KOREA’S IRRELIGION.
Korea has no religion. This is a sweeping statement, I know, and one
that is susceptible of a great deal of dispute, but I believe that in
the main it is true. The books that have been written during the last
hundred years about Korea teem with thick chapters on Korea’s religion,
but for all that, I believe that Korea is without religion. There are
without doubt Koreans who are deeply and genuinely religious, but they
are so infinitesimal a fraction of the population of the peninsula that
they no more justify us in crediting Korea with a religion than the
handful of Theosophists, who are probably in England to-day, would
justify a Korean in crediting England with an at all large acceptance of
Theosophy. Buddhism, which was once as dominant in Korea as ever it has
been in China or Japan, has been almost destroyed. Confucianism is still
a great power in Korea, as it must be in every country where
ancestor-worship and the sanctity of the family are the backbone of the
nation’s moral existence. But I maintain that Confucianism is not,
properly speaking, a religion. It is a theory of ethics, a code of
morals, admirable, sublime even, but it is not, as I understand the word
religion, a religion. There are superstitions in Korea and to spare. The
common people are as superstitious as the common people of any other
civilized country, which is saying a great deal, and the upper classes
are by no means free from superstition. But who shall venture to call
superstition a religion? Unless we call superstition and religion
synonymous; unless we accept Confucianism as an individual and actual
religion; or unless we say that a few scattered monasteries, that must
by law be built far beyond the walls of a city—monasteries inhabited by
monks, who are looked down upon even by the common people, and are not
allowed within the gates of any city; monasteries that are resorted to
by the leisure classes for revel and for roystering, and never for
prayer or penitence—unless we say that these constitute a national
religion, we must, I think, admit that Korea is distinctly irreligious.
The real difficulty in deciding whether Korea is in any way religious or
altogether irreligious lies in the difficulty of distinguishing clearly
between religion and superstition. The dividing line between the two is
often indistinct—sometimes missing altogether—so perhaps I am wrong in
saying that a country so amply dowered with superstition is devoid of
religion.
I base my statement that Korea has no religion not upon the absence of
religion from Korea, not upon the paucity of religion in Korea, but upon
the fact that in Korea religion is neither respected nor respectable. Of
course, if we define religion as broadly as do some of the most eminent
authorities (Rossiter Johnson, W. Smith, Bishop Taylor, Macaulay, and a
host of others), and admit that atheism and superstition are forms of
religion—and I am far from sure that they are not—my statement
totters, if it does not altogether tumble.
Buddhism was until three hundred years ago strong in Korea, and
Confucianism, which, if not a religion, is the most elaborate, and one
of the most perfect systems of morality that the world has ever known,
and has served humanity better than most religions, is strong in Korea
still. A study of these two is, as is the study of all the higher
Oriental doctrines, beliefs, and systems of thought, intensely
interesting, and the temptation to dwell here upon Buddhism and
Confucianism is great. But I fancy that everyone who is interested in
reading about so remote a part of the East as Korea is more or less
familiar with the outlines at least of both Buddhism and Confucianism,
and so I will content myself with trying to tell how the first was
driven out of Chosön, and how the second is still the guardian angel of
such morality as the peninsula possesses.
Buddhism flourished there for centuries, and it was at least tolerated
until the Japanese invasion in 1592. Indeed, up to that time Korea was
not only not without a religion, but she was not without several. The
religions of the Far East are as easy-going as the peoples—they are
modest as a rule, the beliefs of further Asia—and rub along together
very amicably, no one of them seeming over-sure that it is better than
its fellows.
Three hundred years ago, when two great Japanese warriors, Konishi and
Kato, with their respective armies landed in Korea, each was so anxious
to have the glory of reaching and conquering the capital before the
other, that neither dare pause to subdue the towns and the fortresses
(and many of these latter were monasteries) that lay along his route.
Yet neither dare leave behind him a long track of unsubdued and, for
those days, well-armed country. In this dilemma they dressed themselves
and their followers in the garbs of Buddhist priests, and so by strategy
made their entrance into the walled cities, and into the forts, and once
in, put the inhabitants, the unprepared soldiers and monks, to death.
