The Dharma of War - Buddhism and the South Korean Army

According to 2005, statistics, Buddhism remains South Korea`s biggest single religion, commanding the loyalty of 10,720,000 Korean citizens around 1/5 of the whole population. The number of monks, nuns and full-time dharma teachers in diverse Buddhist denominations amounts to almost 50,000 people. The relationship with the South Korean state are historically complicated. Christians (especially Protestants) dominate the South Korean urban elite, and Buddhism, with its poorer and often rural-based following, represented a "soft target" for the state oppression in the days of authoritarian rule the events of October 27, 1980, when the military government accused Buddhist temples of "hiding criminals and Communists" and subjected hundreds of monks to arrest and torture, being just one example. However, despite all the "complications", Korean Buddhist has been continuing, from the later 1960s onward, to provide chaplains for the Korean army. Currently, the military temples in South Korea number ca. 400, with 140 Buddhist chaplains and 550 missionaries and the numbers are constantly increasing. What drives the supposedly "pacifist" religion moreover, a religion in many ways marginalized inside the Korean establishment to invest so much in its cooperation with the military? The lecture will deal with both institutional and ideological aspects of the Buddhist-militarist "cohabitation" in the South Korean society.