Glorifying the Order and Creating Great Monks: A Critical Survey of Oral History Within the Field of Modern Korean Buddhist Historical Studies

With the growth of academic interest in Korean Buddhism’s modern history over the 1990s, newly introduced oral history methodologies showed great potential. In contrast with oral history trends in Western Buddhist studies, oral history in Korean Buddhist studies emerged from the need to supplement the lack of surviving documentation and to record testimony regarding key historical events before witnesses pass away. While the first decades of Korean Buddhist oral history have produced an invaluable increase in primary sources available for current and future resources, the field has nevertheless suffered from methodological issues and limitations often resulting from the Korean Buddhist community’s conflation of oral history with its own pre-established oral traditions. This article examines how oral history methodologies have been mobilized to reconstruct Korea’s modern Buddhist past within South Korean academia. It also critically evaluates the methodological limitations and institutional biases embedded within these studies, before surveying more recent efforts to overcome these issues through greater critical rigor, methodological refinement, and the inclusion of more diverse perspectives.