ABSTRACT

A Korean proverb states that “A habit acquired at the age of three is likely to persist till one is eighty.” Likewise, the shamanistic worldview that forms the core of Korean religious culture has persisted for ages with remarkable resiliency, retaining its traditional “archaic” pattern and at times readily assuming protean forms or characters upon contact with outside cultural influences. Thus we cannot just say that the imported historic religions have been merely exterior layers. Rather, there have been extensive mutual modifications, reformulations, and even mutations in the indigenous and imported religions in the welter that followed a dynamic process of religious interactions. The modernizing and globalizing forces that are at work in today’s world have also challenged these religions. Yet despite these pressures, the fact that traditional shamanistic ways of thinking and acting left their deep-rooted remnants in the Korean mind is truly an intriguing problem. To get a clearer insight into this phenomenon, we might profit by looking into the examples of the persistence of folk beliefs in other countries. What do we learn from the tenacious persistence of the autochthonous animistic beliefs of vital spirits such as phī (phii), thaen, and khwan in Thailand, nat in Burma, and Vietnamese hon even when these lands have become predominantly Buddhist societies? These cults were homegrown and integral to the worlds of local everyday experience. As June C. Nash put it, the nats (a group of age-old, evil animist spirits), for example, are “an extension of the human society in the villages, and propitiation of them affects one’s fortune in this life.” If Buddhism is for the next life, the nat cults help people “in this life,” offering succor, good luck, and providing valuable protection in precarious times, without ever competing with Buddhist ideology.1 Burma or Myanmar is best known as a predominantly Theravada Buddhist country with ubiquitous burgundy-robed monks. Nevertheless, as much as 80 percent of the Burmese at once believe in the nats, without any apparent sense of disagreement. Even so, there has been tension between Buddhism and animist beliefs in Burma. While Buddhism pursues the principle of the renunciation of the world for the ultimate salvation of the attainment of nirvana, the nat religion is an amoral magical religion that

embraces the world for the attainment of worldly goals. Besides doctrinal inconsistency, there is also “a conflict in ethos” or “opposite orientations to the world.” While holding that “Buddhism enjoys unambiguous primacy,” this does not mean “monopoly,” according to Melford E. Spiro. Rather, the nat cults have rendered the persistence of Buddhism possible by draining “the bacchanalian needs, prohibited by Buddhism” into the nat cults, “thereby obviating the necessity either of opposing Buddhism or of corrupting it.”2 Despite various efforts to stifle the belief, long-standing nat cults that pre-date the arrival of Buddhism have persisted, if anything, bringing more people to the cult.3 Even to this day, many people in these societies who have long been Buddhists still perform this indigenous rite to venerate the vital spirits of the rice, calling upon them to ensure that everything will go well with fertility and life.4 A classic dualistic pattern of oscillation between native and foreign religions that we see in these countries sheds much light on the resilience and syncretistic character of shamanism and the related folk belief in Korea. The extremely fluid and flexible characteristics inherent in traditional Korean beliefs have enabled them to adapt to the changes readily. In shamanism, a mudang bargains hard with gods for a constant supply of favors and wins them; she knows how to bargain herself out of predicaments, too. The tenacity with which she clings to her objective is the essential quality that has allowed shamanism to survive in season and out of season, assimilating alien elements in exogenous religions or easily amalgamating itself into a religious melting pot of folk beliefs and practices. We could give credit to this very essential feature in shamanism for the relative lack of hostile religious conflicts in the country’s long religious history. While in the United States one joins a church as a private voluntary association on the basis of confession of faith, no one in Korea joins a shaman shrine or mudang kut community on the basis of a belief. Rather, most Koreans are born into the local culture where a shamanistic way of thinking and being forms its essential symbolic “template.” It is in terms of this inculcated “culture patterns” that the people make sense in cosmic terms of things that happen in their lives and guide their behavior. Yet, to most Koreans shamanism is also more than inculcated “culture patterns.” It forms the very