Questions for Buddhist and Christian Cooperation in Korea
Historically, different religious groups lived together in relative religious peace in Korea. The introduction of Christianity has been a mixed experience: some cooperation, increased confrontations. During the past fifteen years, at least twenty Buddhist temples have been vandalized or destroyed, creating an atmosphere of Buddhism under siege. No one has been positively identified, arrested, or definitely associated with any of these crimes. But all religious groups, including Christian groups, need to join hands in denouncing this persecution. The Korean peninsula is known throughout the world for the stark bifurcation between the communist North and the capitalist South. North Korea (DPRK) is one of the most closed societies in the world, where the public is prohibited access to international communication. Reports tell us that the North is a starving totalitarian state where the people have no freedom or civil rights and where the thoughts of the Great Leader Kim II Sung and his heir Kim Jong II dominate all aspects of life like an ultranationalist cult.1 The major institutionalized religions of the North-Buddhism, Christianity, and Chondogyo-have been subject to purges and are strictly subordinated to the state and its all-pervasive ideology of Juche (self-reliance). Authentic interreligious dialogue and cooperation is a nonissue except for praise of the Great Leader. Survival of the original religious impulses and authentic traditions of the North is what really is at stake after nearly fifty years of political repression.2 What is happening in the South? South Korea (ROK), in contrast, is renowned as an economic superstar, an Asian industrial dragon, who rose from the devastation of the Korean War to host the very successful 1988 Olympics and join the club of developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in record time. South Korea, too, has had its authoritarian leaders we know well (such as Rhee, Park, Chun, and Roh), but none have been as idolized as the father and son duo in the North. Quite the contrary, retired dictators in the South have been denounced as scoundrels and put behind