The leadership of the Tonghaks could refer either to the leadership in the religious activities of the Tonghak cult that began to be preached in the 1860’s or to that in the farmers’ uprising of 1894, which is also known as the Tonghak Rebellion. However, inasmuch as the Tonghak cult and its followers were directly involved in the farmers’ revolt of 1894, the leadership of the Tonghaks must inevitably be taken into account in studying that insurrection. It was the leaders of this religion that led the farmers’ insurrection. This writer is going to examine here from several different angles how the religious leaders came to lead the revolt. He will attempt first to bring about a structural understanding of the religious ideology and examine the position of the local leaders of the sect in this context, next to examine what social stratum these Leaders belonged to and how they could lead the Tonghak army and the farmers legions, and finally to examine the organization of that religious sect. To sum up the basic structure of the Tonghak ideology, this religion was a combination of an unworldly view of ethics and a worldly Shamanism. It was a nationalistic religion with a blend of the reality-denying revelationism and a spirit of resistance against alien menace. It professed to reject the waning religions of foreign origins such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, all of which had ceased being leading ideas for the society, to resist Catholicism which had begun rapidly to spread among the Korean populace, and, with the help of conjurational religious faith based on unworldly dogmas, to build a paradise in Korea, and to save the society from its internal and external crises. To Tonghaks, the basic human ethics derive from the view of morality and virtue based on the ancient Oriental thought from the incidental worship of the Heaven, and have the undercurrent of fatalism based on the Oriental Philosophy of the positive and negative. Obviously deriving its unworldly view of ethics from the Chou-I(周易)and the Li-chi(禮記), it preached that the human morality and virtue concur with the heavenly morality and virtue. A human therefore can become an absolutely righteous man by cultivating his morality and virtue, and his being is virtually the same as that of god. The fatalistic view that human beings ought to submit to the will of the Heaven and the eternal cycles of life dominates the thought of Tonghaks. This religion aims to deny the degraded social ethics and order, seek a new prototype of ethics, and return to the ancient thoughts of the Orient. It was a quest for unworldly ethics in that it pursued absolute goodness as the intrinsic human nature. It implied revelation ism in that it believed in the coming of a new order. And it was revolutionary in that it tended to deny realities. The basic thought of the Tonghaks must have been set by its founder, who had some Confucian acquirements, and his local deputies called Chop-chu(接主). However, their unworldly ethics of absolute goodness could hardly be digested by the general public and the farmers. In order for this religion to be accepted popularly, it had to be accompanied by realistic and concrete means of individual salvation, besides its unworldly ethics. The farmers of the times knew no way of escaping from the seemingly endless succession of ordeals wrought by the tyranny of the upper class and frequent natural calamities including widespread diseases. About the only thing they could do was to turn to Shamanism for salvation. The founder of Tonghaks and his followers had to adopt the magic methods of Shamanism ostensively promising individual salvation in order for Tonghaks to be more widely accepted.
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