Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

1010 EPILOGUE

and their policies provided both inspiration and working models for the new

statecraft scholars.

Yu HYONGWON' S REFORM PLANS

The response to crisis is certainly one of the main reasons why Korean schol-
ars in the seventeenth century began to shift their attention from Confucian moral
metaphysics to the problems of statecraft. The same thing happened in the late
Ming dynasty and spawned the statecraft writings of Ku Yen-wu and Huang
Tsung-hsi, but Yu Hyongwon, unaware of their existence, derived no inspira-
tion from them.
In China the reaction against Sung learning in the sixteenth-century Ming
period took the form of Wang Yang-ming's emphasis on the inner, meditational
approach to self-rectification rather than the apparently external and superficial
approach to book learning and scripture by Chu Hsi and Sung Learning. Since
Wang Yang-ming had been condemned as a heretic by T'oegye (Yi Hwang) in
Korea in the mid-sixteenth century, very few Koreans became followers of his
thought. Born into the Northerner faction, Yu must have abided by T'oegye's
condemnation to adhere to the teachings of Chu Hsi and the Sung school, but
he insisted that the study of institutions as well as book learning was critical to
the rectification of self and society.
Using better institutions to find moral men to assume office was only part of
his plan. He also believed that there was only one model for perfect institutions

• the systems used by the sages in ancient China, but because he agreed that a
  literal recreation of ancient institutions was unworkable, he did his best to extract
  principles that would work in quite different circumstances under the mode of
  centrali7.ed bureaucracy.
  The degree to which he departed from ancient institutions and compromised
  with current reality varied from one institution to another. In some cases, he
  appeared tainted by blind fundamentalism, despite his demunal to the contrary,
  when he insisted that the carving out of embossed squares in the landscape would
  remedy the administrative problems caused by popUlation growth, geographi-
  cal mobility, and laxity in registration. In others, he modified ancient institu-
  tions by compromising with post-Chou reality whether of the Chinese or
  Korean variety.
  For example, he was most adamant in demanding a program of nationaliza-
  tion and redistribution of land to eliminate the evil of private property, and yet
  he rejected the idea that he was simply copying the well-field system of ancient
  Chou China. Since he felt that it was as necessary to create a hierarchy of wealth
  that would match the moral capacity of his new officials rather than the inher-
  ited prestige of the yangban or their talent in literary composition, he prescribed
  extra allotments to those oflicials - a plan that he compared to the limited-field
  system of the Han dynasty. In short, he claimed he was fusing Chou and Han