About thirty years afterwards, when Korea had shaken off, for the time
at least, the Japanese yoke, the Korean priests suffered for the
cupidity of the Japanese generals; as the innocent so generally do
suffer for the guilty in this nice world of ours. The royal decree went
throughout Korea that no Buddhist priest might dwell or even pass within
the gates of a walled city. The priests fled to the mountains, and there
erected themselves such dwellings as they could. The monasteries, in
which they had lived within the city’s walls, crumbling away with time,
and decaying with disuse, ceased to be architectural features of any
Korean city. And this is why all Korean cities are so monotonous in
aspect. For religion has been the patron of architecture as of art, of
music, of literature, and of drama the world over, and more especially
so in the Orient. The priests of the temples of Buddha, having incurred
the disfavour of the government, rapidly lost what hold they had had
upon the people. And the nation, which had always considered its king
almost mightier and more divine than its very gods, soon ceased to pay
tribute to, or ask the services of, a body of men who had lost the royal
countenance. Then, too, the Koreans are great dwellers in cities. They
go far into the country to look at Nature, to rest, and to amuse
themselves, but it would never occur to the Korean mind to journey far
for prayer or sacrifice. So the revenues of the monasteries fell off.
Men well-born and well-to-do ceased to join the order. And little by
little Korean Buddhism passed away, until now it is but a wraith of its
old self.
This at least is the most general account of how Korea ceased to be
Buddhist, but its authenticity is disputed by several of the most
reliable historians, and by one, at least, who has written in English.
These historians claim that some centuries ago all the powerful people
in Korea were divided into two factions—one Buddhist, one
Confucist—and great was the rivalry between these two. Social war
ensued, and the Buddhists, who had become corrupt and enervated, were
terribly defeated. Buddhism was forbidden to dwell within the capital or
within the cities. True, the monasteries that had always been important
features of the rural landscape were in no way interfered with, but
“banishment from the cities produced two results. First, desuetude
rendered the mass of the people quite oblivious to religious matters;
and secondly, the withdrawal of religion from the seats of power threw
the profession into disfavour with the aristocracy. . . . Here, then, we
have a community without a religion—for the cities are to a peculiar
degree the life of the land—a community in which the morality of
Confucius for the upper classes, and the remains of old superstitions
for the lower, takes its place.”
How, then, in Korea have the religiously mighty fallen! For Buddhist
monks once formed a fourth portion of the entire male population of
Chosön, and there were tens of thousands of them in Söul alone. At first
thought it seems strange that now any Korean should be found willing to
embrace the monastic life; but the Koreans are not industrious, many of
them are wretchedly poor, and life in the monasteries affords the
greatest opportunity for the indolent, dreamy, and meditative life, and
the proximity to Nature, which is so dear to the Korean heart. No Korean
monk is called upon to do hard manual labour, and it is still almost a
religion with the Koreans, rich and poor, to give something toward the
sustenance, and even toward the creature comforts of the brothers. So
laziness, and poverty, and misery keep the Korean monasteries and the
Korean nunneries from falling into utter disuse. Strangely enough, the
monks of Korea rarely or never have the brutal sinful-looking faces that
characterize so many of their brethren in China.
I should divide the religion, or the irreligion, of Korea into
rationalism: the religion of the patricians; and superstition: the
religion of the plebeians. Both rationalism and superstition are well
controlled by a system of morality which is rooted in Confucianism, and
impregnably enwalled by ancestor-worship.
Rationalism and superstition have their points of touch—points at which
the one is indistinguishable from the other—lost in the other—in Korea
as everywhere else.
I do not mean that reason and unreason ever lose themselves in each
other, though, like other rival powers, the boundary line between them
may be narrower than any fraction of any hair, and quite imperceptible
to human eyes.
