조상과 후손의 만남에 대한 동서양 다원적 패러다임 연구 - 주자의 감응이론과 칼융의 동시성이론을 중심으로

Abstract

We frequently witness phenomena which occur around us, not revealing the causal relationship. We can ask ourselves whether such phenomena are hard to understand not because they are not true facts but because they are beyond our understanding. The reference data for such a phenomenon in this article are the two events that had occurred in the family of Professor Jae-Gahb Park, one of the co-authors of this article. Firstly, on the eve of the night when his fifteenth-generation ancestor’s grave was to be moved, his ancestor appeared in his consin’s dream, telling him to go and find the bell that his ancestor had cherished. Accordingly, his father and relatives went to Paju county, where his ancestor’s grave is located, to remove the grave to another place. In the process, his father told the participants what his consin had dreamt of including a grave keeper who had kept the bell after reburial. The grave keeper returned it to his father after hearing from him. Secondly, On the day when Professor Park’s father died, his father appeared in the dream of his maternal aunt’s married daughter, carrying a gold watch with him. She was not aware that Professor Park’s father was dead. Furthermore, Neither did she know that Professor Park‘s old brother and his wife in America had bought the gold watch for his father. These two cases are representative examples of ancestors’ revelation through dream. According to the modern civilization which regards sciences as its mainstream paradigm, such mystical and arcane phenomena are just a part of mental phenomena that we cannot verify with our knowledge. However, there are two scholars presenting different explanations about the phenomena of which the causal relationship is not understood yet: Carl Gustav Jung (1875~1961)’s phenomenon of synchronicity and Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130~1200)’s theory of correlation. A phenomenon whose causal relationship is not understood yet is an event in which the obstinate outlook of the restrictive rationality breaks off, and at the same time our life spreads into the vast realm transcending our understanding. We are living in an era when more discussions on the unknown universe and pluralistic paradigms on the questions about life and death need to be made. In this regard, Gustav Jung’s concept of Synchronicity and Neo-Confucian theory of correlation is instrumental in overcoming the phenomenon and case in which the causality breaks off.