A New Understanding of Koryǒsa(高麗史) and Koryǒsajǒryo(高麗史節要) : As an Illustration of Tasks of Researches on Korean History

Abstract

The investigation into different versions of Koryǒsa and Koryǒsajǒryo as well as the historical source criticism of them have stagnated since 1970s or 1980s. The photo prints of each of those books were made with one selected version without understanding the differences among diverse versions of each of them, and digital text files were created based on the photo prints. However overlooking the differences among them is losing many useful informations. The editors’ ideological view point built on Neo Confucianism caused more basic problems of biased description of those books. They allocated excessive space to describe the details of the institutional elements of Confucian culture as precedents of their ideological institution, even though some of those were not able to be enforced from the beginning. They consider the indigenous or localized culture called gukpung(國風) as heretical culture that had to be firmly excluded. Therefore they allocated no or very little space to describe elements of gukpung themselves. Almost all of those were found as fragments concomitant with descriptions of other facts. They made and stated an editorial principle, ‘recording the facts directly’(以實直書) to describe the Koryǒ imperial system. The principle has been misunderstood as unlimited to all the elements of the Koryǒ imperial system.