The Royal Asiatic Society will hold its first semi-monthly Lecture-Meeting of May this coming Tuesday the 8th, at 7:30 pm, in the 2nd-floor Resident’s Lounge of the Somerset Palace Residence (downtown, near Anguk Station, west of Exit #6; north of Jogye-sa Temple. All in English, open to the public (small donation requested from non-members, w5,000 recommended), as always; more info: 763-9483 and www.raskb.com (includes location-map).
This one should be especially interesting all those of us who get into Korea’s religious / cultural history: Professor Sem Vermeersch (PhD History from SOAS of the University of London, now at Daegu’s Keimyung University) will speak on “The Life of an Eminent Koryŏ Monk“. He specializes in Goryeo history and the history of Korean Buddhism; he is now preparing for publication a new book _The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism during the Koryŏ Dynasty_.
See the first response for more detail of his lecture. See you there…
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“Some years ago, John Kieschnick wrote a book called The Eminent Monk, in which he discussed the representation of Chinese monks in biographic and hagiographic literature, and what such images tell us about religious ideals and reality.
China of course has a much more extensive literature on this subject than Korea, at least in terms of written or published documents; however, Korea has a virtually unexplored wealth of unique source materials, namely inscriptions on stone. Especially in the Koryŏ period, dozens of huge stone monuments were erected to commemorate the deeds of eminent monks.
In this lecture, I will look at the life of an eminent Koryŏ monk as it appears in such stele inscriptions. On the basis of one representative example, I will sketch what the typical life of a monk looked like, from his birth to his final nirvana and beyond.
Besides factual information about his monastic career, the inscriptions also contain stories about miracles, beliefs and practices that add some color to the life and times of medieval Korean monks. Buddhism was one of the main religions of Koryŏ, but a look at the ideal (and some not so ideal) monks can tell a lot of what kind society Koryŏ actually was.
By the way, the RAS Lecture now up on http://www.korea.com is Samuel Hawley’s “America’s Man in Korea in the 1880s: The Travels and Tribulations of George C. Foulk” from January 23, 2007. Late-19th-Cen Korean history-buffs, Enjoy…
TONIGHT !
i’m bringing a few students from my Korean Buddhism History/Tourism course, to flesh out the crowd…
It was quite good, informative — plenty of points that i’d not previously known / noticed / considered. Crowd a bit sparse — maybe because of the competition, Yonsei GSIS Forum on a Shamanism subject on the same evening, too bad. But i was glad i went, and so were my friends & students…
Pretty bad Yellow Dust today!
Well worth the time. Both the lecture (with illustrations) and the questions raised some interesting points for further investigation. My favourite, asked by one of the facilitators, was: Why the architectural change in the transition from Goryo to Choseon? He was referring to the detailed bas relief common to Goryo columns that promptly disappeared under Choseon. Kudos to Professor Vermeersch and the RAS!