A Study on the Religious-Ethical Meaning of 'Reorganizing the order of Heaven and Earth' in the Scripture of Daesoonjinrihoe

'천지공사'의 종교윤리적 의미에 대한 연구

The purpose of this study is to research the religious-ethical meaning of the scripture (Jeongyung, 典經) of Daesoonjinrihoe, one of religious orders in Korea. It is 'the reorganizing in the order of heaven and earth' (ROHE, 天地公事)that the believers of Daesoonjinrihoe regard as the essence and basis of their religious belief in Jeongyung, and so I focus on it in this paper. And I have applied the method of religious ethics that recognize the relation religion and morality for understanding religious-ethical meaning of moral principles and norms. In the process of this study I have selected a lot of moral principles, norms and activities in ROHE, and sorted them with their social context of ROHE. In this research I have found some characteristics of ethical norms in the ROHE according to three divisions of ethical category such as personal, social and natural ethics. The understanding of mind is an important point of personal ethic in the ROHE. The mind is understood as the subject and object of personal ethical attitude and volition. So one could have ethical attitude by oneself with mind as subject, and reflect and correct on his ethical faults with the mind as ethical object. The distinctiveness of social ethic in the ROHE is special concerns to the weak at that time such as sick person, illegitimate children, shamans, farmhands and etc. This is a logical consequence of the ethical altruism of the ethic of mutual beneficence(相生) and the dignity of human(人尊) in ROHE. And the ethics of mutual beneficence is applied to natural ethic of ROHE. Since natural world including all sort of plants and animals is intimately related to the human worlds, so it is a desirable attitude for to accommodate to the changes of nature. Even if these characteristics of ethics in ROHE are justified by the religious beliefs, the norms from them are available in our religious pluralistic societies, since they have common ethical values of other religious ethics. It is my concluding remark that religious orders or denominations have to offer a lot of moral norms suitable to religious pluralistic situation. Because it is needed for our society to conquer various sort and kind conflicts among religions, and to act harmoniously together for public peace.