Korea Seminar Series – A New Vision of the Cosmos, the Afterlife, and the Attempt to Create an Ideal Society: Neo-Confucianism in the Koryo and Choson Periods

Korea Seminar Series -- A New Vision of the Cosmos, the Afterlife, and the Attempt to Create an Ideal Society: Neo-Confucianism in the Koryo and Choson Periods

Milan Hejtmanek - Associate Professor of Korean History, Academy of East Asian Studies, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 207, Sterling Memorial Library (2nd floor) See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 6511

After centuries of dominance as the belief system at the core of Korean aristocratic rule, Buddhism in the late fourteenth century was supplanted by a vast reinterpretation of the universe, social and ritual institutions, and the place of human beings in them. Based on Korean elaborations of Song-period daoxue thought, particularly that associated with Zhu Xi and his disciples, the new dispensation provided a durable political and intellectual foundation for the Chosôn period (1392-1910) over the subsequent five centuries and engendered a general consensus on the afterlife, linking intimately the living and the dead, that came to be threatened from the eighteenth century by Catholicism.

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