Haewon-sangsaeng and Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones

This essay reinterprets Yeats’s play The Dreaming of the Bones from the perspective of Haewon-sangsaeng (the Resolution of Grievances for Mutual Beneficence) in Daesoon Thought. Although Yeats was an Irish writer, he sensed the limitations of his contemporary dualism as a result of having accepted many Irish spiritual beliefs and Eastern ideas, and he presented “Unity of Being,” as a state of ideal integration of two opposing powers. Moreover, he desired to reach the state all his life and expressed such processes through his works. Although Yeats’s Unity of Being is perhaps identical to the state of Eumyang-hapdeok (the Virtuous Concordance of Yin and Yang), it should be argued that such a state can only be possible by Haewon-sangsaeng, which is a unique idea found in Daesoon Thought. Sangje, the creator of the universe, diagnosed that the disharmony of yin-yang happened as a consequence of all creations struggling under the dominant principle of mutual contention (Sanggeuk), and Sangje offered the principle of Haewon-sangsaeng to relieve all kinds of grievances through the Reordering Work of Grievance Resolution. Finally, this article examines the situation of conflict described in Yeats’s play The Dreaming of the Bones, the background of which is the ‘Easter Rising of 1916,’ and in the process, tries to analyze the grievance that the characters in the play experience from the perspective of Danzhu, as his grievance is considered to be the origin of grievances in The Canonical Scripture. In conclusion, this article argues that Yeats’s Unity of Being may share the same purpose as Haewon-sangsaeng.