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Hangul and Buddhism

Language Log 2026-01-16

We've seen numerous blockbuster videos from Julesy, but this one is the most explosive ever:

"This might be the most hated film in Korea" (11:55)

Julesy lays it all out in her usual magisterial manner, so I won't repeat what she already has said so clearly in the video, but will just add three items that are relevant to support her case:

1. Aside from King Sejong and his revered Hangul, one of the other most treasured historical relics in Korea is the Haeinsa 해인사 ("Temple of Reflections on a Smooth Sea"), which houses the 81,258 woodblock printing plates of the Korean Buddhist canon.  This is the most complete, best preserved, and most reliable Chinese Buddhist canon.  The monks who constructed and maintained the repository were architectural and technical geniuses who built a wooden monument that was designed to ensure the conservation of the woodblocks from mold, mildew, moisture, as well as extreme cold and excessive heat.  When I visited the temple, I was astonished by all of the ingenious measures the monks took to adjust the ventilation of air through the storage areas.  I simply marveled at the perfection of the edifice.  In recent decades, contemporary engineers did tests utilizing modern storage facilities and techniques to temporarily house some of the blocks, and it was clear that they did not conserve them as well as the many centuries old depository at Haeinsa.

If the Korean people idolize Hangul, they adore Haeinsa.

Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks at Haeinsa

2. The foundational phonological science that enabled the creation of Hangul — whoever is credited with the invention — was Indo-Buddhist.  See:

Victor H. Mair and Tsu-lin Mei. “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Chinese Prosody.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51.2 (1991): 375-470 — on the historical development of tonal patterns in traditional Chinese poetry

"Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in Buddhist translations of the 2nd c. AD" (4/20/20) 

Hill, Nathan, Nattier, Jan, Granger, Kelsey, & Kollmeier, Florian. (2020). Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖 [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3757095

Nathan Hill,“An Indological transcription of Middle Chinese,” Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 52 (2023), 40-50.

W. South Coblin.   A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983.

Axel Schuessler. “The Qièyùn System ‘Divisions’ as the Result of Vowel Warping.” The Chinese Rime Tables.  In David P. Branner, ed.  (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006)), pp. 83–96.

Shuheng Zhang and Victor H. Mair, "Between the Eyes and the Ears: Ethnic Perspective on the Development of Philological Traditions, First Millennium AD", Sino-Platonic Papers, 300 (April, 2020), 1-49.

Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia:  The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751 — for me personally, the most important linguistic impact of Buddhism was its legitimization of the written vernacular in China

3. The Confucianist Choson (or Joseon) 조선 Dynasty (1392-1897) was so anti-Buddhist that in essence they outlawed tea, which was closely identified with Buddhism.  That's why still today, a hundred years after the collapse of the Choson, true tea ("wisdom [prajñā प्रज्ञा] tea") is making a slow comeback against ersatz tea.

"Taiwanese Twosome: tea and Sino-Korean" (6/25/25)

Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (London:  Thames and Hudson, 2009), especially Appendix C on the linguistics of "tea".

BTW, the most stinging / important word Julesy says in her video presentation is the very last one.

—–

P.S.:  You probably can't see the swastika In the top left corner of the title frame of the video because it is covered up by Julesy's little circular portrait, but it has nothing to do with Nazism.  Rather it signifies Buddhism.  For example, if you wonder around street and alleys of Japanese villages and towns, you will see little Buddhist shrines featuring the swastika.  In Chinese it is called 卍字, pronounced wànzì in Mandarin, manji in Cantonese, manji in Japanese, manja (만자) in Korean and vạn tự or chữ vạn in Vietnamese. In Balti/Tibetan language it is called yung drung. (source)

In fact, the swastika long predates Buddhism in what is now called "China".  See:

Mair, Victor H. 2012.  "The Earliest Identifiable Written Chinese Character.” In Archaeology and Language: Indo-European Studies Presented to James P. Mallory, ed. Martin E. Huld, Karlene Jones-Bley, and Dean Miller. JIES Monograph Series No. 60. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man.  Pp. 265–279.

P.P.S.:  I pondered long and hard whether I should title this post as "Buddhism and Hangul" or "Hangul and Buddhism", and whether that made a difference.

 

Selected readings