KOREA : When Monks Join the Movement

Songgwang-sa is a Buddhist monastery in a remote mountain area of southwestern Korea, nearly 300 miles from Seoul and 60 from Kwangju, the closest city. Songgwang-sa can be reached only by a circuitous road, still unpaved in places. When I arrived one day last month, I was surprised to see two khaki-clad soldiers standing just outside the entry gate, obviously watching and noting all comings and goings. I had visited a good number of temples in Asia but had never before seen one under military surveilance. Throughout their history Buddhist monasteries have rarely been places where governments--even repressive ones--felt a need for scrutiny.

Inside Songgwang-sa, however, was a partial explanation and a story little known outside Korea. Many of the monks I had hoped to meet had gone elsewhere that particular day--for reasons that proved to be important. The older monks said that the others had gone as a group to Kwangju city to engage in peaceful protest against the policies of President Chun Doo Hwan. The origins of protest go back seven years to what is called the “Kwangju massacre” when, according to official accounts, Chun’s police killed more than 200 people (many Koreans insist that the real number is closer to 2,000). During May of this year students commemorated that massacre and, when pursued by the police this time, entered Wongak-sa, a small city temple. The police did not respect their sanctuary and fired 30 canisters of virulent tear gas within the temple itself. This so outraged the entire Buddhist community of Korea that Buddhist newspapers openly announced that a crisis-point had been reached and, in response, many of Songgwang-sa’s monks were off protesting in Kwangju .

A sustained Buddhist challenge to Chun is more than a numerical increase in the number of persons opposing his regime. The Buddhists undercut one of Chun’s favorite ploys--his stated rationale for refusing democratic reforms on grounds that such reforms are foreign to the Korean tradition and experience.

Chun regularly fulminates not only against the hated, Marxist north but also against the West for its assumption that Western definitions of democratic ideals have universal applicability. Chun apparently would like history to prove both Marxism and Western-style democracy as culturally alien to the real needs and aspirations of the Korean people. A “Korean democracy” when defined by Chun is stunningly different from that of the West. When he named Roh Tae Woo as his hand-picked successor on June 10, Chun declared that with the transfer of power, “Korean democracy will already have achieved 99% of its goals.” This implies that democracy, Korean-style, is meant forever to be without free elections, a free press, the right to assembly, opposition parties free to oppose and religious institutions protected from attack by soldiers or police. Chun’s view of a “democracy” to fit Korean life and values is clearly a peculiar democracy indeed.

To define things his way, Chun had already made use of some Korean intellectuals. He celebrates any intelligent Korean who studies in Europe or America and then returns to insist that Korea is “different” and ought not follow the political ways of the West. He provides incentives for such thinkers to locate quotes from Western theorists who suggest that the West’s pattern is flawed, full of contradiction or already on the wane.

A favorite for such quotation use is Daniel Bell, a Harvard sociologist who writes of “the disjunction of realms”--seemingly to suggest that capitalist economic development and political liberalization are quite divisible. At least the Korean intellectuals in Chun’s coterie so interpret Bell. It must be music to Chun’s ears to hear an argument that you can have prosperity without a franchise, have a boom for the people without votes in their hands. That kind of thinking, in Chun terms, is right on target, a concept that gives them license to define Korean “democracy” as one from which unneeded Western elements have been removed.

These intellectuals would also like Christianity to be much more Koreanized . Since approximately 25% of Koreans are Christian--often passionately so--it is hardly possible to banish that faith. But those who help Chun conceptualize his goals would like to see Christianity more shaped by indigenous Confucian principles of hierarchy and respect for authority--and much less shaped by Western notions of the individual and justice. Through his wife, Chun makes it appear he is on good terms with the Christian churches, but his people hint that Christianity is still so new in the Land of the Morning Calm that it is infected by unnecessary “Western” elements. Especially when his major political opponents cluster at Seoul’s churches and cathedrals to organize demonstrations against him, Chun sees reasons enough to think of Christianity as still “un-Korean” or even “anti-Korean.”

And that is what makes the protests and posture of the Buddhists such an added aggravation. Chun must be unnerved by resistance from a good portion of Korea’s 25,000 Buddhist monks and nuns--who, in turn, are linked to a Buddhist laity that may constitute close to 40% of the population.

Most significant, the Buddhists implicitly turn Chun’s favorite argument to sawdust. For there is no way that the Buddhists, in Korea for 16 centuries, can be dismissed as “Western” or too recent to understand and value native ways. The Buddhists, simply by participation in the call for democratic reforms, suggest that the right of self-determination is not just a noxious Western weed but something with universal appeal. They certainly have no links to Rome or Washington. By moving from their mountains to the city streets, the Buddhists have exposed the ideological nakedness of a president whose right to rule is questionable.

In Korea, a monk is like a student in interesting ways. Celibate, he has no responsibilities for a spouse or child to make him wary. Often youthful in spirit even when middle-aged, he may be more committed to universal ideals than to practical exigencies. When deeply provoked about justice, the monk can take to the streets and may even risk his life; Vietnam in the ‘60s offered numerous examples .

Korean academics, by contrast, are careful--even when in full support of the protests. A kind of “white-collar violence” is directed against professors and other intellectuals in Korea. If they vocalize their concerns publicly they know the Chun-controlled Ministry of Education, a powerful holder of carrots and sticks, will quite brazenly deny them research monies for years, try to inhibit their promotions or deny them visa clearance to travel abroad. The presidents of the prestigious national universities are, ultimately, appointed by Chun himself. Scholars who have spent what the government regards as “too much time in the West” are, upon their return, pressured into seminars for re-Koreanization. At such sessions, I am told, there is much high-blown talk about Confucian traditions--obedience, unstinting respect for those in authority, hard work for family and nation.

Because it fits the government so well, Confucianism in its most authoritarian version is proffered as what is best for academics who need to wash their brains of foreign toxins.

The Buddhist monks are, by the structure of their institution, the mode of their livelihood and their retreat into temples and mountain monasteries, considerably more free from government control. In Korean history monks did exhibit a good deal of respect--downright abject at times--for political authority. But now for seven years the Chun government has contemptuously harassed them and seems to have become unbearable in their eyes.

In their monasteries monks now listen to what pilgrims tell them over tea, become indignant when it is clear that the common people are abused and--when they see the need--even make decisions to go down to the cities to ask in very public ways for a very fundamental change in public life .