The Intersections Between Buddhism and Folk Religions in the Late Chosŏn: The Case Study of the Kitchen-God Cult

Despite the state policy of suppressing Buddhism, non-Confucian religions survived, or rather thrived, in the late Chosŏn. Buddhism and folk religions, in particular, still attracted many people from almost all classes of the society. Some forms of folk cults were included in the state ritual system and other forms were publicly performed in local regions. Many different practices of Buddhism also developed, including various postmortem rituals, pure land chanting, and Sŏn meditation. The popularity of Buddhism and folk cults led to the active interactions between the two religions, which in turn developed into unique Buddhist amalgams. This paper explores the interactions and intersections of Buddhism and folk religions through a case study of the Buddhist kitchen god ritual. In particular, it looks at how the 19th century Sŏn master Paekp’a Kŭngsŏn 白坡亘璇 (1767–1852) integrated the kitchen god cult into the Buddhist ritual system in his ritual manual collection, the Chakpŏp kwigam 作法龜鑑. This paper, thereby, shows another strategy of how Buddhism fit into the late-Chosŏn society.