Book Reviews Volume 16 Number 2 December 2013 The Review of Korean Studies
Book Reviews 201 Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918-1170: History, Ideology and Identity in Koryŏ Dynasty, by Remco E. Breuker. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 484 pp. US$ 224.00, ISBN: 978-90-04-18325-4 (hardcover) Breuker s illuminating study sets ambitious goals for both himself and his readers. The essential point is that the impulse to characterize Koryŏ through Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, or nativism has distorted our understanding. It is not that the terms themselves are incorrect, but rather that no single term is sufficient. Koryŏ was constituted of all of these and the many interactions among them. Therefore, any attempt to establish dichotomies is a mistake at the outset. Drawing on Paul Feyerabend s Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Breuker notes how [d]elicate issues, such as the general ideological orientation of the Koryŏ dynasty, have been analyzed with the demonstrably crude dichotomies of Buddhism and Confucianism and found to be lacking in crudeness (p. 6). At issue is the difference between analytic categories and the richness of things they purport and necessarily fail to describe. Dichotomies are nice, because they make things easy to understand and present. But it does not mean that they are correct. Breuker argues this point with the aim of showing how Koryŏ s fundamentally pluralist view of reality was sanctioned and encouraged by the state, and fed and supported by society (p. 16). His approach is to draw on as much information as possible and to structure things historically and episodically in order to arrive at a critical mass that, he hopes, will support his arguments (p. 24). A core element in the book is how communal identity was structured and named, providing for a sense of legitimacy. In Part One, Establishment of a Pluralist Community, Breuker shows that the name Koryŏ was typically used to designate the state or the dynasty, but conspicuously less frequently to refer to Koryŏ as a country with a history, or this country s people (p. 52). This is an important but easily-overlooked point, and Breuker shows how that function was instead fulfilled by the idea of the Three Han (Samhan 三韓 ). Predating Koryŏ by roughly one millennium, the Three Han was ambiguous in both historical and historiographical terms. It was therefore useful. Seen through Feyerabend, the designation of the Three Han was capable of enclosing an
202 The Review of Korean Studies abundance that Koryŏ could not. Koryŏ was a dynasty, and thus assumed to be temporally finite. In appealing to the idea of the Three Han, Koryŏ thinkers and writers were making a conscious decision to anchor Koryŏ in a geography that transcended temporal constraints (p. 81). Buddhism played no small role in this: the power of the Buddha protects the Three Han, but Buddhism is also spread through the mediation of the Koryŏ ruler (p. 56). This in turn helped to establish a web of connections that attested to abundance. In protecting the Three Han, the power of the Buddha by extension also protected Koryŏ and its rulers, and they, in turn, had reason to protect Buddhism. Koryŏ intellectuals eagerly reinforced those links (p. 176). However, Breuker s conclusion here hints at the possibility that abundance posed problems of its own: Koryŏ at times presented an idealized picture of itself, both to the outside and domestically [,] reducing the incommensurable elements inherent in its history, society, culture and mythology to a readily understood and relatively easily manageable image (p. 141). Some of the implications of that need to make things readily understood and easily manageable come into focus in Part Two, Understanding Koryŏ Pluralist Ideology, which examines the role of kingship in Koryŏ, the complexities of diplomacy, and the literati. This fascinating material is handled well. Drawing on Winston Churchill, Breuker argues that the Koryŏ ruler was a contradiction wrapped in an inconsistency inside an ambiguity because he united the different pasts of the peninsula through all available thought and belief systems and technologies (p. 145). Koryŏ diplomacy and intellectual life can be described in similar terms, but a necessary distinction should be drawn here. In the political and military context of Northeast Asia, the pluralist nature of Koryŏ diplomacy maintaining simultaneous ties with various states while accommodating their influences represented a fluid mixture of reactions to and anticipation of the international situation, identity formation with regard to the foreign other, state building aspirations and consolidation of the Koryŏ state (p. 256). In short, the pluralism that attached to the Koryŏ ruler and the state s approach to diplomacy were driven by necessity, and in the case of diplomacy, can be described as a matter of survival. Intellectual life is a related question, but it is not the same. An abundance of pre-existing resources on which to draw may have been useful in constituting a pluralism that was necessary for the integrity of the ruler and the state, but neither had much choice in the matter. In this sense, pluralism seems to have
Book Reviews 203 been at once a cause and an effect, something Breuker shows to have been the case but never states outright (see pp. 310-11). But this does not mean that pluralism always was seen to be desirable. It could lead to tension and difficulty in making things readily understood or easily manageable. Intimations of this problem can be found in the writings of Koryŏ literati. Breuker discusses Yi Kyubo (1168-1241) in various contexts and refers to his massive poem, A Lay of King Tongmyŏng (Tongmyŏngwang p yŏn), which is introduced in connection with a broader discussion on the ideas surrounding Koryŏ s historic territory. Although Yi often wrote about Buddhism, his concern in this poem was to see Koryŏ s historic territory in Confucian terms. That was a problem. The reason is that King Tongmyŏng was more like a supernatural being than a mere king, and Confucians were not to write about such things. Breuker quotes from the opening of Yi s preface which begins with [t]he mysterious tales of King Tongmyŏng are so well known that even ignorant men and simple women can tell them (p. 75). But in what followed, Yi attempted to justify what he was doing. How he did this is complex, but the core of the matter as it relates to Breuker s thesis is that we can discern the broad contours of a potential problem in those pluralistic tendencies that Yi exemplified and Breuker describes. The problem was not pluralism itself, but rather Yi s self-conscious Confucianinspired attempt to erase the inconsistencies inherent in Koryŏ s pluralistic worldview. The third and final part of Breuker s study, Koryŏ s Practical Realities of Engagement, examines pluralism in three contexts: The Histories of the Three Kingdoms by Kim Pusik (1075-1151); the eleventh-century Ten Injunctions, attributed apocryphally to King T aejo (r. 918-943), the founder of Koryŏ; and finally, a rebellion sparked by Myoch ŏng (d.1135) in the twelfth century. For those who have a reasonably good idea of the issues under discussion, these final three chapters are a fitting and provocative end to the book. But others will find these chapters difficult, and they are far more difficult than necessary. Two fundamental problems are sequence and a lack of integration with clearly-drawn connections: the Ten Injunctions embodied a vision for the future of the Koryŏ dynasty (p. 351) and was completed roughly one century before Myoch ŏng s rebellion; Kim s Histories was written after the rebellion, which he put down, and was a response to it. For the sake of clarity, it is worth presenting these in their historical sequence, because it is easier to see that Breuker makes three significant contributions in these final chapters.
