CHAPTER 20
Yu Hyongwon's Community
Compact Regulations
"The custom in this country is that we only pay respect to pedigree [munjiJ.
Among those people who engage in the activity of scholars. we also have fa
category 1 that wc call yangban, that is, the sons and grandsons and lineage rela-
tions [clwkfallg 1 of the higher and lower officials [tat'hllsaj. In generaL the sys-
tem of our country is that only the lineage relations of the fachl/sa can obtain
regular oflicial posts as civil and military officials.'"Yu Hyongwon probably wrote his draft of a community compact sometime in
the 1650s, and he insisted that he had to modify the regulations in Chu Hsi's
emendation of the The Lii Family Community Compact for two reasons: it was
primarily an agreement among members of the scholar class alone and repre-
sented their didactic approach to the education of the rest of the population, and
it did not include the common people in the community and lacked the coop-
erative attitude toward the population that Yu felt was necessary. Yu claimed that
his own emendations of Chu Hsi's text was based on two sections of The Rites
oj Chou and the compact regulations drawn up by T'oegye and Yulgok. and he
also cited about half of the full text of Cho Hon's recommendation for com-
munity compacts to King Sonjo in 1574.2
Yu cited statements hy T'oegye and Yulgok that praised the emphasis on moral
leadership in local communities in Chou times. T'oegye lauded the local men
of official rank (hsiang la-fu) in the Chou period who established models of fil-
ial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty, and trust for the local communities (hyang-
dang). He and Yulgok both stressed that in the age of decline after the destruction
of the Chou dynasty it would not be possible to recreate the laws and institu-
tions of the Chou age, but thc moral principles of those times remained intact
and the organization of local government as a means of moral training could be
reconstituted. Nonetheless. Yu's attribution to T'ocgye and Yulgok for the idea
that community compacts had to be representative of all class and slatus groups
in the community was partially misplaced, because although both called for par-
ticipation by commoners and lower people as well as yanghan. Yulgok was par-
ticularly severe in his discriminatory regulations against the lower classes.'
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