Taking Refuge in the Law: Monastic Litigation and a New History of Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the active legal role of Buddhist monastics in the society of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Chosŏn is thought to have been particularly successful in using the law to advance Neo-Confucianism and persecute Buddhism into irrelevance. Although scholars have long called for a fundamental reorientation of that understanding of Chosŏn Buddhism, they have stopped short of offering any workable alternative picture of its social realities. My dissertation does just this. I excavate and analyze the prodigious litigation in which Buddhist monastics became involved throughout those five centuries. Using that record, I show that rather than grinding monastics out, Chosŏn’s legal system, in interpreting and applying policy decisions, functioned steadily and predictably to bring the country’s monastics more and more tightly into the fold. I trace how this developed within monastic social and religious networks, within the country’s land use patterns, and within the country’s law itself. Finally, I follow monastic litigation over the Chosŏn/Colonial Period (1910-1945) divide to demonstrate how the roots of modern Korean Buddhism’s enduring, creative engagement with society through law run deeper than received wisdom tends to suggest. Dispensing with the common understanding of Chosŏn Buddhism as dependent or stagnant—or at best, of uncertain relevance—I introduce a new paradigm: monastics as integrated, responsive, and diverse, and pave the way for further empirical research of premodern Korean religious and legal culture.