204 The Review of Korean Studies First, he persuasively argues that the Ten Injunctions are historically speaking perhaps even more important as a forgery than they would have been, had they been authentic (p. 352), concluding that [u]ntil the end of the dynasty, the injunctions told their readers different stories; most importantly, though, they conveyed to their readers that the existence of different stories was the norm [emphasis added] (p. 406). Kim s Histories can be seen in a similar way. Breuker s second contribution is to show convincingly how Kim s muchmaligned work has been misread as a Confucian ideological manifesto when it was a pluralist history written by a pluralist literatus intent on constructing a practical historical guide for rulers and ministers to consult (p. 315). Third, Breuker s contribution in assessing Myoch ŏng s rebellion cannot be overstated. Contrary to the view that was fundamental in the creation of modern Korean historiography and has predominated for the past century, Breuker argues that it was Myoch ŏng typically lauded for his Buddhist and nativist view of Koryŏ s place in the world who was monist in orientation, not Kim Pusik (p. 444). This is a surprising reversal of the common interpretation, and it makes sense. Although Breuker does not ignore the importance of domestic political tensions, he properly emphasizes that the central issue was Myoch ŏng s insistence that Koryŏ should embrace its destiny, conquer the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), and rule over its corner of the world (p. 436). In this interpretation, Kim and Myoch ŏng were both Koryŏ-centric, but Myoch ŏng knew little of the intricacies of the international situation (p. 434). Pluralism was central to navigating through those intricacies. Myoch ŏng was doomed once his supporters grasped the elemental fact that he pursued a policy that would turn Koryŏ into a state that would no longer recognize the validity of different worldviews (p. 435). However, the Ten Injunctions, Myoch ŏng s rebellion, and Kim s Histories raise other thorny questions when considered in historical sequence. Breuker emphasizes that Kim s Histories was written to recodify Koryŏ s pluralism after the rebellion (pp. 437-38) and judges it to have been a botched attempt due to the necessity of forcibly establish[ing] his vision of Koryŏ s future (p. 439). Earlier, he explains that the Ten Injunctions codified a way of looking at the world that was characteristically Koryŏan, while also allowing contradiction and inconsistency to coexist (pp. 353-54). But if contradiction and inconsistency were characteristic of the Koryŏ worldview something consistently argued over the preceding three hundred plus pages it is difficult
Book Reviews 205 to understand the contrast embodied in the while also. Indeed, the need to codify and then recodify a Koryŏan way of looking at the world suggests that Myoch ŏng s rebellion might have been merely a symptom of deep tensions inherent in Koryŏ s pluralism. Ultimately, Breuker reaches a similar conclusion, noting that Myoch ŏng s rise to power demonstrated the contingence and precariousness of such a worldview and that living with ambiguity had its advantages and disadvantages (p. 445). Alternatively, framed in terms used at the outset, pluralism s disadvantage might well have been its lack of crudeness. The importance of this outstanding work goes well beyond reshaping our understanding of Koryŏ. Indeed, Koryŏ s way of understanding and living within the world as analyzed by Breuker would become an object of fear during the subsequent Chosŏn (1392-1910) dynasty. Those fears and the way they came to be expressed provide much additional evidence for Breuker s thesis on Koryŏ s pluralism. They also point to a profound historical irony. In the minds of the Chosŏn elite, Myoch ŏng was synonymous with political disorder. Yet in a fundamental sense, the Chosŏn elite s outlook had far more in common with Myoch ŏng s monism than with Kim Pusik s pluralism. Among many other things, Breuker illuminates the origins of that remarkable contradiction. Gregory Evon University of New South Wales