CHAPTER I
Confucian Statecraft
in the Founding of Choson
be founding of the Chason dynasty was an exceptional period in the sense
that Confucian scholars, officials, and ideologues were intimately involved in
the political movement that led to the overthrow of the Koryo dynasty and estab-
lishment of the new Choson dynasty under the military commander, Yi Songgye,
Not all Confucians (or Neo-Confueian believers in the Chinese Sung dynasty's
version of Confucian doctrine) supported Yi's usurpation heeause some regarded
it as an act of disloyalty to the Koryo throne, but those Neo-Confucian ideo-
logues who did support the Choson dynasty contradicted their own ethical ohlig-
ation to serve the last Koryo ruler in the hopes of achieving the adoption of a
Confucian program for the new state. For that matter, the Neo-Confucian sup-
porters of the new dynasty did not agree on all aspects of reform for two rea-
sons because fundamentalists thought that the new dynasty should come as close
as possible to the recreation of the vaunted institutions of the ancient Chou dynasty
of China, while others believed that compromises had to be struck het ween ancient
ideals and contemporary Korean reality. Nonetheless, virtually all hoped to effect
a total moral, religious, and cultural conversion of the Korean people from the
evils, comlptions, and harharities of late Koryo dynasty I ife to the refined, glo-
rious, ordered, and ethically superior heights of a society inspired by a Neo-
Confucian vision.
The vitality of the Neo-Confucian movement as a political force was fueled
by the new, antagonistic attitude toward Buddhism that had originated in T'ang
dynasty China in the ninth century with the anti-Buddhist polemics of Han Yti.
The so-called Neo-Confucian philosophical movement of the Sung dynasty con-
tinued that spirit after 960, and the Korean Neo-Confucians of the fourteenth
century adopted it in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and found it
quite relevant hecause Korea was stilI dominated religiously and spiritually by
Buddhism and the Buddhist establishment.
Buddhism had heen the paramount spiritual force in Korea since the fourth
century, hut because of its philosophically tolerant approach toward Confu-
cianism, the two faiths coexisted without rancor. Confucianism was respected
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