In this presentation Juhn Ahn offers a brief description of how wealth shaped religion and death in medieval Korea. The presentation will try to show how the relationship between wealth and religion changed and how the postmortem space of Korean elite families was consequently flattened after the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century.

By taking a closer look at the history of the relationship between religion and wealth in medieval Korea, he hopes to challenge the widely accepted view that the Buddhist establishment in medieval Korea had grown so extravagant and corrupt that the state had to suppress it. When newly rising Korean elites (many with strong ties to the Mongols) used lavish donations to Buddhist institutions to enhance their status, older elites defended their own adherence to this time-honored practice by arguing that their donations were linked to virtue. This emphasis on virtue and the consequent separation of religion from wealth facilitated the Confucianization of Korea and the relegation of Buddhism to the margins of public authority during the Chosŏn dynasty.

Juhn Ahn is assistant professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea (University of Washington Press, 2018).