[KS] Hanonim and Pak Illo

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

	A day or two before Tim Lee mentioned in his posting the poem by
Pak Illo, Bob Ramsey had referred to it in a private message to me.
Naturally, given the position I had taken in earlier messages, I had to
check it out.  I was having difficulty finding a text of that poem so was
grateful for Tim's pointing out the quotation of it on Hananim.com.  Like
Tim, I'm not sure I understand the poem completely.  But, accepting his
challenge, I'll venture the following literal translation, which obviously
makes no literary claims. Transliteration is in the Middle Korean version
of the Yale system:  o= "arae a," wo= modern "o," u= modern "^u, eu,"
etc., wu= modern "u," e= ^o or eo, etc.  This system allows unambiguous
reconstruction of the original Korean alphabetic orthography.

Now and then with lifted head I gaze at the North Star,
And shed tears others wouldn't understand straight toward Heaven.
I humbly pray for wishes held my whole life long. Oh, Hanonim!

Sisilo melitule pukcin.ul polapwokwo,
Nom mwolonon nwunmwul.ul Thyen.ilpang.ey tiinota.
Ilsoyng.ey phwum.un stus.ul piwopnota Hanonim.a!

	I'm not sure about the second line and hope for correction if
needed. I have difficulty with the concept of shedding tears upward,
"straight toward Heaven."  The MK verb root tii- is glossed in modern
dictionaries as ttele ttuta, generally meaning "to drop" or "let fall" but
with many many idiomatic extensions.

	Don Baker's conviction that Hanonim in this poem means Heaven
itself rather than "Hananim" as we now use it seems persuasive to me.
Note that the poet looks toward the North Star, itself a long-established
object of worship in East Asia, as the conventional center-locus of
Heaven, and speaks of "straight toward Heaven."  I agree with Don that
Heaven in this poem should be taken in its Neo-Confucian sense as the
source of morality and principle.  Adding the "-nim" to Heaven personifies
it, but from a Confucian point of view it would be going too far to say
that it deifies it.
	Still, the fact remains that, if this text is authentic as an
expression of Pak Illo in his lifetime (1561-1642), the compound noun form
"Hanonim" clearly existed before the 19th century, contrary to what I said
in one of my earlier postings. A word that exists changes and grows
throughout its life in human society, and there's no reason that it can't
be plucked out of the air and given a new meaning.  It happens all the
time in all languages.  The question for me though, is: Is this text
authentic?

	There is a textual problem that bothers me.  The only edition of
the <(Pak) Nogye S^onsaeng munjip> that I can find in authoritive and
comprehensive modern bibliographies of Chos^on period works is dated
"Kwangmu kapchin," which corresponds to 1904.  Bob Ramsey tells me that in
the entry for this title in the <P'yojun Kug'^o taesaj^on> published by
the National Academy of the Korean Language (a government-established
research institution), an edition of Ch^ongjo 24 (=1800) is cited.  But no
such edition is found in the <Han'guk kos^o chonghap mongnok> (published
by the National Assembly Library), which gives only the 1904 edition,
listing 19 complete and two partial copies by location, all in Korea
except for one in Harvard-Yenching.  (I'm sure there are other copies in
Japan.)

	The significance of this is that, in terms of datable texts of Pak
Illo's poetry, all that anyone could have any hope of finding would be
those published in 1904.  If anyone knows of a text dated 1800, I hope
they will check out this poem in that edition, if it exists.  Perhaps
those up at Harvard (are you out there, David?) could look up the
Harvard-Yenching copy of Pak Illo's collected works, check out this poem,
and see if there are prefaces or postfaces which give useful information
on the history of the text.  Pak Illo (ho Nogye) is for sure no
insignificant poet.  Surely there must be scholars out there who can
comment on his writings from long experience in reading and interpreting
him.  Their opinions on our present problem would be worth having.

	Jim Grayson and Tim Lee have commented very interestingly on John
Ross's published remarks on Hananim, which obviously deserve attention.
But just how many Koreans can Ross, up in eastern Manchuria, be talking
about in the first half of the 1870s?  One gets the idea from the force
with which he argues his position that he had pretty decisively ruled out
in his own mind any translation but "Hananim" for "God," especially
"Sangje," knowledge of which on the part of Koreans he seriously
misrepresented, even if perhaps unwittingly.  I can accept his sincerity
and I would have agreed with him that a native Korean term was to be
preferred above others so long as it was not obviously marred by
connotations unacceptable to Christians at that time.  It is noteworthy
too that he specifically recognized "Hananim" to be semantically identical
to "Ch'^onju."

	On another matter that has come up, I don't think you can argue
from numbers, as Tim does, to demonstrate the unliklihood of Catholicism
and Tonghak spreading their concepts beyond their respective communities
of believers.  When you read the comments of the secret investigators sent
down to Ky^ongsang Province in Twelfthmoon of (lunar) 1863 to investigate
Tonghak, it's clear that just about everybody in the province must have
heard the details of the religion.  The scene was very clear for Chief
Investigator Ch^ong Un'gu:
	"As I galloped under the stars from Bird Pass [the border between
Ch'ungch'^ong and Ky^ongsang provinces] to Ky^ongju, a distance of over
400 li (172km) going through a dozen different counties, not a day passed
when we didn't hear about Tonghak.  There wasn't an inn maid or a mountain
boy who wasn't chanting and telling others about its texts.  They use the
name Ch'^onju.  They say, "Serve Ch'^onju," placidly with no sense of
embarrassment.  They can't help but do so openly.  We should understand
that this thing has spread vigorously and is flourishing..." etc.
	These are just the first few lines of a long and detailed report
(see <Kojong sillok>, 1/9b-10b: Accession Year, Twelfthmoon 20 (Jan. 28,
1864). Of course they're not talking about "Hananim," but the point is
that Tonghak was ablaze.  Who could not know what was in the air?  There
probably really was only a small number of believers relative to the whole
population.  But in a rural society where the only news was what one
heard, everybody seems to have known what was going on.  You can't say,
"they only have a few believers in a population of millions, so how can
the population as a whole know?"  Even though this situation would have
slackened off considerably after Ch'oe Che'u's execution, that event in
itself would have impressed the whole phenomenon on people's minds even
more strongly.  The same thing could be said for the Catholics.
Everybody had to know that thousands were being killed from 1866 to 1873.
One would would have been a fool not to be informed on what had brought
these victims to their fate.  If Catholics and Tonghaks had by the 1870s
begun to use the vernacular form of Ch'^onju-- that is "Hananim" or
related forms-- truly everybody would have known that name.  And that's
pretty much what John Ross was telling us.

Gari Ledyard

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 Timsanglee at aol.com wrote:

> 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)
>