Encapsulating Neo-Confucianism and the Great Learning in 16th century Korea: Yi Yulgok’s Outline of the Sagely Learning, Sŏnghak chipyo 聖學輯要 (1575)

Isabelle Sancho (1)

1 CRC-CCJ - Centre de Recherches sur la Corée

The Great Learning has certainly been one of the most important texts of the Korean reception of Neo-Confucianism, for it provided a stimulating model to build up and strengthen the Chosŏn state. The Yuan orthodox understanding of the Song Neo-Confucian exegesis of the Great Learning conveyed a rather simple message, acceptable for both the Yi kings and their elites in search for a balance of power. The major characteristic of the Korean philosophical exegesis of the ‘Learning of the Emperor’ and the Great Learning paradigm was the focus on the necessary interaction and very close relationship between kings and scholar-officials. These ideas were developed at court, in royal lessons and daily audiences. The first outstanding commentaries on the Great Learning and especially Zhen Dexiu’s Daxue yanyibu, which was the reference text in Chosŏn court from the 14th to the 16th century, were royal commands. Yet they mainly illustrate the self-interests of the scholar-officials anxious to maintain their own social and political status in the new regime officially intended to empower kings. In this general framework, Yi Yulgok’s Sŏnghak chipyo might be regarded as both the continuation of previous tendencies and the dawn of a new era. When Neo-Confucianism became in the late 16th century a significant part of the identity and distinctive culture of the social and political elite trying to implement its ideas at both central and local levels, the Korean exegesis of the Great Learning became paradoxically more idealistic and moral. It might be said that, maybe for the first time in Korean history, Confucianism started being a holistic Weltanshauung rather than a vague reservoir used in political strategies. So, on similar Neo-Confucian grounds, the authoritarian Ming China produced the Daxue yanyibu, a technical textbook dedicated to an anonymous body of scholar-officials resembling much today’s civil servants, whereas Chosŏn Korea gave birth to the Outline of the Sagely Learning, a jewel of the elitist culture of an aristocratic bureaucracy embodied in iconic figures like Yulgok Yi I whose portrait is even printed on South Korean bank notes nowadays.

Mots clés: Great Learning; Neo-Confucianism; Choson; Korea; Yulgok; Yi I

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Histoire

Isabelle Sancho. Encapsulating Neo-Confucianism and the Great Learning in 16th century Korea: Yi Yulgok’s Outline of the Sagely Learning, Sŏnghak chipyo 聖學輯要 (1575). Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises. Anne Cheng (sous la dir.), Lectures et usages de la Grande Étude, XXXVIII, p. 251-267, 2016, Bibliothèque de l’Institut des études chinoise, 978-2-85757-074-5. ⟨hal-02906332⟩