Han Yongun

⚠  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.

Han Yongun (한용운; 韓龍雲; 1879–1944), better known by his Buddhist pen name Manhae (萬海/卍海, "Vast Sea"), was a Korean Sŏn (Seon) Buddhist monk, poet, and independence activist. Trained in Sŏn meditation and in Yogācāra and Hwaŏm (Avataṃsaka) philosophy, Han began his intellectual career steeped in the Social Darwinism popularized in Korea by Liang Qichao (梁啓超), before gradually reworking Mahāyāna doctrines of universal Buddha-nature, equality, and compassion into a program he called "Buddhist socialism" (pulgyo sahoejuŭi, 佛敎社會主義) — an aspirational label whose relationship to any sustained anti-capitalist analysis is disputed among scholars (see Ideas, below). A signatory of the 1919 Korean Declaration of Independence and longtime chairman of the Korean Buddhist Youth League, he combined militant anti-colonial nationalism with sympathetic, though doctrinally independent, engagement with Korea's Communist and anarchist movements, refusing both institutional Buddhism's political quietism and orthodox Marxism's anti-religious atheism. His radicalism is most fully attested in his anti-colonial nationalism and his doctrinal insistence on universal equality; the depth and sincerity of his economic radicalism are more contested. He remains the central figure in any account of radical Buddhism in colonial Korea.

Biography

Han Yongun was born Han Yuch'ŏn (韓裕天) in 1879 near Hongsŏng, South Ch'ungch'ŏng Province, into a declined yangban family of the Ch'ŏngju Han clan. He studied Chinese classics from early childhood and, as a teenager, was locally renowned for his physical strength. Married in his early teens, as was customary, he worked briefly as a village Confucian schoolteacher before leaving his hometown for Seoul in 1897, drawn to Buddhism by his discovery of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and by his reluctance to follow his father, a local military officer, into the suppression of the remnants of the anti-Japanese Tonghak rebellion. His father was killed during this unrest, and his family fell into poverty.

In 1903 Han left his family permanently, eventually settling at Paektamsa Temple in Kangwŏn Province, the temple with which he remained associated for the rest of his life. He was ordained there on 26 January 1905 by Kim Yŏn'gok, a monk known for combining meditation practice with reformist sympathies. In late 1905 or early 1906, inspired by an outdated Chinese geography text, Han attempted an ill-prepared voyage to Vladivostok in hopes of reaching Europe and America; he was nearly killed there after being mistaken for a Japanese spy by anti-Japanese Korean émigrés, an episode that exposed him both to the realities of great-power rivalry and to Buddhism's poor reputation among Korea's militant nationalists. Returning to Korea, he enrolled in 1906 in the supplementary course of Seoul's Myŏngjin School, Korea's first modern Buddhist educational institution, where he studied Japanese and encountered Korea's Westernizing reformist intellectuals. In 1907 his meditation teacher gave him the sobriquet "Yongun" ("Dragon's Clouds"). He traveled to Japan in 1908 for roughly six months at the invitation of the Sōtō sect, and during this period immersed himself in the writings of the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, whose Social Darwinist framework — viewing history as a "struggle for survival" among nations and civilizations — shaped Han's early thought.

Written in 1910, the year of Japan's formal annexation of Korea, and published in 1913, Han's treatise Chosŏn Pulgyo Yusinnon ("On the Reformation of Korean Buddhism") argued that Buddhism's doctrine of universal equality anticipated the liberal internationalism of the modern age, while also urging monks to engage in productive labor and commerce to escape their degraded social position. In 1918 he co-edited, with the Buddhist intellectual Yang Kŏnsik, the short-lived journal Yusim ("Mind Only"), aimed at Buddhist youth. In 1919 Han was one of thirty-three signatories of the Korean Declaration of Independence at the start of the March First Movement; he was arrested and imprisoned until December 1921. His years in prison, during which he followed reports of the German Revolution and the Russian Revolution's growing influence on Korean society, marked a turning point: his earlier hope that the victorious World War I powers would support Korean independence gave way to a more radical political outlook attentive to socialist movements.

Through the 1920s Han became increasingly active in nationalist and left-leaning organizational politics. He delivered a congratulatory address to the All-Korean Youth Party Congress in 1923, assumed the chairmanship of the Korean Buddhist Youth League in 1924, and in 1927 was one of twenty-seven founding members of Sin'ganhoe (New Korea Society), a united front of nationalists and Communists, leading its Seoul branch and maintaining close, reportedly cordial relations with Communist collaborators. He opposed Sin'ganhoe's dissolution in 1931 to the end. During this decade he published a series of essays and interviews — most notably in the journals Kaebyŏk and Samch'ŏlli — that progressively reframed Buddhist doctrine in terms legible to contemporary radicals, culminating in a November 1931 interview in which he announced his intention to write explicitly on "Buddhist socialism." In 1938, amid Stalinist religious persecution in the Soviet Union, he published a lengthy critique, "Communism and Anti-religious Ideal," arguing that the anti-religious campaign was a Sisyphean project bound to fail because religious belief was rooted in human nature itself.

Alongside his religious and political writing, Han was one of modern Korea's most celebrated poets. His 1926 collection Nim ŭi Ch'immuk ("The Silence of the Beloved"), written mainly at Baekdam Temple, fused nationalist longing with the language of romantic and erotic devotion, drawing on the example of Rabindranath Tagore, and remains his most enduring literary achievement. He married again in 1933, and supporters built him a house, Simujang, in Seoul's Seongbuk-dong, deliberately oriented to face away from the Japanese Governor-General's Office. There he refused to comply with the colonial government's forced adoption of Japanese names in his final years. Han died at Simujang in June 1944, one year before Korea's liberation from Japanese rule.

