A Call for a New Earth from Donghak 東學 (Eastern Learning), Learning from Korean Indigenous Philosophy of Life

Donghak (東學, Eastern Learning) is a religious and a political movement in modern Korea beginning 1860s. Beyond reductive unity-seeking, otherworldly idealism, and faceless universalism, this study constructs a new universalism via rehearsing Donghak’s vision of a new world order as diversity-seeking, all-encompassing, and practice-centered. First, it is not a uniform order of the uni-verse but the many becoming one. As a religious-cultural ‘hybridity’ Donghak doesn’t belong to any conventional religions but collectively adapted life-centered concepts from Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity with Korean’s cultural experience and spirituality. Secondly, the world that Donghak seeks is an all-encompassing plurisingular living organism that is called hanul (the divine). Finally, the universe is not an other-worldly utopia but a new earth, which has never been accomplished and exists only in our ideal hope and ethical imagination through practicing for realization. Donghak’s new world is a transformed earth community that should be realized every day. 

Jea Sophia Oh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her research primarily focuses on the fields of Asian and comparative theology and philosophy, religion and ecology, feminist and postcolonial theory. Her first book A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West (Sopher Press 2011) is a path-making work in Korean ecofeminist theology and comparative philosophy. She is the editor and co-author of Nature's Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism (Lexington 2017), Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures (Lexington 2021), Emotions (Jeong/Qing 情) in Korean Philosophy and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), and Greening Philosophy of Religion: Rethinking Climate Change at the Intersection of Philosophy and Religion (Lexington 2024, forthcoming). She is the chair of the ‘Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy’ (SACP) at the Central division and the ‘International Society of Chinese Philosophy’ (ISCP) at the Eastern division of American Philosophical Association (APA). She also serves as the chair of the ‘Society of Study of Process Philosophy’ (SSPP) at APA in all three divisions.