My life at a Korean law firm (part 18)

By Jacco Zwetsloot

I am not a trained anthropologist, but I find Korea a particularly fertile ground in terms of religious activity.

Even before coming to live and work in Korea, I knew that I would find a very lively spiritual scene here. And I was not disappointed. Today I will share just a view vignettes.

One Saturday morning in 1997 I was at Jamsil Station waiting to meet my Korean language exchange partner when I noticed a woman hanging around in front of the ticket turnstiles.

It seemed she was not waiting on anyone, but rather walking about in large circles, and occasionally approaching people. Those she accosted were momentarily taken aback but quickly moved on, visibly not keen to engage in any dialogue with her.

Because she did not appear homeless or mentally ill, I decided to approach her. Thinking that she was perhaps a high school girl, I spoke to her in banmal. I learned later that she had “eaten” more years than I, which embarrassed me and I apologized, but she did not seem fazed. Perhaps she was just happy to have someone to talk to for more than two seconds?

When I asked what she was doing and why she was talking to people, she told me she knew them from her past lives. She would walk up to someone, usually a woman of a similar age, and ask if they too recognized her from a previous existence on this earth.

That was usually interpreted as a sign by many that they should avoid all contact with her and move on, but for anyone who stopped to listen, she would tell them about “do”.

Do literally means “the way” but is also the same Chinese character as “Tao”. However, she was not evangelizing for Taoism, but rather for a native Korean religious movement, perhaps Daesun (or Daesoon) Jinrihoe or Jeung San Do.

Both rival movements trace their roots back to a man named Kang Il-sun, who renamed himself Jeungsan, and whose followers believed him to be an incarnation of the supreme godhead.

Due to my limited Korean and the young woman's limited English, we were not able to get much further than “self-actualization” being the goal of this religious teaching, and that she did not approach people whom she did not know from a past life. This explained why she had not talked to me first.

In years since I have encountered “do” evangelists in various places, including on the street in Apgujeong. There they went around in pairs, one male and one female. The two I spoke to had come from the countryside to Seoul, and had somehow become involved in the work of speaking about this religious doctrine to people who mostly did not want to hear it.

I am told that people who do stop and listen are eventually brought to a religious retreat center, where they are trained to go out and spread the message to more people, after also donating large sums of money, sometimes to pay for ceremonies to cleanse them spiritually. Or something. On Youtube recently I saw some mildly amusing videos made by people acting out scenarios to show others what to do if approached by a messenger of “do.”

I had heard about the Unification Church, or Moonie movement, long before I knew I was coming to Korea, but I had never met anyone from that religion while living in Australia, and I do not recall having even seen a church building.

In Korea, apart from meeting one American ex-Moonie and a woman whose sister was a member, I had no contact with them for a long time. That all changed one spring day in 1999 when I heard there was to be a mass wedding, the kind the Unification Church was internationally famous for, at Olympic Stadium.

I went there with my future wife, just out of curiosity and to take a look. It was quite an occasion, and the stadium was packed with people who had been brought by bus from every corner of Korea and some who had flown from overseas.

The floor of the stadium was filled with men and women of all nationalities wearing bridal dresses and suits. I had never been in such a big crowd before.

There were people from different religions around the world who spoke on the main stage about the importance of marriage. There was a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Muslim Imam, and so on.

But these were all warm-up guys for the big act ― Reverend Moon and his wife, whom followers call “True Parents.” They entered the stage while the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah played from huge speaker arrangements, wearing regal looking robes and crowns. They splashed some kind of holy water around them using dippers in buckets.

It was extraordinary. I think it was also the first mass wedding that was beamed around the world live, so that people could watch and participate wherever they were. After the wedding, I joined the crowd flooding out of the stadium and back to the buses and subway station. To this day I have never seen anything quite like it.

In the early 2000s, I was looking for work as a freelance English-to-Korean translator. That was before I learned that I was not cut out for that kind of work (a story for another time). One job advertisement that kept appearing was looking for someone to translate the sermons and writings of an apparently famous pastor into several languages, so that his teaching might be made known to the outside world.

Skeptical and cautious, I checked on Google and found that not only was he controversial, but his own church network had been kicked out of the Christian Council of Korea for heresy in 1999. I decided not to pursue that work offer after all. That was probably for the best; the minister now stands accused of multiple charges of rape.

Nevertheless, somebody definitely did translate his texts, because this paper has reported several times over the last decade in what one might generously call an uncritical way about this particular pastor publishing books in more than 70 languages, and leading healing and conversion crusades in countries around the world.