[KS] Re: The God of Tonghak

[Timsanglee at aol.com]

Dear List:
 
After reading Don Baker’s last post, I checked a few sources and arrived at 
two conclusions.  One is that Baker (and Gary Ledyard) was right, and I (and 
Benjamin Weem) was wrong about one thing: The concept of Ch’ŏnju, as used by 
Tonghak founder Ch’oe Cheu, did contain a great deal of reference to the 
transcendent.  To what extent that was the case—whether such transcendence was on a 
par with monotheism, for example—appears to be a sticking point among students 
of Tonghak/Chŏndokyo theology.  Nonetheless, Baker was correct in stating that 
the famous Tonghak/Chŏndokyo concept innaech’on—which continues to be 
presented as the signature doctrine of the faith in many sources (including those on 
the Internet)—did not originate with Ch’oe Cheu, that it was a concept 
created by Son Pyŏnghŭi and is heavily laden with Neo-Confucian metaphysics.  
            That said, I must add I remain unconvinced of Baker’s following 
statement: “If a vernacular term for the Lord of Heaven was well known to 
Koreans in 
northern Korea and southern Manchuria in the last quarter of the 19th century 
(as Ross claims), yet we don't see any use of this term for an indigenous 
supreme Korean deity in pre-19th century Korean documents, that would suggest 
that Catholic and Tonghak ideas had penetrated Korean communities all over and 
around the peninsula, not that that term had long been a part of Korean 
indigenous spirituality. (We know that there were both Catholics and Tonghak believers 
in the northern part of the peninsula by the last quarter of the 19th 
century.) In other words, in the century between when Catholics first began preaching 
in Korea about the Lord of Heaven and Ross queried Koreans about a vernacular 
term for the Supreme God Above, this notion of a Lord of Heaven  must have 
spread beyond both Catholic and Tonghak communities and become known to other 
Koreans as well.”
            If I understand Baker correctly here, in the above paragraph, he 
is assuming that the word hananim and its cognates did not exist in Korea 
before the 19th century, except the few cases that “Haneul-nim is being used as a 
Hangeul synonym for Ch’eon as that term is used in Confucian writing.” (Baker’
s post of 12/12/03)  His point, in short, is that this vernacular was 
invented in the 19th century to account for a God that Catholics and Tonghaks 
vigorously espoused, and that they so succeed in this endeavor that by the early 
1870s Ross could say hananim had universal currency among Koreans.   
            It’s interesting that my sense of what is plausible in this case 
is completely opposite that of Baker’s.  My point is this: considering the 
historical circumstances of Korean Catholics and Tonghaks in the decades 
immediately preceding 1873—the year Ross visited the Corean Gate in Manchuria—it is 
extremely implausible that the Catholics and Tonghaks, even together, could 
have had the kind of profound and widespread impact on the culture such that 
ordinary Koreans could readily identify hananim with a high god, if not a 
transcendent God.  For the most part, in those decades, both the Catholics and 
Tonghaks were either on the run or in hiding.  By 1800, the Catholics numbered around 
10,000.  In the following year, they suffered their first major persecution—
the kihae pakhae; two more major persecutions followed in 1839 (sinyu pakhae) 
and 1846 (pyŏng’o pakhae); and in 1866 (pyŏngin kyo’nan) there began the 
fiercest persecution of them all, one that continued even as Ross was looking for 
a Korean language teacher in Manchuria, one that killed about 10,000 
Catholics.  As a result of these persecutions, by 1900 there were only about 42,000 
Catholics.  (This figure is from Baker’s own work: “Sibling Rivalry in 
Twentieth-Century Korea: Comparative Growth Rates of Catholics and Protestants,” in 
soon to be published Christianity in Korea, ed. Robert E. Buswell and Timothy S. 
Lee)  
What about the Tonghaks?  Have they fared any better?  Hardly.  Between 1860 
when Ch’oe Cheu received his revelation and in 1864 when he was executed, he 
succeeded in attracting a significant following.  It is important to note that 
in these years, the vast majority of his followers came from the southern 
provinces—kyŏngsangdo, chŏllado, and ch’ungchŏngdo.  Not many hailed from the 
northern provinces, let along Manchuria.  After Ch’oe Cheu’s execution, 
Tonghaks, like the Catholics, were driven underground, hiding in places like Mt. 
Taebaek.  Under the leadership of their second patriarch Ch’oe Sihyŏng, Tonghaks 
regrouped, but only in secret.  It was not till 1871 that Tonghaks would once 
again come into public eye—when one of their leaders, Yi Piljae, started the 
organization's first major uprising.  
            If Baker’s claim is to be accepted, one would, in fact, have to 
accept the following statement: In the few decades immediately preceding 1873, 
roughly 50,000 Catholics and Tonghaks, while hiding in deep mountains such as 
Taebaek or in boondocks where only lowly ong'gijaegnis (potters) would bother 
to frequent, exercised such a profound and widespread influence on Korean 
culture that their transcendent deity Ch’ŏnju was universally recognized, with 
some Koreans coining “hananim” to account for it.  
        This sounds rather far-fetched to me.  Given the evidence provided by 
Ross, I think it is much more in the spirit of Occam's razor to say that the 
term “hananim” does indeed predate the 19th century and that it refers to a 
high god.  
Moreover, it appears that there is at least one piece of literary evidence 
that “hananim” predates the 19th century.  I stumbled upon this evidence while 
surfing the Korean cyberspace.  You can check it out at hananim.com (no 
kidding!).  Posted on this website is a part of a poem written in pure Korean 
(hunminjŏngŭm) by the poet Pak Inro (1561-1642), in which hananim (the second vowel 
in “area a” [or lower a]) is clearly used.  I, however, say “appears” 
because I am not entirely sure how “hananim” works in this poem, and also because 
this website seems to belong to a nativist organization that makes outlandish 
claims about Korea’s antiquity.  But the poem and the word are clearly there, 
and perhaps someone like Professor Ledyard could check it out for us.
 
Best Regards,
 
Timothy S. Lee
Brite Divinity School (TCU)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20031216/224bac65/attachment.html>