Wŏnhyo

Wŏnhyo (617–86). One of the most eminent scholar-monks in Korean history, and an influential figure in the development of the east Asian Buddhist intellectual and commentarial tradition. His extensive literary output runs to over 80 works in 240 fascicles, and some of his commentaries, such as those on the Nirvāṇa Sūtra and the Awakening of Faith (Mahāyāna-śraddhotpāda Śāstra), became classics revered throughout China and Japan as well as Korea. In fact, his commentary on the Awakening of Faith helped to make it one of the most influential and intensively studied texts in the east Asian Mahāyāna tradition.

Wŏnhyo lived at a time of social and religious ferment and upheaval. His life extends over the period when the three kingdoms of the Korean peninsula were united under Silla in 668, and when Buddhists were coming out of a period of focused study of individual texts and beginning to address questions of Buddhism's doctrinal coherence. By temperament, Wŏnhyo was a systematizer and integrater, and he broadly surveyed the literature and doctrines of all of the various schools of thought that had entered Korea: San-lun, Satyasiddhi (Ch'eng-shih), T'ien-t'ai, Hua-yen, Pure Land, and Ch'an. He set their various teachings into an overall framework so that each could be seen as a part of the larger tapestry of Buddhist wisdom and practice, and he is credited with the foundation of the first fully indigenous school of Korean Buddhist thought, Pŏpsŏng (‘dharma-nature’), which sought to account for the ultimate nature of all phenomena that bound them together in spite of their apparent diversity. Wŏnhyo's own integrative vision of Buddhism came to be called ‘t'ong pulgyǒ’, or ‘unitive Buddhism’. In addition to his scholarly activity, Wŏnhyo is credited as one of the men who took Buddhist study out of the aristocracy and spread it among the common people, a development that followed his resignation from the monastic order (Saṃgha) and subsequent marriage. It was through his endeavours among the people that the Pure Land practice of reciting the Buddha's name became widespread.