Nemeth, David J. 2018. “2018. “Book review.

” P'ungsu: A Study of Geomancy in Korea, edited

by Hong-key Yoon. SUNY Press. The AAG Review of Books, 6, 3 (Summer):160-162.

DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2018.1471929

Hong-Key Yoon, editor and major contributor to this breakthrough new book about East
Asian geomancy, has chosen its title, P'ungsu: A Study of Geomancy in Korea, with great care—
although at no small risk to the success of its publication as a commercial enterprise. Why
P'ungsu? Does the choice of this esoteric foreign-language term make the book's title (which
also features “geomancy”) redundant?

Western-educated scholars and students of the two primary examples of East Asian geomancy
(Chinese fengshui and Korean p'ungsu) will likely debate his choice for an appropriate title. I
agree with his choice in the context of the primary goal of this book, which is to create a work of
rigorous scholarship in English that documents, analyzes, and explains past and current practices
of Korean geomancy. Yoon aims to provide Western-educated readers of P'ungsu a better
understanding of the impact of geomancy on the traditional Korean cultural landscape and to
teach them to appreciate the significant ecological principles embedded in the geomantic
traditions of Korea.

His potential readers are well advised, I think, to mindfully compare and contrast these three
prominent key words—geomancy, fengshui, and p'ungsu—used in the titles of Yoon's three
major book-length publications appearing over the course of several decades during his academic
career that cover essentially the same esoteric subject matter. The title of his first book is
Geomantic Relationships Between Culture and Nature in Korea (Yoon 1976 Yoon, H.-K. 1976.
Geomantic relationships between culture and nature in Korea. Taipei, Taiwan: Oriental Culture
Service. [Google Scholar]). His second book he titled The Culture of Fengshui in Korea: An
Exploration of East Asian Geomancy (Yoon 2006 Yoon, H.-K. 2006. The culture of fengshui in
Korea: An exploration of East Asian geomancy. Lanham, MD: Lexington. [Google Scholar]).
His third book, the topic of my review, is P'ungsu: A Study of Geomancy in Korea.

Although the term geomancy is prominent in the titles of all of all three books, very few erudite
Western-educated scholars and academics appear to have undertaken and sustained a serious,
prolonged, and in-depth study of this esoteric topic. To do so with undue enthusiasm these days
invites the accusation of overindulgence in an “Orientalist” pursuit. Not surprisingly, some
scientific scholars in the West have summarily dismissed the topic of East Asian geomancy with
outright disdain.

Although there is scarce little written in an academic vein in English about geomancy during the
past few centuries, those descriptions that do exist in print are invariably derogatory and vitriolic.
Examples include (and I paraphrase here) a howling wilderness of erratic dogmatism, a
caricature of science, a farrago of nonsense and childish absurdities, the blind gropings of the
Chinese mind after a system of natural science, a debasing offshoot of a degenerate Taoism, an
abyss of insane vagaries, a mere chaos of childish absurdities and refined mysticism,
necromancy, and so on.

This ubiquitous high level of incredulity and disdain encountered throughout published historical
documents written by erudite authors (notably, accounts by college-educated U.S. missionaries
residing in China and Korea) indicate wide agreement among them suggesting that the very
existence of exotic geomantic theories and practices in their midst historically manifests an
affront, if not a threat, to Western science and religion.

U.S. academic human geographers have been notably overcautious to the point of dereliction of
duty for their almost total lack of effort to engage the topic of geomancy seriously—especially
when its challenge seems primarily at the core of obviously geographical subject matter.
Describing the profound cartographic wonder of the geomancy map, for example, reveals why
East Asian geomancy has been termed “topomancy” and “terrestrial astrology” in preliminary
studies authored by Western authors writing from a geographical perspective and thus perceived
as akin to “reading a landscape.” Some of these more profound aspects of p'ungsu maps Yoon
introduces in several subsections of this book and notably within Chapters 6 and 10.
In the face of so long a duration of wide academic agreement aligned against geomancy, what
sort of academic today would be so bold as to have written three consecutive erudite English-
language books on the topic, all aimed at educating skeptical if not hostile Western-educated
academic audiences?

