716 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
T'oegye's Community CompactsThrough the end of My6ngjong's reign there was thus no progress made in push-
ing the central government to institute a policy of community compacts for the
whole country, but certain individuals were able to do so in their own commu-
nities. While recuperating from illness in his home town in Yean district in
Ky6ngsang Province in J 556, T'oegye wrote the preface to the articles of a com-
munity compact (the hyangnip yakcho) based on information supplied by Yi
Hy6nbo and his other friends in the community, and most of the articles in this
compact were to be found either in Ming or Korean statute law, or in the pro-
visions of earlier local community organizations. Thus, while community com-
pacts begun in the early sixteenth century were based on the Lil-Family
Community Compact and Chu Hsi's emendation of it, the principles of local self-
government organization and moral rectitude were not confined to one specific
institution created in the Sung dynasty, but to the broader traditions and long
history of politics and morality in the Chinese experience.
T'oegye's introduction to these articles became an important source for
reformers and was quoted extensively by Yu Hy6ngw6n. Contrary to the argu-
ment ofYi T'aejin, however, that T'oegye represented the finest product of the
sarimp'a movement and presumably should have opposed the Yuhyangso
because they werc all controlled by capital bureaucrats and relatives of queens,
T'ocgye asserted that the Yuhyangso performed the same function that the hsiang
ta-fu did in Chou times, of promoting moral standards and maintaining sur-
veillance over immoral and illegal acts to benefit the nation as a whole. He claimed
that the Yuhyangso would succeed in preventing fighting, defending the weak
against the strong, and obtaining respect for moral standards if the right men
could be found to run them. T'oegye was willing to use the existing structure of
local self-government as the locus for moral education without insisting that
new institutions called community compacts had to be created independently.
His draft articles called for obedience and respect for the head of the local
association as well as punishment for any violations by them of law or moral
standards. He and his colleagues in Yean were probably seeking to correct what
had happened in Ch6nju in Ch611a Province in 1546 when a gang of local mag-
nates and official rankholders invaded the assistant governor's (P'an'gwan, who
doubled as magistrate of the town) office and wrecked the place, and the local
Yuhyangso failed to take any punitive action. In other words, T'oegye sought to
make the Yuhyangso a more reliable upholder of law and moral order than it
currently was.
Although T'oegye criticized the Lti-Family compact because it emphasized
punishment for misdeeds rather than encouragement for the cultivation of virtue.
his own set of penalties for violations of moral standards read more like a penal
code than a text for moral instruction. The compact prescribed that compact
association members might correct other members of the community secretly
if their misdeeds were minor, but they had to admonish them publicly at the