, and that at least in the
Protestant and Tonghak cases, they were simply calqued forms of
"Ch'^onju," created in translating that term into a new, pure Korean term.
	My second conclusion follows from the first: that prior to the
late 19th century, it is very doubtful that any compound noun like
"Han^u(l)nim" ever had any existence in the spoken or written Korean
language.  It's not impossible that Catholics could have glossed or
discussed the term ch'^onju using <han^ul + nim>, but in the very few
Catholic han'gul texts (there were hundreds) that survived the
persecutions, the vernacular term does not appear.
	One can well imagine the need for a change from "Ch'^onju" on the
part of non-Catholics.  In the 1860s and early 1870s, thousands of
Catholics were killed by the Korean state in what the government hoped
would be the final extirpation of Catholicism in Korea.  Ch'oe Che'u was
executed before this bloody persecution began.  When he adopted the term
Ch'^onju for God in the monotheistic sense, he could not have been unaware
of its use by Catholics.  Every policeman and magistrate in Korea knew
that word and was ever alert for any sign of it.  Ch'oe himself referred
to the challenge of the West in his writings, vividly evoking the sense of
foreboding in Korea after the Westerners forced China, in 1860, to accept
Western international norms and lift all prohibitions against the practice
of free trade and free religion, all of which was seen in Korea as the
total humiliation of China.  Could Korea not be next?  This spiritual
crisis was precisely the matrix and the context in which Ch'oe heard God
speaking from heaven, causing him to imagine and create the Tonghak
religion.  Doubtless some of the people killed in the great persecution of
1866 to 1871 were Tonghaks, dragged into the Catholic net by the term
"Ch'^onju."  What would have been more natural than Koreanizing it in a
vernacular form to escape the dreaded syllables?  We can't be sure whether
it was the Protestants or the Tonghaks who did this first, but both had a
crucial interest in dissociating themselves from the Catholics.  My belief
is that to accomplish that end, they translated the most central term in
their faith into a vernacular form.  It was all the more attractive as it
would be more comprehensible familiar to ordinary believers than the
Chinese "Ch'^onju."
	It is not logically possible to prove a negative, and it would be
foolhardy to say that a certain compound noun made out of genuine, known
elements in a given language had never existed.  But the fact remains that
in all the glossaries and other sources from which we have recovered old
Korean vocabulary from pre-alphabetic times, no hint of "hananim", etc.
can be found.  Nor is it known from any Middle Korean text following
Sejong's invention of the alphabet.  Nor has anyone ever reported such a
word from any of the Korean language source materials that become more and
more numerous from the end of the 17th century on.
	And if there had been such a concept and such a word with such a
serious religious significance, which somehow had managed to find a line
of social transmission over the centuries, would it suddenly appear in the
1880s in three variant forms?  The odds would seem to be low.
	Note that the the forms of hananim, etc. that do exist all have a
variation in the second syllable of han^ul, which resulted from the
fallout of the doomed "arae a."  That process had occurred within no more
than a couple of hundred years of 1880.  The fact that the -ln- contiguity
had phonologically resolved itself in two different ways, in one a dropped
-l-, in the other a doubled -ll-, is not in itself abnormal.  But if such
a thing had happened in the deep past, the odds are that one form would
have gradually dominated and the other dropped out of common use, or that
the two forms would both survive with some differentiation in meaning.
In English, for instance, both "guard" and "ward" originated in the same
word, but substantial semantic differentiation has occurred.

	The older one claims the word hananim, etc. to have existed, the
longer the odds against finding it as hananim, han^unim, and hanullim all
suddenly together in the same time and place with no significant semantic
difference between the forms.  "Hananim" has to be rescued from antiquity.

Gari Ledyard