3. Yulryeo Thought and the Revitalization of Jeongyeok Thought
Kim Ji-ha, upon being released from prison, presented the Yulryeo thought. Yulryeo is a law corresponding to the harmony of Eastern music; in a cosmos infinitely nested as the Lesser Supreme Ultimate and the Greater Supreme Ultimate, its function is that of attuning all things by rhythm, like a metronome that tunes all the instruments of an orchestra. Kim Mi-mi summarizes as follows, in a paper on the history of scholarship, the process by which Kim Ji-ha's thought reached all the way to Yulryeo after passing from the life of Donghak through the life of Catholicism.
After being released from prison, Kim Ji-ha came to acquaint himself with diverse systems of thought. What he sought to find in Catholicism, the main object, was the way of true life, but Catholicism too did not contain a thought that overcomes the dualistic division of heaven and earth, and he found the clue in Donghak. People are bewildered by his seemingly changed appearance, but in Donghak, too, political statecraft and the cosmology of Gaebyeok are not mutually contradictory. There is merely a difference in the way of viewing the state of affairs and in the method of action; Donghak does not exclude politics. A line of argument such as the above is, on the whole, repeated in the writings that subsequently treat his world of thought, and no particularly new perspective is found. To organize the general discussion simply, it is thus: taking the 1980s as the point of departure, thereafter, through Aerin and Daeseol Nam, the philosophy of life represented by "Aerin" comes to the fore. (Yet Kim Ji-ha scholars argue that the philosophy of life was already implied from an earlier period.) Thereafter, together with the acceptance of Donghak, the poetics of "bearing/serving" (侍) represented by "Sicheonju" (侍天主), and, as a practical movement, "Yulryeo," appear; and after the publication of the prose collections The Road of the White Shadow (2003) and The Aesthetics of the White Shadow (2005), it is organized into the "aesthetics of Huingeuneul (White Shadow)"—this is, though somewhat rough, a single line of flow.[23]
That Kim Ji-ha took note of Yulryeo is because he regarded the Jeongyeok thought of Kim Il-bu, the source of Kim Ji-ha's Yulryeo, as the Yijing-studies (yeokhak) unfolding of Donghak.[24] Regarding the reason the Donghak Peasant Revolution, in which Donghak unfolded, failed as the absence of theory, what was presented as the alternative was Jeongyeok thought, the Yijing-studies unfolding of Donghak. The failure of the Donghak Peasant Movement brought about the paradoxical result that Donghak thought, which had asserted "life," took away the most lives. Donghak thought, meeting the new liminality of the machine gun—used for the first time in the world—was once again placed at a moment of decision.
In fact, after the modernization period, the East Asians of Korea, China, and Japan were in a continuous series of limit-situations. Without sufficient information, they always had to encounter new problems, and were routinely driven into an ultimate limit-situation in which survival was guaranteed only if they resolved those problems. Problem-solving by traditional correlative thinking no longer held good in the new environment of modernity, and, before the harsh new reality of capitalism, one's identity and existence were placed in a limit-situation under a tradition powerless to respond. In a situation where even Donghak, presented as an alternative, had rather enlarged the problem, an alternative was very urgently needed.
At this juncture, the Yulryeo theory of Jeongyeok—an innovative theory based on tradition—could become a theory capable of replacing Donghak. Jeongyeok thought, which is based on Yijing studies and emphasizes principle (li), could, unlike Donghak, which emphasizes vital energy (gi), be applied more to everyday problems. What was presented alongside Yulryeo thought in this period is also Kim Ji-ha's Bap (rice) thought. The Bap thought that "rice is heaven" was presented as a model of a philosophy of life more grounded in reality, as against the philosophy of life of Donghak, which was inclined toward the conceptual.
Through Yulryeo thought, Kim Ji-ha sought to revitalize the liminality triggered by Donghak. Yulryeo may therefore be seen as the philosophy of life as liminality having been revitalized and appearing as a practical movement. Kim Ji-ha regarded the Jeongyeok thought of Kim Il-bu, which unfolded after the failure of Donghak, as the Yijing-studies alternative to Donghak, and took note of the Yulryeo thought of Jeongyeok. Although Kim Ji-ha founded the Yulryeo Society and even served as its first president, Yulryeo was the most abstruse part even among the Eastern thought represented by correlative thinking, and so he continually confessed his difficulty in explaining Yulryeo.[25] Indeed, there has also been research that regards Donghak as the beginning of revitalization.[26] In East Asia, the tradition of revitalization was common not only to Korea but also to Japan and China.[27]
Revitalization theory (Revitalization Movements), unlike the theory of liminality, which emphasizes the internal process of change in response to change, is a theory that explains the change in the process of response to external change. Revitalization theory was first introduced by the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015) in his monumental 1956 paper "Revitalization Movements."[28]
Just as an individual, when threatened with the possibility that his identity may dissolve, reorganizes and changes his own belief system on the basis of his strengths, puts the changed belief system into practice, and thereby changes his position in society, so too a society, when it meets a crisis in which its social identity may dissolve, revives the strengths of each society's existing cultural tradition and thereby changes its social belief system—this Wallace named revitalization.
