Wonhyo

Wonhyo worked at a moment when Chinese Buddhism was fragmenting into schools, each with a scripture it held supreme and a technical vocabulary of its own. Silla received all of it more or less at once, without the sequence of arrivals that had made the Chinese sense of development possible, and Wonhyo's response was to ask what a doctrinal dispute actually is.

His answer, hwajaeng, is usually translated as the harmonisation of doctrinal disputes. It is not a plea for tolerance. The method assumes that a position held seriously by serious people is answering to something real, and that disagreement usually arises because two parties are affirming and denying with respect to different aspects of the same matter. The task is to find the standpoint from which the affirmation and the denial can both be granted their proper scope, and the failure being corrected is not error but partiality. He applied this to the arguments over emptiness and consciousness, over sudden and gradual attainment, and over the status of the buddha nature.

The instrument he used most was the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, a short text whose Indian origin is now doubted and which proposes that the mind has two aspects, suchness and arising and ceasing, neither reducible to the other. That structure gave him exactly what hwajaeng required: a single thing describable in two incompatible registers without contradiction. His commentary on it became the standard reading across East Asia, and Chinese authors cited it under the name of the commentary from east of the sea.

The biography is unusually eventful for a scholastic. He and his friend Uisang set out twice for Tang China. On the second attempt, according to the later accounts, they sheltered overnight in what they took for an earthen shelter, and Wonhyo drank water in the dark that refreshed him; in daylight he saw that the place was a tomb and the vessel a skull. The account has him concluding that since the same water was sweet in ignorance and foul in knowledge, the difference lay in the mind and not in the water, and turning back. Uisang went on and studied under Zhiyan.

That story is not in Wonhyo's writing. It appears in Chinese and Korean biographical collections from the tenth century onward, in differing versions, and its function is to explain why the greatest Silla thinker never studied abroad, which in that period required explaining.

What is better attested is the second half of his life. He fathered a son, Seol Chong, who became a major scholar of the Confucian classics and of the writing of Korean, and he ceased to be a monk in good standing. He then took his teaching to villages and markets, singing and dancing with a large gourd and using a phrase from a sutra as a refrain. The Samguk yusa says that by this means people who could not read came to know the name of the Buddha. A career that begins in the most technical scholasticism of its age and ends in a market square is not the usual shape, and Korean tradition has never treated the second half as a decline.