Please join the Society for Buddhist Studies for a talk by Juhn Ahn (University of Michigan).

In Goryeo and Joseon Korea, the restoration of Buddhist monasteries became the subject of heated debate. Although the Buddhist establishment in Korea had continued to restore monasteries at regular intervals for centuries, a growing number of high-profile individuals in the late Goryeo period began to voice strong concerns about the necessity of monastic restoration. Some claimed that restoration was wasteful. Others claimed that restoration was carried out by the greedy and corrupt for personal gain. Scholars of Korean Buddhism have tended to take these criticisms at face value and argue that late Goryeo Buddhism was indeed corrupt. In this talk Prof. Ahn hopes to revisit the evidence used to make such claims and show that these claims are essentially baseless and misleading. She also hopes to show that arguments in favor of or against Buddhist restoration work made on either public or private grounds gained salience only in the early Joseon period as what she call the politics of giving began to render the Buddhist practice of giving problematic. In lieu of a formal conclusion, this talk will offer some brief thoughts on how to best contextualize the public-private language that shaped the debate concerning Buddhism in early Joseon Korea and it will do so by taking a closer look at the broad transformations that took place in the general attitude towards Buddhism’s material splendor in Korea.

This event is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC and the Department of Asian Studies, and is open to all interested.