EPILOGUE 1003society who would be regarded as thoroughgoing Confucians because despite
the presence of Confucian ideas for two millennia, Buddhism functioned as the
dominant religion at the upper levels of society, and folk religion, which
included animistic spirit worship and shamanism, was pervasive among the rural
peasantry. The new dynasty was ushered in by a small coterie of converts to the
Neo-Confucian doctrines of Sung dynasty China, particularly as digested and
recapitulated by Chu Hsi in the twelfth century. These men set out on an effort
to convert all of Korea to belief in Neo-Confucian principles and the practice
of Confucian norms.
They and their successors at the top of government and society went a long
way to achieving their aims, but they never fully completed their task. Even
though the peasants were eventually converted to Confucian ancestor worship
and patrilineal family organization and the like, they never fully discarded their
fear of the spirits in general. Total conversion of Korean society to Confucian
belief was also hindered because its educational enterprise was underfunded.
The early Chason state's official school system proved a failure even before the
end of the fifteenth century, and even the private academies after the mid-six-
teenth century were not created to educate all benighted peasants. Their Con-
fucian overlords needed them more in the fields than in the schoolroom.
The inadequacy of mass education was not the only reason for the violation
of Confucian norms and standards in real life. Many of the officials who had
been schooled and indoctrinated in Confucian moral standards placed private
interest over the public good, took bribes to enrich themselves and their own
families, exploited peasants and slaves to increase their wealth, and foreclosed
on mortgages to expand their landed properties instead of fulfilling their role as
moral examplars for society at large. Even though Neo-Confucian bureaucrats
were supposed to run Korean affairs as they would a moral order, many of them
were incapable of living up to the high standards of the moral code.
In this sense the history of the Chason dynasty could be viewed as a moral-
ity play in which a solid core of true believers did battlc with the reality of human
weakness and foible. Neo-Confucians understood the persistence of human
imperfection because they had been taught that inner goodness in the mind was
obscured or obstructed by psychophysical force. Historical experience had also
demonstrated that dynasties were not static or perpetual; they had a life of their
own that led to decline marked by the breakdown of social order and rebellion
in which the forces of evil seemed to win the day.
Confucianism, however, was not discredited despite its failure to halt moral
and dynastic decline because of the view that chaos and disorder was the fault
of leadership, education, or institutions, not the moral philosophy itself. Con-
fucian standards could outlive one dynasty and be resuscitated by the next. Con-
fucian thought was thus preserved as the dominant system of belief and the source
of statecraft wisdom from the Sung through Ch'ing dynasties in China despite
the overthrow of individual dynasties. Korea had only one dynasty dominated
by the Confucian vision, the Choson dynasty. It should have come to an end in