Beyond the “Nation-Protecting” Paradigm : Recent Trends in the Historical Studies of Korean Buddhism

This paper is focused on the recent Western scholarship on the history of Korean Buddhism, and attempts to explain why Western scholars questioned the dominant paradigm of understanding Korean Buddhism as an expression of the “nation-protecting” tradition. This paper’'s initial part is devoted to the historicization of scholarship on Korean Buddhism. It develops the argument that the “nation-protecting” paradigm evolved in Meiji Japan, and was subsequently imported to Korea by Japanese scholars, engaged in the production of “knowledge” about Korean Buddhism. Japanese Buddhist scholarship emphasized the Sino-centric nature of Korean Buddhism. The Korean scholars of Buddhism in the late colonial and postcolonial eras uncritically inherited the Japanese theoretical model of “nation-protecting” Buddhism, and it was not until the late 1980’'s, the years marked by the growing momentum of radicalism, that some young Buddhist monks and scholars of Korean Buddhism questioned this paradigm and proposed an alternative “minjung” perspective to understand Korean Buddhism. This paper places scholarship on Korean Buddhism within the context of these significant developments, and proceeds to discuss Western intervention in the debate in the 1980s. Western scholars revealed the nationalist passion that underpinned major writings on Korean Buddhism, and more specifically they chose to attack “nation-protecting” projects for their weak conceptual foundation. This paper also takes up a few relevant Western studies to demonstrate in what ways they differed in terms of approach and methodology from the existing “nation-protecting” parameter of understanding the history of Korean Buddhism.