Rites and Faiths

Earlier chapters met ancestral rites at Seollal and Chuseok, a Buddhist holiday in the public holiday table, and mentions of shamanic origins. This chapter looks at those practices directly. It describes what the sources say about ancestral rites, Buddha's Birthday and shamanic gut rituals, and how the sources describe their mixing. It treats religion as practice and history, and judges none of it.

Ancestral Rites

The Jesa article calls jesa "a ceremony commonly practiced in Korea" that "functions as a memorial to the ancestors of the participants", usually held on the anniversary of an ancestor's death. It says "the majority of Catholics, Buddhists and nonbelievers practice ancestral rites, although Protestants do not". A later sentence in the same article says "many Korean Protestants no longer practice this rite", which is a softer claim, and the article does not reconcile the two.

The kinds of rite

How a rite is done

The article describes the performance in some detail, and I summarise only the outline. The family at the eldest son's house prepares foods including wine, soup, beef, fish, vegetables of three colours, fruit and songpyeon, "particularly those that were favored by the deceased". A memorial tablet (shinwi), "which symbolizes the spiritual presence of the ancestor", is placed at the centre, or a written prayer is set up if the family has no tablet. The sequence includes calling the spirits down, three offerings of rice wine, a spoon placed in the rice, a pause when the participants leave the room so the ancestors can eat, a tea offering, the removal of the table and the burning of the written prayer. It ends with eumbok, in which participants share the offerings, which the article says "symbolizes the receiving of the blessings bestowed upon the family".

The article describes an arrangement of food on the table and gives details such as men's offerings on the west and women's on the east. Chapter 4 gave a different layout for the Chuseok charye (rice and soup on the north), and the Chuseok article added that "these details can vary across regions". I take the variation as part of the picture.

Change

The Jesa article says that ancestor worship "has significantly changed in recent years". It is now "common to hold ancestor rituals up to only two generations of ancestors", and in some cases only for dead parents; more rites are held in the evening, not after midnight; and "people can also perform ancestor rituals in a younger son's house". It adds that "in modern days, the daughter or younger son of the family may perform these rites". It concludes that in most Korean families the rites "still remain an important part of their culture and they are faithfully observed". That last claim comes without a survey, so I treat it as the article's judgment.

History

The article traces ancestral rites back to the Bronze Age, citing table-top dolmens "used for ancestral worship". It describes state rites to founders of dynasties, the shrines Jongmyo and Sajik, and says that "today's Confucian rituals were introduced from the end of Goryeo" and, in the early Joseon, a Chinese ritual manual "was accepted and spread gradually". It adds that the Catholic ban on ancestral rituals "was lifted in 1939, when Pope Pius XII formally recognized ancestral rites as a civil practice". These are the article's accounts, and I did not check them.

Buddha's Birthday

The Buddha's Birthday article says that in South Korea the day is "celebrated according to the Korean lunar calendar and is a national holiday" (as Chapter 2's table shows: the 8th day of the 4th lunar month). It lists its names: Bucheo-nim o-shin nal (부처님 오신 날), "the day when the Buddha came"; Seok-ga T'an-shin-il; and Chopail (초파일), "the first 8th day".

• Lanterns. "Lotus lanterns hang in temples throughout the month and lanterns are hung in homes and in the streets." Many temples hold a large lantern festival, Yeondeunghoe (연등회). Chapter 5's note on lantern lighting at Daeboreum, and Chapter 1's mention of the recent Seoul Lantern Festival, show lanterns in three different settings with three different ages.
• Free meals. On the day, "many temples provide free meals and tea to all visitors", often including sanchae bibimbap.
• Who takes part. The article says it "is a popular holiday and folk celebration in Korea, and is often celebrated by people of all religious faiths". That is a claim about participation, with no figures.

Shamanic Rites

The article on Korean shamanism (Musok, Muism) calls it "a religion from Korea" that scholars classify "as a folk religion and sometimes regard... as one facet of a broader Korean vernacular religion distinct from Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism". It stresses how little is fixed: "There is no central authority in control of Musok". The practice centres on gods and ancestral spirits, and "ritual specialists, the majority of them female, called mudang (무당)". They perform gut (굿), in which they offer food and drink and entertain the spirits "with storytelling, song, and dance". Gut may be held at home or in a shrine "often located on a mountain".

History, as the article gives it

• "The origins of Musok are unclear but the earliest historical references to mudang date to the 12th century."
• During the Joseon, "Confucian elites suppressed the mudang with taxation and legal restrictions, deeming their rites to be improper."
• From the late 19th century, "modernisers – many of them Christian – characterised Musok as misin (superstition)".
• Under Japanese rule, nationalist folklorists "began promoting the idea that Musok represented Korea's ancient religion", an idea "later heavily promoted by mudang themselves". The word musok itself was coined by the folklorist Yi Nŭnghwa, and "developed during the Japanese colonial period, when it was employed with derogatory connotations".
• In the mid-20th century, persecution continued, including in South Korea through the New Community Movement. From the late 1970s, "more positive appraisal" came, with practitioners associated with the pro-democracy minjung movement and regarded as "a source of Korean cultural identity".
• Today the article says there are "over 200,000 mudang" in South Korea, and that "disapproval of mudang, often regarded as charlatans, remains widespread in South Korea, especially among Christians".

The Mixing of Traditions

The shamanism article says "while Korean attitudes to religion have historically been fairly inclusive, allowing for syncretism between Musok and Buddhism, the mudang have nevertheless long been marginalised." The Jesa article gives a concrete example: altar food may be distributed to neighbours and friends in a Buddhist rite called shishik, "a form of merit-making" that, with sutra reading, is said to hasten the deceased's entry into Sukhavati (the Buddhist pure land). So a rite with a Confucian shape can have Buddhist elements, and Chapter 5 showed a festival (Dano) with an older Korean layer merged with a Chinese one.

How many people belong where?

The Religion in South Korea article opens with a survey claim: "A majority of South Koreans are irreligious." Citing a 2025 survey, it says 51% report no religion, 31% identify with Christianity (20% Protestant, 11% Catholic), 16% with Buddhism and 1% with other religions. It adds that both Buddhism and Christianity "have been declining in adherents" since 2000, that shamanism "remain[s] popular and may account for a large share of the seemingly irreligious", and that "according to scholars, South Korean censuses do not count believers in indigenous Korean shamanism". In a 2012 survey "only 15% of the population identified as nonreligious in an atheistic sense".

Reading a Claim About Religion in Korea

1. Affiliation or practice? A survey answer about religion is not a record of rites performed.
2. Whose label? "Shamanism", "superstition" and "folk religion" are labels with histories, and some began as insults.
3. Which rite? Jesa, charye and gijesa are not interchangeable.
4. Which layer? A rite can be Confucian in form, Buddhist in an element and shamanic in its roots, and the sources may stress different ones.

Exercises

Next chapter: Life-Cycle Ceremonies, which covers the first birthday, the 60th birthday, weddings and funerals: what is traditional, what is modern, and what the law and the sources say.