This research can be reduced to two fundamental questions; what happens to Sŏn Buddhist pedagogy when it moves beyond the Korean peninsula into various contexts in Europe and elsewhere in Asia? And; might there be a gendered aspect to any adaptations and accommodations in non-Korean contexts? This project adopts a constructivist methodology to conduct an ethnographic investigation into the semiotic function of Korean Sŏn rhetorical pedagogy in various non-Korean social and cultural contexts in Europe and Asia. By adopting a hitherto unused gender paradigm through which to research Sŏn pedagogy itself and its transnational interactions, mediations, transcultural-flows and relationships, this research investigates contemporary South Korean Sŏn Buddhist transnationalism itself to present four key findings. Firstly, this study frames post-Korean War (1953 onwards) Sŏn transnationalism and its spread from South Korea to the Global North, in the backdrop of the South Korean Buddhist ‘Purification Movement’ (1954-1970) which ostensibly ‘purified’ South Korean Buddhism of colonial ‘Japanized’ elements but which this research argues was a gendered division of the South Korean Sŏn institution itself, a bifurcation which reflected a “Western” orientalist view drawn from Buddhist modernism which dichotomized Buddhist meditation and ritual. Referring to historical precedents and following Walraven’s use of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ within historical Korean religious culture as a paradigm, this research shows that this division is both symptomatic of the influence of Buddhist modernism on early twentieth-century Korean Buddhist transnationalism and that it characterizes subsequent post-war South Korean transnationalism until the present. I apply Walraven’s notion of public and private to domestic and transnational Sŏn. Secondly, as the spread of post-war South Korean Sŏn Buddhism correlates with the transition of the South Korean economy from the Global South to the Global North it also coincided with the second-wave of global feminism. Building on the first point above of ‘public’ and ‘private’ being gendered in the historical Korean socio-religious context, this research shows that the gendered institutional-division of Sŏn during the ‘Purification Movement’ in South Korea, constructed an institutional ecclesiastical Sŏn which participates in re-masculinizing the nation. This extrapolates abroad in Sŏn transnationalism to reveal a continuum in which exist ‘parallel congregations’ – Sŏn Buddhist communities of ethnic-South Korean emigrants which sprung up in the post-war period and non-Korean ‘convert’ centres which for the most part do not overlap and I include the southern half of the Korean peninsula in this analysis of Sŏn transnationalism. The nature of these parallel congregations within the continuum of contemporary transnational Sŏn have implications for whether Sŏn can even be called [South] Korean any longer and how despite sometimes virulent anti-Japanese sentiment used to divide Sŏn institutionally at home, it exhibits rhetoric of Japanese imperial Zen in Europe with respect to race and providing in some cases, a type of generic Zen ‘couture’ for right-wing extremism. Thirdly, through participant-observation at South Korean Buddhist sites in Europe (Germany, France and Poland) and in Asia (Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand) as well as semi-structured qualitative interviews of both Sŏn teachers and learners, this gendered perspective implemented in this research suggests that despite ‘traditional’ perceptions of Sŏn rhetorical pedagogy, the eclipsed feminine collaborates in this rhetoric in a number of ways. In the East Asian context, this collaboration co-constructs masculinity while outside of South Korea, this collaboration co-constructs the empowerment of the individual. Offering itself as a form of gendered bio-power for the state, institutional South Korean Sŏn is inextricably tied to the androcentric military-industrial-complex of South Korea which ecclesiastic South Korean Sŏn endorses politically with its gendered rhetoric. Based on this gendered notion of public and private within domestic and transnational South Korean Sŏn mentioned above, this research relates the political aspect of gendered Sŏn-rhetoric in transnational contexts back to the super-structure of domestic South Korean Sŏn by theorizing if ethnic-South Korea Sŏn transnationalism is part of a state-endorsed re-masculinizing within the Global North – what I call an ‘eschatology of re-unification’ which being nationalized can never be transcended until the existential crisis of the androcentric-state is resolved through re-unification or by destruction. In that sense, the semiotic function of Sŏn rhetorical pedagogy participates in state discourse. By conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews on location in Europe and Asia, participant observation, interviews online and an online-survey of monastics in South Korea, this research is one of the most extensive inquiries into contemporary Sŏn practice as well as contemporary Sŏn transnationalism at large. Specifically, this project is one of very few which takes women into account in the analysis of Sŏn Buddhism and the only research conducted into the gendered nature of Sŏn pedagogy.