earticle

영어

This treatise treats the tropics of magic arts and play in the travels that are included in Yeonhaeng-rok, Hwa-jip(a tale book), Yikook(a strange land) of Korea. That deals with only a part of about 500 kinds of Yeonhaeng-rok, but it will be a help to studies of magic arts and play in the future.
Many elements of magic arts and play are a by-product of the interchange of Korea and the other countries of Eastern Asia, East Asia and the other areas of the world.
Magicians and their magic arts seen to travelers are diverse, but in that diversity we can find the fact that magic arts show realistically the uncertainty of human affairs.
And we can also find a important value of Yeonhi-gi(a book of play) that is recording the concrete aspects of play at that time, because it enables us to know Korean and Chinese culture, the characteristic of play at that time and its literary excellence.
Confucian's response to magic arts and play can be divided into three types. The first response is that though Confucian cannot enjoy them because of their Buddhist and Taoist elements, if they have the contents that encourage good and punish evil, they can be recommended to common people. The second type of Confucian recognized them negatively due to their lewd element, but they thought that if magic arts and play are didactic, they don't have to be prohibited. But the position of the third type of Confucian is that they should be prohibited necessarily because of their immoral and obscene irrational aspects. I think that the traveler's assertion that we have to learn the strict order consciousness of Chinese seeing magic arts and play needs to be written indelibly on our heart, even if the times is different each other.
The problem that the magic arts of Yeonhaeng-rok appear again in Hwa-jip, I think, has meaning more than a simple re-gathering. Besides, the topic of magic arts and play needs to be discussed in a religious viewpoint centering around the East-West interchange history concerning to them.