Material Affordance and the Mediated Turn in Korean Buddhist Material Culture

Contemporary Korean Buddhism circulates through an expanding network of material and mediated forms that operate without explicitly demanding doctrinal commitment or institutional affiliation. Against the prevailing frameworks of secularization and commodification, this article proposes material affordance as an alternative analytical vocabulary, asking not what Buddhist objects and spaces signify but what they do to those who encounter them. Through this lens, the article analyzes four affordance types through which the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism sustains its cultural presence in a disaffiliating society: access infrastructures, affective attunement devices, aesthetic identity markers, and public-cultural interfaces. Together, these modalities constitute what this article terms the mediated turn in Korean Buddhism, a structural transformation in which the tradition extends its reach not through the intensification of belief or the recruitment of formal members, but through the proliferation of designed material environments that make Buddhist sensibilities, aesthetics, and affects available to those who may never self-identify as Buddhist. Central to this analysis is the Korean paradox of mediated Buddhism: that de-institutionalization is itself institutionally engineered, inverting Grace Davie’s formulation of “believing without belonging” into something more radical: encountering without either.