Choe Je-u

Choe Je-u came from an impoverished branch of a scholarly family, barred by the circumstances of his birth from the examination path, and he spent years travelling and trading before returning to Gyeongju. Korea in 1860 had been shaken by news of the Anglo-French occupation of Beijing, by repeated famine and epidemic, and by the spread of Catholicism under persecution. He described what happened to him in the fourth month of that year as a sudden trembling, a voice identifying itself as the Lord of Heaven, and the gift of a talisman and an incantation for healing.

He called what he taught Donghak, Eastern Learning, defining it against Seohak, the Western Learning of the Catholic missions. The opposition is real, and the borrowing is obvious and he did not hide it: a single supreme heavenly lord addressed directly, a written scripture, a congregation. What he set against the Western version was the doctrine that the heavenly lord is borne within every person, so that serving heaven means serving people, and that the truth in question is Korean rather than imported.

The practice was accessible in a way that examination learning was not. A twenty-one syllable incantation, recited; talismanic writing burned and taken in water; and a body of hymns composed in vernacular Korean and meant to be sung, so that people who could not read classical Chinese possessed the teaching directly. That combination is what made the movement spread, and what made the authorities regard it as dangerous.

Choe Je-u was arrested at the end of 1863 and executed at Daegu in the spring of 1864 on a charge of deluding the people with heterodox doctrine. Leadership passed to Choe Si-hyeong, who spent more than thirty years in hiding, organising a network of local units and editing his predecessor's writings into the two books that remain the movement's scripture.

The organisation outgrew its origins. In 1894 Donghak adherents were central to a peasant uprising in the southwest, directed first against local corruption and, in its later phase, against Japanese intervention. The uprising was crushed with Japanese assistance, Choe Si-hyeong was executed in 1898, and the movement was left with the double character it has kept in Korean memory: a religion and a rebellion. The documentary record of the revolution was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2023.

In 1905 Son Byong-hi reorganised the surviving body as Cheondogyo, the Religion of the Heavenly Way, giving it a public and legal form. It was in that form that it took a leading part in the March First Movement of 1919: fifteen of the thirty-three signatories of the Korean declaration of independence were Cheondogyo members, including Son himself. Cheondogyo is a living religion with congregations in Korea today, and is described here rather than assessed.