Professor Howon(浩園) Lim Hun-jin was born in Sinchon, Seoul in 1949, the youngest son of three sons and one daughter of Professor Lim Geun-soo and First Lady Chung Bok-soon. After graduating from the Department of Sociology and Graduate School of Sociology at Seoul National University in 1967, he earned a doctorate from the Department of Sociology at Harvard University in the United States. He was appointed as a professor of sociology at Seoul National University, his alma mater, in 1983, and retired at the retirement age in 2014. Currently, he is an honorary professor of sociology at Seoul National University and is a member of the Korean Academy of Sciences. Three of Professor Lim Hyun-Chin's various contributions and dedication to Korean social studies and social studies will be remembered. 1) Continuous discussion and contribution to the formation of the theoretical foundation of civil society development theory, revitalization of civil society theory, and direction of development 2) The founding and development of Seoul National University's Asia Research Institute 3) The efforts to criticize and coordinate in the objective position of Professor Lim Hyun-Chin served as the president of various academic organizations, including the Korean Society of Social Sciences, the Korean Society of Social Sciences, and the Korean NGO Association, and founded the Seoul National University Asia Research Institute in 2009 and put it on the rock. Of the 96 academic books he has published so far, about 20 have received the Excellence Award from the Academy, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and Sejong Book Award. Among the hundreds of papers published in domestic and international journals, 10 have been published in world-class academic journals such as SSCI, SCOPUS, A&HCI, 25 KCI registrations, and 10 KCI candidates. Please refer to Professor Lim Hyun-jin's Curriculum Vitae for detailed activities such as his academic background and career. Please refer to the list of his books and papers as an appendix at the end of this article. It is a remarkable achievement. Professor Lim actively introduced social science discourse on neo-liberalism and globalization to Korean society in the late 1980s and discussed them in various aspects. Lim said, "What is Professor Lim Hyun-jin's discussion on the era of complex crisis and global civil society? Lim argues that the risk of globalization is a complex crisis that combines economic crisis, resource crisis, and environmental crisis. He diagnoses that three alternatives have emerged from the perception that the cause of the complex crisis stems from globalization: anti-globalization, rolling back globalization, and alternative globalization. Although the global civil society represented by the Global Justice Movement and the World Social Forum has grown rapidly since the 2000s, Professor Lim points out a number of obstacles to development. These include issues of continuity of solidarity, inequality between social movement organizations in developed countries and social movement organizations in underdeveloped countries, opacity of solidarity activities, and establishing relationships with global civil society and individual countries. Professor Lim reiterates that in order for Korean social movements to be reborn after democratization, the process of globalization of social movements must be viewed from the perspective of transnational solidarity activities. Rather than seeing international solidarity activities as a burden, it is an opportunity to actively utilize them and should be viewed as exercise resources. It is also emphasized that domestic social movement organizations are growing into quality brokers connecting transnational spaces.

