THE PRESENT-DAY KOREAN CONFUCIAN PRIMER: ANNOTATED TRANSLATION OF THE FOUR-CHARACTER ELEMENTARY LEARNING (SAJA SOHAK, 四字小學)
The Four-Character Elementary Learning (Saja sohak) is a short 1250-character-long collection of basic Confucian decorum and moralistic aphorisms, which is by far the most commonly-used Confucian primer in Korea today. It is studied, at least partially, by approximately half of all Korean elementary...
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| Published in: | Acta Koreana 2016-12, Vol.19 (2), p.239-253 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The Four-Character Elementary Learning (Saja sohak) is a short 1250-character-long collection of basic Confucian decorum and moralistic aphorisms, which is by far the most commonly-used Confucian primer in Korea today. It is studied, at least partially, by approximately half of all Korean elementary school students as part of the burgeoning ‘decorum’ or ‘humanistic’ courses and camps (yejŏl kyoyuk, insŏng kyoyuk), now organized in public schools, hyanggyo’s, and sŏdang’s throughout the peninsula.1 In many of these programs the text is learned by communal chanting and memorization, a method which certainly imbues its moralistic instructions with certain authority and sanctity. I have met several twenty-year-old students who could still chant from memory parts of this text, ten years after spending a few days in one of these camps. In fact, the Saja sohak is the only Confucian book actually taught on a large scale to Koreans today. Its particular injunctions are internalized and often guide the attitudes and actions of many, and as such—it certainly deserves further attention. Unlike the Dizi gui (弟子規), a comparable seventeenth-century Confucian primer often used in China and Taiwan,2 the Saja sohak seems to be a modern compilation. There have been no references to it prior to the twentieth-century, and its earliest existing anonymous woodblock edition was dated to 1932.3 Although the title seems to refer to Zhu Xi’s Elementary Learning (小學, C. Xiao xue, K. Sohak), the Saja sohak is not a simple summary of this predominant work but a whole new alternative.4 Unlike Zhu Xi’s text, the Saja sohak centers on decorum and behavioral codes and mostly shies away from theoretical expositions. Additionally, many of the aphorisms in the Saja sohak are not taken directly from the Elementary Learning but are rather selectively extracted from the ancient Book of Rites, the Analects, the Book of Poems, the Book of Changes, the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, and from the writings of Korean Confucian scholar Yi I Yulgok (1536– 1584).5 I have divided the following translation into eight subsections according to specific social-relationship comportments: filial piety and dutifulness, distinctions between husband and wife, sharing between older and younger siblings, respecting teachers, honoring elders, receiving guests, proper friends, and general decorum attitudes. As might be expected from a Confucian primer aimed mainly for children, the largest sections are the ones |
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| ISSN: | 1520-7412 2733-5348 |