602 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONCourt Audiences: AccessibilityIt is obvious from Yu's advocacy for the restoration of the State Council as the
supreme deliberative council of state that he hoped that consultation by the king
with the officials of this institution would prevent the tyranny and despotism
associated with absolutism in a monarchical system. He did not feel, however,
that the mere existence of institutions like the State Council and agencies of
remonstrance by themselves would be sufficient to check tyranny. It was also
important to win the king's adherence to and application of an ethos of balanced
government enshrined by the conduct of rites. The purpose of the council was
to open the king's mind to the information and criticism necessary for enlight-
ened rule.
Yu realized that the existence of a bureaucratic structure did not guarantee
automatically that the king would make himself accessible to the flow of infor-
mation and opinion from both these officials and the public at large. He recorded
H6 Ch6k's plaint about King lnjo (r. 1623-49) that he had not opened his court
to his own officials. "[Your Majesty] keeps himself deeply ensconced within
the nine-layered walls [of his palace] and rarely ever sees the faces of his offi-
cials. Every day all the affairs of state are handled only in writing. Decisions
that could be made in one word take up ten pages of text, while actions that
could be taken in fifteen minutes are delayed for days."
H6 believed that Injo's failure to open access to his person by his ministers
had created a precedent for inattention that destroyed the efficiency of govern-
ment operations as a whole.
It is because the king ahovc is remiss in his attention to government affairs that
those below are also lax in attending to their duties. None of the hureau [offi-
cials] take their scats in their respective offices, and when they do take their
scats there, they pass the whole day floating around. All government business is
left to the clerks and petty officials. Rules and regulations are neglected and mis-
takes arc made. and all regulations and provisions are in utter confusion.He also lamented lnjo's abolition of the round-table discussion (yundae) that
had previously required officials in an audicnce at court to voice their opinions
on governmental affairs. Even though H6 realized that Injo had dispensed with
the system because he found that the responses had been routine, he argued that
there had to be at least one or two ideas worth adopting from a discussion by a
large number of officials over several days. Abolishing this "beautiful method"
just because of the superficial quality of the discussion would be equivalent to
some one "giving up eating just because he happened to choke on the food."
H6's solution to these difficulties was to return to the precedents for the stan-
dard audience (sangch'am) and court audience (cllOch'am) conducted early in
the dynasty and codified in The Ceremonies of the Five Rites (Oryeui), a text
that King Sejong ordered compiled and was completed later in 1474. The stan-