This essay offers a concise synthesis of Professor Hyun-Chin Lim’s scholarly world, grounded in my experiences accompanying him both as a student and as a fellow researcher. Professor Lim leaves behind a substantial body of scholarly work, including numerous books and articles; he rightfully deserves to be regarded as a giant not only in sociology but in the broader social sciences. His intellectual trajectory was always undertaken in dialogue with his students and colleagues, thereby offering them the opportunity to “stand on the shoulders of a giant.” From the very beginning of his academic career, Professor Lim’s intellectual footing was broad and multilayered. Although his empirical focus was on Korean society, he never lapsed into methodological nationalism; instead, he consistently maintained a comparative-sociological perspective. From the vantage point of Third World comparative studies spanning Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he examined both the possibilities and the limitations of a Korean model of development. Rare among sociologists, he engaged extensively with political scientists and economists, remaining acutely attentive to global political and economic dynamics. These scholarly concerns are deeply embedded in his research themes and academic contributions. He analyzed “Korean society” within the relational nexus of the capitalist world-economy and the international state system. In studying “Korea’s social development,” he employed an analytic framework that layered the world system, the state, and civil society. He conceptualized the nature of the Korean state as that of a ‘broken nation-state,” a “developmental state,” and later a “strong-middle power state.” Professor Lim sought to articulate a third perspective capable of bridging the divide between premodernist and modernist narratives concerning the formation of the Korean nation. At the same time, he aimed to capture the distinctive dynamics of state formation in East Asia―an important subsystem of the world-system. Within the intersections of these historical and global processes, he theorized the two states that coexist on the Korean peninsula as a broken nation-state, that is, incomplete nation-states. Through this conceptualization, he proposed a dynamic approach to Korean unification, arguing that the stages of integration―from confederation, to federation, to a unitary state―are better understood through the lens of a broken nation-state rather than through the conventional Western notion of divided states. In Korea, where politics and the economy have remained only ‘imperfectly differentiated,’ Professor Lim highlighted the mechanism of the formation and consolidation of se (勢)― clusters of power and influence―to explain how an immature capitalism could persist despite democratic deficits. He proposed a model of Korea’s complex power structure that identifies three interrelated yet distinct dimensions of domination. First, a centralized bureaucratic apparatus spanning the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, functioning as the transmission belt of state power. Second, central and local elites who, while members of civil society, occupy positions of dominance. Third, factional politics shaped by enduring regional cleavages. Through the concept of se, he offered a novel analytic strategy for mediating between structure (state institutions) and agency (ruling classes and dominant groups), thereby providing a new methodological direction for studying domination in Korea. Professor Lim envisioned not only the indigenization of Western theories but also the development―and international dissemination―of original Korean theories. He worked tirelessly to articulate self-referential theoretical frameworks such as dependent development, a broken nation-state, and se. His intellectual vision ultimately took institutional form in the establishment and development of the Seoul National University Asia Center.

This article conceptualizes the current crisis of Korean democracy as a multi-level structural crisis in which institutions, political culture, civil society, the public sphere, the lifeworld, and the East Asian regional order are simultaneously eroding. Drawing on and reconstructing LIM Hyun-Chin’s theory of multilevel democracy, it analyzes how winner-take-all electoral institutions and fandom politics, algocracy-distorted public sphere, bureaucratized and professionalized civil society, the disintegration of care, trust, and reciprocity in everyday life, and the regression of democracy in East Asia interact and reinforce one another. On the basis of a close reading of LIM’s major writings and his long-term policy engagement, the article synthesizes his discussions of life world democracy, social economy and local self-governance, global framing, and transnational civil society into a multilevel transformation model of democracy. This model identifies as core tasks the reconstruction of care and social reproduction in the life world, the strengthening of local democratic infrastructures, the restoration of civil society’s autonomy and movement capacity, the reform of majoritarian political institutions, and the renewal of normative circulation and solidarity between Korean, East Asian, and global civil societies. Paying particular attention to the notion of “rooted cosmopolitan citizenship,” the article argues that Korea’s democratic future depends on citizens who are simultaneously grounded in local life worlds and capable of engaging with transnational norms and networks. In doing so, it reassesses the theoretical and practical significance of LIM Hyun-Chin’s democratic thought and contends that creatively inheriting this multilevel perspective is a crucial task for future research and reform debates on Korean democracy.

This study reexamines the relationship between the theory of mind and human nature (simseongron) and statecraft discourse (gyeongseron) in late Joseon Confucianism through the lens of Seongho Yi Ik’s theory of desire. While the mainstream Confucian tradition of Joseon emphasized self- cultivation as the primary means of regulating human desire, Seongho extended this concern to encompass social institutions and the ethical obligations of public officials. Through his interpretation of the Four Beginnings and Seven Emotions theory, he analyzed the mechanism by which desire degenerates into greed and argued that its proper regulation requires both personal moral cultivation and institutional safeguards. In particular, he advocated strengthening legal systems of reward and punishment―bestowing commendations on upright officials and imposing strict penalties on corrupt ones. Seongho’s conception reflects both his confidence in the innate goodness of human nature and his sober recognition of the practical limits of human desire. He maintained that preventing corruption among public officials necessitates the concurrent enhancement of the scholar-officials’ moral character and the sustained operation of institutional mechanisms. By integrating the theory of desire with practical statecraft, Seongho developed a distinctive form of pragmatic Confucianism that, while grounded in Zhu Xi’s li-qi metaphysics, simultaneously sought concrete reforms in governance and administration. His insights retain relevance in contemporary society, offering implications for anti-corruption efforts and the cultivation of public-sector integrity. In particular, his conviction that both institutional effectiveness and moral education must be reinforced to eradicate corruption remains a meaningful proposition today. Accordingly, Seongho’s theory of desire should be reappraised as an intellectual legacy that not only addresses individual self-cultivation but also articulates fundamental directions for social ethics and administrative institutions.

