Abstract

Abstract:Investigated here is how Pyŏn Kye-ryang, one of the most distinguished Neo-Confucian scholar-bureaucrats of fifteenth-century Korea, achieved the balance between ritual-based moral universalism, as pertaining to the hierarchical order between China and Korea, and the Korean monarch's Heaven-given responsibility for the well-being of his people under staggering political pressure for the consolidation of the new Korean Neo-Confucian dynasty called Chosŏn (1392–1910). Contrary to the prevailing view of Pyŏn as an advocate of Chosŏn's political independence and national identity, Pyŏn Kye-ryang is presented here as a distinctively Neo-Confucian political realist who enabled Chosŏn's consolidating rulers to carry out the mandate of Heaven as the new state's socioeconomic and political circumstances would require, without having it violate the ritual propriety it owes as a Ming foreign vassal state. Special attention is paid to how Pyŏn developed his Neo-Confucian political realism through the creative reinterpretation of the Confucian theory of "the expedient."