Study Of The Korean Nation, The Traditional Conception Of Death

As a Korean, the author believes that the biological existence of human being comes with the life and goes with the death. And this rule forms the social metabolism. How does Korean people deal with the problems of life and death that trouble them again and again?The Korean view of life and death is a result of their meditation through history. Generally speaking, the view of life and death deals with human beings' interpretation of life and death. Such topics as life and death, birth and decaying, the long for long-life and the abode after death, the spiritual connection between living people and those who are dead, strengthen different people' s philosophical meditation, cultural values, religious pursuits and literary and arts representations, and hence affect their different social aspects.However, for a long time this gray topic of death was absent in China. Recently Anthropologists and folklore researchers focus mainly on man and their different ethnic groups in the death rituals, neglecting the death itself.As tome is an expression of its authors' cosmology and view of life and death, while different peoples' cares about old people and their interpretations of the funerary ritual are also a social representation, the author chose three cases for fieldwork. They are the different tomes in southern Korean, old Koreans' lives in present Fushun, China, and the death rituals in Korean society in general.This paper bases on materials from the three fieldworks and texts such as mythologies, folklore stories and historical records. By employing methods from folklore studies, sociology and history studies, the author analyzes Korean view of life and death and explores them from the perspective of worldview and life view. The author hopes to bringsomething new to the study of life and death.The first chapter discusses different forms of Korean tomes and their evolution in history. The author analyzes different views of death that connects with tomes, which came into being no later than the Three Kingdoms Period and they are reincarnation, avoiding evil spirits and god-becoming ascendance. Those different aspects of the view of death affect later development of Korean thoughts and culture.The second chapter concerns about Korean traditional categories and forms of anima and their knowledge about the future life. The Korean view of soul is characterized as not to clarify clearly between good and evil anima and not to distinguishing resenting souls, which are reflected in Korea people' s lives, and this view shows a peaceful and charitable aspect of Korean spirit. And their worldview also gives priority to the mountain Efland and the sea Efland, which was supplemented by the interfacial undergrounds Hades. As the mountains and seas become the abodes of soul after death, it shows that the life-world and the death-world could overlap and they could communicate and mix with each other once any of them transform itself into the other through the incarnation.The third chapter analyzes the Korean original view of life, that is, the genital worship that evolves from their original cosmology. Its two elements are Heaven-Born and Earth-Born, originating from the adoration of heaven and the belief of gnome mother respectively. The author believes the fishing and hunting life styles are earlier than agricultural life styles, and this historical process determines that between the two elements of male and female structure, the genital worship of the female is earlier than the male. Korean people worship sex organs only for prosperous and harvest.In chapter 4 and 5, the author approaches his core part of thedissertation. The fourth chapter analyzes the Korean traditional philosophy and aesthetics on the death, which are mixture of both Korean essentialities of unity and coordination and Chinese Confucianism. This mixture cultivates the five secular forbidden rules, the spirit to die to achieve virtue and to lay down one's life for a just cause, which are the highest pursuits of life. It is more a thought of the ideal of synchronizi...