This study aims to redefine the crisis of religion facing 21st-century modern society not merely as a quantitative decline, but from the perspective of structural changes resulting from a civilizational Great Transition. It further seeks to identify autonomous innovation tasks for Korean Buddhism in response to this. Today, the three massive waves of digital/post-social transition, socio-cultural transition, and demographic/ecological transition possess a paradoxical duality: they are threats dismantling the traditional authority of religion while simultaneously being opportunities demanding new spiritual roles. Within this macroscopic context, this paper multidimensionally analyzes the changes Korean Buddhism is undergoing across three levels: agents, organizations, and institutions. First, the analysis at the level of agents reveals that Korean Buddhism faces crises of absence of intellectual leadership and drifting of religious practice. The path dependence that relied on the past model of passive donors is colliding with the emergence of current autonomous spiritual consumers striving for individual survival, causing severe cultural lag. It was confirmed that because the sangha’s education system fails to cultivate modern intellect and communication skills, believers are degenerating into consumers floating in the spiritual market without doctrinal roots. Second, at the organizational level, rigidity and alienation were diagnosed as key problems. The exclusive hierarchical structure centered on the sangha and factionalism, formed through the historical experiences of colonization and division, run counter to the openness and flexibility required by the period of Great Transition. In particular, even in the face of the demographic crisis of a sharp decline in monastics, the closed nature of excluding abundant human resources ― such as bhikkhunis (nuns) and lay experts ― from decision-making structures results in self-limiting the organization's survival capabilities. Third, at the institutional level, cultural lag and lack of publicness were observed. The legacy of Zen-centrism and outdated State-protection Buddhism has deepened the privatization of practice, which focuses solely on individual inner peace. This has become the cause of Buddhism's social isolation, as it fails to provide a meaningful ethical compass for public agendas of modern society, such as the climate crisis or AI ethics. Based on this multidimensional diagnosis, this study proposes three innovation tasks as an active response to the Great Transition. The first is innovation of intellect. Fossilized doctrines must be reinterpreted into modern language, and a wisdom infrastructure suitable for the AI era must be built to lead believers into becoming reflective seekers. The second is innovation of organization. Democratic governance where the fourfold community participates equally must be established, and temples must be transformed into open practice platforms to restore social trust. The third is innovation of ethics. By establishing Buddhist social doctrines and engaging in public practice that answers civilizational challenges, Buddhism must be reborn as a community that embodies the values of compassion and coexistence as public wisdom. In conclusion, the crisis is not a sign of the end, but a solemn calling urging a rebirth as a guiding light of the times by breaking through the old shell.

This study examines the concept and practice of Buddhist offering within Buddhism, particularly focusing on the teachings of Seon Master Daehaeng, and empirically explores the Buddhist offerings practiced by the lay members of Hanmaum Seon Center. The research methods primarily involve ethnographic methods, alongside a literature review. This study analyzes how the Buddhist teaching that matter and mind are not different is practiced through Buddhist offerings and investigates how this relates to the concerns of new materialism, a perspective that has recently gained significant attention in the humanities and social sciences. New materialism, which fundamentally challenges the dualistic thinking of Western philosophy, critiques Western modernization and anthropocentrism, and seeks a new global ecosystem where humans coexist with nature. This study argues that new materialism aligns with Buddhist philosophy, particularly the thought of Seon Master Daehaeng, which emphasizes non-duality and the idea that humans are not separate from nature, the Earth, or the universe. Seon Master Daehaeng taught that and "mental offerings" were more important than "material offerings," while she did not ignore the imporatnce of “material offerings.” She emphasized that by performing "material offerings" and "mental offerings" with a selfless, non-dualistic, and impartial mind, one is essentially acting "for oneself." The lay members of Hanmaum Seon Center, though living in a capitalist world that emphasizes the material realm, learn through the concrete practice of Buddhist offerings that material and mind are not different, and that all beings coexist harmoniously in the equal law of one mind[Hanmaum]. The ethics of Buddhist offering may present a new ethical paradigm of "benefiting both self and others" for modern individuals, who often live in isolated and fragmented conditions.

