Comparative Study on Indigenous Modernity of Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought: Focusing on Trinity of Heaven, Earth and Man

The Donghak Peasant Movement is today being reassessed as a modern movement comparable to the French Revolution, and Daesoon Thought, as a traditional East Asian system of thinking, is attracting attention as an indigenous thought capable of explaining the world's transformations since the modern era.

This paper examines how, centering on the concept of “Donghak (Eastern Learning, 東學)” as a method of inquiry within East Asian philosophy, both traditions each reconstructed their View of Heaven (天觀), View of Earth (地觀), and View of Humanity (人間觀) to construct an indigenous modernity of East Asia.

Grounded in the concept of multiple modernities understood as “the convergence of the Sacred (聖, seong) and the Profane (俗, sok),” this paper compares the indigenous modernity of the two traditions through the East Asian philosophical method of Correlative Thinking, employing three religio-anthropological frameworks: Correlative Thinking (A.C. Graham), Liminality (Victor Turner), and Revitalization (Anthony Wallace).

Daesoon Thought constructed an indigenous modernity combining Correlative Thinking with the Heaven-and-Earth Divine Spirits (天地神明), enacting Chiran (治亂, Governing Disorder) as the True Donghak (참동학) — a new indigenous modernity surpassing Donghak Thought's unresolved Jangnan (作亂, Instigating Disorder).