REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 341As in the case of the larger land allotments to the sadaebu, land taxes would be
paid to the state but no military service would be required yo
In addition to this basic, returnable grant, princes and princesses would also
be entitled to a prebendal grant called sasejon, "land from which taxes are
granted by the throne." These grants were to be measured in terms of grain pro-
duction, from 500 kok (where in this case he defined one kok as equivalent to
one som, sok in Sino-Korean pronunciation, or 15 mal or tu in Sino-Korean,
not the ro tu of his new measurement system)9! for a taegun or grand prince
down to roo kok for the daughter of a crown prince by a concubine (hyonju).9^2
Yu specified that the recipients would be entitled to receive only tax revenues
from people's land (minjon), which in his scheme meant the basic land grants
awarded to the peasantry and cultivated by them. Accordingly, people's land
would be subject to military service requirements because the land itself was
granted to the peasants and not to members of the royal house. Local magis-
trates would take responsibility for assessment of crop damage and temporary
tax reductions. The taxes on the people's land would be paid directly to the
local magistrate's granary, and the granary would issue in its place stored grain
to the designated recipients.^91
Yu also indicated that these sase prebends would be used for rewarding merit
subjects so designated by the king, but he left out of his regulations any pro-
gram for gradations based on degrees of merit. He also stipulated that the royal
prebendal grants could be inherited by sons and grandsons; the eldest son of the
legitimate wife would receive an extra third, obviously to support ancestral sac-
rifice, when the prebend was divided up among all the sonsY4
Yu, of course, realized the necessity to provide justification for a system of
double grants to royal relatives and merit subjects - both land grants and prebends.
He defended the use of regular land grants to princes on the grounds that "it is
an ancient principle that the taebu do not engage in agriculture; how then could
the household of a prince engage in agriculture?" Certainly if scholars and offi-
cials were entitled to land grants, so too were princes.^95 But why did he insist
on providing prebends as well?
Yu answered this question in the context of a debate with his hypothetical
adversary, who complained that Yu's system was too complicated and too detailed
(tadan) and objected that there was no need to grant princes and merit subjects
both land and prebends; either one or the other would be sufficient. The antag-
onist offered two alternate plans each with its own set of tax and military ser-
vice requirements and exemptions. To understand the terms of the debate and
Yu's reasons for rejecting his adversary's propositions, it is necessary to review
the relationship between the type of grants and tax and military service oblig-
ations that Yu proposed in his own system.
As we have seen thus far, Yu offered three kinds of grants based on the posi-
tion or status of the recipient. Commoner peasant cultivators were to get a land
grant (sujon), pay the land tax (napse), and provide military service (ch 'ulbyong).
The sadaebu (scholars and officials, or more accurately the class offamilies that