Earticle

Wŏnhyo (617–686) is known to the world as Korea’s leading Buddhist thinker and scriptural commentator, mainly due to his numerous exegeses and treatises that attempted to sort out the plethora of new Buddhist ideas generated in the fifth through seventh centuries in East Asia—ideas produced both through the continued influx of newly translated Indian texts, as well as the rapid appearance of fresh East Asian interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine. Wŏnhyo is especially noted for being the only scholar among the great East Asian commentators who had neither sectarian affiliation nor took a sectarian- based approach in the interpretation of Buddhist doctrines. Thus, the privileging of a specific sectarian approach was for Wŏnhyo impossible, since he saw each of the various doctrinal streams of Buddhism as representing a distinct but valid piece of the vast Mahāyāna system—as true as any other piece, but not to be seen as some kind of “ultimate” doctrine. Wonhyo’s method—known as hwajaeng 和諍 (“harmonization”)—is characterized by the juxtaposing of two or more divergent theoretical positions, comparing them, and clarifying their distinctive assumptions and aims. Once these assumptions are properly apprehended, what on the surface appear to be contradictory opinions are shown to be commensurate with each other from a deeper perspective. This article examines in detail the range of motivations, method-ologies, and approaches seen in Wonhyo’s hwajaeng project. Wonhyo’s approach will be examined in terms of three general aspects, which straddle the range of doctrinal/ scholastic, logical/philosophical, and religious, with the religious showing at least three levels of profundity.

This article explores the role of forensic medicine in the colonial civilizing project of East Asian imperial power on the Korean Peninsula. It does so by focusing on how state-sponsored projects of forensic medicine forged a link between Confucian conjugal practice (i.e., early marriage), savagery, and the affliction of the subaltern female subjects, which in turn helped construct the colonial burden to “emancipate” suffering female subjects from indigenous patriarchy and the legacies of Confucian rule in colonial Korea (1910–1945). At the intersection of feminist theory and the postcolonial history of medicine, I examine the medical discourse of emancipation and civilization in the context of global colonialism. To do so, I draw on Gayatri Spivak and other post-colonial studies scholars who powerfully reflected on the British colonial construction of the White men’s burden to save brown women from brown men and patriarchal practices such as sati (widow immolation) in colonial India. I propose to interrogate how Japanese imperialism and its discourse of forensic medicine constructed the Yellow men’s burden to save Yellow women from “fellow” Yellow men and exploitative early marriage allegedly perpetuated by indigenous Confucian patriarchy. I delineate these points through a case study of the Japanese physician Kudō Takeki (1879–?) and his forensic medical studies on young Korean women and female slaves in 1920s and 1930s Korea. This paper also draws attention to how uncritically the Korean community adopted, appropriated, and incorporated Kudō’s racialized colonial frameworks into their own production of knowledge on women’s crime and early marriage. Kudō’s study presented then cutting-edge scientific theories and methods to advance his agendas. In contrast, indigenous Korean scholarly investigations were not perceived as being grounded in biomedicine or scientific-statistical methods. This gap was exactly the one through which the colonial medical scientist chose to navigate.

This essay examines Kim Suyŏng’s poems with the focus on their aesthetic ontology and corresponding literary forms in their historical context. In contrast to previous scholarship, which portrays Kim Suyŏng as either a political realist or a modernist within a narrowly defined political reading, with the assumption that his poetry was completely changed after the April Revolution in 1960, my study places his poetry in a broader cultural and historical context, demonstrating that his poetic ideal is the retrieval of an ultimate subjectivity or sovereignty of the imagination immanent in vernacular Korean, throughout his poetic career. My analysis of Kim Suyŏng’s works reveals how he pursued a poetic vision of sovereignty often threatened not only by colonization and subsequent national division, but also by compressed modernization. Moreover, my reading of his poetry demonstrates how Kim Suyŏng fundamentally changed the understanding of language from a vehicle of communicative meaning to a form of ultimate imagination. My study explains how he equated a poetic ideal with a political vision without sacrificing either the existential complexities of an individual or a social reality.