Buddhism in 21st Century Korea: A Giant with Feet of Clay?

Event time: 
Monday, April 6, 2020 - 1:30pm to 3:15pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

South Korea organizes a population census every five years. Besides basic information about individuals and families, every ten years the census also includes questions about religious affiliation. The results of this “religious census” are generally regarded as the most reliable statistics on the composition of South Korea’s religious population, and the results of the 2015 census were therefore eagerly anticipated. When they were finally made public in 2016, the results came as a shock to the Buddhist community: for the first time in living memory, Buddhism was no longer the biggest religion: the percentage of people who claimed Buddhism as their religion of choice had fallen from 22.8 to 15.5 per cent. This caused huge consternation among monks and lay believers alike, and gave rise to a lot of soul searching on what had gone wrong. In my presentation I will not try to give my own assessment of this “crisis” in Buddhist belief; rather, what interests me more is the Buddhist reaction: why is this considered so important? What do the methods employed to reverse the trend tell us about the self-identity of Korean Buddhism? What kind of analyses have been offered by Buddhists, and do these really get at the heart of the problem? Is the Jogye order, as the self-declared representative order of Korean Buddhism, prepared to implement far-reaching changes? These questions will help to reflect on the position of Korean Buddhism over the past century, and will hopefully also lead to some answers on the religious identity of Korean Buddhist monks and lay people.
Sem Vermeersch is a historian of Korean Buddhism. He is associate professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Seoul National University, and concurrently serves as the director of the International Center for Korean Studies, Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. His major field is the history of Korean Buddhism, focusing particularly on the organizational aspects of the religion, its social and political contexts, and its position within East Asian Buddhism. His recent publications include A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea: An Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryŏ (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016), “Views on Buddhist Precepts and Morality in Late Koryŏ” (Journal of Korean Religions 7:1 (2016)), and “Archival Practice in Premodern Korea: Record-Keeping as Archive and Historiography” (The Journal of Korean Studies 24:2 (2019)).

Sem Vermeersch - Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Seoul National University