Tonghak, or Eastern Learning, was a Korean religion founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tonghak may also be read as “Korean Learning” because, before the twentieth century, Korean writers often referred to the Choson dynasty as “the eastern country”(tongguk)in geographical relation to China. As a local religious response with national and international import, the teaching first promised spiritual and physical renewal and then culminated in an armed uprising. As believers developed a particular consciousness as a community, they posed a threat to the state monopoly on religion. In the wake of faith-based movements in China,...

In 1796, a Korean envoy returning from Beijing reported that a religious rebellion had broken out in China: “It is named the White Lotus, and the leader is called their religious master. He incites the foolish commoners through his evil methods and dazzles them.” Another diplomat condescendingly concurred: “The so-called White Lotus, Red Lotus, and Blue Lotus titles mean that they are bandits and thieves.” A third report was concerned with the widespread nature of the uprising: “The so-called heretic rebels . . . have spread to Sichuan, Shaanxi, Hubei, and Henan provinces, and it is said that the livelihoods...

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Catholics and Tonghak followers demonstrated the limits of centralized governance and its attempt to regulate religious expression as they continued to spread their teachings and worship in private spaces. While the Catholic community came into a direct conflict with the state, Tonghak hoped to negotiate the laissez-faire policies of King Ch’ŏlchong’s reign (r. 1849–1863). In this context, Ch’oe Cheu’s early writings offered advice on coping with some of the hardships in the southeast by describing the solutions he had found for himself and his family. As these lessons evolved into a religious...

Drawing on a strong education, a sense of rural pride, and his exposure to Catholicism, Ch’oe Cheu began turning away from Qing China as the center of cultural authority and building on the Sinic Three Teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism to found a program of learning that centered on the Korean peninsula. Ch’oe’s works referenced many aspects of pre-Qing philosophy and literature. Granted, this was a practice very common among educated scholars, but in making these references, he engaged with a large body of scholarship full of meaning and symbolism that transcended the contemporary China of his day. Through...

A letter from the missionary Siméon-François Berneux (1814–1866) to the Missions-Étrangers in France described Kyŏngsang Province in late 1863 as “the only district that had serious harassment [of Christians].” Mon seigneur d’Acones (d. 1866), who was working in Kyŏngsang at the time, explained to Berneux that local officials had fostered a climate of religious persecution when they launched a search for followers of a sect named “tong-hac(doctrine de l’Orient)–to distinguish themselves from the Christian designation under the namesen-hac(doctrine de l’Occident) . . . [allowing officials to profit] from this occasion by taking money and fulfilling...

At the end of 1905, Son Pyŏnghŭi announced the inception of Ch’ŏndogyo, or Religion of the Heavenly Way, named after a line extracted from Ch’oe Cheu’sSpreading Virtue(P’odŏngmun), in the Korean daily papersTaehan maeil sinboand theCheguk sinmun: “Our teaching has its origin in the way of heaven and it is called Ch’ŏndogyo. Founded forty-six years ago [in 1860], the believers were numerous and widely spread out. The church was carefully built up, but unfortunately it was not allowed to practice openly. Today’s scholars elucidate how the natural beliefs of each religion make up all the countries...

In 1907, a year after the founding of Ch’ŏndogyo, Pak Hyŏngch’ae, a Tonghak follower and scholar in Seoul, petitioned the king about removing the ban against the status of Tonghak: “As for Ch’oe Cheu who was executed as the leader of Tonghak in the cyclical yearkapcha[1864] and Ch’oe Sihyŏng who was killed in the year ofmusul[1898] because they disturbed the correct way and were wicked, they were executed as a consequence of following the laws of the times. But later scholars frequently explored their scholarship and researched their origins, and they understood that the name ‘Eastern...