This dissertation studies on the implication of vocabulary derived from divination. There are many vocabulary derived from divination in the Korean language. But the National Language Dictionary doesn't have enough explanations about the vocabulary or...
This dissertation studies on the implication of vocabulary derived from divination. There are many vocabulary derived from divination in the Korean language. But the National Language Dictionary doesn't have enough explanations about the vocabulary origin, or even misses them.
Divination is widely used in modern times such as tarot, asterism, rice spread divination, horizontal lines divination, divination by the features, four pillars of destiny, shamanism, etc. As a matter of fact, the word, divination came from Bok(卜) which means telling the messages of God by human tongue. In the ancient Shang dynasty, they tried to tell the future by reading images appeared on the tortoise carapaces or bones of animal when heating them on fire. This method was called the divination by bones and tortoise carapaces. The royal family in Shang dynasty had documented the results of the divination by bones and tortoise carapaces. Those documents were first excavated in 1889 and have been researched for over 100 years. The study on the divination by bones and tortoise carapaces is relatively a newly developed research topic on the ancient divination. Those documents have the descriptions of primitive 64 trigrams that make the divination by bones and tortoise carapaces work as a matrix of divination. In the late Shang and early Zhou dynasty, the grass called Sicho(蓍草) had been used in addition to the bones and tortoise carapaces.
In the Shang dynasty, memorial service and divination were conducted together. At the memorial service, they tried to receive divinations for questions such as daily trivial problems, war, and the year's harvest. The Shang dynasty was the nation of theocracy, so the memorial services had been conducted almost the year for Nature, late kings, and Sangje(上帝). At the memorial service, king, royal family, shaman, and Jeongin(貞人) attended. There were always sacrifices such as cows, dogs, slaves, prisoners, and lower level shamans. As the Shang dynasty perished, shaman and Jeongin disappeared at the memorial service, and the relatives of kings carried memorial service later on.
In the era of warring states, a divination based on the numbers had replaced the divination by image reading. In the Han dynasty, a new divination method based on 『the Book of changes』was developed by Gyeongbang(京房); the five elements were added to Yin and Yang, and trigram, ten celestial stems and twelve earthly branches were used. And the applied divinations were born by creating Yukchin(六親) theory(logical reasoning of the six family relations) from Seol Gye Jeon in 『the Book of changes』. Those applied divination includes horizontal lines, Gimundungap(奇門遁甲), Chinese geomantic principles(風水地理), four pillars of destiny, the features etc. However, the root of all the divinations is the divination by bones and tortoise carapaces.
Vocabularies derived from such historical documents are still used in our language. Those vocabularies are derived from various sources such as memorial service and shamanism, 『the Book of changes』, and the applied divinations. Especially, the images on bones and tortoise carapaces were the source of Chinese characters. Chinese characters were widely used for recording the contents of divination, therefore, people under Chinese culture commonly use the language derived from the divination. As the Shang dynasty perished, people moved to other countries such as the Chu dynasty, the old Korea etc. Literatures showed that the customs of the Shang dynasty were transmitted to many countries. The professor Gang Sang-won argued that the dialects in our language came from the language used in the Shang dynasty which is called Sildham. He argued that Chinese characters are the transliteration of Sildham and those dialects are the root of languages in the countries of the East and West. And he added that the Shang dynasty was a nation of the Dongyi tribe, which had spreaded around the eastern parts of Asia such as Korea, China, and Japan. Even if the Shang dynasty existed in Chinese territory, their culture influenced over the territory. Therefore, we have to call them the Eastern Culture such as 『the Book of changes』, Chinese character, Yin and Yang five elements etc.
As divination was widely used in the literature, history, and philosophy, more vocabularies should be collected by the scholars of divination science, historian, and Korean language in addition to the vocabularies listed in this thesis. The effort would make the Korean Language dictionary more helpful for junior scholars and recover the honor of the divination which is taken as superstition in these days.