"This is the first and long-overdue book-length work in English on the history of Choson Buddhism. Salvaging Buddhism will undoubtedly prompt scholars to think of Choson Buddhism in a much more critical, comprehensive, and nuanced way. The uniqueness of the study lies in the way Gregory Evon tackles the questions surrounding Choson-era Buddhism. Evon reasserts the centrality of Neo-Confucian persecution, which scholars have recently been eager to jettison when describing the conditions of Choson Buddhism. He argues that the Neo-Confucian government did indeed try to wipe out Buddhism altogether and that the state persisted in its efforts throughout the Choson period. To prove this, Evon draws on three bodies of evidence: state anti-Buddhist policies; debates among intellectuals about ghosts, spirits, and rituals; and a vernacular novel, Lady Sa’s Journey to the South. Seamlessly organized and smoothly presented with rich stories substantiated with exhaustive primary sources, Salvaging Buddhism is beautifully written and deeply engages in current scholarship through a critical analysis of texts. There is no comparable book on this topic in English; this book will become the authoritative history of Choson-era Buddhism.” –Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Yale University
"Tracing the tensions between Confucianism and Buddhism in Choson Korea, this provocative volume contains a bold interpretation of the writings of the Choson official Kim Manjung that is grounded in the author’s own discovery of the connection between the exiled Confucian official and a shipwreck carrying forbidden Buddhist artifacts that washed up on Korea’s shores in the seventeenth-century. Evon’s innovative reading of Kim Manjung’s work contextualizes it in the anti-Buddhist movement and Confucian preoccupations of the Choson male elite, and Evon illuminates the possibility that Kim’s reevaluation of Buddhism led him to write a Buddhist-Confucian novel for elite women who suffered under the impossible, patriarchal commitments of the Confucian tradition that the Choson dynasty was famously and exclusively committed to. Salvaging Buddhism’s unique methodological approach enables a nuanced study of how real, historical people chose and understood their religious commitments in times of intense change, and this makes it essential reading for scholars of Buddhism in particular and religion in general." –Stephanie Balkwill, UCLA
"Gregory Evon’s Salvaging Buddhism combines extensive research of the historical record with keen literary analysis to argue that Kim Manjung’s late seventeenth-century novel, Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, should be read as an effort to convince his contemporaries that Buddhist faith was ultimately beneficial rather than injurious to Confucian moral virtues. Evon meticulously traces the attacks on Buddhism by the Confucian elites, and the anti-Buddhist arguments that accompanied them, in the first half of the Choson dynasty, before turning to the historical circumstances that surrounded Kim Manjung’s exile from the capital to a remote location on the southern coast of Korea. Along the way, Evon solves the puzzling centrality in Kim’s novel of the White-Robed Guanyin, a figure primarily known in Chinese Buddhism, and makes a strong case for interpreting the positive role of Buddhist faith in the story as a reflection of Kim’s symbiotic view of Buddhism and Confucianism. Salvaging Buddhism makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on Buddhism in Korea under the Choson dynasty, but its richly nuanced and historically contextualized account of a literary creation by a famous Korean author will appeal to a wider audience." —Mark Nathan, University at Buffalo
