[KS] NEW BOOK> The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏng Kam nok and Insurrectionary Prognostication in Pre-Modern Korea, Translated by John Jorgensen
Charles Muller
acmuller at l.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Sun Jun 10 23:37:17 EDT 2018
The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏng Kam nok and Insurrectionary
Prognostication in Pre-Modern Korea, Translated by John Jorgensen
University of Hawai'i Press
520pp. June 2018
ISBN: 9780824875381
Detailed book information:
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9961-9780824875381.aspx
Description
Korea has long had an underground insurrectionary literature. The
best-known example of the genre is the Chŏng Kam nok, a collection of
premodern texts predicting the overthrow of the Yi Dynasty (1392–1910)
that in recent times has been invoked by a wide range of groups to
support various causes and agendas: from leaders of Korea’s new
religious movements formed during and after the Japanese occupation to
spin doctors in the South Korean elections of the 1990s to proponents of
an aborted attempt to move the capital from Seoul in the early 2000s.
Written to inspire uprisings and foment dissatisfaction, the Chŏng Kam
nok texts are anonymous and undated. (Most were probably written between
the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.) In his expansive
introduction to this first English translation, John Jorgensen notes
that the work employs forms or codes of political prediction (Ch.
tuch’en; Kor. toch’am) allied with Chinese geomancy (fengshui) but in a
combination unique to Korea. The two types of codes appear to deal with
different subjects—the potency of geographical locations and political
predictions derived from numerological cycles, omens, and symbols—but
both emerge from a similar intellectual sphere of prognostication arts
that includes divination, the Yijing (Book of Changes), physiognomy, and
astrology in early China, and both share theoretical components, such as
the fluctuation of ki (Ch. qi). In addition to ambiguous and obscure
passages, allusion and indirection abound; many predictions are
attributed to famous people in the distant past or made after the fact
to lend the final outcome an air of authority. Jorgensen’s invaluable
introduction contains a wealth of background on the history and
techniques of political prediction, augury, and geomancy from the
first-century Han dynasty in China to the end of the nineteenth century
in Korea, providing readers with a thorough account of East Asian
geomancy based on original sources.
This volume will be welcomed by students and scholars of premodern
Korean history and beliefs and those with an interest in early, arcane
sources of political disinformation that remain relevant in South Korea
to this day.
---------------------------
A. Charles Muller, Professor
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
Faculty of Letters
University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongō, Bunkyō-ku
Tokyo 113-8654, Japan
Office Phone: 03-5841-3735
Web Site: Resources for East Asian Language and Thought
http://www.acmuller.net
Twitter: @H_Buddhism
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