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Korean Buddhists, fired
by allegations of religious bias from the Lee administration, take to
the streets but the real reason lies much deeper.
 South Korean Buddhists
are up in arms, accusing President Lee Myung Bak and his
administration of showing religious bias against Buddhists and
favoring Christians.
South Korea by law is a
secular state, as clearly enshrined in its constitution defending the
freedom of religion. It bars designation of any faith as state
religion. Yet, a phenomenal rise in the size and power of the
Christian community in recent decades has the Buddhist community here
gripped by apprehension. In the course of the last five decades of
Korea’s industrialization and modernization, the role and size
of Korea’s once-powerful Buddhist population has significantly
declined.
Internally, not only is
the Buddhist hierarchy torn by schisms and squabbles over control of
the large financial assets involving temple properties like land and
buildings, its failure to attract new converts through renewal has
resulted in their growing marginalization.
Their preoccupation
with material assets, which are sometimes protected through hiring of
mafia-like thugs camouflaged in monks’ robes engaging in bloody
gang wars, has alienated a growing number of socially and politically
powerful younger generations who run Korea Inc.
Unfolding against that
background of turmoil, some analysts regard the current uproar over
the government’s perceived slights and affronts against the
Buddhists as a sign that it could be seeking a rallying cry to unite
the flock. That could be the beginning of new political activism to
revitalize the sagging momentum of Korean Buddhism, some analysts
say.
At a massive,
traffic-disrupting rally of August 27 in Seoul at which over 200,000
lay Buddhists protested what they said was the government’s
“religious discrimination”, they demanded the firing of
the National Police Director by holding him responsible for a number
of developments they claimed indicated his religious bias. One was
his call to evangelize the entire police force, he being an ardent
Presbyterian churchgoer. Another episode involved the riot policemen
stopping and searching a temple abbot’s car, which they said
was necessary to look for anti-US demonstrators hiding inside a Seoul
temple compound.
In a fit of rage, one
Buddhist monk has slashed his stomach with a razor blade. It was not
a life-threatening wound, but the incident was enough to poison the
atmosphere of the confrontation. The Buddhist clergy now vows to hold
a new series of demonstrations across the country unless President
Lee, himself a Presbyterian elder, issued a statement of apology.
But tension has been
building up since December, when newly elected president Lee began
filling his first cabinet with Christians. At least a half of his new
ministers were people professing to be Christians, with the prime
minister, Han Seung Soo, said to be a Roman Catholic. Not a single
cabinet minister professed to be Buddhist.
And when Lee was Seoul
mayor, he himself stirred a storm of debate by saying he would
“consecrate” his public service “to God,”
omitting the fact that he was there to serve the citizens. Other than
making these statements which were considered religiously
over-zealous, neither the President nor the police director has been
specifically cited for taking discriminatory steps in their
administration or leadership. Government officials say they may have
been guilty of giving “wrong impressions” but harbored no
actual religious bias.
There’s no
denying that Christians have become a powerful force in the Korean
society. First is the numbers: people professing to be Protestants or
Roman Catholics total more than 14 million or over 30% of the
population. The once-dominant Buddhists have shrunk to a little more
10 million, according to the last government survey taken in 2005.
It’s not so much
this number as the Christians’ rise in Korean society that is
unsettling the Buddhists. Korean Christians boast higher education
levels than their Buddhist peers. A recent survey by a Buddhist
scholar showed that 23.1 percent of Presbyterians had a college or
higher level education level (9.8 percent for Catholics) while for
Buddhists, this was 10.8 percent. The perception has risen that
Christianity represents a superior religion, a western faith with
progressive thinking while Buddhism is old and tradition-bound, at
the level of folk belief, mainly sustaining itself vague promises of
good luck and fortune, said Kim Yong Pyo, a professor at Dongkook
Buddhist University in Seoul.
The younger generation
is even more negative. “You don’t want to go to a temple
where all you do is recite sutra and bow before a Buddha image, and
all the time mingling with oldsters,” says a university student
contemptuously, not wanting to be identified by name. To him,
Buddhism is little more than a superstition, something far from
modern theology answering today’s problems.
Kwon Ki Jong, another
professor on the same campus, said all this is a familiar refrain.
The Buddhist establishment must find a better way of proselytizing
the young, by appealing to rational, intellectual thinking, not
mysticism. He suggests holding seminars and conferences using modern
religious language and idiom to address issues of the modern life and
society. Otherwise, Buddhism will stop being relevant to the young,
educated audiences of today’s Korea.
Upgrading the quality
of discourse is essential to revitalize Buddhism and make it relevant
to Korea’s young, Kwon said. He underlines this case with a
number showing that educated Buddhists are deserting in increasing
numbers.
While Buddhists fight
the government and debate how to keep their faith fresh, the
Christian denominations, even though vigorously expanding, face
similar criticisms for a host of ills including the Korean churches’
venality and aggrandizement. Richly endowed and overzealous, they
move aggressively into Muslim nations, developing trouble with the
local authorities with evangelical works and ignoring local customs
and religion. In 2007, the government reportedly paid tens of
millions of dollars in ransom to get 23 of them released from
hostage-taking Taliban in Afghanistan. One was beheaded in Bagdad.
Still others have been deported from China for trying to infiltrate
Christian converts into the communist North Korea from border areas.
Korea’s economic
prosperity in recent decades has meant that huge amounts of church
donations have flowed into overseas missionary works. The Korean
Buddhists have not been an exception: they too send out priests and
laymen to Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka where Buddhism remains
strong. Thus venality and vainglory run deeply in both Christian and
Buddhist activities.
Like Korea’s
economic development, quantity has overwhelmed quality in the
nation’s spiritual life. The current stirrings in the Buddhist
community may be a part of bigger picture that reform campaign is
afoot in the nation’s temples, just as Christian churches are
now debating their own direction of growth.
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