Korean rationalism is practically identical with rationalism the world
over. Korean superstitions are unique in form if not in essence. It
merits at least passing notice that Reason expresses herself in one way
everywhere, and that Unreason in different parts of the earth speaks in
tongues as differing as fantastic.
The expression of Korean superstition is picturesque. The more
picturesque a superstition is the more impregnable it is.
Korean demon-worship is positively fascinating. Superstition has not
always been the power in Korea that it is now. In Korea religion and
superstition have played a long game of see-saw. The Koreans outgrew
their early superstitions, discarded them, and embraced a highly
civilized and civilizing form of religion; then they discarded that
religion. Now, the average human mind must believe in something outside
of its own material ken, beyond its own demonstrating. _Quod erat
demonstrandum_ forms no part of the rituals and the creeds of most
religions, so when the time came that Buddha and his coterie of
well-bred and fairly rational deities had practically been banished from
Korea, the Koreans fell back on their old superstitions, and to-day
superstition and its ridiculous rites are more rife in Korea than in any
other civilized country.
There are three classes of supernatural beings in whom the people of
Korea believe—the demons who work all manner of evil, the beneficent
spirits whose practice it is to do good occasionally, and who
semi-occasionally combat the evil spirits, and an intermediate class of
spirits who dwell, as a rule, on the mountains, and neither work good
nor evil, but who, in themselves and in their lives, are the subjects of
much charming folk-lore. The Korean—the Korean of the populace—the
superstitious Korean attributes all his ills to demons. He, being a
Korean, cannot conceive that Nature can be malignant, nor can he
conceive that he is ever punished for breaking laws of whose very
existence he is ignorant. So he peoples the air, the sea, and the rocks
with devils of earthquake, devils of pestilence, devils of lightning,
devils of hurricane, and a thousand other devils of blight and of
sorrow. Having determined that they cause all his troubles, he then sets
about doing the best he can to propitiate the spirits of evil. Korean
demons are supposed to be very small, and I have never heard of one to
whom much physical strength was attributed; and almost always when it
comes to a face-to-face contest between one of them and a powerful man
(and such contests occur very often in Korean myths), the demon has the
worst of it. Still, the majority of the Korean populace live in
unceasing terror and dread of these demons. Korean methods of
circumventing them are delightful, and delightfully simple. I have
already spoken of the beasts that sit on guard on many Korean roofs.
They are supposed to be the most efficacious combatants of the Korean
devils; but the privilege of having them is rather monopolized by
royalty and by the high favourites of the royal family. On lintels of
the houses of well-to-do Koreans are usually hung two oblong pieces of
coloured paper upon which are drawn in black, or two oblong pieces of
white paper on which are drawn in colours, terrible enough portraits of
two famous old generals. One of these warriors was a Chinaman, the other
was a Korean, and both are renowned in the legends of the peninsula as
having waged highly successful warfare against several evil spirits of
Chosön, and their portraits are supposed to protect the houses, outside
of which they hang, from the invasion of the imps of mischief and of
misery. Korean devils, for some unfathomable reason, are supposed to be
far more powerful indoors than out, and so the Koreans are at special
pains to exclude their devilships from Korean interiors. The Korean
householder, who is debarred by poverty or by his own social inferiority
both from using the roof-scarecrows, and from hanging counterfeit
presentments of the two old warriors on his portals, fastens a strip of
cloth and some wisps of rice straw outside his door. He fastens the rice
straw there in the hope that the devil about to enter may be hungry, and
stop to gorge himself and then go away. He fastens the bit of cloth
(which must be torn from some old garment of his own), because the
Koreans have the nice taste to consider their devils extremely stupid,
and so believe that any devil who is confronted with a fragment of a
man’s garment will mistake it for the man himself, and, in view of how
often men have defeated devils, fly and trouble that house no more.
