| Summary: | ‘Ecological thought’ in this thesis means a religious or philosophical reflection on a way that humanity and all other existences can co-exist. Korea has a multi-religious context in long history. Shamanism, Taoism, Confucianism, Donghak, Christianity, etc, were introduced, accumulated, and developed in Korean mentality according to the historical progress, and constituted an unique Korean culture coexisting various religions. In this understanding of the multi-religious context, this thesis examined Korean ecological thought through three thinkers who have different religious backgrounds such as Donghak, Buddhism and Christianity. Chiha Kim as a poet, writer and civil activist; Pomnyun as a Buddhist monk and unification campaigner of South and North Korea; and Hyunju Lee as a Methodist church minister and writer of children’s stories, are all well-known people in relation to ecological thought at the present time in Korea. They all argue the relationship between God, humanity and the natural world to overcome ecological crisis, although they are not happy with this artificial classification of God, humanity, and nature. Their understandings of the relationship have been differently described according to their religious backgrounds and bases such as ‘life’, ‘dependent origination’, and ‘incarnation’, but they commonly point to ‘indivisibility’, ‘interconnectedness’, or ‘oneness’ about the relationship. Chiha Kim insists an indivisibility of all realities through the understanding of which ‘life’ is ‘an endless dynamic generation’ within all existences. Pomnyun understands the relationship in which all realities have been endlessly interconnected by the principle of ‘dependent origination’. Hyunju Lee argues that all existences are an expression of divine incarnation and all beings having spirituality cannot be independent but are one.
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