26 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYfor its practical utility in educating officials to the methods of government and
aiding in the maintenance of social order. Since the Buddhists directed their main
attention toward spiritual salvation and escape from the defiling attachments of
the illusory and transient real world, they were not jealous of the role that Con-
fucians played in the world of practical rule and bureaucratic life.
When Korean Confucians became enamored of Neo-Confucian thought, they
attacked Buddhism for the corruption of its monks, the submersion of the faith
into materialism as a consequence of its accumulation of landed property and
slaves, and more seriously, its subversion of Confucian moral values by an empha-
sis on individual salvation at the expense of filial obligation and family welfare.
The passionate attachment to the new faith and the conviction that Neo-Confu-
cian moral philosophy was the only acceptable fount of wisdom put an end to
toleration and fueled the vehemence of the reformist spirit in general.
That passion for reform extended to the political and social realm as well. To
be sure, the distaste and contempt for corruption was an obvious goad to re-
formist zeal, but a more crucial source of discontent stemmed from the usurpa-
tion of political power and property by private hands. Private control over
resources meant the destruction of the public good to the Confucian mind, and
the king, the ruler of the state, was supposed to function as the guardian of that
public good.
Almost every administrative deficiency in the late Kory6 period could be trans-
lated as a manifestation of the violation of that moral principle. The monarchy
and central authority was not accorded proper respect by the private holders of
power. Most of the officials were members of the hereditary yangban class who
held their posts by virtue of their prestigious ancestors. Their cousins in the coun-
tryside held two-thirds of the magistrate's posts in the districts, running them
as semiautonomous bailiwicks of personal power. The king was left with insuf-
ficient revenues for the central government and the national army because a suc-
cession of kings had been intimidated into granting tax-exemption privileges
for most of the best land in the country. The king was unable to use the labor
power of the country in the service of his own or the national interest because
about one-third of the population consisted of private slaves almost totally under
the control of their private masters, and the commoner peasants who served as
tenants on their estates were little better off than the slaves. Even the Buddhist
establishment could be regarded as another arm of the privileged Kory6 yang-
ban, whose sons dominated the Buddhist clergy and controlled vast monastic
estates, peasant tenants, and private slaves that were likewise exempt from the
taxes and labor service requirements of the central government.
To be sure, the debilitated state of the Kory6 kingship was by no means entirely
the fault of the Korean yangban. Kory6 kings were virtual puppets under a suc-
cession of military commanders since the military coup of I 170, and after a
brief exile on Kanghwa Island while the Mongols ran rampant and unopposed
over Korean territory on the peninsula, they once again became pawns, this time
in the hands of Mongol overlords from 1258 to 1355. During that period the