Ascetic Charisma and Institutional Authority: Bhikṣuṇī Inhong and the Glocal Formation of Female Monastic Leadership in Modern Korean Buddhism

This article examines how the ascetic practice of Bhikṣuṇī Inhong (仁弘, 1908–1997) became recognized and institutionalized as religious authority in modern Korean Buddhism. Rather than treating her “never lying down” (changjwa purwa 長坐不臥) and one-meal-a-day disciplines as strategies for acquiring power, the study situates them first within Buddhist cultivation and then asks how their sustained practice became socially legible as extraordinary commitment. Drawing on institutional records, biographical and commemorative materials, Max Weber’s account of charisma and routinization, and Conger and Kanungo’s attributional model, it traces a sequence from ascetic practice to communal recognition, formal office, and monastic institution building. Attention is given to Inhong’s election to the Jogye Order’s Central Assembly, her participation in the Buddhist Purification Movement, and her reconstruction of Sŏngnam-sa as a Bhikṣuṇī Sŏn center. The article argues that gender is most clearly visible in the institutional consequences of recognized ascetic authority rather than in the austerities themselves. Inhong’s case shows how recognized religious credibility acquired durable institutional form under specifically Korean postcolonial conditions and how transnational colonial inheritances were reworked within the postwar saṅgha.