Managing the Dead, Governing the Living: Ritualization, Power, and the Water and Land Ritual in Korea

By examining the Water and Land Ritual in Korea from the fifteenth century to the present, this article challenges the conventional assumption that Buddhist ritual practice directly embodies the doctrinal principles of Buddhism. Drawing on ritual manuals, Buddhist scriptures, official historical records, and fieldwork observations, it adopts a historical-philosophical and practice-centered approach informed by Gregory Schopen’s critique of text-centrism and Catherine Bell’s theory of ritualization. The study argues that the ritual is best understood as a historically constructed and continuously reconfigured system shaped by the interaction of Buddhist concepts with traditional Chinese cosmology, Confucian ethics, and institutional interests. While the ritual incorporates ideas such as karma, rebirth, and merit-making, its performative structure often generates tensions with core Buddhist doctrines, including no-self and the limits of merit transfer. Rather than embodying doctrinal coherence, the ritual functions as a strategic practice that produces religious authority and mediates relations between the living and the dead. This analysis highlights the need to foreground practice, context, and power in the study of Buddhist ritual.