The Buddhist Dream Tale Past and Present

Speaker: Francisca Cho, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University
Moderater: Seong Uk Kim, Il Hwan and Soonja Cho Assistant Professor of Korean Culture and Religion, Columbia University

Kim Manjung’s Kuunmong, or Dream of the Nine Clouds, was written by a scholar-official and he turned to the Buddhist trope that “life is nothing but a dream” in order to express his doubts and disappointment about the Confucian social structure in which he lived. The speaker argues that the dream tale turns the act of fiction writing into a Buddhist philosophical exercise, and she will draw out this argument by considering how the medium of fiction functions in a ritual way. In this vein, she brings the dream tale into the present by considering the experience of cinema as an analogue.

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