Political Tool of “Immoral Rituals” and Resilience of Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Confucians in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) employed the notion of “immoral rituals” as a tool to control Buddhist and shamanic rituals in a selective manner. In Confucian terms, immoral rituals specified those that were dedicated to “ghosts or deities who do not deserve worship”, and, in most cases, they referred to non-Confucian prayer rituals. Buddhist prayer rituals (and shamanic rituals) were largely subject to control by Confucian state officials. Through the Confucian prism of immoral rituals, this article explores the question of which aspects of Buddhist rituals were denounced by the Confucian critics and which goals the Confucians tried to achieve by wielding the tool of immoral rituals against Buddhism. Based on an analysis of four episodes in which Buddhist prayer rituals were denounced as immoral rituals, the article suggests that the Confucians tried to construct a new collective identity of distinction and privilege, to keep in check the royal family and, by extension, the sovereign, to control the female body, and, in collaboration with the king, to suppress people’s discontent with governance. In this process, Buddhism—caught in the politics of immoral rituals, as this article suggests—nevertheless remained vibrant by conducting prayer rituals in the social margins. And for their part, Confucians benefited by continuing to exploit the notion of immoral rituals up to the end of the dynasty. The trajectory of immoral rituals reflected how Buddhism functioned and evolved in Chosŏn Korea.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it