The evil spirits of Korea are also frightened away by noise; noise so
enormous, so metallic, so discordant, so altogether diabolical, that it
is no wonder the devils rush from it, rush on their wings of sulphurous
flame, and the only wonder is that any human person or persons can
endure to make it. This practice of frightening with noise the evil ones
of heaven (for mark you, the peoples of the Far East, unlike the Greeks,
have no belief in Hades) is common to China, to Siam, to Korea, and to
Burmah. The devil-jails and the devil-trees, and the professional
devil-catchers, of which I have spoken before, come in importance next
to the roof-beasts, and then, I think, come the prayer-poles. A
prayer-pole may be a straight, symmetrical, polished piece of wood, or
it may be a carelessly cut branch of a tree. In either case it is stuck
in the earth a few feet from the doorway, and on it are hung prayers to
the good spirits, and bits of rag, and bits of refreshment to allure and
deceive the evil spirits. Sometimes a bell is hung on the top of the
branch to attract the attention of both the cursers and the blessers of
the land.
The good spirits that inhabit the big kingdom of Korean credulity are
unfortunately lazy, and have to be rather urgently supplicated when
their good services are needed. When their good services are not needed
they are left, to do the Koreans justice, beautifully alone. But when
the evil-doers who dwell in the Korean heaven get altogether
unmanageable, the good spirits are called upon with dance and with song,
with counting of rosaries and with ringing of bells, to wage war against
their wicked brethren. Often the Korean angels, being Korean, go to
sleep, forget to wake up, and neglect to send rain. The sending of rain
is one of their few active offices. If it does not rain in Korea the
rice does not grow in Korea, and then, indeed, are the Korean devils to
pay. When drought falls upon Korea all Korea prays. The superstitious
and the rational kneel down together, and if their united invocations
fail to pierce the slumber of their well-meaning deities, then the king
goes beyond the city’s walls, and entering into a temple, or a sort of
rustic palace that is kept in readiness for the purpose, throws himself
upon the ground, and prays that his people may be blessed with rain. The
rain may fall the next day, it may fall the next moon; but whenever it
falls the loyal Koreans attribute it altogether to the intercession of
their king. It is only when drought falls upon the land that the
ordinary Korean is allowed to pray directly to most of the Korean gods.
But every Korean has a household spirit—a good guardian angel of his
own hearthside—to whom he may pray as often as he likes. And best
beloved, most god-like, most fit to be worshipped, most fit to be prayed
to, most fit to be loved of the Korean gods, and of all the Korean
spirits, is one called “the blesser of little children.” He is the
favourite vassal of the great spirit: the phrase “great spirit” is as
often upon the tongue of a Korean as upon the tongue of a North American
Indian. “The blesser of little children” has under his personal charge
every home in Korea. He journeys from house to house scattering
blessings upon the baby heads, and forbidding evil to approach the baby
people.
The Koreans emphatically believe that Korea was originally peopled by
spirits and by fairies, and this belief has developed a folk-lore that
is delightful and interesting in the extreme, and that often reminds us
of the Norwegian folk-lore.
“When a belief rational and pure enough to be called a religion
disappears, the stronger minds among the community turn in self-reliance
to a belief in nothing; the weaker, in despair, to a belief in anything.
This happened here; and the anything to which they turned in this case
was what had never quite died out, the old aboriginal demon-worship.”
And the stronger minds among the Korean community turned to the belief
in nothing, which is so often called rationalism. But in Korea
rationalism is tinged with, almost disguised by, that strange phenomenon
of Asiatic mentality, of Asiatic belief, of Asiatic instinct called
ancestor-worship.
Ancestor-worship in Korea, and ancestor-worship in China, are almost
identical. The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising agnostic I
ever knew was a Korean. The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising
atheist I ever knew was a Chinaman, but both were staunch and
uncorruptible ancestor-worshippers. Korean ancestor-worship is more than
interesting, but it is merely a vassal of Chinese ancestor-worship.
