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The Logic of Zhengfa: Warfare, Calendar, Clock, and Firearm Weapon in 15th-Century Chosŏn Daham Chŏng(Hanyang University) This paper is to rethink 15th century Chosŏn’s warfare against Jurchens with transnational perspective. Unlike Korean historians’ views that underestimate those wars as self-defense, which originated from nationalists historiography’s hereditary victimhood on “foreign invasion”, those wars were clear representation of the political idea Early Chosŏn created on its position in Northeast Asian interstate order, which situated Chosŏn high above Jurchens. Basically, those wars were defined as “war for punishment and correction of world order”, Zhengfa(Kr. Chŏngbŏl), by the bipolar rhetorics of the language of Universal Empire, which Chosŏn kings dared to appropriate. Accordingly, on the other side of physical violence of war, Chosŏn’s egocentric rhetorics which kept bipolarizing the heavenly mandated punisher and the convict, were repeatedly represented. Along with proclamation of war, it was emphasized Jurchens have belonged to Chosŏn since the dynastic founder. Then, Chosŏn kings were described as benevolent parents, and Jurchens were inevitably characterized with immorality of parricide. It was those particular rituals and traditional sciences which symbolized this vertical hierarchy in this war. From the departure of armies, via battle fields, to their returning to the capital, powerful combination of traditional rituals and sciences including clock, calendar, and firearms, kept justifying physical violence of war, by representing the imagined hierarchy under heaven where divine legacy of Chosŏn king ruled and Jurchens should obey. Through this warfare, Chosŏn kings ultimately tried to build up its “Lesser Suzerain” status in Northeast Asia vassalizing those Jurchens, in a periphery of the bigger frame of Ming Sinocentric East Asian order.