Married Monks

Into a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Seoul stumped Korea's leathery old President Syngman Rhee for a quick look around. He peeked into the tile-roofed monk's residence attached to the temple, and was scandalized to find a woman asleep. It was his wife, explained the monk, and there were four children. "I thought," snapped Rhee, "that Buddhist monks are supposed to be unmarried. How long has this been going on?" The embarrassed man muttered the classic excuse: "All the monks are doing it."

Back in Seoul, Methodist Rhee discovered that some 5,000 Korean Buddhist monks are married. This, he decided, was another example of the sinister influence that the Japanese exerted during their occupation of Korea (some Japanese sects of Buddhism allow monks to marry). Rhee promptly issued a statement of policy, "to restore the old Korean traditions" and the celibate priesthood.

To about 700 of the 1,800 Buddhist monks and nuns in Korea who have stayed single, Rhee's stand opened vistas of power, prestige and the best priestly accommodations instead of the worst. Some 500 of them trudged down Seoul's main street to Rhee's mansion behind a taxicab with a loudspeaker blaring: "We will fight to the last man for the purification of Korean Buddhism, even if we may die from cold and hunger."

Last week Korea's Ministries of Home and Education distributed a new Rhee ukase demanding that "married monks should repent their past and become laymen." The badly frightened family men, who claim that Buddhist priests have been marrying for 300 years, met with representatives of the protesting faction of celibates and offered to cede them the top temple priesthoods and move their families out of the priestly residences and into village quarters. At week's end the unmarried 700 were still insisting on out-and-out expulsion.

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