Editing Han Yongun (section)

== Ideas ==

Han Yongun's thought moved through two broad phases that together constitute his distinctive synthesis of Buddhism and radical politics. In the 1900s–1910s, working within the Social Darwinist idiom that dominated Korean reformist discourse, Han argued that Buddhism's doctrines of universal Buddha-nature and equality made it uniquely compatible with, and indeed a higher fulfillment of, the liberal internationalism of the modern age; he envisioned a future "world of Buddhism" characterized by equality, freedom, and "great unity." Yet in this period he also accepted the era's capitalist "struggle for existence" as an inescapable feature of modern civilization, urging monks to enter the money economy and compete with rival religions rather than proposing any structural alternative to it. His treatise's single use of the term ''sahoejuŭi'' ("socialism") in 1913 referred only to a principle of communal solidarity opposed to individual salvation, not to any political program.

Han's outlook radicalized substantially after his imprisonment for participation in the March First Movement (1919–1921), during which he became newly attentive to the German and Russian revolutions and to the domestic influence of socialist and anarchist ideas among Korean youth. In essays of the 1920s he redeployed Kropotkinian "mutual aid," then popular among Korean anarchists and early Communists, as a concrete vehicle for Buddhism's abstract doctrine of universal compassion, and he took pains to rebut the charge, current among Marxist-influenced critics, that Buddhism was merely an "idealist philosophy": drawing on Yogācāra teachings that "mind is inclusive of matter," he argued that Buddhist metaphysics did not simply negate material reality but integrated it. Pressed by an interviewer in November 1931 to state what Śākyamuni's economic ideas would amount to "in modern language," Han replied simply that "it would be Buddhist socialism," adding that he was "planning to write about Buddhist socialism" at greater length — a project he never completed. His stated grounds for the label were narrow: the early saṅgha's communal ownership of monastic property, Śākyamuni's own indifference to personal accumulation, and Buddhism's rejection of the caste system, presented as an indigenous economic ethic parallel to, but independent of, Marxist class analysis, and analogous to contemporary movements for Christian socialism in Korea and to [[Senoo Giro|Seno'o Girō]]'s Buddhist socialist [[Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]] in Japan, of which he was aware.

Whether this label reflects a developed anti-capitalist position or a more strategic borrowing of fashionable vocabulary is disputed. Lajos Brons has argued that Han's turn to "Buddhist socialism" answered a practical need: Buddhist activists needed to build bridges with the socialist- and communist-leaning youth who dominated the anti-colonial movement, while also proving to a young, self-consciously "progressive" audience that Buddhism was not an outdated creed; on this reading the term functioned at least partly as a device for coalition-building rather than as the conclusion of a systematic economic analysis, though Brons allows that it "seems to sketch what Han really believed as well."<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, p. 97.</ref> Vladimir Tikhonov and Owen Miller, by contrast, read Han as "sincere and consistent in his attempts to describe Buddhism in terms acceptable to contemporary radicals."<ref>Tikhonov, Vladimir, & Owen Miller (2008). "Introduction: Han Yongun: From Social-Darwinism to Socialism with a Buddhist Face". In: Tikhonov, Vladimir, & Owen Miller (Trans.), ''Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to "Socialism with a Buddhist Face"'': 1–36. Global Oriental, p. 22.</ref>

Han's own texts supply only limited material for resolving this dispute. The term "Buddhist socialism" was first put to him by the interviewer rather than volunteered by Han himself, and its stated content never went beyond the personal ethic of non-accumulation and the historical fact of the early saṅgha's communal property: Han did not analyze capitalism as an economic system, did not discuss exploitation, wage labor, or class in structural terms, and did not identify capitalism, as distinct from caste or personal greed, as the cause of worldly suffering. When the same interviewer pressed him on whether Śākyamuni would have sought to "reform the basic system" responsible for the poverty of the Indian masses, or have committed "any act worthy of a revolutionary," Han declined to answer in kind, describing Śākyamuni's aim instead as a "cosmic revolution" transcending any particular nation, caste, or era, and repeatedly deflecting the interviewer's attempts to pin him down to a concrete political or economic program.<ref>Han Yongun (1931). "Sakyamuni's Spirit: Dialogue with a Journalist". In: Tikhonov, Vladimir, & Owen Miller (Trans.), ''Selected Writings of Han Yongun'': 158–164. Global Oriental, pp. 158–160.</ref> His essays directly addressing Marxist anti-religious campaigns, "On the Anti-religion Movement" (1931) and "Communism and Anti-religious Ideal" (1938), likewise defend religion chiefly as a source of psychological consolation rather than argue for any transformation of the economic order: Han maintained that while material conditions might remain difficult for "the proletariat," religion alone could supply the "spiritual comfort" that material improvement could not — a defense of religion's traditional consoling function that sits uneasily beside any call to abolish the conditions producing that hardship in the first place.<ref>Han Yongun (1931). "On the Anti-religion Movement". In: Tikhonov, Vladimir, & Owen Miller (Trans.), ''Selected Writings of Han Yongun'': 211–215. Global Oriental, p. 214.</ref> 

Measured against a definition of radical Buddhism that requires identifying capitalism as the structural cause of worldly suffering and demanding systemic change, Han's corpus offers little direct evidence of such an analysis. His most clearly sustained radicalism lies in his anti-colonial nationalism and in his doctrinal insistence on universal equality; "Buddhist socialism," on his own account, remained an unrealized project rather than a worked-out economic doctrine, and readers should be cautious about treating the label as evidence of a systemic anti-capitalist commitment comparable to that of contemporaries such as Seno'o Girō or [[Lin Qiuwu]].

His scattered attempts to defend Buddhist metaphysics against Marxist philosophical objections show a related strain. In "The Buddhism I Believe In" (1924) he first denied that Buddhism rests on an idealist metaphysics, then argued that "mind is inclusive of matter," and by the essay's end described Buddhism as grounded in an idealism "inclusive—nay, transcendent—of both mind and matter," a sequence that has been read as an unresolved tension rather than a settled position.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', pp. 97–98.</ref> His later, more direct rejection of materialism, in the 1932 essay "Meditation and Human Life," rested on the claim that "the famous Communist Manifesto came not out of Marx and Engels's hands, but out of their minds"; this has been judged a straw man, since materialism does not deny the existence of mind or ideas but holds that mental processes are themselves physical (typically neural) processes.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', pp. 98, 121.</ref>

Throughout, Han's views remained emphatically Buddhist rather than Marxist. He never adopted the framework of dialectical materialism, and he consistently opposed the militant anti-religious campaigns waged by Comintern-aligned Communist and anarchist youth organizations in 1920s Korea, which treated all religion, Buddhism included, as an "opiate" to be eradicated. His 1938 essay on Stalinist religious persecution went further, arguing that Communism itself functioned as a substitute religion and that the human need for religious belief could not be legislated away. At the same time, he never abandoned his conviction that anti-colonial nationalists and Communists needed to cooperate for the sake of Korean independence, a position that placed him consistently to the left of mainstream institutional Buddhism while keeping him doctrinally, and — on the evidence above — programmatically, distinct from the secular left he collaborated with.