Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chŏng Tojŏn (Sambong) and Hamhŏ Tŭkt’ong (Kihwa) trans. by A. Charles Muller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chŏng Tojŏn (Sambong) and Hamhŏ Tŭkt’ong (Kihwa)trans. by A. Charles Muller Uri Kaplan Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chŏng Tojŏn (Sambong) and Hamhŏ Tŭkt’ong (Kihwa)translated with an introduction by A. Charles Muller. Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 181pp. Religious polemics can open a window into the process of creating (and erasing) boundaries between traditions. Violent polemics have taken such a central role in the imagery of inter-religious encounters in Europe and the Middle East that we often tend to underestimate the diatribes exchanged between the relatively tolerant East Asian traditions. Nevertheless, they certainly do deserve our attention. Charles Muller’s new book puts together translations of three such polemical works from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Korea: two critiques of Buddhism and Taoism by Chŏng Tojŏn (1342 – 1398), who was a major official in the early Chosŏn period and a founding member of the Confucian Academy of Sŏnggyun’gwan, and an apologetic response in defense of Buddhism by the Confucian-scholar-converted-into-Buddhist-monk, Kihwa (1376–1433). Muller, [End Page 273]a veteran translator of Chinese classical texts and the editor of the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, provides us with a smooth, easy to read English rendering of the essays, accompanied by copious notes and a well-rounded introduction. For those interested in a closer look at some of the passages the full Chinese-character texts are conveniently available in the appendixes. The introduction can be largely divided into two sections. The first section offers the essential historical context, locating the essays within the history of the Buddhist-Confucian encounter in China, as well as within the particular Korean political situation at the time. It is the second more theoretical part of the introduction that I found especially appealing. It centers on what Muller sees as the necessary shared infrastructure that provides the common ground allowing the debate in the first place, that is the essence-function ti-yong(K. ch’e-yong) 體用 framework. In an earlier paper Muller has called this the “pivot of metaphysics and hermeneutics” 1of East Asian thought, and here he attempts to tie this mode of reasoning to what Robert Sharf has termed “sympathetic resonance” (Ch. ganying, K. kamŭng感應), in which localized phenomena and the state of the whole always influence and reflect upon each other. 2Muller explains this connection using the metaphor of a perfume—the concentrated essence “is always wholly unified with the most distant permeation of its aroma” (32). To put it plainly, East Asian polemics centered on arguments regarding the question as to which teachings were the essence and which were the function, which were the root and which were merely the branches. Yet, we must remember that even the farthest branches still resonate and are perfumed by the essence of the roots. This becomes quite clear when reading the first translated essay, Chŏng’s On Mind, Material Force, and Principle( Simgiri p’yŏn, 心氣理篇). Its argument is rather straightforward: Buddhists mistake the Mind to be the root and Taoists mistake Material Force ( Qi) to be the root, but these are only the branches and it is actually the (Confucian) Principle ( Li) which is the primal essence that underlies (and perfumes) both Mind and Qi. This is a fascinating short essay, which, although it may misrepresent Buddhism and Taoism at times, generally helps to elucidate the different foci of the three traditions. It goes on to reiterate Zhu Xi’s critique of Buddhists as being overly fearful of death, saying that both [End Page 274]Buddhists and Taoists spend their lives only attempting to escape or delay death, forgetting that justice and humaneness are more important than one’s body. Chŏng’s later essay, An Array of Critiques of Buddhism( Pulssi chappyŏn, 佛氏雜辨), launches a more vehement attack against Buddhism. It states that Buddhist masters are glib, lewd, and tricky, spreading confusion and disputation among the people, and calls for the burning of their books. Such attacks on...