Minjung Buddhism

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Minjung Buddhism (Minjung Pulgyo 民衆佛敎, "Buddhism of the Masses" or "the Oppressed") was a Buddhist activist movement in South Korea, active from roughly 1980 to the early 1990s, that fused early Buddhist and Mahāyāna doctrine with Marxist and other socialist frameworks in order to criticize the ruling military dictatorship, the Chogye Order's collaboration with the state, and South Korea's dependency on the United States. Emerging out of student and lay Buddhist circles at Dongguk University in the 1970s and radicalized by the military's violent 1980 raid on Buddhist monasteries (the "10.27 Persecution"), the movement organized clergy and laypeople into federations that agitated for democratization, land and labor rights, national reunification, and Buddhist institutional autonomy. Although its most explicitly Marxist theoreticians, chiefly Yŏ Ikku (여익구/呂益九, 1946–2012), borrowed heavily from Japanese precedents such as Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, Minjung Buddhists framed their politics as a recovery of the "original" communitarian and anti-caste spirit of the early Sangha. The movement is the principal Buddhist counterpart to the better-known Christian Minjung theology of the same period, with which it shared vocabulary, personnel, and adversaries but not doctrinal foundations.

Terminology and Antecedents

Minjung (民衆), literally "the mass of the people," denotes in Korean political theology and social criticism the historically oppressed — laborers, farmers, the urban poor, and dissident intellectuals — understood as the collective subject of history rather than a passive object of rule. The term entered Christian theological discourse in Korea in the mid-1970s as Minjung sinhak (Minjung theology), developed by Sŏ Nam-dong, Ahn Byung-mu, and others out of the 1973 "Korean Christian Manifesto" against the Yushin dictatorship of Park Chung Hee. Buddhist engagement with the concept predates the 1980s movement proper: the monk-poet Ko Ŭn (고은/高銀, 1933–) argued in a 1970 essay, 「한용운론」 / [A Study of Han Yongun], that Buddhists should labor for minjung liberation through bodhisattva practice, and by 1976 the University Buddhist Association (Han'guk Taehaksaeng Pulgyo Yŏnhaphoe) had convened a symposium at Songgwang Sa on "Minjung Pulgyo ron," though without concrete proposals beyond an appeal to compassion. Ko Ŭn and others also developed a millenarian strand linking Minjung hopes to the cult of Maitreya (Mirŭk), the future Buddha, whom they contrasted with Amitābha's promise of a posthumous Pure Land, a promise they regarded as a narcotic that reconciled the oppressed to their suffering.

The 10.27 Persecution and Radicalization (1980–1981)

On October 27, 1980, martial law troops under the newly installed regime of Chun Doo-hwan raided the Chogye Order's headquarters and more than three thousand monasteries nationwide, arresting fifty-five monks and detaining ten monks and eight laymen; several detainees were tortured and the abbot of Naksan Sa died of his injuries. Officially framed as a "purification" of corrupt and draft-dodging clergy, the raid is widely read as an extension of the "social cleansing" that followed the Kwangju Massacre of May 1980, and as an attempt to force the newly assertive Chogye Order administration back into the subordinate role of "state-protection Buddhism" (ho'guk Pulgyo). The Kyŏngsin Persecution, as Buddhists called it, shocked even conservative clergy and precipitated the radicalization of younger monks and lay activists who had previously only loosely organized around the minjung theme.

Organizational History (1981–1988)

The initial response took two forms: an attempt to "monasticize" society (sawŏnhwa) by turning temples into centers of popular education and labor organizing, and a more academic effort to theorize Buddhism's social role. The Sawŏnhwa Movement, based at Myogak Sa and modeled explicitly on the propertyless, casteless primitive Sangha, was suppressed by the authorities between late 1981 and early 1982, its leader Pŏb'u sentenced to three years' imprisonment for introducing "Southeast Asian Buddhist socialism" into Korea. Suppressed but not extinguished, the movement's cadres regrouped around the newly founded Central Sangha College at Kaeun Sa, whose students formed the National Young Monks' Conference for Six Harmonies in 1981 and, together with lay reformers of the Center for the Study of Buddhist Society and Culture, organized the National Buddhist Youth Federation Conference at Pŏm'ŏ Sa in July 1983, attracting some 1,700 participants.

The theoretical foundation for this generation was supplied less by direct contact with liberation theology or Southeast Asian Buddhism than by the translated works of the Japanese sociologist Kōhashi Shōichi (孝橋正一, 1912-1999), whose 『社会科学と現代仏教: 仏教の社会化をめざして』 (Social Science and Modern Buddhism: Aiming for the Socialization of Buddhism, 1968) was itself indebted to the interwar "Buddhist Marxism" of Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) and his banned Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (新興仏教青年同盟, 1931–1935). Both of Kōhashi's translated works, prepared by the lay reformer Yŏ Ikku, were banned by the South Korean government, which nonetheless failed to prevent their becoming the conceptual basis of the movement.

The movement's most influential organization, the Minjung Buddhist Movement Federation (Minjung Pulgyo Undong Yŏnhap), was founded on May 14, 1985 by roughly 180 laypeople and monastics under Yŏ Ikku, demanding Buddhist autonomy, an end to the military dictatorship, support for workers and farmers, a democratic constitution, and national reunification; 104 of its founders were promptly arrested. Its organ, Minjung pŏptang ("Minjung Dharma Hall"), grounded its politics in Mahāyāna scripture, repeatedly quoting the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra — "When sentient beings are in pain, the Buddha is in pain" — and insisting that Korean Buddhism had historically been "the Buddhism of kings" rather than a Minjung Buddhism. The Federation was active in labor disputes, most notably the June 1985 Sŏngdo Textile strike, and survived the political thaw of the "1985 Spring" before being drawn into the violent Inch'ŏn labor demonstrations of May 1986, after which several of its leaders, including Yŏ Ikku, went into hiding or were arrested, and a monastic splinter group, the National Sangha Association for the Realization of the Pure Land, formed separately in June 1986.

The movement's high-water mark came after the death in custody of the student activist Pak Chong-ch'ŏl in January 1987. The Federation relaunched its publication as the newspaper Minjung Pulgyo and, following the police assault on Wŏn'gak Sa in Kwangju on the anniversary of the Kwangju Massacre in May 1987, mobilized several thousand monks and laypeople in monastic sit-ins across the country. An unprecedented assembly of over two thousand monks and nuns at Haein Sa in September 1986 had already forced the Chogye Order's own secretary-general to publicly denounce the 10.27 Persecution as "an outrageous act of violence." These mobilizations fed directly into the nationwide June 1987 Democratic Uprising that forced constitutional reform. After 1987, however, the movement fractured over its ambivalent endorsement of presidential candidate Kim Dae-jung, over an increasingly explicit adoption of Marxist–Leninist and juche vocabulary in its internal literature, and over the acceptance of revolutionary violence as a legitimate response to state terror — a position its authors defended through the Buddhist concept of "compassionate killing" (ilsal tasaeng, killing one to save many). A moderate breakaway, the Mahāyāna Buddhist Sangha Association (1988–1991), rebranded the cause as "National Buddhism" (Minjok Pulgyo), explicitly de-emphasizing class struggle in favor of reunification and national issues.

Philosophy

The movement's fullest theoretical statement is Yŏ Ikku's 『민중불교철학』 (Minjung Pulgyo Ch'ŏrhak, Minjung Buddhist Philosophy, 1988). Yŏ argued that Buddhism was neither naïve materialism nor subjective idealism but a dialectical realism grounded in dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda): because all phenomena, including mind, arise only in mutual, ever-changing conditioning, no permanent self or essence exists, and clinging to such permanence is the root of ignorance and suffering. On this basis Yŏ mounted a sustained critique of mainstream Korean Mahāyāna: Hwaŏm's doctrine of mutual interpenetration and Sŏn's meditative subjectivism were denounced as forms of idealism that dissolved concrete class inequality into an undifferentiated metaphysical harmony, thereby sanctifying the status quo, while the "primitive" Sangha of the Buddha's own day — which Yŏ read as propertyless and casteless — was held up as the authentic communist model that later, wealthier Buddhist institutions had betrayed. Compassion, in this scheme, ceased to be an individual virtue and became a "revolutionary practice," and enlightenment was redefined as a historically embedded, collective transformation rather than a private release of the mind. Yŏ characterized South Korea itself as a "neo-colonialist state-monopoly capitalist society" dominated by chaebŏl privilege and U.S.-aligned military dictatorship, from which liberation required class struggle, national autonomy (chuch'e), democratization, and reunification — with the minjung defined not as the inert masses (taejung) but as a politically self-conscious historical agent.

Relation to Minjung Theology

Minjung Buddhism developed in close, sometimes uneasy dialogue with the Christian Minjung theology of Sŏ Nam-dong, Ahn Byung-mu, and Kim Yong-bok. Comparative treatments by Buddhist–Christian dialogue theologians have stressed a shared soteriological structure — both traditions relocate salvation from an individual, otherworldly register to collective, historical liberation — while noting a basic difference in first principles: Minjung theology grounds liberation in divine grace and a providential reading of history, whereas Minjung Buddhism grounds it in dependent origination and the practice of the bodhisattva, with no transcendent guarantor. Buddhist and Christian minjung activists cooperated directly during the 1980s: Chogye Order reformists and the National Council of Churches in Korea shared communication networks during the 1987 June Uprising, jointly organized prayer vigils for political prisoners, and treated Chogye Sa and Myŏngdong Cathedral alike as sanctuaries for demonstrators. Some Korean theologians engaged directly with Buddhist philosophy on Minjung terms, including the Anglican priest-scholar Kim Eun-Kyu Micah, who has argued that Minjung Buddhism's doctrines of non-self, interdependence, and the this-worldly Pure Land constitute a genuinely Buddhist, rather than borrowed Christian, resource for social liberation, one that Christian Minjung theology should engage in interreligious dialogue against the shared adversaries of Cold War capitalism and American global hegemony.

Critiques and Decline

Minjung Buddhism drew sustained criticism from moderate Buddhist intellectuals even before its dissolution. Critics such as Hyŏn'ŭng and Pak Kyŏngjun argued that the movement had merely grafted historical materialism onto Buddhism rather than deriving a philosophy of history from Buddhist thought itself, that its dismissal of Hwaŏm and Sŏn as mere "idealism" relied uncritically on the crude historical-materialist readings of the Chinese Marxist scholar Ren Jiyu (任继愈; 1916–2009), and that its reading of the primitive Sangha as fully communistic was doctrinally and historically simplistic. The movement's acceptance of revolutionary violence, though justified through classical precepts on "compassionate killing," alienated pacifist moderates and drew uncomfortable comparisons to the earlier justifications of state violence by pro-government "nation-protection" Buddhists under Park Chung Hee. Critics also faulted the movement's leadership for doctrinal elitism, factionalism, and an ill-defined conception of the minjung itself.

The movement went into rapid decline after 1988–1989, a decline scholars attribute to the collapse of the Eastern European and Soviet communist bloc, the 1992 election of longtime opposition leader Kim Young-sam to the presidency, and the 1994 removal of the Chogye Order's undemocratic, pro-government administration — developments that addressed several of the movement's core grievances by other means. Its final theoretical publications appeared in 1988–1989, and its publications were displaced by the more moderate journals Chŏngt'o kuhyŏn and Taesŭng Pulgyo. Although Minjung Buddhism achieved neither Korean reunification nor a lasting institutional foothold, scholars credit it with rousing the Chogye Order from institutional lethargy, embedding social-scientific analysis into Buddhist doctrinal discussion, restoring the Order's independence from direct state control, and channeling former activists into the environmental, social-welfare, and monastic-reform movements of the 1990s — a legacy visible, for instance, in the later environmental activism of the dissident monk Pŏpchŏng.

Literature in English

• Mun, Chanju (2014). "A Historical Introduction to Minjung (Liberation) Buddhism: A South Korean Version of Radical Buddhism in the 1980s". Politics, Religion & Ideology 15.2: 264–282. [A concise historical overview emphasizing the movement's three core aims — democratization, anti-imperialism, and reunification — and its dependence on both Marxism and Christian liberation theology; published in a special issue devoted to radical and revolutionary Buddhism.]
• Kim, Eun-Kyu Micah (2012). "Minjung (the Oppressed) Buddhism in the Context of Korea". Madang: International Journal of Contextual Theology in East Asia 17: 103–122. [Written from within Minjung theology rather than Minjung Buddhism itself, this article is chiefly useful as a primary example of how Korean Christian theologians read and appropriated Minjung Buddhist ideas for interfaith dialogue.]
• Jorgensen, John (2010). "Minjung Buddhism: A Buddhist Critique of the Status Quo — Its History, Philosophy, and Critique". In: Park, Jin Y. (Ed.), Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism: 275–314. State University of New York Press. [The most comprehensive English-language study of the movement, reconstructing its organizational history from Korean-language primary sources including Minjung pŏptang and Minjung Pulgyo, with a detailed exposition and critique of Yŏ Ikku's philosophy.]

Literature in Korean

• Yŏ Ikku (여익구/呂益九) (1989). 『민중불교철학』 [Minjung Pulgyo Ch'ŏrhak, Minjung Buddhist Philosophy]. Minjoksa. [The movement's principal theoretical text, synthesizing dependent origination, dialectical materialism, and a critique of Hwaŏm and Sŏn as ideologies of the ruling class; the primary source underlying most secondary accounts of Minjung Buddhist philosophy.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Minjung Buddhism". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 6 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Minjung_Buddhism.