Korea

⚠  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.

Korea's Buddhist community has passed through Neo-Confucian marginalization under the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910), forced institutional restructuring under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), postwar division into a socialist North and an anti-Communist South, and decades of authoritarian rule in South Korea before democratization in 1987. Against this backdrop, Korean Buddhism produced three distinct, non-continuous waves of engagement with left-wing and radical social thought: a colonial-era reformist current, epitomized by the monk and poet Han Yongun, that sought to reconcile Buddhist doctrine with socialism and anti-imperialism; the explicitly Marxist- and liberation-theology-influenced Minjung ("liberation") Buddhist movement of the 1980s, directed against South Korea's military dictatorships; and a post-1990s current of socially and ecologically engaged Buddhist activism. Each wave arose from acute domestic crises — colonial subjugation, dictatorship, and large-scale developmentalist destruction of the environment, respectively — and each generated its own distinctive Buddhist idiom of protest.

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. 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. 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.

Radical Buddhism in Korea

The first sustained encounters between Korean Buddhism and left-wing politics occurred in the 1920s, as a small number of monks — most from comfortable backgrounds and educated in Japan — were drawn to anarchism and Communism; a handful became prominent activists in exile, such as the anarchist Kim Sŏngsuk and the Japan-based Communist organizer Kim Ch'ŏnhae, though most such conversions came at the cost of severing all institutional ties to Buddhism. Deeper cooperation between institutional Buddhism and the organized left was complicated throughout the decade by the militant anti-religious propaganda of Comintern-aligned Communist and anarchist youth organizations, which viewed all religion as an "opiate" incompatible with class struggle, even as Buddhist youth leagues participated in nationalist-left coalition politics such as the 1923 All-Korean Youth Party Congress and the 1927–1931 Sin'ganhoe united front. Within this fraught landscape, the monk and poet Han Yongun developed the era's most systematic and enduring synthesis of Buddhist doctrine and radical politics, moving from an early Social-Darwinist reformism to an explicit proposal for a Buddhist economic "socialism" grounded in early monastic communalism, while remaining consistently opposed to Communist anti-religious orthodoxy.

Han Yongun

➣ Main article: Han Yongun

Han Yongun (1879–1944), pen name Manhae, was a Sŏn Buddhist monk, poet, and independence activist. Educated in Buddhist philosophy, he integrated Social Darwinism and Mahāyāna doctrines of equality into a unique framework called "Buddhist socialism." He was a key signatory of the 1919 Korean Declaration of Independence and led the Korean Buddhist Youth League. Manhae championed militant anti-colonial nationalism while engaging with communist and anarchist movements. Crucially, he rejected both institutional Buddhism's political quietism and Marxist atheism.

Minjung (liberation) Buddhism (1970s–1990s)

➣ Main article: Minjung Buddhism

A considerably more explicitly Marxist-influenced wave of radical Buddhism emerged in South Korea beginning in the mid-1970s, in direct response to the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. Termed Minjung ("masses" or "people's") Buddhism, this movement — led chiefly by university-affiliated monks and lay activists organized around institutions such as the National Federation for Buddhist Associations of Universities and Colleges and the Central Sangha College, and later coordinated through bodies such as the Federation of Minjung Buddhists Movement (1985–1991) and the National Sangha Association for the Construction of Pure Land (from 1986) — drew heavily on Marxism and on Christian Liberation Theology to reinterpret core Buddhist concepts, including dependent origination and the nature of suffering, in explicitly social and structural terms. Its three stated aims were the democratization of Korean Buddhism and South Korean politics, the rejection of the American military and political influence that Minjung activists saw as underwriting the dictatorship, and the eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula. The movement reached its peak of influence around the massive national monastic conference at Haein-sa Temple in September 1986 and the country-wide pro-democracy demonstrations of June 1987, and declined rapidly after South Korea's democratic transition, the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European Communist bloc, and the Jogye Order's own 1994 internal democratization removed the movement's principal grievances.

Socially engaged and eco-Buddhist activism (1990s–present)

From the 1990s, a less explicitly Marxist but still avowedly activist current of "engaged Buddhism" emerged in South Korea, carrying forward the basic spirit, though not the terminology, of Minjung Buddhism into new domains, particularly environmentalism. Lay-led organizations such as the Jungto Society (founded 1988 by the former Minjung activist Pŏmnyun) and the Indra's Net Life Community (founded 1999) combined Buddhist-inspired eco-idealism with grassroots organic farming and cooperative living, while the Sŏn master Sukyŏng, drawing on a Tibetan Buddhist prostration practice, led a widely publicized 2003 samboilbae ("three steps, one bow") march against the Saemangeum Reclamation Project. The nun Jiyul conducted a series of hunger strikes between 2001 and 2006 against a high-speed rail tunnel through Mt. Chŏnsŏng, and the monk Munsu self-immolated in 2010 in protest against the Four Rivers Project. These campaigns achieved considerable public visibility and, in Sukyŏng's case, briefly repositioned Buddhist clergy as leaders of a broader social movement, but none of the underlying development projects was ultimately halted.

Literature in English

• Yoon, Young-Hae, & Sherwin Jones (2014). "Ecology, Dharma and Direct Action: A Brief Survey of Contemporary Eco-Buddhist Activism in Korea". Buddhist Studies Review 31.2: 293–311. [A detailed case-study survey of three major eco-Buddhist protest campaigns (2001–2010), situating them within debates on the authenticity and origins of "eco-Buddhism" as a category.]
• 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. [The most detailed English-language institutional history of the Minjung Buddhist movement, tracing its organizational lineage from the mid-1970s through its decline in the early 1990s.]
• 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: 275–313. State University of New York Press. [A critical intellectual history of Minjung Buddhism's theoretical claims, assessing the movement's Buddhist bona fides alongside its Marxist and Liberation-Theological borrowings.]
• Park, Pori (2010). "New Visions for Engaged Buddhism: The Jungto Society and the Indra's Net Community Movement in Contemporary Korea". Contemporary Buddhism 11.1: 27–46. [Traces the lay-organizational lineage connecting 1980s Minjung Buddhism to post-1990s socially and ecologically engaged Buddhist organizations.]
• 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 primary texts by Han Yongun, Korea's foremost colonial-era Buddhist socialist thinker, with an extensive scholarly introduction.]
• Tikhonov, Vladimir (2006). "Han Yongun's Buddhist Socialism in the 1920s-1930s". International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 6: 207–228. [An open-access account of the first documented contacts between institutional Buddhism and Korea's anarchist and Communist movements in the 1920s.]

Literature in Korean

• Kim Kwangsik (2000). Kŭnhyŏndae Pulgyo ŭi Chaejomyŏng [Reappraisal of Modern and Contemporary Buddhism]. Seoul: Minjoksa. [A broad Korean-language institutional history of Buddhism in Korea from the late Chosŏn period through the twentieth century, frequently cited in the English-language scholarship on colonial-era Buddhist socialism. 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). "Korea". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 5 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Korea.