This study aims to empirically investigate the effects of Sitting Meditation practice from the perspective of physical posture and to propose an effective solution for the chin posture, which many practitioners find to be the most difficult. To this end, a Sitting Meditation Posture education program developed based on prior research was administered to 117 templestay participants, with quantitative and qualitative analyses conducted through surveys and interviews. Furthermore, an additional experimental study was conducted with 26 participants to explore the most effective method for chin posture. The study yielded the following results. First, the Sitting Meditation Posture education showed high overall satisfaction, regardless of the participants’ concentration levels or prior training experience. Notably, the group with ‘strong concentration’ demonstrated a significant improvement in their depth of breathing and practice satisfaction as they progressed beyond the initial stages of setting their pelvic and hand positions to the fine-tuning phase of correcting their chin and tongue posture. Regarding prior experience, participants with ‘posture training’ perceived greater physical changes, while those with ‘breathing training’ experienced more significant mental and psychological changes. The group that received integrated education on the ‘relationship between posture and breath’ showed the most outstanding effects in all aspects of tongue posture, including stability and concentration. Second, the study identified the specificity of the Sitting Meditation Posture’s effects, a key finding. High-performing groups, such as the ‘group with a positive attitude toward life’ and the ‘group familiar with abdominal breathing,’ showed a significant difference in effects compared to lower-performing groups during the chin and tongue posture stages, after establishing a stable physical foundation through a neutral pelvis and correct hand posture. This suggests that the full benefit of correct Sitting Meditation Posture is perfected through fine adjustments made upon a stable physical base. Third, the study confirmed that the most effective method for correcting chin posture is the repetitive motion of ‘pushing the neck forward and then pulling it back to a neutral position,’ which is based on the principle of proprioceptive feedback (average satisfaction score of 9.21). This method works by first relaxing the muscles around the neck, then allowing the brain to self-perceive and learn the correct position, which minimizes tension from forced correction and induces a natural posture. In conclusion, this study empirically demonstrates that the effects of Sitting Meditation Posture are maximized through a systematic, step-by-step approach that proceeds from a neutral pelvis → to the hands → to the chin → and to the tongue. Its significance lies in providing a specific, evidence-based solution to the persistent issue of chin posture faced by many practitioners, thereby establishing a foundation for a more stable and efficient practice.

