Cheondoism

Choe Je-u expressed his central insight in the phrase si cheonju, bearing the Lord of Heaven within. He did not mean that a person is God, and he did not mean that God is remote. Haneullim, the Lord of Heaven, is understood as present in every person and in all things, so that serving other people is the way in which God is served.

The second leader, Choe Si-hyeong, drew the practical conclusion in a formula usually rendered as treating people as heaven, and applied it in ways that were socially explosive in nineteenth-century Korea. He taught that a child being beaten is heaven being beaten, and that a daughter-in-law at the loom is heaven at work. The movement took in slaves, the low-born, women and widows permitted to remarry, and treated the caste distinctions of the late Joseon order as simply false.

The third leader, Son Byong-hi, condensed the teaching into innaecheon, man is heaven, the phrase by which Cheondoism is now best known. Scholars disagree over how far that shifted the religion from theism towards a humanistic immanentism, and Cheondoists themselves have taken different positions on it at different periods.

Practice is deliberately plain, and there is no priesthood in the sacrificial sense. The core devotion is a twenty-one character incantation recited daily. Members keep a rite using a bowl of clear water, cheongsu, set out at a fixed hour, and a practice of silent report to the divine before acting. The scriptures are the Donggyeong Daejeon, in classical Chinese, and the Yongdam yusa, hymns in vernacular Korean, both from the founder.

The Donghak rising of 1894 was the largest popular revolt in Korean history and the point at which the movement entered politics permanently.

Its immediate cause was local. A magistrate at Gobu in the south-west imposed forced labour to build an unnecessary reservoir and then charged the peasants for the water. A local Donghak leader, Jeon Bongjun, led the protest that followed, and it spread across the Jeolla provinces. The rebels' demands were not primarily religious: they concerned taxation, corrupt officials, the treatment of the low-born and the export of grain during shortage. They took the provincial capital at Jeonju and negotiated a settlement that included local self-governing councils, an experiment in popular administration with few contemporary parallels.

The second phase was different in kind. When the Korean court called in Chinese troops and Japan sent its own forces in response, the rising resumed as resistance to foreign intervention. It was destroyed at Ugeumchi in late 1894, where peasant forces with matchlocks and bamboo spears were cut down by Japanese units with modern rifles. Jeon Bongjun was captured and executed in 1895. Casualty estimates run from tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands and none is reliable.

The rising failed and helped trigger the First Sino-Japanese War, which ended Korean independence in practice. Its memory has since been claimed by very different parties, as peasant revolution, as nationalist rising and as religious movement. UNESCO inscribed its surviving archive on the Memory of the World register in 2023.

Cheondoism was one of the largest organised movements in colonial Korea, and the division of the peninsula split it in two.

In the north, where Donghak had always been strong, adherents formed the Chondoist Chongu Party in 1946. It was briefly enormous, reporting over two hundred thousand members at the end of that year and outnumbering the communists. An attempted rising in 1948 was suppressed and the leadership purged; by the mid-1950s a few thousand members remained. The party still exists as one of the minor parties permitted inside the ruling front, holding a small number of seats and no independent policy, and the state presents it as evidence of religious freedom. It is the only religious political party left in the country. Figures published from Pyongyang cannot be checked, and outside estimates of practising Cheondoists there range from about ten thousand to fifty thousand.

In the south the religion held a respected place as a native Korean faith with an independence record, but did not grow. The national census recorded around 28,000 adherents in 1995, 45,000 in 2005 and 66,000 in 2015, in a population above fifty million. Its central temple stands in Seoul.

Its influence has outrun its membership. Cheondoist thought fed the minjung theology of the 1970s, and the modern Korean children's rights movement, including Children's Day, was founded by the Cheondoist Bang Jeong-hwan. The teaching has outlasted the institution, which is a fair description of its position in both Koreas.