Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017. xxii, 421 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6869-3.
The title indicates a study of geomancy, not fengshui, but geomancy. The word choice is significant. Geomancy is characterized in editor Hong-key Yoon’s earlier work, Geomantic Relationships between Culture and Nature in Korea (Taipei: The Orient Cultural Service, 1976), as “a unique and comprehensive system of conceptualizing the physical environment which regulates human ecology by influencing man to select auspicious environments and to build harmonious structures (i.e., graves, houses, and cities) on them” (1). In this edited volume, Yoon distinguishes his chosen subject from “fengshui,” a Romanization of the standard Chinese pronunciation for “wind and water,” otherwise known as “geomancy.” The Korean pronunciation, “p’ungsu” is boldly capitalized in the title. Yoon does this for two reasons, both deeply implicated in the project at hand. First, he observes that fengshui has been popularized in the English-reading world through a welter of how-to manuals which promise that attention to the proper arrangement of structures and objects in space brings happiness, wealth, and auspicious real estate ventures. As Yoon and his colleagues abundantly demonstrate, the influence of geomantic ideas is more far-reaching, extending into many different domains of cultural practice, from literature to gardening. Second, the term fengshui carries the implication that geomancy is an exclusively Chinese project, overlooking the fact that Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese have made their own uses of it. “‘Geomancy’ does not favour any one particular nation in East Asia” Yoon asserts (16). The book is intended as an exploration of the particular historical inflections and cultural nuances that geomancy took when it reached the Korean Peninsula. P’ungsu is not an English-language introduction to how Korean geomancy works; that information is contained in Yoon’s other writing and only the basics are provided here. Rather, the aim is to convey Korea’s geomantic heritage, writ broad and large.
The book is the product of an ambitious project that brought the seven authors together over a series of four workshops between 2009 and 2011 with ample opportunity to consult with each other and with the editor. Yoon himself has written more than half of the chapters yet he has also invited an array of distinctive specialist projects beyond the scope of a single scholar. The culmination of years of planning, the resulting volume was clearly a labour of love, enhanced by a wealth of illustrations of historical sites, geomancy maps, and artifacts. The first half of P’ungsu offers an understanding of geomancy in different and specific historical contexts, tracing evidence of geomantic practice in textual, architectural, artefactual, and other remains. It offers a corrective to any sense that when geomancy and the practices associated with it arrived from China, possibly as early as the seventh century CE, it was anything like a complete package, or that it persisted unchanged over several centuries. Instead, the historical chapters authored by Yoon show a waxing and waning of geomantic influence in Korea as well as changes in the different institutional apparatuses intended to monitor and maintain good practice and preserve government control over particularly empowered sites. Here, and in a contribution by Hwa Lee later in the volume, one gains an awareness that attitudes toward geomancy were by no means uniform, even in a single historical period, and that in late Chosŏn some Confucian scholars were skeptics. It did not help that roving geomancers sometimes played an active role in popular rebellions.
The second half of the book, which brings in the specialized perspectives of the six other authors, explores some distinctive Korean contexts where geomantic understandings of the environment influenced traditional Korean life, affecting such things as the location of villages and temples, construction works intended to artificially inscribe positive features onto the landscape, water acquisition and management, forestation, architecture, the siting of Buddhist temples, and garden landscaping. Some of these topics are introduced with less specificity in the historical section. Both sections reference the anthropological notion of cultural ecology, the manner in which a particular culture exists in relationship to its environment. Chapter 5 makes a case for a proto-environmentalism in traditional Korea, while Dowon Lee’s contribution on water management gives empirical demonstration of the compatibility of some common geomantic practices with modern ecological understandings. As one would expect of an edited volume, some of the contributions read more fluidly than others. For this reviewer, the only truly sour note was Cheol Joong Kang’s discussion of geomancy and psychology, grounded in very dated Jungian theories of consciousness. A couple of authors seem unnecessarily defensive or even embarrassed in the face of the modernist critique that geomancy is just superstition.
The sum of this volume’s ambitious unpacking of “Korean geomancy” is both intellectually intriguing and richly realized, a movable feast traveling through both time and space even as the veins in a geomantic landscape were expected to wax and wane over time. According to Yoon, Korean geomancers relied more on field observation than their Chinese counterparts, in part because many of them were not able to read geomantic textbooks written in classical Chinese. However, the essentialist claims for a “Korean geomancy” as distinct from a “Chinese geomancy,” the work of chapter 6 and a leitmotif of the entire project, risks eliding certainty that the latter also varied over time and space, that we might best consider Korean and Chinese “geomancies,” some with closer claims of kinship than others. Yoon himself acknowledges that the state of comparative research is not sufficient to argue that what he sees as key features of Korean geomancy are necessarily unique to Korea (110). And yet, one gains a deeper, richer knowledge of life in the Korean past by reading this volume.
Laurel Kendall
American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA