Editing Korea (section)

== Buddhism in Korea ==

Buddhism entered the Korean peninsula from [[China]] in the fourth century CE, becoming the state religion successively of the Three Kingdoms, Unified Silla, and Goryeo dynasties, and producing a rich scholastic and meditative (Sŏn, the Korean form of Chan/Zen) tradition alongside major institutions of statecraft and learning. This position reversed sharply with the founding of the Neo-Confucian Chosŏn Dynasty in 1392, whose ruling class viewed Buddhism as intellectually retrograde and socially parasitic; monks were barred from the capital and reduced to a low, sometimes outcaste, social status, and Buddhist institutional life retreated largely to mountain temples for the following five centuries.

[[Japan]]'s annexation of Korea in 1910 brought a new, and ambivalent, set of pressures. The colonial government's 1911 Temple Law (sach'allyŏng) subjected Korea's Buddhist temples to centralized administrative control, while the colonial administration also promoted the Japanese Buddhist practice of married, non-celibate clergy, which spread widely among Korean monastics over the following decades and provoked lasting controversy. It was within this colonial institutional and intellectual ferment that reformist monks such as Han Yongun (see below) called for the modernization of Buddhist education and monastic economy, while other monks and lay activists began, more cautiously, to engage with the anarchist and Communist movements of the 1920s.

Following liberation in 1945 and the division of the peninsula, South Korean Buddhism underwent its own major institutional reorganization. The government-supported Purification Buddhist Movement (1954–1970) sought to expel the Japanese-introduced tradition of married clergy and restore a "traditional" celibate monastic order; its activists gained control of the Buddhist establishment after a national monastic conference in August 1955, from which the modern Jogye Order (Taehan Pulgyo Jogyejong), Korea's largest Buddhist sect, and the smaller, married-clergy T'aego Order both trace their present form.<ref>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, p. 265.</ref> Having achieved institutional dominance, the Purification Movement's leadership became closely, and controversially, allied with the successive authoritarian governments of Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan; the state's 1961 Law for the Control of Buddhist Properties gave the government direct authority over Sangha appointments and assets, and the military junta's violent nationwide "27 October Buddhist Persecution" of 1980 marked the nadir of state–Sangha relations under military rule.<ref>Mun (2014), "A Historical Introduction", pp. 268–269.</ref> South Korea's 1987 democratic transition and the Jogye Order's own internal democratization in 1994 opened space for a considerably more pluralistic and socially engaged Buddhist landscape, including new lay organizations, environmental and human-rights activism, and a modest but persistent current of reunification advocacy directed at North Korea.