Compared with its prior status, the Buddhist world in Chosun was much reduced in its scale, and apparently lowered in its place. These changes had been carried out by various policies against Buddhism adopted in the 15th ~ 16th centuries in order to c...
Compared with its prior status, the Buddhist world in Chosun was much reduced in its scale, and apparently lowered in its place. These changes had been carried out by various policies against Buddhism adopted in the 15th ~ 16th centuries in order to constrict its material and human resources. This study, accepting the existing studies, takes aims at characterizing empirically in how the Buddhist world had survived in those conditions where it was oppressed, and when its existential aspects had been established in the Chosun period.
For about a hundred years since its foundation, the Chosun Dynasty had disposed of the officially authorized national Buddhist temples through national policies, which seem to have had influence on private temples in various areas. Andong is worth considering as it had been under the influence of the central government's policies and had undergone Confucian consolidation, simultaneously.
Most of the Buddhist sanctums among the most representative in the Andong area that could be seen in various geographies edited by government until the early 16th century were closed in the middle and late 16th century, and there were cases in which those Buddhist facilities that had been rebuilt by government and people in the late 15th century were damaged deliberately by the government or the upper class, Yang-ban(兩班). Sometimes some Buddhist sanctums were rebuilt, but all of those rebuilting were carried out through the Buddhist services for the donators' ancestral burial grounds.
In addition, those areas where Confucian lecture halls were built, and many institutions like Seowon(書院: a building for study where one could sit and read silently) and Jungsa(精舍: a building to accomodate a monk who managed the burial grounds of some family in the era of Chosun Dynasty) were distributed reflected strong Confucian attitudes, and showed the phenomena of much sharper decline in the number of the Buddhist temples, of which cases Imha-hyeon(臨河縣) and Pungsan-hyeon(豊山縣) as well as regions of the headquarters were the most typical ones. The large buildings of the Buddhist temples closed in those ways were transformed into Confucian facilities like Seowon(書院), Seodang(書堂), Jaesa(齋舍) or their structural materials were diverted into properties of government, which shows their aspects in which they were actively absorbed into the system of Confucianism.
Furthermore, more than half of the large and formal Buddhist temples in the Andong area in that period had been closed, and more than the other half of the rest temples had survived in the form of a small?scale Buddhist cell. In addition to this, temples in mountainous areas only were mostly left untouched whereas 2/3 of the Buddhist temples in plain areas had been closed. Thus, about 80% of the Buddhist temples located in mountainous areas when "Yeonggaji(『永嘉誌』)" was being written.
Consequently, it is conceivable that Buddhism in the Chosun period was reduced both on the sides of scale and power due to the strengthening of the Confucian regime along with the policies against Buddhism such as interruption of financial support from government. The above mentioned cases of the Andong area show that those Buddhist temples in rural districts were managed in a small scale in order to survive, or located in mountainous areas dispelled from plain areas under such conditions, which verifies that these changes occurred intensively in the middle and late 16th century.