COMMUNITY COMPACT SYSTEM 729erty rights of the landlords and slaveholders and reducing (if not abolishing)
both the inherited privileges of the yangban and inherited burdens of the slaves.
Sakai has stressed Yulgok's openness and his commitment to the study of all
ideas in China. but this interpretation is belied by Yulgok's insertion into Chu
Hsi's list of misdemeanors of new bans against heterodox ideas and the conduct
of "lewd rites" (by the sulka or practitioners of shamanism. acupuncture, and
geomancy), specifically those that caused frequent delays in the interment of
the dead, suspension of burials because of disease, and reburials of the dead
because of interpretations of geomantic forces.
Yulgok's almost obsessive reliance on punishment as the means for coercing
conformity to moral norms in his Haeju regulations represented a shift in sen-
timent from the greater emphasis on moral cultivation in Chu Hsi's community
compact and in compacts proposed during Chungjong's reign in the early six-
teenth century. His requirement that repeated misdemeanors or gross violations
of standards deserved expulsion from either the community compact, the vil-
lage granary he. or the village itself, was far more severe than Chu Hsi's pro-
vision to permit such recalcitrants simply to leave the compact. While Tabana
conceded that Yulgok deserved credit for introducing specificity into penal law,
he deplored Yulgok's morbid fascination with exposing all possible examples
of human immorality and corruption.^42 Furthermore, the essence of that speci-
ficity in his penal rules was the gradation of punishment by the social status of
both perpetrator and victim a practice quite typical of the T'ang penal code
and Korean slave society.
Finally, Sakai's view that Yulgok's progressive social outlook and his realis-
tic appreciation of the lower classes was to be explained by his belief in the impor-
tance of material force (ki) in the construction of human nature and thc universe,
and his objective apprcciation of Wang Yang-ming appears totally unjustified.4J
Yulgok's handling of people oflower status and slaves indicates primarily a pater-
nalistic and aristocratic approach to the education of the ignorant. not an incli-
nation to liberate the oppressed from the domination of thc yangban and
slaveowners.
It was T'oegye, the advocate of the preeminence of principle over psycho-phys-
ical energy, who believed that considerations of social status should not intrude
on the organization of schools or local government associations! Even ifYulgok
had been more sympathetic to the lower classes. there is no reason to believe it
would have been the product of his preference for psycho-physical energy as the
foundation for objects of the real world and the nature of the human mind.
Injo's Reign. 1623--19The history of community compacts and the larger concern with moral educa-
tion in general displayed a pattern of ebb and flow according to shifting national
moods. King lnjo's interest in moral education and the community compact sys-
tem was sporadic and weak. In 1629 he approved publication of the Sohak and