According to Wallace, the change in a society's belief system occurs through the mazeway (a mental image, a cognitive map; the original meaning being "labyrinth"), which is the mental image possessed by a member of a society.[29] According to Wallace, every member of a society, as a part of the social organism, comes to have a mental image not only of the regularity of his own body and of the actions his body performs but also of the society and culture to which he belongs, and it is precisely this image that corresponds to the mazeway.[30]
Wallace regarded human society as a vast organism, and the mazeway is the way in which each member of society adapts to this social organism. The concept of the mazeway (labyrinth) includes not only the perception of physical objects within the social environment, but also the perception of the way an individual adjusts in order to minimize given stress, and of the way he adjusts and reconfigures this labyrinth together with the members of society.[31]
When a crisis of social identity comes, a crisis comes to this mazeway for the individual, and because this connects even to the crisis of the ideology that constitutes society, rather than being merely a material crisis, it comes to the members of society as a greater threat than a material crisis. To this, society responds with various religious revitalization movements, and some religious movements expand even into political movements.
For the leaders of the countless colonial countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when imperialism was expanding, what was most threatening was not the material crisis but the crisis of identity. Traditions that had continued for thousands of years were degraded into superstition by Western civilization, and the respected leaders were reduced to swindlers who fomented superstition, so that the belief system of traditional society could no longer maintain the social order, and the individual's social status too fell irretrievably.
For the general public, too, the collapse of tradition acted as strong mental stress. Even though the new Western belief system was, like the collapsed traditional belief system, a belief system coming from long tradition that could collapse at any time, in a situation where only their own belief system was negated, the method the general public and the leaders could choose was the appropriation of tradition—that is, revitalization—that newly interprets the existing tradition.
Revitalization was applied to time, space, and human beings alike. In the case of time it appears as millenarianism, the movement holding that a new age will arrive, and in the case of space it also becomes an earthly-paradise movement holding that a new utopia will arrive. In human terms, syncretism, in which religious doctrines are blended, also appears, and non-resistance also appears politically. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious movements can be classified as types of revitalization, and in the case of Donghak all of these types are synthesized.
Revitalization theory set out from a theory that sought to evaluate the birth and development of religious organizations on the basis of an inquiry—in 1952—into the Long House movement that appeared among the Iroquois in the early nineteenth century, which had been waged by Handsome Lake (1735–1815), the prophet of the Seneca, one of the Indian tribes.
Just as the capitalist material culture of the West and Japan raised a crisis of identity in the Joseon society of the time—Joseon, which had known only the long clan-law order centered on China as the whole of the world—so too, for the Indians, who had lived for long ages with cultural pride, the Western culture and the Western people who toppled their own authority with guns and swords came as a great shock.
For the Iroquois, the representative Indian tribe of the northeastern United States where New York is located, that shock came all the greater. Handsome Lake, who had been one of the leadership class of the Seneca, one of the Iroquois, was also a figure who had gravely undergone a crisis of identity under the colonial policy of the United States. The period in which Handsome Lake lived was a time when American gold mines were discovered and the gold rush was under way; with the emergence of this gold rush, the status of the Indians—who in the past had made contracts state to state, on an equal footing with the United States—fell, so that they were reduced to a protectorate, just as Joseon too, which had lost its status as a state at the time of the Japan-Korea annexation, was reduced to a protectorate.
What makes revitalization important in the study of Kim Ji-ha's thought is the point that the national thought treated by revitalization is the beginning of humanity's universal thought. Since any universal thought must set out from the thought of a particular people, in order to achieve a universal thought the revitalization of national thought must first take precedence. The starting point on the road toward a thought of reconciliation and coexistence lies in the revitalization of national thought.