Like, and with Confucianism, it has come from China to Korea, and like
and with Confucianism it is the mainstay of Korean morality. The worship
of ancestors is an almost daily detail of Korean life. The observances
of ancestor-worship are more rigidly carried out by the well-to-do
Korean rationalist than by the poor superstitious Korean peasant. Death
and burial mark the first, the greatest, and the most picturesque of the
functions of ancestor-worship. Logically enough, the death and the
interment of a child or of any unmarried person involves almost no
expense, and demands no ceremonial. The infant (an unmarried man or
woman of eighty is an infant in Korea) is wrapt about with the mats, the
tiger skins, or the rugs upon which he died. These are wrapt about with
rice straw, and the bundle is buried. That is the end of a Korean who
leaves no descendants. When the father of a family dies his eldest son
closes the eyes as the breath leaves the body, and the family (men and
women gather together for once) let loose their hair, and shriek and
sob, and, if possible, weep. So long as the dead remains in the house
his relatives eat the food they like least, and as little of that as
will sustain life. Indeed, the eldest son is supposed to eat nothing.
Four days after the death, the members of the family redress their hair,
and put on their first mourning. In Korea, as in all the Far East,
mourning consists of coarse, unbleached fabrics that are commonly
called, but are not quite, white. On this fourth day the family,
friends, and acquaintances prostrate, prostrate, and prostrate
themselves before the dead, and an exceptionally good dinner is laid
beside him. Huge loaves of especially prepared bread also, and as many
kinds of fruit as the market affords—the rarer, the more expensive, and
the more hard to obtain, the better. A dinner is also prepared for the
friends, but not for the family. About the body, and throughout the
house, candles and incense burn, and wailing is incessant. The mourners
and the professional wailers take turns in sleeping, and relieve each
other in the audible grieving. Paper money, that is, imitation money,
and long paper banners covered with the titles and the good qualities of
the dead, are burned. With the poor, burial takes place five, or at the
most nine days after death. With the rich the body remains unburied for
at least three months. Korean coffins, like Chinese coffins, are, or are
supposed to be, air-tight. But the Korean coffin is much smaller than
the Chinese coffin, and the spaces left between the outlines of the
coffin and the outlines of the body are, in Korea, filled up with the
old clothing of the dead. If the dead had not enough clothing, pieces of
linen or of silk are added to it. The rich Koreans usually employ a
geomancer to indicate the most auspicious day for burial. The coffin is
covered with beautiful brocaded silk, or with beautifully carved pieces
of wood. Prayers are said almost continuously, from the hour of death
until some time after the interment. The coffin is borne on a death-car,
a unique Korean vehicle, or by men who are hired for a small sum and who
do nothing else. Beside the coffin are carried the banners, recording
the rank and the virtues of the dead, and the lanterns which in life he
was entitled to use. His sons follow him, in Korean mourning, and
Chinese-like, leaning heavily upon sticks. Acquaintances and friends
bring up the rear, in sedan chairs and on horseback.
Korean graves are usually on hill sides, and are decorated at the utmost
possible expense. Even the graves of the Korean poor are well tended,
and covered with the gentle green grass, and with the soft flowers of
spring, if no monument or temple is possible. But if it can be managed,
a miniature temple is erected near the grave—a temple which is a
shelter for those who come periodically to mourn the dead—and the grave
is guarded with quaint stone images of men and other animals.
If a Korean family is unlucky they are very apt to think that one or
more of their ancestors has been buried in an uncongenial spot. Then, no
matter what the cost, no matter what the trouble, the grave is, or the
graves are, opened, and the dead moved to some more desirable place.
Korean mourning is as long or longer, as intricate or more intricate,
than Chinese mourning, but so similar to Chinese mourning, which has
been so often and so fully described, that it would be superfluous to
here more than mention Korean mourning.
Such, then, is the religion or the irreligion of Korea. Superstition for
the people; ancestor-worship for the people, the princes, and for those
who are between. Strange that a nation that has driven from its midst
one of the great religions of this earth, and has unrelentingly
persecuted the religion of Christ, should be so devoted in its
ancestor-worship. But which of us that has ever lain awake through the
wordless watches of the lonely night and longed in vain—
“For the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still,”
shall blame the Koreans for their incessant, their blind, filial
devotion?