Vladimir Tikhonov, Owen Miller, trans. Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to Socialism With a Buddhist Face. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008. vii + 263 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-905246-47-2.
Reviewed by Micah Auerback
Published on H-Buddhism (November, 2008)
Commissioned by Jin Y. Park
Global Attention to a Global Buddhist Thinker: Bringing a Leading Modern Korean Buddhist to an Anglophone Readership
Tikhonov and Miller have done us a great service in producing the first monograph-length publication in English to treat the Buddhist thought of the Korean Buddhist monk Han Yongun (1879-1944). Known by his monastic sobriquet Manhae, Han enjoys continued renown in his land as a poet and as an activist for national independence, but remains largely unknown even to scholars of Buddhism in the West and Japan.[1] This welcome volume not only introduces Han as a Buddhist thinker, but also represents the first collection of scholarly translations into English of primary historical materials from modern (late nineteenth/early twentieth century) Korean Buddhism. As such, it gestures toward an “internationalization” of Han Yongun studies--particularly valuable because one of the volume’s chief contributions lies in showing just how deeply Han himself engaged with some of the global intellectual trends of his world. These included Social Darwinism, socialism, and nationalism. After the insightful introduction, which acknowledges such varied influences upon Han as Liang Qichao (1873-1929), Japanese Buddhist reform movements, and Christian socialism, the volume offers translations grouped into three headings: “Korean and World Buddhism,” “Criticism of the Anti-Religion Movement,” and “Memoirs.”
Of particular interest in this volume is the translation in the first section of Han’s early treatise “On the Reform of Korean Buddhism” (Choso(n Pulgyo yusillon,1910), heretofore available to readers of English only in excerpts.[2] Tikhonov and Miller point out that from the 1970s onward, Han Yongun was rediscovered and appropriated by left-leaning minjung (mass-oriented) nationalists in the Republic of Korea (p. 11). This later history of reinvention is particularly fascinating, given that “On the Reformation of Korean Buddhism” evinces little sympathy for popular Buddhist practice in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Korea. In his specific prescriptions for the reform of popular Buddhism, Han condemns a range of practices deeply linked to common Buddhist devotion: (1) the recitation of the name of the Buddha Amita-bha (Ch. nianfo, Kor. yo(mbul) (pp. 69-73); (2) the worship of a pantheon of sacred figures from “Buddhist” and “folk” traditions, instead of devotion to the single image of the historical Buddha, S'a-kyamuni (pp. 88-96); and (3) the practice of the “economy of merit,” by which laypeople make offering to monks to memorialize the dead, and monks make themselves available for this purpose as “fields of merit” (pp. 96-99).[3] Far from demonstrating an investment in the lives and practices of Korea’s Buddhist laity, these proposals imply a deep suspicion of the very forms of devotion that would have typified the minjung Buddhism of his day. Indeed, one overarching pattern to emerge from the text as a whole is an advocacy of top-down reform in Korean Buddhism, guided and managed by elite educational and monastic institutions. Of course, we should not take this proposal as the final articulation of Han’s thought about the reform of Korean Buddhism. On pp. 26-27, the introduction briefly touches on his later, and shorter, Project for the Reform of Korean Buddhism (Choso(n Pulgyo Kaehyo(k an, 1931), whose translation and publication in the near future is a definite desideratum.
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