CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 27military disappeared as a serious political force and the kings retained some
authority, but they were able to offer little resistance against the emergence and
domination of the Korya state by the yangban families who dominated the cen-
tral bureaucracy, the estate owners, and slaveholders. I
The Neo-Confucian supporters ofYi Sanggye proposed a program to reverse
all these problems, and they did so from a feeling of moral outrage. They fully
supported the creation of a bureaucratic monarchy to a level of prestige and power
that surpassed anything that had been seen since the military dictatorship ofYan
Kaesomun in the mid-seventh-century Kogurya dynasty. They did so not because
they admired tyranny, but because they saw a more powerful king as the agent
who would break the domination of hereditary yangban aristocrats of Korya by
requiring passage of the civil service examination as mandatory for appoint-
ment to the most prestigious offices. Once the new dynasty was in place, they
expected to restrain the tendency toward arbitrary and tyrannical rule by sub-
jecting the king to the ethical admonishments of his Confucian advisers and
remonstrance officials.
Since the central bureaucracy would hence be the exclusive locus of men edu-
cated in the Nco-Confucian canon, they planned to expand central, bureaucratic
control over the whole country by requiring that all district magistrates be
appointed from the pool of regular officials at the capital. They also aspired to
build up the defense establishment by creating a national structure of command
in both the capital and the provinces, expanding the number of forts and bases
throughout the country, and requiring all adult male subjects of the state except
slaves to perform some service for the military. They wanted to increase the tax
revenues of the king and central government, and one of them, Chong Tojon,
even hoped to divest the landlords of their private property by having the new
state nationalize all land and distribute subsistence grants to all peasant families.
In the economic realm they sought to counter the flourishing commercial life
of the private merchants by reducing merchant activities to a minimum, taxing
the merchants, and returning the excess of merchants to productive lives as pri-
mary producers of food and clothing. This, too, was based on the moral precept
that merchant activity was inherently evil because it catered to the selfish desires
of men for profit and wealth through the manipulation of the market, rather than
through honest toil and productive enterprise.
Their practical program for the restructuring of government institutions was
also accompanied by a social, cultural, and religious program. The Neo-Con-
fucians laid out plans to replace traditional kinship and marriage practices by
replacing hilateral kinship organization, occasional matrilocal marriage, and
greater status and inheritance rights for women with a patrilineal kinship and
inheritance system, and a reduction of the place of women by subordinating them
to the male heads of household.^2 They worked to replace Buddhist funeral rit-
ual with Confucian ceremony and ancestor worship, and they also called for the
physical as well as religious obliteration of Buddhism, including the confisca-
tion of most of its estates and slaves.