만암 대종사 행장에 관한 고찰

Abstract

Venerable Manam Jongheon(1876-1957) was born at the end of the Joseon Dynasty and lived through the Korean Empire, Japanese occupation, and the devastation of the Korean War. He could have stayed in the mountains and lived as nobly as a crane, but he didn't. He traveled back and forth between the world and the sacred, and lived a long life full of hard work for the sake of combat and sangha harmony. Venerable Manam appears in the form of a multi-faceted Buddha. He was a governor who fought to preserve national culture during the Japanese invasion, and he was the founder of a large temple in a decade on a site that had fallen into ruins. He was an educator who founded a modern school, Gwangsunguisook, and promoted the Buddhist Preparatory School to the Central Buddhist College; a president who practiced meditation and farmed alongside the masses; an inheritor of traditional Buddhism who led the 'GoBulChongrim(古佛叢林)' movement to clean up the remnants of Japan and establish a comprehensive system of Zen and doctrine; and an outstanding sangha leader who maintained a thoroughly public attitude for the development of the sect and the unification of the Sangha. As such, Manam's life and thought can be used as a rudder to set the coordinates of Korean Buddhism. However, there are some details in books and articles about Manam that can lead to errors and confusion. The date of his death is one of them. We examined the current situation and reasons for the discrepancies in the date of the monk's death in encyclopedias, books, and articles, and suggested that the date of Manam's death should be written as "January 16, 1957" instead of "December 16, 1956" to reduce confusion in the long run. Regarding Manam's surname, several researchers have examined why it should be spelled 曼庵 rather than 蔓庵, even though it is often transcribed as 蔓庵. They concluded that while it is clear that the surname Man-am originated from Chu-sa's writing, the anecdote of Chu-sa's giving the surname to Monk Baekpa is most likely not true, and that Manam began using the surname when he returned to Baekyangsa Temple in 1909. In addition, Manam's practice of ‘bansenbannong(伴禪半農)’ began with the reconstruction of Baekyangsa Temple in the late 1910s and may have preceded that of Yong-sung, the monk whose academic name is known as the originator of ‘bansen-bannong’, which systematizes the parallelism of practice and work. Regarding Manam's teacher monk, Regarding Manam's teacher, Dojin, a brief life trajectory was presented through inscriptions.