Hyangsoon Yi
Dr. Hyangsoon Yi is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on Korean literature and film; the intersection of Buddhism, literature, and the visual arts; Buddhist influence on Western literature; and Chosŏn-dynasty Buddhist nuns. Her recent publications include Life of the Buddha (University of Toronto Press, 2025); Buddhism, Digital Technology and New Media in Korea: Ŭisang’s Ocean Seal Diagram (Routledge, 2024); and Tongasia piguni (Buddhist nuns in East Asia, Minsokwon, 2022). Her award-winning Piguni wa Han’guk munhak (Buddhist nuns and Korean literature, Yemunsŏwŏn, 2008) remains a groundbreaking work as the first book-length study of Korean Buddhist nuns in their 1,600-year history. Dr. Yi has also (co-)edited three special journal issues on the Korean Wave (Hallyu) and contemporary Korean popular culture. She is currently working on a new book project regarding Elizabeth Anna Gordon, a British scholar of comparative religion.
University of Georgia
Session
My paper concerns the view of Buddhism as an Asian version of Christianity, which prevailed among the western expatriate community in East Asia from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The conceptual framework of the identity between Christianity and Buddhism was laid down by Timothy Richard (1845-1919), a Welsh Baptist missionary to China. Richard’s mastery of the local language enabled him to read Chinese Buddhist texts and even translate a major Mahayana sutra, Dacheng qixin lun (Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana), into English. His view of Buddhism was enthusiastically shared by Elizabeth Anna Gordon (1851-1925), a British religious scholar who devoted her expatriate life in Japan to researching commonalities between Shingon Buddhism and Early Christianity. While Richard provided evangelists in the Asian mission field with an ideological basis for their efforts to convert local people from the Buddhist faith, Gordon aimed at establishing one universal spiritual discourse that would globally unify all major religions, by tracing the historical and geographical flow of interreligious and intercultural ideas and symbols on a global scale.
In this article, I will first examine the representative books by Richard and Gordon to map out how they exchanged their thoughts and how their work influenced missionaries in Korea. This will be followed by a discussion of the philosophical core of the Christian-Buddhist parallel that they theorized. The last part of the article will focus on the impact of their globality on the emergence of comparative religious studies as a new discipline in East Asia.