[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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