Particularly underrepresented in English-language writing on Korean history is the Koryŏ period of 918 to 1392. Michael C. Rogers, Gari Ledyard, Hugh H. W. Kang, Edward J. Shultz, Ellen Salem, John B. Duncan, Sem Vermeersch, and others have published articles and monographs since the 1960s. Research by South Korean historians is available as translations published in various journals and edited volumes. In addition, Western historians of medieval Japan have viewed Koryŏ typically through the failed Mongol invasions and their contributions to the weakening of the Kamakura bakufu in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. And in recent years Western scholars of Chinese history too have taken interest in this period, through Yuan China's presence in the peninsula.
Remco E. Breuker has frequently added to the count of journal articles in recent years, and now has contributed an intriguing book, Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918–1170: History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty. Infused with theories of group boundary, identity, nationalism, and other concepts, this widely ranging book challenges historiography that treats Koryŏ over the first half of that country's existence as a state ascribed a clear lineage from the past, and as a state and society in which elites concentrated their social practices within a single field, such as Buddhism, over the first half of this state's duration. Breuker argues rather that Koryŏ had plural pasts, in Koryŏ were pluralist ideologies, and that the state and individuals embraced multiple thought systems and created syncretic approaches in administration and in personal life. In the Introduction he writes, “The focus on pluralism in this study precludes the understanding of a community with a region-transcending identity as a unitary subject. The kind of community I shall discuss here is never a stable, single whole. Indeed, significant elements of Koryŏ identity were characterized by fragmentation and changeability.” Further, Koryŏ's historical origins derived from origins more fragmented than the common attribution to Koguryŏ permits.
Breuker argues against a presentist historiography that posits clear distinctions between Buddhism, Confucianism, and other thought patterns in the lives of Koryŏ elites. Those borders rather were fluid and not well demarcated. He untwines Koryŏ-period narratives that emphasized political and cultural unification by Koryŏ, arguing, “Koryŏ's worldviews were scattered, inconsistent, plural and full of treasured anomalies.” These worldviews were in part reactions to engagement culturally, politically, and diplomatically in a transregional, foreign, and dominant culture, that of China, with its own multiple worldviews.
Breuker begins Part 1, “Establishment of a Pluralist Community,” with an interesting discussion of how Chinese and Korean names and designations for areas in the peninsula and the contents of those terms changed over time. For example, the ancient Chinese term Samhan (here in the Korean romanization; C. Sanhan) indicated three political units in the southern half of the peninsula before the emergence of Paekche and Silla. In later centuries in the peninsula the term became a referent for the peninsula, that is, for Koryŏ. And the geonym Haedong, or the country east of China, too contrasted Koryŏ with China, and, like Samhan, became a supradynastical term, one no longer limited to Koryŏ. Naming also linked the present to a historic home territory. The identification of Koryŏ with Koguryŏ, one which has been widely emphasized in the historiography, is for Breuker largely “limited and opportunistic.” A preferred past was inscribed into the territory that Koryŏ now governed. Having shown the naming and placing of present and past, he turns to genealogies of descent for country and for king. Koryŏ's legitimacy as the ruling government stemmed not from blood, that is, as a single ethnic group throughout the peninsula, but from legitimacy gained through Confucian ideas, domestic policy, and foreign policy. These included the inclusiveness of Korea's ancient history in which elites of Chinese descent frequently appeared. That is, for the ruler, legitimacy to govern territory was more important than blood lineage. Addressing the significance of Koguryŏ as the predecesssor, or as a predecessor, to Koryŏ, rather than stressing genealogies of naming and of rule, Breuker suggests that the identification was “mainly of a territorial-political nature.”
Part 2, “Understanding Koryŏ Pluralist Ideology,” concentrates on the king and his activities as ruler, on diplomacy, and on the writings of literati. This king was Son of Heaven in Koryŏ and at times a “vassal” of another Son of Heaven. That is, the monarch was in an “ambiguous role” in domestic and international contexts. However, Breuker does not clarify why these two roles brought ambiguity, in particular a singular ambiguity rather than multiple ambiguities. The king's roles extended broadly beyond Buddhist or Confucian categories for royal status, and the royal lineage survived for more than 400 years in no small part due to the “multitude of roles [he] played and the many duties he performed.” In relations with (Northern) Song China, “deep-rooted mutual distrust” and other problems characterize interactions, and not the “idealized relationship between the paradigm of Sinitic culture and its most talented and avid student.” And literati frequently noted their own interests in Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other thought and belief systems.
In Part 3, “Koryŏ's Practical Realities of Engagement,” Breuker returns discussion to the writing of the past, both “practical” as in Kim Pusik's Samguk sagi and “apocryphal” as he describes “The Ten Injunctions” commonly attributed to Wang Kŏn, the founder of Koryŏ. He ends with an analysis of what is typically understood as Myoch'ŏng's rebellion in 1135–1136. Writing against standard analyses of this challenge to the government in Kaesŏng, he takes aim at scholarship since Sin Ch'ae-ho saw this rebellion as a confrontation between Buddhists and Confucianists, between progressives and reactionaries, with the latter victorious and Korea since then hobbled by the outcome. The author separates Myoch'ŏng and the rebellion, and argues that this geomancer too expressed multiple worldviews in his criticism of the Koryŏ government, but the goals of the rebellion, whose participants included numerous government officials, threatened to strip the state of its pluralist approaches to diplomacy in continental northeast Asia and to impose upon society a conservative idealism that would isolate Koryŏ. Kim Pu-sik, who was Sin Ch'ae-ho's reactionary, becomes the progressive, an official who endeavored to maintain the pluralism in Koryŏ society and to keep the Koryŏ government involved in northeast Asia interaction, especially with Jin. Here Breuker returns to Samguk sagi and, offering another new analysis of Koryŏ history, describes this text as one “written to codify Koryŏ's pluralism.”
Readers may be disappointed that the author does not return to the term “medieval” in the book's title. While providing an important complication of the ideologies and place of “Koryŏ,” he does not address the time marked here as “medieval” or the social structures, social practices, or state structures that composed “medieval” Koryŏ. He notes “the medieval state of Koryŏ” in the Introduction, but does not continue further. This is unfortunate not only for specialists in Korean history, but also for readers with an interest in Japanese history. Since the mid-1970s, western historians of Japan have pushed the medieval period forward in time from the ninth century to the beginning of the Kamakura period, and now to the end of the Kamakura period. Consistent across these three beginnings is the important presence of armed men in service in Japanese society. In the Koryŏ period, too, of course, was a period when military men exerted significant power in the government. Or, perhaps “medieval” in the title represents the word chungse 中世 as a middle period, but this connection to periodization is not taken up either. This rich vein of historiography is left untapped, and one hopes that Breuker will return to “medieval” in a later publication.
Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918–1170 lacks a Conclusion. Breuker ends the last chapter with a discussion of the longer-term effects of the rebellion upon governance in Koryŏ. After 445 pages of very interesting and frequently revisionist discussion of the first two and one-half centuries of the Koryŏ period, a review of the arguments and the disagreements with earlier scholarship would have strengthened the author's presentation. Nevertheless, we are the fortunate recipients of a powerful discussion of historiography, ideology, diplomacy, and culture over the first half of the Koryŏ period, one that provides important new perspectives for debate.