subterranean basis of their unlettered, habitual, and realistic temperament and is their primary cultural support in adjusting to their environment. Better yet, it provides them with accustomed attitudes toward life with a familiar set of moods and motivations, which stays in the background underneath the changing surface but plays an important role in their secular life.5 Even shamanism itself proves not to be an entirely native Korean product, as is evident if we compare its nature and characteristics with those of Shintō 神道 in Japan. Let us simply mention several outstanding cases that illustrate such similarities. Shintō, like Korean Musok, has often been regarded as the oldest indigenous Japanese religion with native roots and it originally didn’t even have a name. Rather, the name Shintō, which means the “way of the gods,” was coined self-consciously to distinguish it from the “Way of the Buddha” only after the massive importation of Chinese culture and especially Buddhism in the

sixth century ce. It is reminiscent of the Muslims’ introduction of the concept “Hindu” into India. Shintō lacked a doctrinal identity to stand on its own. In the course of history it could not successfully resist the influence of other religions and thoughts such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, and it had been nurtured and transformed by them. Shintō is not totally Japanese in origin at that, because it shares, along with Korean Musok, elements from religious phenomena of Siberia, Mongolia, and Inner Asia, and even of similar phenomena in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. As an ancient religion of the nation of rice cultivators, Shintō is centered on the concept of kami 神 found at the core of the elementary beliefs and practices of Japanese religious culture. According to the famous classic definition of Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長, 1730-1801), a leading advocate of nativist National Learning (Kokugaku 國學), in ancient usage kami was a term to designate an “awe-inspiring” sacred world of “everything that is strange, fearful, mysterious, marvelous, uncontrolled, full of power, or beyond human comprehension.” It also conjures up the worship and aesthetic appreciation of nature to celebrate life and fertility (musubi 産靈 or generative force), deified emperors and heroes, and deities of Japanese mythology.6 Primarily concerned with such communal ritualistic observances as festivities and pilgrimage, Shintō, like shamanism, devalued theological or doctrinal matters, ethical questions, and political principles as insignificant. Shintō does not have a founder, fixed doctrines, sacred writings, or church organizational structure such as we associate with the notion of religion in the West. Subscribing to the reigning values of society, it accounts for the origin, history, and distinctiveness of the particularistic Japanese tradition and forms the foundation of ethnocentric Japanese self-understanding and racial identity, which dichotomizes two opposite principles: insiders and outsiders; good and evil; and purity and pollution. The Japanese and Korean episodes of the descent of the offspring of the heavenly deities from the heavens on mountains and in trees present striking similarities. A conceptual tendency to fuse together the shaman’s religious role with political rule in ancient theocracy is a common phenomenon in the two countries. The episodes of marriage of male gods descended from the heavens with the female goddesses of the earth or waters that are found in both countries are ultimately traceable to the northern Asian area. Therefore, it is not a big surprise that Shintō mythological, spatial symbolisms abound with the theme of longing for an eternal home, which is latent in Japanese cultural self-consciousness, and that it has long been associated with turning to Korea and the continental culture, the ultimate home of Japanese gods.7 Much like Korean shamanism, the history of Shintō is the story of interaction and syncretistic fusion with foreign religions, especially with Confucianism and Buddhism. Today in Korea one can find nearby almost every main shrine of the Buddha two subsidiary ones dedicated to the shamanistic, tutelary Mountain Spirit (sansin’gak 山神閣) and the Daoist Big Dipper (ch’ilsŏnggak 七星閣). The sansin shrine includes a picture of the tiger, the much-feared emissary of the

