The Manhae Festival Promotion Committee (chaired by Kwak Chae-gi, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Dongguk University) announced the five winners of the 24th Manhae Prize on Wednesday, July 15. This year’s Peace Prize goes to monk Phra Bodhirak, the founder of Thailand’s Santi Asoke. The Practice Prize is awarded to mountaineer Um Hong-gil and the Keimyung University Daegu Dongsan Hospital (Director Suh Young-sung). The Literature Prize is jointly awarded to writer Kim Joo-young and poet Shin Dal-ja.

The highlight of the 2020 Manhae Festival—the Manhae Awards Ceremony—will take place next month, on Wednesday, August 12, at the Hanuelnaerin Center in Inje-gun, Gangwon-do. The Manhae Festival, which celebrates the spirit of Reverend Manhae (Han Yong-woon, 1879–1944), is co-hosted by Dongguk University, Gangwon-do, Inje-gun, Chosun Ilbo, and the Society for the Promotion and Practice of Manhae’s Thoughts. Various programs will be conducted, such as the Yusim Literature Prize ceremony, academic seminars, culture and art events, contests, and local college events.

The Manhae Prizes are awarded to individuals who have made a significant impact worldwide in one of the following three areas: Peace, Practice, and Literature. Previous winners include former South African President Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, former Chairman of the Hyundai Group Chung Ju-yung, former Korean President Kim Dae-jung, Catholic priest Ham Sei-ung, former Sorokdo nurse Marianne Stoeger, novelist Jo Jung-Rae, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mo Yan.

Monk Bodhirak, this year’s Manhae Peace Prize winner, is a figure who realized the life of non-violence and peace as found in scriptures. Once a composer and television programmer with wealth and fame in Thailand, he was ordained a monk with the resonating idea: “I, like the Lord Buddha, did not succumb to wealth, fame, and comfort.” He criticized the ineffectiveness of the orthodox ecclesiastical order and formed Santi Asoke, a community that practices simplicity and self-sacrifice; the followers live Buddha’s life and the community currently comprises five different villages, nine schools, six vegetarian restaurants, four organic fertilizer factories, three rice mills, two herbal medicine factories, one hospital, and a 160-hectare farm. In the community, monks eat once a day and reside in huts (kuti) to renounce their worldly possessions. Other followers, consisting of couples and children, while enjoying freer and more active lives than the monks, also find happiness in their communal livelihoods in the absence of greed.

The Manhae Practice Prize winner, Um Hong-gil, is widely known for scaling the summits of all 14 Himalayan peaks (eight-thousanders) higher than 8,000 meters in 2000. With deep affection toward adolescents and those with disabilities, he established the Um Hong Gil Human Foundation in 2008, which has since been devoted to education work in the Nepalese Himalayas and remote villages. In addition, the Um Hong Gil Foundation Hospital opened and has been in operation at the entrance of the Himalayas Everest in Kumbu Namche (3,440 meters) since May 2017. He has also conducted activities for supporting Korean mountaineers’ surviving families since 2011, providing KRW 373 million in total as of June 2020.

The co-winner of the Practice Prize, Keimyung University Daegu Dongsan Medical Center, was the last bastion of quarantine situated at the frontline in the battle against COVID-19. On February 21, three days after the first COVID-19 case was reported on February 18, the Daegu Dongsan Medical Center rapidly evacuated all hospital rooms to focus exclusively on the treatment of COVID-19 patients; the hospital managed to host a total of 1,022 COVID-19 patients. This was 13% of the infected patients in Daegu and 9% of the total COVID-19 patients in the country—a number that no other hospital in the country has managed to surpass.

The Manhae Literature Prize winner Kim Joo-young is a writer who avidly explores the lives of ordinary folks that are not heroes and casts them as main characters of historical fiction. He made his literary debut with A Period of Dormancy in 1971, which won the New Writer’s Award in Literature Monthly; he then rose to fame through his 1979 saga, The Innkeeper. Kim produced multi-volume historical novels such as Righteous Band of Brigands, Yajeong, and The Wanderers, and continues to publish works at the age of 80. Through his publications that eloquently depict the lives and customs of laypeople from the past, Kim has demonstrated outstanding achievements that will remain in the history of Korean literature and its international exchange.

Another co-winner of the Literature Prize, poet Shin Dal-ja, has published a total of 15 poetry collections. With Bongheonmunja as her debut into the literary circle, her works include The Water of Home, The Light of the Father, Mother, That Crooked Writing, Passionate Love, Paper, and The Northern Village, which was written during her two years of living in Bukchon Hanok Village and aimed to promote its beauty and history. She explores love from meeting and departing, life from birth to death, and these phenomena and nature as creatures that create and extinguish, based on her quest for human existence from an ontological perspective. Along with the title as the “poet of reconciliation and healing,” Shin is regarded as an author who boldly pioneered and represented the field of female poetry in Korean literature.