Violent Buddhism : Korean Buddhists and the Pacific War, 1937~1945

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 국제한국문학문화학회
· 수록지 정보 : 사이間SAI / 7호 / 169 ~ 204페이지
· 저자명 : 박노자

초록

This article deals with the ideological fundament of the support to the Japanese war efforts rendered by the institutionalized monastic Buddhism in Korea in 1937‐1945, during the Pacific War. In the beginning, I discuss the main institutional frameworks for colonial Buddhism in Korea, as provided by the Japanese Government‐General’s laws and regulations, particularly the Temple Law (1911). I attempt to show that, while having essentially become an organic part of the colonial administrative apparatus, institutional Buddhism was rewarded by a privileged position on the colonial religious market, and showed a robust modern development (in terms of the opening of new missionary stations, schools etc.) during the colonial age. However, its cohesive relationship with the Japanese authorities prevented it from acquiring modern nationalist credentials of the sort partly obtained by Protestant Christianity, and small groups of nationalist and liberal dissidents－best represented by Han Yongun (1879‐1944)－remained to all intents and purposes a rather powerless minority in the Buddhist monastic ranks.
While active participation of Korean monastic Buddhists in the mass propagandist campaigns of the colonial administration began already in the early 1930s, the start of the Pacific War (1937) saw a dramatic strengthening of Buddhist collaboration with Japanese governmental policies. Monastic Buddhists provided the most essential wartime ritual services (their memorial rites for the dead soldiers were important in inculcating the idea of the “honourable” and “karmically salubrious” nature of the battlefield death) and concomitantly were serving the Japanese Empire as war donations collectors, Japanese language teachers, propagandists etc. On the ideological level, those activities were legitimized by the belief in the Japanese Empire as a “Buddhist state” waging a “dharmic war” against “Christian enemies” for the sake of unifying the whole world under its aegis. The Mahayana ideas of all‐inclusive totality were described as the philosophical grounds for the wartime “totalitarian statehood” (the term was used approvingly), and the battlefield experience was explained in the terms of Buddhist “self‐cultivation” and Bodhisattva‐like self‐sacrifice. While much of the war‐approving ideology of the wartime colonial Buddhism was undoubtedly borrowed from the contemporaneous Japanese sources, it looks as if the leading figures of the Korean Buddhist establishment had hopes and plans of their own, envisioning great enhancement of their position both domestically and internationally in case of the ultimate victory for the Japanese.
The belief in desirability of the cooperation with the state war efforts became deeply ingrained into the minds of the Korean Buddhist leaders as a result of their experiences during the Pacific War. Their willing cooperation with the South Korean state and its army has been continuing after the end of the colonialism and shows no signs of weakening so far.

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