This paper questions the practice of cremation during the Koryo period (AD 918-1392), when Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the ruling court. Considering the close associations between Buddhism and cremation, it has widely been assumed that cremation was the preferred means of dealing with the corpse at this time, but as recent research indicates historical documents and the archaeological material present a different picture. Even during the mid-eleventh and twelfth centuries when cremation was at its most popular, it appears not to have been the preferred way of disposing of the dead and instead other means of burial were the norm, predominantly pit or cist graves which were frequently furnished with funerary offerings.

Invariably this raises questions as to why the traditional Buddhist custom of cremation was not widely adopted and what was achieved by carrying out other means of burial? Taking as it its focal point archaeological material, this paper aims to address the questions of how Koryo society viewed death and issues related to dying and how this was materialised in the ways in which the dead were interred.

Milan Hejtmanek, University of Pennsylvania

With the appropriation of songnihak ritual and social practice from Yuan China in the fourteenth century, Korean funeral customs among the elite underwent a profound shift away from cremation and rituals sending off the departed to a new existence to interment and the welcoming of them into a family shrine.

As a result, newly developed notions of piety required frequent, often daily, ritual contact with departed ancestors and prompted whole new venues of interaction with the world of the dead while pondering such matters as grave sites, tomb decoration, and reburial. Across the peninsula a lively new traffic in coffin transportation arose, as bodies were shuttled from one location to another in the quest for an appropriate and propitious place of repose.

The ritual demands of chesa, firmly based around the dead, moved the social center of gravity of elite families from the living to the departed, conferring hierarchical status on its members based on their proximity to the dead spirits being celebrated. The new intimacy between the living and the dead reached a special intensity during the prolonged periods that sons spent at the graveside mourning their departed parents.

This paper examines the morbid turn in Korean thought, ritual, and society during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries using contemporary diaries, letters, court records, philosophical tracts, and literary accounts to elucidate shifting notions of the relation between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Anders Karlsson, SOAS, University of London

Although harsh forms of execution like quartering (nûngji ch’ôch’am) existed in Chosôn Korea, the severest form of punishment according to the penal structure in the law code was the application of illyul; execution by decapitation after which the head was displayed. The display of decapitated heads was referred to as hyosu. This practice is often associated with the suppression of rural rebellion and Catholicism in the nineteenth century. However, apart from such rebellious and subversive crimes covered by illyul, hyosu could be meted out as a punishment in itself for other severe crimes challenging state power and authority. This study tries to get a picture of all the types of crimes for which these two forms of the most severe punishment could be meted out, and it is based on an analysis of the eighteenth-century law code Soktaejôn and royal edict collections. As an important element of this punishment was the deterrent effect, the aim is to see how the state used its penal authority and right to corporal punishment to maintain social order and protect state authority and monopolies. This legislation shows how the state considered the taking of life and the desecration of bodies to be a state monopoly; a person who desecrated an executed body, for instance, would him/herself be executed by this most severe form of punishment. The study further shows that the majority of the crimes were related to the state’s economic monopolies and its ambition to keep the country’s borders closed, reflecting both the changing socio-economic situation of the period and state ideology.

Michael J. Pettid, State University of New York, Binghamton

Undoubtedly death is one of the few universals to all human societies and due to the finality of this event, has been something that is largely approached with feelings of dread and the unknowable. Given the significance of death to humans, an understanding of how societies conceive of death, the afterlife, and what might occur to the dead can reveal a great deal of how a given society understands its place within the cosmos. Particularly interesting are those beliefs concerning the condition of the dead after death; specifically, the nature and function of ghosts.

There are numerous accounts in the literature of the Koryo and early Choson periods in Korea that feature encounters with ghosts or beings from beyond the human world. While these accounts can be sometimes humorous or frightening, a more important value is the insight they offer into the way that the peoples of these times understood death and the afterlife. Narratives of ghosts can range from didactic tales that aim at altering the lifestyles of the living to those accounts that reveal social fears such as the retaliation of one who wrongly died.

This paper will use period accounts from Koryo and early Choson to examine how death was understood. This study will thus bring into relief the understandings of these peoples concerning death and the afterlife, and how this was reflected in the lives of the living.