The page 99 test of my dissertation (Bae 2024) leads me to revisit the moment of breach at a Buddhist temple in a return-to-the-farm (gwinong) village in South Korea. During my fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, the temple held a reading group titled “Let’s Live as a Buddha,” where the head monk, local elderly people, and middle-aged newcomers participated. The reading group was originally intended to recruit only newcomers but it happened to be open to locals as well by mistake. In one meeting, the head monk wanted everyone to share their thoughts and discuss the reading as equal participants, but local people kept asking for teaching by the head monk as an authoritative figure. The head monk ended up admonishing participants for their inadequate attitude that was waiting for a sermon, when they were supposed to try to study themselves. Why did this breach moment take place, and what does it tell us about the dynamics in the South Korean return-to-the-farm village that was cultivated by the eco-religious movement?

The return-to-the-farm village that I call Mosan, located on Jiri Mountains, presents a rich ethnographic site in which different groups of people pursuing different values come to interact with one another. After the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, a local Buddhist temple initiated a return-to-the-farm movement drawing on the Buddhist idea of interrelatedness, which attracted educated urbanites to move in for alternative ways of life as a critique of capitalism. While newcomers overall promote egalitarianism, they didn’t move into a social vacuum. There are local elderly residents in the village, small-holder farmers who still value kin-based hierarchy and aspire to development-oriented values. The different sets of values that locals and newcomers emphasize are recursively drawn on as they justify their practices across the social dimensions of speaking, farming, and religious participation. The breach moment at the Buddhist reading group emblematically showcases the different tendencies between locals and newcomers, not only in terms of Buddhist practice but also in terms of their everyday interaction with others and the environment.

While different values upheld and practiced by diverse villagers can lead to tensions and conflicts, that is not the end of the story. As the villagers live and farm next to one another, they come to accommodate different kinds of practices and landscapes that each cultivates, which influences how they see and evaluate oneself and others. I attend to the generative role of ambivalence, as to how the villagers’ ambivalent stance-taking of oneself and others affords the cultivation of meta-ethical awareness. In other words, they come to see oneself not only from their own perspective but also from others’ eyes as well. I argue that the meta-ethical ambivalence is an emergent form of interrelatedness by Mosan villagers in their efforts to learn to co-exist and engage with different others.