Editor’s Note

Abstract

Abstract:Wŏnhyo (617–686) is known to the world as Korea’s leading Buddhist thinker and scriptural commentator, mainly due to his numerous exegeses and treatises that attempted to sort out the plethora of new Buddhist ideas generated in the fifth through seventh centuries in East Asia—ideas produced both through the continued influx of newly translated Indian texts, as well as the rapid appearance of fresh East Asian interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine. Wŏnhyo is especially noted for being the only scholar among the great East Asian commentators who had neither sectarian affiliation nor took a sectarian-based approach in the interpretation of Buddhist doctrines. Thus, the privileging of a specific sectarian approach was for Wŏnhyo impossible, since he saw each of the various doctrinal streams of Buddhism as representing a distinct but valid piece of the vast Mahāyāna system—as true as any other piece, but not to be seen as some kind of “ultimate” doctrine. Wonhyo’s method—known as hwajaeng 和諍 (“harmonization”)—is characterized by the juxtaposing of two or more divergent theoretical positions, comparing them, and clarifying their distinctive assumptions and aims. Once these assumptions are properly apprehended, what on the surface appear to be contradictory opinions are shown to be commensurate with each other from a deeper perspective. This article examines in detail the range of motivations, methodologies, and approaches seen in Wonhyo’s hwajaeng project. Wonhyo’s approach will be examined in terms of three general aspects, which straddle the range of doctrinal/ scholastic, logical/philosophical, and religious, with the religious showing at least three levels of profundity.