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In 538, the Paekche Kingdom moved its capital to Sabi (present-day Puyŏ) and thereafter established over twenty-five Buddhist temples in the area. These temples served not just as sacred spaces, but as political and symbolic landscapes and a national ceremonial area within the new capital. This paper analyzes the spatial and temporal distribution of the temples in the Puyŏ region and elucidates the changes in their construction in relation to both the landscape of the city and to royal authority. The sites selected for these important temples were near royal palaces, defensive installations, and communication routes, and reflect the trend toward engagement with the Buddhist world. Examining the distribution of these temples and their locational changes allows a more dynamic understanding of the visual transformation of Sabi, Buddhist temples as national and religious institutions, and their relationship to royal authority.

Sweet dew paintings, which emerged in the sixteenth century, served as altarpieces for the low ritual altars where ceremonies for the disembodied were conducted in the three-altar configuration of the Korean Buddhist liturgy. Through their complex iconography, these paintings conveyed the message that all souls suffering from the misfortune and wrongdoings of previous lives could be saved through the salvific power of the divine and thus attain a better rebirth in their next life. Although this uniquely Korean genre of Buddhist paintings flourished throughout the Chosŏn period, it appears to have received heightened interest from the late 1930s to early 1940s with the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). However, this phenomenon has yet to be contextualized within the rich history of the genre and the convoluted history of modern Korean Buddhism. This paper explores the restructuring of this genre through a close examination of works produced in late colonial Korea by Poŭng Munsŏng 普應文性 (1867–1954) and Namsan Pyŏngmun 南山秉文 (d. 1950), and Kŭmyong Ilsŏp 金蓉日燮 (1901–1975)—three monk painters who reformulated the well-established iconography of sweet dew paintings at a time when the need to deliver the deceased and provide solace to the living was most urgent. This study examines the dual role that these paintings performed amidst the wartime mobilization of Koreans by the Japanese colonial authorities: While Munsŏng and Pyŏngmun’s collaborative work aimed to deliver the souls of fallen Japanese soldiers, Ilsŏp’s compositions from the 1940s intended to help Koreans counter the trauma of colonial mobilization. This article both reveals the multi-faceted function of modern Korean Buddhist paintings and contributes to our understanding of the war experiences of colonial subjects through the medium of religious visual culture.

In 1749, King Yŏngjo and his courtiers began to venerate the Ming emperors Hongwu and Chongzhen at Taebodan in the courtyard of Ch’angdŏk Palace. This was in addition to Wanli, who had been honored since 1704. During the late Chosŏn period, the court regularly held rituals to worship these emperors. This study examines court discussions to assess the impact of this veneration on the image of the emperors. These show that prior to 1749, Chosŏn monarchs and ministers often viewed the emperors negatively, while at the same time lauding their virtues. The study also explores the process through which the court constructed orthodox narratives on the emperors, a process which bestowed the emperors with certain merits and virtues. These images became the only legitimate means through which to view them and were reinforced by regular state rituals. After 1749, the emperors became objects of supreme veneration rather than objective evaluation. Ming loyalism discouraged voices critical of the Ming or disrespectful to the emperors, an approach that supplanted a more critical Confucian interpretation.

The languages spoken in the state of Kara 加羅 or Kaya 伽耶 (ca. AD 42 – 562) have remained largely beyond reach, impeded by previous approaches to the data. In this paper, I examine the earliest editions of the Samguk sagi 三國史 記 and the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 and offer an appraisal of certain Kara words and suffixes building on Beckwith’s phonetic reconstruction of the conservative frontier dialect of Chinese spoken on the Korean Peninsula in pre-Unified Silla times and on Toh’s geographic identification of Kara toponyms in the Samguk sagi. Following this methodology, I identify the original Kara forms of the toponyms Hadong-gun 河東郡, Agyang-hyŏn 嶽陽縣, Kyeja-hyŏn 谿子縣, and Habin-hyŏn 河濱縣. In addition, I analyze the earliest Koreanic words for ‘child’, ‘east’, ‘mountain’, river’, and ‘shore’, and the genitive-attributive suffix, as well as data from neighboring Puyŏ-Koguryŏic languages and dialects. The findings of this exploratory study exemplify a new approach to Korean Peninsular historical linguistics and elucidate the linguistic diversity of the Korean Peninsula in ancient times, thereby increasing awareness of Korea’s multilingual and multicultural past.

This study compares the hyangch’al 鄕札 of the Silla 新羅 Kingdom (57 BCE–935 CE) and the sŏktok kugyŏl 釋讀口訣 of the Koryŏ 高麗 (918–1392) dynasty. Both hyangch’al and kugyŏl incorporated borrowed characters (ch’aja 借字) from Chinese to phrase the Korean vernacular. Although hyangch’al is older than kugyŏl, materials written in hyangch’al demonstrate a similar usage of borrowed sinographs and analogous syntactic structures. This affinity between the two systems implies they were created in similar cultural contexts by a similar social class. Based on this, the paper reexamines a well-known principle of hyangch’al, called hunju ŭmjong 訓主音從, wherein word segments in hyangch’al consist of hunch’a 訓借 (sinographs borrowed as semantograms) and ŭmch’a 音借 (sinographs borrowed for their sound), which together comprise ch’aja 借字 or borrowed sinographs. However, the complications inherent to the differentiation of hunch’a and ŭmch’a have led to another crucial division between ch’aja and normal Sinitic being neglected, resulting in a misleading interpretation of hyangch’al. In kugyŏl, a word segment comprises normal Sinitic first followed by sinographs, a rule that also applies to hyangch’al. We call this hanju ch’ajong 漢主借從 (Sinitic leads, borrowed usage follows). This paper reclassifies the four categories of hyangch’al characters and applies this reclassification to the reading of hyangga 鄕歌 songs recorded in hyangch’al. This approach to utilizing findings from research into kugyŏl allows for a more accurate translation of hyangga songs.

This article examines three episodes reported from Suijŏn (Unusual Stories), a text full of fantastical elements compiled between the 10th and 12th centuries and surviving only in part, due to fragments reported in later works. The three episodes are united by the literary tòpos of crossing the sea, common to many cultures since the most remote antiquity. By conducting a comparative/ structuralist analysis of the Korean text and other texts of the Western tradition, the paper seeks to identify a common “cultural structure”, because of which crossing of the sea becomes a metaphor of atonement and transformation of the individual. In this regard, the three Korean stories are particularly interesting in that the “mechanisms” that drive the crossing of the sea (and therefore of the “alchemical” process of transformation), differ in each episode, but are ultimately positive in terms of the formative path of the protagonists.

This study explores the North Korean initiative to translate Korean writing into foreign languages from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the North Korean government focused on the translation of Soviet texts, such as Lenin’s Collected Works, into Korean. The North Korean elite attempted to learn about Soviet culture and Marxism-Leninism by translating books and magazines from Russian into Korean. They accepted, rejected, or transformed elements of Soviet culture and Marxism-Leninism and applied them to their own context. At the same time, the North Korean leadership launched a Korean-to-foreign language translation project to introduce North Korean texts such as Kim Il Sung’s writings to Third World countries. When Kim Il Sung promulgated the Juche idea while visiting Indonesia in 1965, the focus of the North Korean leadership moved from Russian-to-Korean translation to Korean-to-foreign language translation. Previous studies have seen translation in North Korea as a way of importing written texts from the outside world, particularly the Soviet Union. However, this study sheds light on translation as a practice of exporting culture, ideas, and knowledge to the world, notably to the Third World.