Page:Korea (1904).djvu/290

238 the monks, but lives entirely apart, existing altogether in a world of their own making.

The forms of religion which prevail in Korea to-day are Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shamanism. Statements of ancient Chinese and Japanese writers, and the early Jesuit missionaries, tend to prove that the worship of spirits and demons has been the basis of national belief since the earliest times. The god of the hills is even now the most popular deity. Worship of the spirits of heaven and earth, of the invisible powers of the air, of nature, of the morning star, of the guardian genii of the hills and rivers, and of the soil and grain, has been so long practised that, in spite of the influences of Confucianism, and the many centuries in which Buddhism has existed in the land, the actual worship of the great mass of the people has undergone little material alteration. However widespread this leaning of the lower classes towards demonolatry may be, the philosophy of Confucius has been from the fifteenth century the official and fashionable cult in Korea. In its middle period, it attained to that point when a religion, which at first was fostered by the few and has spread gradually until it became absorbed by the people, feels itself firmly established, and emphasises its ascendency by the bigotry of its assertions, its intolerance, and, crowning triumph of all usurping tenets, by the virulence of its persecution. Confucianism now overspreads the whole peninsula. From the fourth to the fourteenth century, when the religion of the Enlightened One prevailed, it was studied and practised only by the learned classes. Buddhism predominated throughout the southern half of the peninsula, and only partially leavened the northern division of the Empire, where it was unable to combat the teachings of