著者

金子 祐樹 Yuuki Kaneko

雑誌

国際文化論集 = INTERCULTURAL STUDIES (ISSN:09170219)

巻号頁・発行日

no.32, pp.151-195, 2005-06-15

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In Korea, a traditional kneeling bow, called jeol (_), is performed duringceremonies of ancestor worship, jaisa (__). The purpose of this paper is toinvestigate the origin of jeol and the background to how it came to be performedin Korean Confucian ancestral rites.Should jeol be performed in jaisa? Strictly speaking, it should not. The correctritual for jaisa was laid down in the chapter titled "Ancestral Rites" in theFamily Rituals of Chu Hsi (朱熹), and stipulated that participants should bowwhile kneeling with a straight back. Although jeol is a prostration of Koreanorigin, in coming to be accepted as a form of Confucian bow it became a Koreanvariant of traditional Confucian rites. In this phenomenon we can find thenatural energy that transformed jeol from a Korean folkway to a Confucian ritualprostration.To clarify how this came about, I examined the vicissitudes of movementtechniques in Korean ritual ceremonies from ancient times to the period of theJoseon dynasty.From the era before unification by Silla, dance accompanied by singing wasthe centre of Korean religious ceremonies. It remained popular after Buddhismwas introduced to Korea, perhaps because, as a means of appeasing andcommunicating with the spirits, it was considered to be superior to previousforms. However, dance was rejected in the Joseon period because of theJoseon dynasty's policy of indoctrination with Neo-Confucian ideology, includingthe holding of ancestor worship ceremonies according to Chu Hsi's FamilyRituals. Nevertheless, jeol, being a kneeling bow intended to express respectfor elders or superiors, came to be performed in ancestral rites because it wasadmitted as implying respect for ancestors.Korean Confucianists had to solve this problem. First came the techniquefor the kneeling bow developed by Jeong Gyeong-sai, which eventually led toKim Jang-saeng's coining of the term jeonbae to denote jeol defined and carriedout as a Confucian bow. In this way jeol was finally admitted as being a Confucianbow, and has continued to be performed in Korea up to the present.