Mountain Spirit; and the Dipper are believed to benefit worshipers with longevity, health, and success. From the seventeenth century increasingly these divinities have been considered to be as worthy of veneration and placation as the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. People visit the main hall that enshrines the Buddhas and bodhisattvas as well as the subsidiary shrines that enshrine the deities of the shamanistic and Daoist pantheons, without even distinct awareness of the difference between the two symbiotic entities. It is not strange to see even today some Buddhist monks playing the role of shamans by engaging in popular practices such as folk medicine, exorcism, or divination; and such behavior by the monks represents the degree to which shamanism and Buddhism have intertwined, especially at the popular level.8 In the Sŏn and Pure Land cults, the idea of magical salvation and the Daoist idea of an immortal, youthful body have blended together with the Buddhist conception of otherworldly salvation. Underlying this tendency toward syncretism in Korea is the fact that the transcendent elements in Buddhism have been compromised to accommodate the values of shamanism, Daoism, and Confucianism that affirmed this world.9 This tendency to adjust the transcendental orientations of classical Buddhism to the political order and a more mundane this-worldly emphasis also happened in Japan during the seventh and eighth centuries.10 Both Korean Musok and Shintō lack a universally binding philosophical framework strong enough to resist foreign influence. What is more noteworthy, however, is that the this-worldly religious character so fundamental to both Musok and Shintō has largely drained the transcendental elements in historic religions into basically this-worldly orientations of the small local traditions. This contrasts with the process of synthesis as manifested in the imitation, adoption, or integration of Greek culture or ideals into a higher new unity of mixed cultures – Hellenism, for example, by the post-dispersion Jews or the Romans. For those morally conscious intellectuals who naturally assume the universal validity of certain beliefs and principles deeply rooted in the Western or Asian religious tradition, a political culture that does not posit the possibility of transcendental principles and ethical imperatives of the Bible or Buddhist and Confucian scriptures may be confusing or even annoying. It is because they take it for granted that all high civilizations develop ideals of unconditional, universal claim innate to humanity and conscience. In the Japanese tradition of moral culture and the Korean culture of Musok, however, moral orientations are contingent upon changing situations, and particularistic values and individual beliefs shift and change in terms of the changing situation. This stands in glaring contrast not only to the Western moral tradition but also to the Korean NeoConfucian moral culture, which imagined a set of unconditioned moral maxims of basic humanity rooted in the idea that the human world forms a single organic whole with Heaven and earth.11 While Japanese Shintō and Korean Musok had many characteristics in common, the distinctly different framework of Shintō serves as the perfect foil to Musok. Unlike in Korea, in Japan, there has been more periodic reformulation and restoration of its independent cultural identity, especially throughout the

Tokugawa period (1600-1867), by clearing out foreign accretions from ancient Shintō sources. The central matter of concern for the Japanese was the problem of legitimizing the state and defining collective national identity (yamato gokoro 大和心, Japanese soul) in the name of Shintō, in the face of the intrusions of foreign elements. Thus, between Tokugawa Japan and the modern period, the Japanese regarded the danger of the cultural assimilation or adulteration by alien Chinese culture (kara-gokoro から (唐) ごころ, Chinese mind), especially the transcendental and universalistic elements in classical Confucianism and Buddhism and later the encroachments of modernizing change as a threat to Japanese authenticity and cultural identity. Similarly, when later Christianity and Marxism challenged the paramount authority of the imperial order, the alien ideas were either banned or compelled to compromise their fundamental principles with the legitimacy of Japanese imperial authority. As a counter to these threats, since the Tokugawa period, and increasingly in the twentieth century, “archaic” Shintō nativism had been used, along with Confucian sources, as a state ideology to legitimize the uniqueness of Japan and the myth of racial superiority of the Japanese. Particularly, the ideology that had inspired and delineated the directions of extreme and exclusivist nativist intellectual discourse during the late Tokugawa period was drawn from Kokugaku 國學 (School of National Learning) and royalist sentiment advocated by Mitogaku 水戶學 (Mito School). It is in this cultural historical context that we can make sense of the process of nationalistic unification through State Shintō (Kokka Shintō 國家神道) since the Meiji Restoration12 as well as the so-called contemporary nostalgic and narcissistic discourse on the uniqueness of Japanese identity and national character (Nihonron 日本論). The traditional insular