Engraving Virtue: The Printing History of a Premodern Korean Moral Primer by Young Kyun Oh (review)

The founding of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) marked a transition through which the Korean elite grew critical of their own past, denouncing Buddhism and proclaiming the rightness of the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130–1200). Oh’s study traces the consequences of this transition through the history of The Illustrated Guide to the Three Relations (Samgang haengsil-to) and its lessons on proper Confucian behavior.

Oh’s “Introduction” (1–11) provides a helpful overview and is followed by “Prelude to a Confucian State: Literati, Morality, and Books” (13–54), which examines how Neo-Confucian influence grew through the end of the Koryŏ dynasty (935–1392). Oh makes the point “that the Yuan and Koryŏ literati were sharing concurrent progress [in scholarship]” (53). That progress occurred one century before the event that prompted the compilation of The Illustrated Guide, and it was enabled by the flexibility of the Yuan rulers (see esp. 44–47). But the Koryŏ literati’s unprecedentedly “direct and personal” (53) access to Sinitic scholarship through Yuan policies culminated in inflexible views. The history of The Illustrated Guide is a case in point.

“The Conception of the Samgang haengsil-to” (55–126) introduces the event that prompted the compilation of the book: in 1428, the court learned of a patricide. King Sejong (r. 1418–1450) and his court were alarmed. Although the murderer was sentenced to “death by slow slicing” (nŭngji ch’ŏsa), his crime sparked legal debate. Oh illuminates the debate’s legal background, but there was another element lurking in the near historical past. Sejong’s own father, King T’aejong (r. 1400–1418), had violated each of the main laws that Oh cites (57). Sejong had good reason to be unnerved by the patricide, but it also provided an opportunity to underscore his own commitment to Confucian rule. There was also the sticky problem of diplomacy with Ming China (1368–1644), specifically gifts of Chinese Buddhist and Daoist morality books. These gifts were “troublesome” because “the Chosŏn court aspired to become a strong Confucian state and to put an end to the deep-seated Buddhist practices of the past” (73). By Sejong’s reign, that process was underway, but widespread illiteracy was a problem. At the conceptual level, the solution was simple: prepare the book in such a way that the literate could interpret the classical Chinese text for the illiterate. This “mediated reading” necessitated illustrations to make certain that the listeners understood (125–126). But it was impossible to foresee how the text would be recreated in each instance of mediated reading. Oh’s discussion of Walter Ong and Sheldon Pollock demonstrates the depth of thought underlying his own analysis. We can thus see the outline of a problem: the assumed fluidity of mediated reading for an audience immersed in “orality” (Ong) was in tension with the “literarized” (Pollock) text.

“Vernacular Sounds and the Reduced Edition” (127–196) turns to the vernacular version of 1481, enabled by the invention of the Korean alphabetic script in 1444, and the “doctrinal refinement” in the 1490 “excision of the text” (127). Oh suggests that the purpose of using vernacular Korean was “to assist the reader-reciters…in creating the oral text” (128). The overall result was a tightening of what was recounted and how it was to be recounted. In a lucid analysis of “the problem of language in Chosŏn” (140–154), Oh offers one of his many impressive insights in relation to Sejong’s plan to use the vernacular to “rul[e] all of his people directly,” thus bypassing the literati (154). Sejong’s anxieties over the literati were an amplification of the anxieties over mediated reading. Likewise, the excision of the text aimed at moral-ethical coherence and marked a moment when “Chosŏn society began to stipulate its own social memories” (127). The social memories were typically violent or disgusting—notable examples being cutting off...