KSAA First Keynote Speech | Abstract

Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly

Robert Buswell, UCLA

Travel for religious training, missionary propagation, and devotional pilgrimage has long been an integral part of Buddhism and Korean Buddhism was no exception. Travel to the Buddhist meccas of India and China, as well as to the mythic undersea bastion of the faith, played a crucial role in connecting Korea to the broader Buddhist cultural sphere. By sojourning in such regions, Koreans were demonstrating their associations with the wider world of Buddhist culture, whether that world be terrestrial or cosmological. Simultaneous with their continued travel overseas to major Buddhist sites, Koreans were also bringing those sites homes through a wholesale remapping of the domestic landscape, which both domesticated the dharma and harnessed the numinous power of its cosmology for the residents of the peninsula. At least by the ninth century, Korea had been thoroughly remapped in terms of Buddhism, with a replication on the peninsula of both the imaginary geography of Buddhist cosmology as well as the Indian and Chinese historical landscapes. The “relocalization” of Buddhism on the peninsula enabled Korean Buddhists to travel through the sacred geography of Buddhism from the (relative) comfort of his or her own locale, allowing domestic travel to stand in for pilgrimage to either worldly or otherworldly lands. This presentation will explore the diversity of Korean Buddhist travel experiences and outline this process of relocalizing Buddhist sacred geography on the Korean peninsula.