A State Built on a Reading of Ritual

Joseon is the clearest case anywhere of a state remaking a society around a body of philosophical texts. The dynasty founded in 1392 adopted Neo Confucianism, and specifically the synthesis associated with Zhu Xi, not merely as a court philosophy but as the standard for law, education, family structure and worship. Peter Bol's account of Neo Confucianism as a historical movement is useful for seeing what that involved, because the programme was never only about ideas. Mourning periods were fixed by degree of kinship, ancestral rites were prescribed for households, inheritance and adoption were reorganised so that a patrilineal main line was preserved, women's remarriage was restricted, and the civil service examinations tested the approved commentaries. Buddhism, which had been the state religion of the preceding Goryeo dynasty, lost its landholdings and its place in the capital and continued largely in mountain monasteries.

Roger Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli's ethnography of Korean ancestor rites shows how far the resulting household practice persisted into the twentieth century. The kings maintained the royal ancestral shrine at Jongmyo and the altars of soil and grain, and their own rites were the model the rest of the society was expected to scale down from.