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When I was first approached about contributing a volume on Korean spirituality to the Dimensions of Asian Spirituality series, my first reaction was to decline. I wasn’t sure if I could deal adequately with the complexity and diversity of Korean spirituality in one slender volume. However, the series editor encouraged me to search for common themes across the wide spectrum of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices in Korean culture, past and present. Once I began producing chapters under his guidance, he wielded an editorial scalpel that excised much of my verbose prose and raised questions that stimulated me to look at old material in new ways and see connections I hadn’t noticed before. The result is the book you now hold in your hand, a distillation of an academic career spent observing and analyzing Korean spirituality.
I first went to Korea in 1971. The U.S. Peace Corps sent me to Kwangju, a provincial capital in the southwest corner of the peninsula, to teach English to seventh and eighth graders. It was an eyeopening experience. Korea was then a poor country ruled by a dictator, former general Park Chung Hee, but the rich diversity of Korean culture was still evident. I spent many hours wandering the urban streets and rural paths of Korea and discovering what a wide-ranging spiritual tradition Korea had. On city streets I saw crosses marking Christian churches and heard the drums of shamanic rituals. In the countryside I saw Buddhist monks chanting in mountain temples and elderly men conversing within the walls of Confucian academies. The beauty and complexity of Korean culture that I observed in the Kwangju region made me determined to learn more about Korea after I returned to North America.
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