Korean Buddhist Historiography and the Legacies of Japanese Colonialism (1910–1945)

Abstract

Recent research has begun reexamining assumptions surrounding the view that Korean Buddhism was merely a victim of Japanese imperialism starting in the late nineteenth century. This work has shown that it is conceptually untenable to continue to employ an exclusively binary framework of nationalism versus collaboration to analyze Korean Buddhist responses to the Japanese colonial state. Japanese colonialism raised a particular set of problems due to the historical position of Buddhism in Japan and Korea prior to colonial rule. On the one hand, emphasis on the alignment between the interests of the state and the Buddhist institution represented the possibility for Korean Buddhist clerics to reclaim prestige. On the other hand, that alignment of interests has bedeviled postliberation Korean Buddhist scholarship’s emphasis on the Korean Buddhist tradition’s commitment to ethnic nationalism. This chapter examines crucial elements of these problems to outline the influence of the Japanese colonial period on Korean Buddhist historiography.