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 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." 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."

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Writings

• Chosŏn Pulgyo Yusinnon [On the Reformation of Korean Buddhism] (written 1910; published 1913). [Han's foundational reform treatise, arguing that Buddhism's principle of universal equality anticipated modern liberal internationalism and calling for monks to enter productive labor and the money economy; contains the single, still non-political use of the term "sahoejuŭi" (socialism) in Han's corpus.]
• Pulgyo Taejŏn [Great Compendium of Buddhism] (1914). [A vernacular Korean-language digest of Buddhist scripture, intended to make canonical teaching accessible outside the monastic elite as part of Han's broader program of Buddhist popularization.]
• Articles in Yusim [Mind Only] (1918, journal, co-edited with Yang Kŏnsik). [A short-lived Buddhist youth journal through which Han and other reformist intellectuals debated Buddhism's place in a modernizing, and increasingly nationalist, Korean society.]
• "Pulgyo esŏ naega mitnŭn kŏt" [The Buddhism I Believe In]. Kaebyŏk (March 1924). [Reframes Buddhist "universal love" through the language of Kropotkinian mutual aid and defends Buddhism against the charge of "idealism" via a Yogācāra argument that mind and matter are mutually inclusive.]
• Nim ŭi Ch'immuk [The Silence of the Beloved] (1926). [Han's most celebrated poetry collection, fusing anticolonial nationalist longing with the register of romantic devotion; not a directly political text, but foundational to his reputation and widely read as an allegory of a colonized nation awaiting its "beloved," independence.]
• "Sahu ŭi saengmyŏng" [What Happens with Life after Death?]. Samch'ŏlli (August 1929). [An interview using the Mahāyāna doctrine of "form is emptiness" to argue for the metaphysical equality of all beings and things.]
• "Sŏkka ŭi chŏngsin: kija wa ŭi taehwa" [Śākyamuni's Spirit: Dialogue with a Journalist]. Samch'ŏlli (November 1931). [Han's most explicit statement on "Buddhist socialism," invoking early Buddhist communalism and Śākyamuni's criticism of private accumulation, and announcing his intention to write a systematic account of the concept, which was never completed. The term is introduced by the interviewer's question rather than volunteered by Han, and his replies to more pointed questions about systemic economic reform or revolutionary action are notably evasive.]
• "Kongsanjuŭi wa pan-chonggyo sasang" [Communism and Anti-religious Ideal] (1938). [A lengthy essay surveying Stalinist religious persecution in the USSR, arguing that such campaigns are self-defeating because religious belief is rooted in human nature and that Communism itself functions as a substitute religion.]
• Han Yongun Chŏnjip [Complete Works of Han Yongun], 6 vols. (Seoul: Sin'gu Munhwasa, 1973). [The standard posthumous scholarly edition of Han's collected writings (frequently cited in the secondary literature as "HYC"), compiling his essays, treatises, poetry, and correspondence.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Brons, Lajos (2022). A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism. Earth, Milky Way: punctum books. [The section "Korea—Han Yongun's Buddhist Socialism" in chapter 3 (pp. 96–98) surveys Han's shift from social Darwinism to Buddhist socialism and argues that his adoption of the label was substantially motivated by the practical need to build bridges with the socialist-leaning youth of the anti-colonial movement; chapter 4 (p. 121) revisits his engagement with Marxist materialism as an example of a confused rejection of physicalism.]
• Huh, Woosung (2015). "Confronting Empires: Manhae's Understanding of Buddhism". Diogenes 62.2: 81–91. [Situates Han's thought within a comparative framework of anti-imperial critique, examining his doctrine of the "Loved One" (nim) alongside Confucian influences.]
• Nam-lin Hur (2010). "Han Yong'un (1879–1944) and Buddhist Reform in Colonial Korea". Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 37.1: 75–97. [A detailed scholarly account of Han's institutional reform program within the broader context of Buddhism under Japanese colonial administration; freely accessible through the journal's open-access archive.]
• Tikhonov, Vladimir, & Owen Miller (2008). Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to Socialism with a Buddhist Face. Global Oriental. [The principal English-language anthology of Han's own writings in translation, with an extensive scholarly introduction that reads Han's turn to socialist vocabulary as sincere rather than merely strategic; the essential starting point for primary-source research on Han in English.]
• Tikhonov, Vladimir (2006). "Han Yongun's Buddhist Socialism in the 1920s-1930s". International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 6: 207–228. [An open-access journal article tracing the development of Han's Buddhist socialism against the backdrop of Communist anti-religious campaigns in colonial Korea; closely related in content to Tikhonov's festschrift chapter of the same year, below.]
• Tikhonov, Vladimir (2006). "Han Yongun (1879-1944): From Social-Darwinism to Buddhist Socialism, 1900s-1930s". In: Anderl, Christoph, & Halvor Eifring (Eds), Studies in Chinese Language and Culture: Festschrift in Honour of Christoph Harbsmeier on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday: 217–237. Hermes Academic Publishing. [A parallel version of Tikhonov's 2006 journal article, expanding somewhat on Han's early Social Darwinist phase.]

Secondary Literature in Korean

• Kim Kwangsik (2004). Ch'ŏt K'isŭ ro Manhae rŭl Mannanda [Meeting Manhae with the First Kiss]. Seoul: Ch'angsŭng. [A book-length Korean-language biography of Han Yongun, drawing extensively on temple records and Han's own recollections; widely cited as a standard biographical source in the English-language scholarship. Editorial note: this entry has not been independently examined by RBP editors and should be verified by a reader with direct access to the volume before further citation.]

How to Cite This Article

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