This study seeks to elucidate and disseminate the socio-philosophical implications of Kang Soo-Taek’s and Choi Woo-Young’s expansive and productive commentaries on my Oneness Logic. Kang’s analysis, grounded in his creative synthesis of Ham Seok-Heon’s Ssial philosophy and his own theory of civic solidarity, examines the Oneness Logic in a contrastive framework, thereby highlighting its unique conceptual differentiations. Choi’s commentary, drawing on the theoretical resources of Luhmann, Foucault, Lacan, and Camus, develops what I term the “theory of the liberation of free individual desire (jouissance),” a designation encapsulating Choi’s liberal, individualist, and desire-emancipatory orientation. Both commentaries raise issues of considerable theoretical depth and breadth, extending across Eastern and Western intellectual traditions. These interventions not only enrich and expand the theoretical horizon of the Oneness Logic but also contribute to the ongoing globalization of Korean social theory. While sharing significant theoretical affinities with the Oneness Logic, both commentators articulate distinctive perspectives. In response, I clarify my position on each critical issue, while simultaneously exploring new possibilities for dialogical reciprocity. First, I critically reinterpret such key notions as collective consciousness, cooperation, materialism, faith in enlightenment and hope, and theory of the third way, as these emerge from Kang’s reconstruction of Ham Sok-Hon’s Ssial philosophy through the lens of Ssial Solidarity Theory. Subsequently, I engage with Choi’s discussion of individual-level communicative pathologies? Luhmann’s black box, Foucault’s micro-power and the relative autonomy of morality, and Lacan’s radicalization of desire?while critically reconstructing these themes within the normative parameters of the Logic of Oneness. In pursuit of a unification between the commentators’ perspectives and that of the Logic of Oneness, I draw upon my own conception of hubid-one Anarchism, an East Asian form of individualist anarchism. Kang’s approach remains faithful to the principles of modern anarchism articulated by Ham Sok-Hon, while Choi’s position resonates with post-structuralist anarchism. Their synthesis thus provides fertile ground for what I call trans (脫)-anarchism, a unifying framework achieved through Hybrid-One Anarchism. Concretely, the dialectical tension between the whole and the individual is mediated through the Logic of Oneness’s principles of “the one as the whole”(一卽全) and “the whole as the one” (全卽一). Likewise, Kang’s concept of hope and Choi’s of desire are interlinked through their shared concern with the pursuit of pleasure?rooted in self-interest?as the driving force of freedom. In conclusion, I emphasize that both the becoming-one and the liberation of desire ultimately converge in the pursuit of joy. I further propose elevating my notion of safe pleasure(安樂) into an East Asian way of Tao in joy(道樂), advocating the middle way of minimalism as its guiding principle for ethical and practical realization.

This study explores the contemporary meaning of “science and technology” through two seminal questions concerning the divergence in scientific and technological development between East and West. Taking as its point of departure the perspectives of Western Europe and North America as global hegemonic centers of science and technology, the study examines how the “East” has been conceptualized through specific civilizational entry points articulated by Western scientists. The British scientist Joseph Needham questioned why the remarkable scientific achievements of China from antiquity through the fifteenth century did not lead to the emergence of modern science comparable to that of Europe after the sixteenth century. Similarly, in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), the American evolutionary biologist Jared Mason Diamond responded to a question posed by a young New Guinean politician: why non-Western societies did not produce the material “cargo” associated with Western power. This study argues that these two questions share a common core: the implicit meanings (signifiés) embedded in “science” and “technology,” which are examined here through the transformation of Western European education systems during the formation of the nineteenth-century modern nation-state. Focusing on post-Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Empire, the study shows how national education systems institutionalized the convergence of science, engineering, elitism, and military imperatives. Although Needham sought to exclude “political domination” from his conception of modern science, his framework nonetheless neutralizes conquest and warfare as constitutive forces of scientific development. Diamond, while explicitly addressing domination and conquest in human history, spatializes agency by proposing the circumvention of geographic constraints, thereby positioning “cargo-bearing societies” as historical subjects. By adopting these two questions as pedagogical and analytical tools in the liberal arts course Eastern Thought and Science & Technology, this study examines how distinctions between East and West, and between cargo-bearing and non-cargo-bearing worlds, are structured around science as “the totality of systematic knowledge of the universe in the form of testable predictions,” and around cargo as a connotative symbol of progress and a better world. The study argues that both Needham’s East-West distinction and Diamond’s division between cargo-bearing and non-cargo-bearing worlds function as historically situated “entry points” constructed within a Western temporal framework of civilization and the history of science. In the twenty-first century, global scientific advancement is increasingly driven by East Asia, including developments centered in mainland China and technological leadership such as Japan’s semiconductor industry. This raises critical questions: Is “world science” now emerging from the East through the circulation of externally introduced cargo? Will the East be redefined in the twenty-first century? The study argues that unless the foundational entry point-one that evaluates science and technology from the standpoint of resultant dominance and material possession-is fundamentally reconfigured, science and technology will continue to serve as instruments of domination in the century to come. This study acknowledges its limitations in fully addressing comparative histories of science, Orientalism, and East-West philosophies of science and technology. It concludes by calling for the establishment of a new entry point for science and technology in the twenty-first century, leaving further discussion to future research.