백곡 김득신의 공부론

Abstract

This study investigated study theories based on the knowledge and life of the 17th century Joseon Confucian scholar, Baekgok Kim Deuk-Shin(柏谷 金得臣, 1604〜1684). Baekgok began his academic studies as a type of family scholarship at the late age of 10 because of smallpox that he suffered from as a child. He was slow in learning and so his family members told him to give up on studying. However, his father saw that Baekgok’s upright character was a quality that would allow him to study for his entire life, so he taught his son based through trust and magnanimity. Just as his father taught, Baekgok did not give up on his studies and he was able to achieve realization on his own by reading many books. The meaning of Gomun-samshipyuksu-doksugi(古文三十六首讀數記), which he recorded after repeat reading the one book over 10,000 times, was to guard himself from becoming lazy during the course of his studies. To Baekgok, reading extensively was a studying method for him to fall into the abyss of thoughts, and the reason why he read the one book over and over was to realize implicit knowledge and connect knowledge and life organically. Furthermore, the reason why Baekgok studied poems and thought about a single letter thousands of times while writing poetry was to make his ‘heart upright(正心)’ and practice Saramdaum. Baekgok was able to achieve academic growth and development by interacting with various men of literature with flexible relative values regarding partisanship, age and religion and so on without clear teacher-student relations.