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Foreword
For many years, prominent Western intellectuals such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Carl Jung, and Hermann Hesse studied the I-jing (Book of Changes) or Buddhism to understand the East. They made great contributions to the development of human civilization in bridging the East and West through scholarship and literature.
Dr. Hong Beom Rhee has also worked diligently to bridge the dynamism of Western and Eastern wisdom through millenarian study, with the aim of further developing human civilization.
The millenarian dream is essentially the attainment of great peace in the world.
Here, the concept of millenarianism is not limited to the messianic expectation of Judeo-Christian eschatology but is broadly applied to revolutionary and nonrevolutionary religious, social, and political movements such as Nazism, Communism, totalitarianism, socialism, postcolonial nationalism, Falun Gong, and terrorism. It even explores medicine, technology, and natural science as secular millennial equivalents.
Dr. Rhee was asked to study Asian millenarianism, including the Taiping and the Tonghak, in comparison to Western millenarianism by