Yoon is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
He earned his PhD in geography in 1976 under the direct supervision of Clarence J. Glacken and
Sinologist and sociologist Wolfram Eberhard. Yoon also enjoyed the strong encouragement of
Carl O. Sauer. Yoon's revised dissertation is his 1976 publication. This was an original,
breakthrough academic publication, invaluable to curious cultural geographers like me who were
in dire need of an erudite English-language introduction to the topic of geomancy as practiced in
Korea. His three books on East Asian geomancy essentially address the same esoteric subject
matter, in increasingly erudite and informed volumes, and he informs his readers on page 11 of
P'ungsu that these three terms—geomancy, fengshui, and p'ungsu—are essentially synonymous.
He elaborates that in the interest of introducing their vague triumvirate meaningfully as one
profound and worthy idea to his Western-educated English-speaking audience, he prefers to
choose geomancy as his umbrella term. Why?

Because, as he argued convincingly and emphatically in his 2006 book and then reiterates in
P'ungsu, fengshui (as traditional Chinese geomancy) is likely to remain inscrutable to Western
academic analysis because “there is no concept equivalent to [East Asian] geomancy in the West,
nor can it be understood in terms of any Western notion” (Yoon 2006 Yoon, H.-K. 2006. The
culture of fengshui in Korea: An exploration of East Asian geomancy. Lanham, MD:
Lexington. [Google Scholar], 311). He elaborates his earlier argument with clarity and added
emphasis in this new book.

Yoon attempts to offset the potential risk of publishing his new book with the unfamiliar title
P'ungsu (although it also features the term “geomancy” in its subtitle) with what I perceive might
be a clever if convoluted gambit. He reinvents the archaic, unpopular, and inscrutable
“geomancy” English-language term of old as a new and positive geographical kitbag of Korean
“p'ungsu” ideas and practices, and he tailors them to appeal to a new generation of more
receptive contemporary Western-educated academics willing and eager to learn of its traditional
wisdoms under a new label.

In P'ungsu, Yoon and his collaborators describe through two parts and sixteen mindfully
coordinated chapters the following:

1. A traditional (and inscrutable) East Asian geomancy that was a unique and highly
systematized ancient art of selecting auspicious sites and arranging harmonious structures
such as graves, houses, and cities on them by evaluating the surrounding landscape and
cosmological directions.
2. A unique and comprehensive system of conceptualizing the physical environment that
regulated human ecology in traditional Korea by influencing Koreans to select auspicious
environments and to build harmonious structures such as graves, houses, and cities on
them.
The second sort of East Asian geomancy is the P'ungsu story that Yoon and his collaborators
strive to relate, albeit selectively, over its more than 400 pages.

My review of P'ungsu begins by relating its long journey from barnstorming ideas to its final
publication. Yoon describes his quest to edit a collective authorship of P'ungsu as having begun
in January 2009, when a group of scholars representing different disciplines formed a research
project team with the aim of producing a monograph-length piece of research work on the
agency of p'ungsu, Korean geomancy, as an applied cultural ecology.

Yoon describes how his project team met during three workshops convened between 2009 and
2011. Yoon and the other contributors to his edited book project each produced a draft
manuscript chapter by the end of 2012. An Academy of Korean Studies grant funded by the
Korean government supported the project. Although the team's primary goal—to publish a
monograph on Korea's geomantic heritage for readers in the English-speaking world—is
successfully accomplished, it seems by design that all the contributors to this P'ungsu publication
project are Koreans. P'ungsu is a decidedly nationalistic book project.

The editing process of each author's manuscript “required much more effort and time” than
Yoon, as the book's editor, had originally anticipated. This delay, in my opinion, was justified
considering the excellent academic quality of the final publication, which is admirable in all
aspects.

