Abstract

In this article I will address the question of religion the hwarang group professed and its relationship with Chinese heterodox sects. Particularly, those sects were built around the cult of Candraprabhākumāra, a minor character becoming the center of devotion not unlike that of Maitreya during the post-Han era, specifically during Sui-Tang dynasties. The major concerns of this paper are if Silla and hwarangs may have known about this heterodox figure, and if so, how and when. There will be a tentative of verification of Prof. Pankaj Mohan’s thesis in the light of other scholars, in particular Hubert Michael Seiwert, and most importantly Erich Zürcher, who tried first to study the Candraprabhākumāra’s cults. There will be an assessment of what we know about the hwarangs and what we know about Candraprabhākumāra that could be more related to them. More specifically, the Shouluo biqiu jing, a text examined by all there three scholars, will be analyzed in philological terms. On this basis and on the historical accounts known to us, new hypotheses will be formulated. The conclusions are that the Shouluo jing and the Candraprabhākumāra’s cults were known in Silla though the text was likely written in China as opposed to Pankaj Mohan’s hypothesis of its origin in the southern Korean kingdom. The hwarangs likely also knew that, by mediation of Baekje: the neighbor kingdom likely acted as a mediator for this particular form of Maitreya’s cult.