BRev. Paul Beirne, Su-un and His World of Symbols 2009

Paul Beirne, Su-un and His World of Symbols. The Founder of Korea’s First Indigenous Religion, Ashgate, 2009

Charles Sherlock

Why would an Irish-heritage, Australian-accented Anglican Christian of evangelical conviction be reviewing this book? Not long ago, all I knew of Korean history, culture or religion was that being Presbyterian went with being Korean, and that they liked Karl Barth.

Paul Beirne and I worked together at the Melbourne College of Divinity office for some years. Such an office without theological reflection is not a happy place, and Paul began to share his doctoral work with me, lending me the draft to read. I began to understand what fascinated him about reflecting on faith beyond one’s heritage, and specifically, things Korean. In particular, I was hooked by the account of the author’s search to find the mysterious Jeong-Bu.

The subject of this book, Ch’oe Che-u, or Boksul, was born in South Korea in 1824. His first 36 years were those of a poor scholar, struggling to support a family but doomed to insignificance as the son of a remarried widow. Through a remarkable experience at home on May 25, 1860, his life was transformed. He entered an intense three-year ministry of teaching and healing among the poor and desperate – men, women and children alike. His followers called him ‘Su-un’, ‘Water cloud’, and his movement was known as Donghak, ‘Eastern Way’. Its egalitarian ethos was seen as a threat by the state, and Su-un was tried and executed for heresy in 1864, aged 39. This small movement would have faded were it not for the hard, sacrificial work of his itinerant successor, Haewol, who retrieved Su-un’s writings from their oral sources. A canon of scriptures emerged, along with a pattern of Sunday worship involving chants, teaching and water. In time, some Donghak leaders led a rebellion: though this failed, it drew China and Japan to intervene in Korea, and the rest, as they say, is East Asian 20^th century history.

Beirne’s aim in his research was “to postulate Su-un’s self-image at the end of his life”. While the ‘external’ history of the Donghak movement has been well covered, there has been no study like this of Su-un in Korean, let alone English. I am no expert here, but found the exegesis of the Korean context, culture, literature and above all the Donghak Jumun and scriptures to be exemplary, and the argument both convincing and attractive.

Three features of this book beguiled me. 

First was its unfolding structure: Beirne leads the reader by the hand with consummate skill, so that even the novice in the subject can follow its development – and more, to have a growing sense of excitement as the story and theological analysis unfolds.

Secondly, I have long been committed to the general thesis that if you want to change the world, shift people’s imaginations . This is Beirne’s conclusion about the long-term consequences of the life and ministry of Su-un, whose way of seeing the cosmos was transformed by his heart-to-heart encounter with the Lord of Heaven, and drew him into a ministry of empowering the imaginations of others.

And thirdly, the way Beirne opens up the hermeneutics of visual meaning is impressive. Some 35 years ago, learning Mandarin in a Chinese-speaking context, I heard sermon after sermon whose scriptural exegesis depended less on biblical studies than on the visual interplay present in Chinese characters. 

For English-speakers/readers, hermeneutics revolves around sentences made of words made of syllables made of letters: the alphabet, spelling and word-plays are foundational. In the ideographic world of Korean and Chinese, meaning emerges from image groups made of characters made of symbols, each of which has a visual root – and dictionraries are a challenge!

Berne brilliantly explores this visual dimension of linguistic meaning. To give one example, he notes that the character for heaven, tyan (in Mandarin) is like a roof over the character for great, da, which is a stroke crossing the base character, ren, human. This in viewing the character for ‘heaven’ the reader ‘sees’ a subliminal message - that to be human is to be great, made for the heavenlies.

Beirne’s analysis of visual character concepts lies at the heart of his detective work in recovering the key symbol which Su-un was given, the Jeong-Bu. His practice was to draw this in meditation, then eat it, and so celebrate (not initiate) communion with the Lord of Heaven. When imitators distorted this into manipulative magic, Su-un withdrew the symbol, hence its disappearance from the Donghak. Beirne’s patient retrieval of it, through an analysis of the gung-eul motif, is brilliant. He argues convincingly that Su-un’s lost symbol was half of the double-character for ‘weak’, gung  (ruo in Mandarin) which also contains the character for ‘two,’eul (er in Mandarin). When split, the character has no meaning, but evokes the sense of power through weakness which lies at the heart of the Eastern Way.

Two other aspects of this book should be mentioned. 

First, Beirne’s acceptance of Su’un’s repeated repudiation of the ‘Western Way’ (the Roman Catholic faith) I found puzzling. The similarities between them are many – e.g. Ezekiel’s experience of God, the notion of incarnation and heart-to-heart communion, the dangerous effectuality of sacraments, the transforming character of a message, power in weakness, the subtle interplay between movement and institution and so on. A hypothesis which came to mind for testing was, ‘Donghak’s ability to transcend neo-Confucian confines was in part due to its blending the Korean heritage with elements of Catholic faith, rejecting the latter because it was seen as part of Korea’s downfall’. Exploration of this approach may sharpen this book, or enable Beirn to take his research further.

On the other hand, I was impressed by the structural similarities between Jewish and Christian experiences of graced, personal encounters with the living God, and that of Su-un. The delicate balance of divine and human initiative, being simultaneously overwhelmed and empowered, struggling with wanting to communicate yet serve – this is awe-inspiring stuff. Beirne makes no claim to a false objectivity, but writes with integrity, acknowledging this ‘gracing’ of himself in and through his fine exploration of different faith tradition to his own.