A lot of the success of P'ungsu as a rich reading and learning experience rides on the authority,
validity, and decision-making skills of its editor. Yoon's P'ungsu demonstrates the care and
commitment he has dedicated to the book project since its official inception in 2009.

Due in part to its delayed publication, the overall excellent contents of P'ungsu are not entirely
original material. Several contributors including Yoon were (by mutual agreement) free to
publish versions of their chapters elsewhere. Yoon confides with readers of P'ungsu, “Some
chapters in this book were based on and developed from our earlier studies that have appeared
previously in journals. For inclusion in this book they were revised and severely edited” (p. 5).
Examples of previously published albeit “severely edited” chapters in P'ungsu include Chapters
2 through 5, 8, and 10 through 14. Although Yoon's caveat might dismay those few expert
scholars and academics in geomancy studies who have already read P'ungsu chapter content
elsewhere, and are in search of original content, most of Yoon's potential academic readership
will discover the content of P'ungsu to be refreshingly new, informative, and inspiring.

My favorite chapter, Chapter 9, is “Geomancy and Traditional Architecture during the Choson
Dynasty” by In-choul Zho. It is a substantive read, clearly written, and profusely illustrated with
superb maps, detailed diagrams, and colorful photos. It is by far the longest chapter in the book
and every page brings new revelations and delectable intellectual delights. Chapter 15 is another
outstanding chapter, Hwa Lee's “Geomantic Discourses of the Choson Confucian Literati,” in
which Lee describes the neo-Confucian official attitude toward Korean geomancy at the time
was “Unbelievable but Indisposable” (pp. 329–31). The deep roots of p'ungsu in Zen Buddhism
reveal themselves in this Kafkaesque bureaucratic quandary.
Strong and essential subchapters include “Astro-Geomancy in Korea” featured in Chapter 1. This
chapter justifies Yoon's strong argument that Chinese geomancy and Korean geomancy are very
distinctive theories and practices mainly due to (1) the characteristic and intensive “compass
school” of geomancy having had its genesis and practical utility focused appropriately within the
uninspiring topographic conditions prevailing on the ancient North China Plain, and (2) the
derivative “form school” of p'ungsu geomancy having had evolved its practical utility amidst the
awesome and inspiring mountainous terrain that is ubiquitous throughout the Korean peninsula.
Yoon unfortunately does not introduce the form and compass schools, and the geomantic
compasses themselves, until a tardy, disconnected, elaboration in Chapter 6 entitled “Mainly
Based on the Form Landform-Landscape School.” Thus Yoon allows a significant and avoidable
disconnect to occur in an essential chain of thought at the heart of geomantic thinking in a
historical context.

I cannot agree with all the assertion and truth claims made by Yoon and his collaborators in
P'ungsu. For one, this book gives short shrift to the impact of Taoism, an integral part of neo-
Confucian syncretic ideology, toward the shaping of the traditional cultural landscape on the
Korean peninsula. In addition, I am not convinced that East Asian geomancy studies prior to the
advent of P'ungsu were as incomprehensible to the Western-educated mind as Yoon asserts. If
the modern Western scientific mindset was more susceptive to engaging East Asian geomancy as
a valuable learning experience during the past few centuries, and if Western scholars instead
pursued geomancy diligently as a rigorous study, I believe geomancy would have long ago
become more comprehensible to the Western mind-set within the context of its own (East Asian)
worldview and symbolism. In sum, I highly recommend reading P'ungu as an appropriate
introduction to the traditional theories and practices of East Asian geomancy.

References:

Yoon, H.-K. 1976. Geomantic relationships between culture and nature in Korea. Taipei, Taiwan: Oriental Culture Service.

Yoon, H.-K. 2006. The culture of fengshui in Korea: An exploration of East Asian geomancy. Lanham, MD: Lexington.