백곡 김득신의 공부론

Baekgok Kim Deuk-Shin’s Theory of Kung-fu

본 논문은 17세기 조선의 유학자 백곡 김득신(柏谷 金得臣, 1604〜1684)의 앎과 삶을 바탕으로 공부론을 고찰하였다. 백곡은 어린 시절 앓았던 천연두로 10세의 늦은 나이에 가학(家學)의 형태로 학문을 시작하였고, 배움을 익히는 데 있어 노둔하여 주변 가족들은 공부를 그만두라고 하였다. 그렇지만 아버지는 백곡의 올곧은 품성이 평생 동안 공부를 이어갈 수 있는 자질이라 보고 믿음과 포용으로 아들을 가르쳤다. 백곡은 아버지의 가르침대로 공부하기를 포기하지 않았고, 많은 독서를 통해 스스로 깨달아 터득하였다. 한 권의 책을 만 번 이상 반복하여 읽으면서 기록하였던 ｢고문삼십육수독수기(古文三十六首讀數記)｣의 의미는 공부하는 과정에서 자기의 게으름을 경계하기 위해서였다. 백곡에게 다독은 생각의 심연 속으로 빠져드는 공부 방법 중 하나였고, 한 권의 책을 반복적으로 읽은 것은 암묵적인 지식을 깨달아 앎과 삶을 유기적으로 연결하고자 하였던 것이다. 또한, 백곡이 시를 공부하고, 시작(詩作)을 위해 한 글자를 놓고 천 번 고민했던 것은 결국 ‘마음을 바르게(正心)’ 다스려 사람다움을 실천하고자 함이었다. 백곡은 뚜렷한 사승관계 없이 당색·나이·종교 등에 유연한 상대적 가치관으로 다양한 문인들과 교유하면서 학문의 성장과 발전을 이룰 수 있었다.

This study investigated study theories based on the knowledge and life of the 17th century Joseon Confucian scholar, Baekgok Kim Deuk-Shin(柏谷 金得臣, 1604〜1684). Baekgok began his academic studies as a type of family scholarship at the late age of 10 because of smallpox that he suffered from as a child. He was slow in learning and so his family members told him to give up on studying. However, his father saw that Baekgok’s upright character was a quality that would allow him to study for his entire life, so he taught his son based through trust and magnanimity. Just as his father taught, Baekgok did not give up on his studies and he was able to achieve realization on his own by reading many books. The meaning of Gomun-samshipyuksu-doksugi(古文三十六首讀數記), which he recorded after repeat reading the one book over 10,000 times, was to guard himself from becoming lazy during the course of his studies. To Baekgok, reading extensively was a studying method for him to fall into the abyss of thoughts, and the reason why he read the one book over and over was to realize implicit knowledge and connect knowledge and life organically. Furthermore, the reason why Baekgok studied poems and thought about a single letter thousands of times while writing poetry was to make his ‘heart upright(正心)’ and practice Saramdaum. Baekgok was able to achieve academic growth and development by interacting with various men of literature with flexible relative values regarding partisanship, age and religion and so on without clear teacher-student relations.