Sun Myung Moon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Sun Myung Moon | |
|---|---|
 Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han | |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 문선명 |
| Hanja | 文鮮明 |
| Revised Romanization | Mun Seon-myeong |
| McCune–Reischauer | Mun Sŏnmyŏng |
| Birth name | |
| Hangul | 문용명 |
| Hanja | 文龍明 |
| Revised Romanization | Mun Yong-myeong |
| McCune–Reischauer | Mun Yongmyŏng |
| Japanese name: Emoto Ryūmei (江本龍明) | |
Sun Myung Moon (born February 25, 1920) is the Korean founder and leader of the worldwide Unification Church. He is also the founder of many other organizations and projects. One of the best-known of these is News World Communications, an international media conglomerate which publishes The Washington Times and other newspapers.[1] He is famous for holding blessing ceremonies, often referred to as "mass weddings".
Moon has said, and it is generally believed by Unification Church members, that he is the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ and is fulfilling Jesus' unfinished mission.[2][3] He has been among the most controversial modern religious leaders, both for his religious beliefs and for his social and political activism.[4]
Contents[show] |
[edit] Early biography
He was born in 1920 in northern Korea and named Yong Myung Moon (later changed to Sun Myung Moon). His birthday was recorded as January 6 by the lunar calendar (February 25, 1920, according to the Gregorian Calendar).[5]
[edit] Life in Korea
Moon was born in Sangsa-ri (上思里, lit. "high-thought village"), Deogun-myon, Jeongju-gun, North P'yŏng'anProvince[6] (now in North Korea; Korea was then under Japanese rule). His father, Kyung-yoo Moon, was a scholar. His mother, Kyung-gye Kim, was a homemaker. He was one of thirteen children and the second son. When he was a child, Moon was heavily affected by his elder brother Yong-Su Moon's deep faith. The family went into bankruptcy when the elder brother of Sun Myung's grandfather, Rev. Yunguk Moon, gave most of the money belonging to the family to an independence movement from Japan. [7] In 2009, the Yonhap News Agency reported that Moon had plans to establish a sacred sanctuary at his birthplace.[8]
In the Moon family, there was a tradition in the form of a superstitous belief that held that if the second son was to receive a Western-style education, he would die early. As a result of this, Sun Myung received a Confucian-style education when he was a child and did not receive his first Western-style education until he was 14 years old.[9]Confucianist beliefs, but converted to Christianity and joined the Presbyterian Church when he was around 10 years old. Moon taught Sunday school for the church.[10] On April 17, 1935, when he was 16 (in Korean age reckoning), Moon says he had a vision or revelation of Jesus while praying atop a small mountain. He says that Jesus asked him to complete the unfinished task of establishing God's kingdom on Earth and bring peace to the world. When he was 19 (in Korean age reckoning), Moon criticized Japanese rule over Korea and Japanese education at the graduation ceremony speech, which made himself a focus of police.[11] The Moon family held traditional
Moon's high school years were spent at a boys' boarding school in Seoul, and later in Japan, where he studied electrical engineering at Waseda Advanced Engineering School. During this time he studied the Bible and developed his own interpretation of it. After the end of World War II he returned to Korea and began preaching his message.[10]
Moon was arrested in 1946 by North Korean officials. The church states that the charges stemmed from the jealousy and resentment of other church pastors after parishioners stopped tithing to their old churches upon joining Moon's congregation. Police beat him and nearly killed him, but a teenage disciple named Won Pil Kim nursed him back to health.
Moon was arrested again and was given a five-year sentence in 1948 to the Hŭngnam labor camp, where prisoners were routinely worked to death on short rations. Moon credits his survival to God's protection over his life and his habit of saving half his meager water ration for washing the toxic chemicals off of his skin after long days of work, bagging and loading chemical fertilizer with his bare hands. After serving 34 months of his sentence, he was released in 1950 when UN troops advanced on the camp and the guards fled.
The beginnings of the church's official teachings, the Divine Principle, first saw written form as Wolli Wonbon in 1946. (The second, expanded version, Wolli Hesol, or Explanation of the Divine Principle, was not published until 1957; for a more complete account, see Divine Principle.) Sun Myung Moon preached in northern Korea after the end of World War II and was imprisoned by the regime in North Korea in 1946. He was released from prison, along with many other North Koreans, with the advance of American and United Nations forces during the Korean WarPusan.[12] and built his first church from mud and cardboard boxes as a refugee in
In 1954, he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul (also known as the Unification Church).[13] The Unification Church expanded rapidly in South Korea and by the end of 1955 had 30 church centers throughout the nation. In 1958, Moon sent missionaries to Japan, and in 1959, to the United States of America. In 1975, Moon sent out missionaries to 120 countries around the world.[12]
[edit] Marriages and children
In November 1943, Moon married Sun Kil Choi. Their son, Sung Jin Moon, was born in 1946. They divorced in 1953 soon after Moon's release from prison in North Korea. Choi and Sung Jin Moon are now both members of the Unification Church.[14] Sung Jin Moon married in 1973 and now has three children.[15]
Moon was still legally married to Choi when he began a relationship with his second (common law) wife Myung Hee Kim, who gave birth to a son named Hee Jin Moon (who was killed in a train accident). His church does not regard this as infidelity, because Sun Kil Choi is said to have already left her husband by that time. Korean divorce law in the 1950s made legal divorce difficult and drawn out, so much so that when Myung Hee Kim became pregnant she was sent to Japan to avoid legal complications for Moon.[16]
Moon married his third wife, Hak Ja Han,[17] on April 11, 1960, soon after she turned 17 years old, in a ceremony called the Holy Marriage. Han, called Mother or True Mother by followers, and her husband together are referred to as the True Parents by members of the Unification Church.
Hak Ja Han gave birth to 14 children; her second daughter died in infancy. The family is known in the church as the True Family and the children as the True Children. Shortly after their marriage, they presided over a Blessing Ceremony for 36 couples, the first of many such ceremonies.
Nansook Hong, the former wife of Hyo Jin Moon, Sun Myung Moon's eldest son, said in her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family that both Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han told her about Moon's extramarital affairs (which she said he called "providential affairs"), including one that resulted in the birth of a boy raised by a church leader, named by Sun Myung Moon's daughter Un Jin Moon on the news show 60 Minutes.[18]
[edit] Name and titles
In 1953, Moon changed his name from Mun Yong Myong to Mun Son-myong (which he spelled "Moon Sun Myung"). In a speech Moon explained that the hanja for moon (문, 文), his surname, means "word" or "literature" in Korean. The character sun (선, 鮮), composed of "fish" and "lamb" (symbols of Christianity), means "fresh." The character myung (명, 明), composed of "sun" and "moon", (which was part of his given name), means "bright." Together, sun-myung means "make clear." So the full name can be taken to mean "the word made clear." Moon concluded by saying, "My name is prophetic." [19]
In the English-speaking world, Moon is often referred to as Reverend Moon by Unification Church members, the general public, and the media. Unification Church members most often call Moon Father or True Father. He is also sometimes called Father Moon, mostly by some non-members involved with Unificationist projects. Similar titles are used for his wife: Mother, True Mother, or Mother Moon. Dr. Moon has also occasionally been used because Moon received an honorary doctorate from the Shaw Divinity School of Shaw University.
