Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Ancient to Contemporary Times

Chapter 2 Death and Burial in Medieval Korea: The Buddhist Legacy

21 2 Death and Burial in Medieval Korea The Buddhist Legacy SemVermeersch Material evidence of funerary rituals is one of our main windows into the past. Especially in societies without a written culture, burials form one of the most important archaeological witnesses to past society. For medieval Korea,1 there is only a very modest corpus of useful textual material for Koryŏ, and even less for Greater Silla. Conversely, there is more archaeologicalevidenceforSillathanforKory ŏ.Giventhispaucityofsourcematerial , it is simply impossible to write the kind of intimate portrayal of how medieval people faced death that is possible for France or Japan.2 How Silla or Koryŏ people faced death, how they dealt with the deceased body, and what they believed would happen after death—there are simply very few sources that allow us to answer these questions. Yet as James Watson has argued in the case of Chinese funerary ritual, perhaps we should not assume that there were very clear guiding ideas that led people to treat death and the deceased in a particular way; anthropological research has shown that people are usually much better informed about what they do (ritual) than why they do it (ideology).3 In other words, orthopraxy, norms for ideal practice, rather than orthodoxy, norms to control ideas, should probably be the first thing to study in East Asian funerary customs . And here, fortunately, the combined use of mortuary texts (funerary steles and epitaphs) and archaeological information does allow us to reconstruct the evolution of some funerary practices in medieval Korea. The key aspect of the funerary process that is the focus of this chapter is the treatment of the deceased body, that is, cremation versus burial. 22 / Sem Vermeersch The reason for making the practice of cremation central is that, in a context with sparse documentation, it is one of the practices that is sufficiently well attested to allow us to ask key questions and trace developments . Most scholarship assumes that cremation was simply introduced together with Buddhism into the Korean Peninsula and traces its development in contradistinction to “traditional methods” of burial. Yet even a cursory look at the funerary customs of the period shows that there was a great variety of practices and that, although cremation is easily identified, what it stands for and how it developed are not so clear. Also, the so-called traditional (native) methods—usually understood to be a kind of double burial, with final interment of the bones after about three years of exposure—turn out to be a scholarly invention that often does not fit the evidence. Therefore, this chapter sets out to unravel the basic development of cremation in medieval Korea and tries to answer the question of what exactly it says about the acceptance of Buddhist beliefs and practices related to death. A number of important insights from the study of Buddhism and funerary practices in other contexts need to be stated at the outset since they frame my interpretations. While cremation and the use of special containers for the cremated remains serve as the easiest markers of Buddhist influence, we should, however, be cautious: for Buddhists, be they monks or lay believers, cremation has never been an absolute requirement .4 Rhetorically, cremation is an expression of nonattachment to the body, but expediency allows for other strategies as well,5 and canonical and other texts describe other burial methods. It is true that in China as well as Korea since the introduction of Buddhism there has been a strong association between cremation and Buddhism, but it is never demanded of the faithful, and its soteriological value is never stated. A second insight that applies here is that funerary ritual is about much more than the disposal of the body. James Watson therefore distinguishes between funerary rites and rites of disposal: the former take place within the purview of the local community, whereas the burial itself is “out of bounds” and therefore not governed by universally accepted norms.6 Thus funeral rites follow a state-approved course, but at the interment site different customs can apply. This is of course an anthropological view, and although we cannot really know about medieval Korean funerary rites in this sense, it is good to keep this in mind. In Death and Burial in Medieval Korea / 23 this chapter, I make a distinction between the more general term “funerary rites,” which include all the ritual practices surrounding the dead, from...