Korea Dispatch

Yesterday’s JoongAng Ilbo reported on a South Korean Buddhist monk who attempted to disembowl himself at Seoul’s Joggye Temple, during protests against President’s Lee Myung-bak’s discriminatory religious policies.

On Saturday, a 60-year-old Buddhist monk used a knife to cut open his own abdomen at Jogye Temple to protest perceived religious bias in the government. The monk, Venerable Sambo, is the former head monk of Sangwon Temple in Gangwon Province. The Jogye Order said he was rushed to a hospital and that the injury was not fatal.

Apparently the Ven. Sambo has been very active in political dissent going back to the 1980s, when

he was arrested during the Chun Doo Hwan regime’s Buddhist crackdown… in what the government called “religious purification.”

When I first saw the monks set up in front of Joggye temple a few weeks back to conduct a hunger strike protesting the president, I asked a friend — a monk himself — for his thoughts on the whole affair. Decidedly a-political, he kind of shrugged, but said that quite a few of those monks recall the 1980s under President Chun Doo-hwan, and that memory is, in part, driving their actions today.

It reminded me that a lot of what we see going on politically here has a historical context that is often not taken into account, and thus may seem irrational, or ridiculous.

On that note, another report in the Korean language JoonAng Ilbo printed edition noted that following the Buddhists’ protests Lee Myung-bak invited a youth choir from the Christian Broadcasting Service, along with several Pastors, to the Blue House to perform during a state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao. Real tactful!