Buddhism is often framed through renunciation, severing ties with “the world” as the premise of religious life. This paper challenges that presumption by reframing colonial Korean Buddhism’s modernization project (1910—1945) as a utopian enterprise. Rather than a reactive accommodation to colonial rule, modernization operated as a utopian social imaginary: an effort to conceptualize and engineer Buddhism as a public religion producing recognizable public good within a state-centered order and redefining its place in society.
Focusing on two axes, educational reorganization and institutional incorporation, I show how Buddhist leaders pursued “socially viable Buddhism” as both a normative and institutional project. Legitimacy hinged on public usefulness, bureaucratically legible organizational forms, and personnel able to translate Buddhist ethical claims into civic morality and social responsibility. Here, “utopia” names a this-worldly mode of Buddhist world-making: repositioning Buddhism from mountain seclusion into urban public space as a defensible, socially consequential civic actor under colonial constraint.