The revitalization presented in Jeongyeok thought was precisely the reinterpretation of the tradition of the Zhouyi (I Ching). That Kim Ji-ha took note of Jeongyeok for the reinterpretation of tradition is because, in the modernization period, the three countries of Korea, China, and Japan sought to fuse Western thought through countless theories based on tradition—such as "Chinese essence, Western function" (zhongti xiyong)—yet there was no theory that fundamentally reinterpreted tradition as Jeongyeok did.
The Yulryeo thought of Jeongyeok was, as Jeong Jin-hong said, a logic that consistently unifies tradition. The logic that Jeongyeok pursued was the consistency of the East Asian Five Phases system that is potae, yangsaeng, and yokdae (the stages of gestation, nurturing, and maturation). The potae, yangsaeng, and yokdae of Jeongyeok were clearly elucidated by Jeungsan, but they were already implied in Jeongyeok thought.
In the "Sibil-il-eon" (十一一言) of the Yijing, discussing the principle of the opening (Gaebyeok) of heaven and earth centered on the Earthly Branches, it is argued that the Earthly Branches of the Former Heaven begin with ja and chuk, as follows: "The ten-earth and six-water are the unchanging earth. The one-water and five-earth are the unchanging heaven. The government of Heaven opens at ja, and the government of Earth opens at chuk. The chuk-cycle is five-six, and the ja-cycle is one-eight." (十土六水는 不易之地니라 一水五土는 不易之天이니라. 天政은 開子하고 地政은 闢丑이니라. 丑運은 五六이오 子運은 一八이니라.) (Kim Hang, Jeongyeok, "Sibo-il-eon," Chapter 22; requoted from Lee Hyeon-jung, "The Principle of the Sexagenary-Cycle Degrees (干支 度數) of Jeongyeok (1)," Studies in East and West Philosophy, Vol. 27, Korean Society of East-West Philosophy, 1998, p. 59.) If Daoist thought and Buddhist thought are discussed on the side of subject and object, then, whereas Daoist thought sought to achieve the self-awareness of a world in which subject and object are united on the side of the object of cognition, Buddhist thought may be said to have sought to become aware of the world of personhood in which subject and object are united on the side of the subject of cognition. Confucian thought, by contrast, has its center not in self-awareness, but, by proclaiming being itself as the ground of the possibility of self-awareness, has its center in self-awareness and practice on that ground. Therefore Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought form a temporal-successive relationship, constituting the period of birth, the period of growth, and the period of maturity.[32]
This can be interpreted as the religious-ideological change as mythos, logos, and theos of which Jeong Jin-hong spoke, but the Jeongyeok interpretation has been expressed more mathematico-logically by Han Tae-dong. Kim Ji-ha is a form that expresses this in literary terms. Looking first at Han Tae-dong's explanation, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are logically connected to one another as liminality.
Han Tae-dong's research,[33] which expressed Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in mathematical logic, indirectly shows that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are not merely philosophies but scientific theories based on Yin-Yang and the Five Phases. The characteristics of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity become clearly evident in how they define the relationship of friend and foe. Confucianism—which delights in learning (X) and practicing it in due time (X), and delights when a friend (X) comes from afar and again (X) visits—holds that the ruler (X) must be ruler-like (X) and the subject (-X) must be subject-like (-X),[34] so that, in the relationship of friend (X) and foe (-X), friend (X) is friend (X) and foe (-X) is foe (-X). As against spring-Confucianism, which drives friend and foe apart like a repulsive force, Daoism—the long-standing archrival of Confucianism—holds that the Way (X) called the Way (X) is not the Way (-X), that being (X) is nonbeing (-X) and nonbeing (-X) is being (X), that the weakest water (-X) is the strongest (X), and that the ugliest (-X) person is the most beautiful (X),[35] so that foe (-X) is friend (X) and friend (X) is foe (-X).[36] As against Daoism—of explosive force and latent concealment—which arranges foe and friend symmetrically, Buddhism, the long-standing mediator of Confucianism and Daoism, asserts a total emptiness (空) in which there is neither friend (X) nor foe (-X). Of course, Christianity, which brought about a great innovation in the triangular relationship of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, encompasses all of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism with respect to Buddhism through the words "love your enemy (-X)."[37]
In the end, the Yulryeo manifested in the Jeongyeok thought of which Kim Ji-ha speaks may be interpreted in the sense that the syncopation and harmony of mutually different systems of thought are logically achieved. Kim Ji-ha stated, in his acceptance remarks at the award ceremony of the Jeong Ji-yong Literary Prize, that the poetry of Jeong Ji-yong could be an example of fusing mutually opposed systems of thought.[38]