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Exodus and Errantry ─ The Grotesque Body and Spatial Politics in Korean and Chinese Narratives of the Precept-Breaking Saint

  • The Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China
  • Abbr : JSLCKC
  • 2026, (80), pp.341~388
  • DOI : 10.16874/jslckc.2026..80.013
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Study on Chinese Languge and Culture
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : April 10, 2026
  • Accepted : May 20, 2026
  • Published : May 31, 2026

Ni Sen 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the narratives surrounding two precept-breaking holy monks—Wonhyo (元曉) of Silla and Jigong (濟公) of the Southern Song—across three registers: body, space, and history. Although both figures share the paradox of being at once the most popularly compelling saints and the most notorious precept-breakers in their respective Korean and Chinese traditions, sustained comparative work on the two, and in particular scholarship attending to the body itself, has been almost entirely lacking. This study argues that while both monks are figured as grotesque bodies in the Bakhtinian sense, their grotesquerie operates along diametrically opposed axes. Jigong’s body is an ingesting body—an alchemical furnace (鍊金爐) that draws wine and meat, dust and grime into itself and transmutes them into sacred medicine, like the mud-pellet remedies of the legends. Wonhyo’s body, by contrast, is an emanating body, one that ceaselessly releases the energy of awakening outward through the Unhindered Dance (無碍舞), through song, and through transgressive border-crossings into plague-stricken villages. This corporeal divergence translates directly into a divergence of spatial politics. Wonhyo’s exodus (出走) is a path of strategy in Michel de Certeau’s sense: an active departure from the monastery and the founding of new sites of practice on the soil of the laity. Jigong’s stubborn remaining-in-place and his errantry (游走) within the monastic precincts constitute, by contrast, a path of tactics, in which staying put is itself made into a form of resistance. These two narrative logics were reactivated in opposing directions during the crises of the modern and contemporary period. In colonial Korea in 1942, Yi Kwang-su (李光洙) reimagined Wonhyo’s exodus as a project for grounding the Buddhist origins of Korean culture itself; in 1985, the television drama Jigong, starring You Benchang (游本昌), emptied Jigong’s body of its theological skin and refilled it with a secularized discourse of feeling, opening an emotional aperture through which the repressed humanity (人性) of the post–Cultural Revolution era could return. Where Yi Kwang-su sought to use the saint’s body to defend the soil of the nation, You Benchang sought to use it to restore the warmth of human feeling. The two adaptations diverge in opposite directions according to whether the source of repression is located outside or inside; yet they share a deeper structure, in that each, at a moment when the sacred itself was under threat, sought through the mediating figure of the precept-breaker’s grotesque body to stake out an alternative ground for the sacred.

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