Yu's COMMUNITY COMPACT REGULATIONS 751fundamental texts like the Sohak, which concentrated on reducing moral teach-
ing to the simple and mechanical instruction of untutored children and youth in
acts of filial piety and respect for elders. The advocates of the community com-
pacts or other agencies that incorporated similar values did not believe that increas-
ing economic production, or even distributing wealth more widely, was sufficient
to create a secure and happy society because ultimately the tranquillity of social
life depended on creating a moral atmosphere throughout the local villages. For
that reason any attempt by twentieth-century scholars to reduce Neo-Confucian
moralism to economic materialism and class interest would simply distort an
understanding of the nature of social thought in the Confucian era.
Yu Hyongwon, however, did represent something new in the history of com-
munity compact writing, because he rejected the tendency represented by Yul-
gok to defend, almost unself-consciously, social status discrimination in the
administration of punishment and in the seating order in the compact regula-
tions. Instead, he sought to provide better treatment for slaves and nothoi, but
his instincts for reform were limited by the strength of Korean social prejudice.
Nothoi would be given more opportunities for advancement in public life, but
in the family they would continue to acts as inferiors. Slaves would be judged
for their misdemeanors just as commoners within the community compact asso-
ciation, but they would have to sit separately from the rest of the members. Yu's
instincts were much closer to the sentiments of T'oegye than Yulgok because
T'oegye had written that at least in schools and local self-government organi-
zations men deserved to be treated on the basis of academic accomplishment,
capacity for moral behavior, and age. Nevertheless, he had never insisted that
those standards be applied in all social institutions or that slaves be liberated
from bondage.
It would be difficult to attribute Yu's more active opposition to social dis-
crimination than Yulgok's to T'oegye's philosophical preference for principle
over psycho-physical energy in the constitution of the cosmos and the human
mind. Nevertheless, it might be possible to speculate that Yu, like T'oegye, may
have had greater respect for the principles of governance contained in classical
literature rather than the force of contemporary social custom, and he may for
that reason have been more willing to challenge social convention. The weak-
ness of this argument, however, was that T'oegye himself was not stirred to
socially revolutionary propositions, and that despite Yulgok's support for social
status arrangements, he was far more audacious in his concern about practical
reform. Yu was fairly free to adopt arguments from many quarters and did so
from both T'oegye and Yulgok alike, but he was far from a freethinker; he was
as strongly prejudiced against "heterodoxy," or shamanism, geomancy, and Bud-
dhism as Yulgok and other intense Neo-Confucians.