The Introduction of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism to Korea

Neo-Confucianism, the metaphysical and ethical synthesis that the Southern Song scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200) built out of the Northern Song thought of Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, Zhou Dunyi, and Zhang Zai, reached the Korean peninsula toward the end of the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392), a state whose ruling class had long patronized Buddhism as its dominant intellectual and religious framework. The scholar-official An Hyang (1243-1306), who traveled to Yuan-dynasty China as part of a Goryeo delegation, is traditionally credited with bringing back copies of Zhu Xi's commentaries and portraits of Confucius, and with founding an early shrine to Confucian learning at the national academy, the Gukjagam. His younger contemporary Yi Je-hyeon (1287-1367) spent extended periods at the Yuan court in Beijing, where he interacted with Chinese scholars steeped in the Cheng-Zhu tradition, and helped transmit its texts and interpretive apparatus back to Korea. By the mid-14th century a cohort of Goryeo literati-officials, trained through the civil service examination (gwageo) that had tested classical learning since 958, had begun reading the Four Books - the Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean - through Zhu Xi's own annotated editions rather than through the older Han and Tang commentarial tradition.