mindset that is preoccupied with the self image of the homogeneity of Japanese people and the uniqueness of their culture, language, and even the land itself inevitably leads to the sakoku 鎖國 (secluded nation) mentality, which is intrinsically incompatible with the popular catchword kokusaika 國際化 (internationalization) that requires the a far-reaching transformation of Japan’s particularistic order to meet global, or universal norms and standards.13 What is so distinctive about the development of the nativist movements under the influence of Shintō? It is that both Confucianism and Buddhism took a flexible turn to legitimate the Tokugawa regime and the Japanese society by draining the universalistic and transcendental elements inherent in classical Confucianism and Buddhism into more immanent, particularistic, and situational discourses.14 The remarkable assimilative power and nationalistic spirit exhibited in State Shintō molded and transformed not only Confucianism and Buddhism in the name of “Japanism” but also later-comer Japanese Christianity, accommodating its universalism to the claims of national Shintō uniqueness and the Japanese spirit.15 The most outstanding characteristic in the Japanese way of culture import and acculturation is the persistent and easily visible pattern of Japanizing foreign influences by the accretion of sediments, laying layer upon layer of cultural imports over the bottom layer of the archetypal culture, which Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 called kosō 古層 (an age-old structure or bottom

layer) or genkei 原型 (an archetype).16 Shintō could be considered as an example par excellence of the Japanese archetypal culture. A simple, ramification of this national habit is that Japanese rulers have always imagined themselves as representing ultimate virtues. Unlike in Korea, and for that matter, in China and Vietnam, too, where classical Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism in principle held even the rulers accountable for the transcendental and universalistic Mandate of Heaven, the emperor in Japan was regarded as the embodiment of the divine and therefore was not to be held accountable to anyone. Japan’s long held belief in a special connection between the divine and the nation, which was articulated by the Kokugaku, resurfaced in the 1930s and 1940s, serving Japan to legitimate the fabrication of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere under imperial Japan’s hegemony with devastating historical consequences. The aforementioned Nihonron is only a reincarnation of the old belief in Japan’s uniqueness in modern garb, and it seems that such a myth always comes to the surface, especially when the country is under duress, anachronistically resorting to the old myth of national exceptionalism as a means of self-assurance and self-assertion. The Japanese national exceptionalism becomes clear too, in Japan’s response to Catholic Christianity, which was brought to Japan in 1549 and spread rapidly in a relatively short time, winning up to one million converts. Threatened by the fear that the Christianity might eclipse the supreme power of Japan, Catholic missionaries were barred in 1587, followed by the cruel persecutions of Christians that culminated in the ban on Christianity in 1614. This sad past inevitably shaped Japan’s restrictive policy against Christianity in the Meiji period.17 In contrast, however, in China and especially in Korea, where Christianity had no less difficult beginnings than in Japan, it could eventually penetrate the countries after a checkered history, sustaining its influences for a long time and making the countries the focus of Christian expansion in East Asia. It is also noteworthy that Japan’s unique Shintō nationalism has nurtured in the Japanese people that they are all members of the so-called ie 家, which literally means household. In reality, however, this quasi-familial collectivity or “corporate group” is distinguishable from both Korean chip, Chinese chia 家, and the “household” or “family” in English because it refers to a larger network of a consensual and hierarchically arranged order, which transcends blood kin and serves the national solidarity symbolized by the living deity emperor. In traditional Japanese society ie was a functionally rational and goal-oriented collectivity devoted to production and warfare, but in modern Japan this feudal idea has been somewhat on the wane. Shintō is the fountain that has fed the spiritual resources that unify Japanese with the nationalistic ties and obligations of kinfolks of the larger, mythical, and unique national community structure headed by the imperial household of Japan. The entire Japanese society even today can be considered as an “ie civilization,” because all other patterns of social organization in Japan are formed according to this model.18