Feminism and Feminine Spirituality in Won Buddhism

Won Buddhism is a reformed Buddhism founded by Chungbin Park (Sot’aesan, 1891-1943). After he got enlightened in 1916, he read main religious texts such as Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist, Christian texts. He thought they had great insights for helping human societies. However, traditional religions enforced the social system of patriarchy and hierarchy. Patriarchy is the family culture where the eldest son becomes head of the family, succeeds in the family lineage, and plays the central role in all decisions and hegemony. This kind of eldest son-centered family culture justified gender roles in households of the paternal family. It devised various tools to control women through the idea of the purity of women, the idea of the good wife and good mother, and the idealization of motherhood. This patriarchy produced social strata marked by discrimination between the gentry and commoners, between male and female, between legitimate and illegitimate children and between different races or ethnic groups; it produced a perpendicular human relationship structure of dominance and submission. Sot’aesan criticized that Korean culture did not allow women to have basic rights of education, property, occupation, and social engagement as human. Further, for Sot’aesan’s time, industrialization, capitalism, and imperialism developed by Western countries became more powerful and escalate social hierarchy and increase the gap between poor and rich: then more people and more women could be driven into unsafety. I present the way how the founder recognized the unreasonable discrimination against women and how he wished to abolish the unreasonable discrimination against women.