Subproject B02

Beyond Self-Cultivation: Moments of Transcendence in Ego-Documents of Korean Confucian Provenance

The religious dimension of Confucianism is frequently being sought in self-cultivation, understood as a quest for self-transcendence. The project aims at testing the validity of this assumption for Korean Confucians of the Chosǒn era (focussing on the 16th to the early 19th century) by studying the metaphors employed in expressions of transformative experiences as found in self-expressive texts such as travel essays, dream records, and study diaries, thus mapping the notions of and expectations towards the “beyond” current among members of the literati class.