By
Ko-Eun Kwang-soon, Women's rights activist and doctor of Chinese medicine.



Not many people know that the tradition of ancestral rites is not a longstanding practice. Few also know that it was the Joseon royal family and aristocrats', or yangban, way of imitating Chinese imperial culture, which was so dominated by the upper class that commoners and members of the lower class who did it would be summoned and flogged. It was during the period of Japanese rule, when the aristocrats lost their authority, that the creation of genealogical tables and ancestral rites became an ordinary practice among the Korean public. The aristocrats of the dynastic era used those rites and tables as part of a strategy to set themselves apart, claiming that their blood was different, and that others should not defy their authority. The French public brought down centralized power with a successful revolution and called for new values of liberty, equality and fraternity, but the Joseon masses sought to escape the pain of discrimination by aping the yangban culture after those aristocrats lost power with an invasion by outside forces. And because the yangban maintained their tables and rites so as not to forget their pride in the past, the ancestral rite became an event observed by all Koreans during the Japanese occupation.


Some say that it is a beautiful thing to honor the departed, but a culture created or promulgated long ago during a period of harsh discrimination by status and sex is neither necessary nor beautiful today. Even in China, the progenitor of the ancestral rites, all children with the means to do so set their tables for just one to three years after the individual's death. The lingering presence of so many empty formalities in Korea's coming of age, wedding, funeral, and ancestral ceremonies stems from our failure to move beyond a discriminatory and pretentious yangban culture that was not even all that original.


Even if you don't believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, it is not respect for the departed to shut them up in the world of death through graves, stones, and decades of ancestral rituals and ask their blessings. If someone dead happens to appear in a dream looking bad, this does not call for us to move their grave site or visit a fortuneteller. I would like to see us imagining them sometimes smiling amid radiant light and bestowing love and blessings on all things in the world. We should think and live rationally and creatively rather than simply following along with something because others do so and because people have done so for many years.


Ours is an aging society. While we are alive, let us spend real time with our families, allowing ourselves the enjoyment of being moved by the green shoots and yellow and red flowers that emerge from the black soil and experiencing gratitude for the sweet songs of the birds and the smiles of ourselves and others. The genes of our parents and ancestors are being carried on in us. Our ancestors would applaud seeing us value others and ourselves and helping one another with sincerity, not formality.　


The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.