7 The Life and Thought of Chinul

Most of the major approaches to doctrine that became the mainstays of the mature Korean tradition were developed during this period. The central scholastic teachings imported during the Three Kingdoms period were systematized into five main ideologies, which became the orthodox schools of traditional scholastic Buddhism from the Silla period onward: the Kye-yul chong (Vinaya), Yŏlban chong (Nirvana), Pŏpsŏng chong, Wonyung chong (Chinese: Yüan-jung; Avatamsaka), and Pŏpsang chong (Dharmalakṣaṇa, Yogācāra).⁴⁰ (See Table 1.)

The Wonyung (Hwaŏm; Chinese: Hua-yen) school enjoyed the widest and most enduring popularity during the Unified Silla dynasty and into the Koryŏ dynasty. The school was founded by Ŭisang (625–702), who studied in China under the second patriarch of the Chinese school, Chih-yen (602–668). Fa-tsang (643–712), the third Chinese patriarch and the effective systematizer of the school's doctrines, had great respect for Ŭisang's understanding and continued to correspond with him after the Silla monk's return to his native land.⁴¹ Ŭisang's major work, the Chart of the Avatamsaka One-Vehicle Dharmadhātu (Hwaŏm ilsŭng pŏpkye to),⁴² written in 661 and presented to Chih-yen as the quintessence of his understanding of Hwaŏm doctrine, is one of the seminal works of extant Korean Buddhist literature and is quoted copiously by Chinul. Ŭisang returned to Korea in 670, and in 676 he founded Pusŏk sa, the head temple of the Hwaŏm sect.⁴³ Through the efforts of Ŭisang and his disciples, Hwaŏm theory became the foundation for most future Korean doctrinal developments and had the greatest influence of all the orthodox schools on the scholastic orientation of Korean Buddhism.⁴⁴

The Pŏpsŏng (Dharma-nature) school, also known as the Haedong⁴⁵ school, deserves special mention as a uniquely Korean school of thought organized along syncretic lines. Its founder, the Korean monk Wonhyo (617–686), was a close friend of Ŭisang and probably the greatest scholar produced in the Korean Buddhist tradition. Wonhyo was the author of 240 works on Buddhist topics, of which twenty are still extant;⁴⁶ his explications of the Awakening of Faith treatise in particular were a major influence in the development of Fa-tsang's thought—in fact, Wonhyo can be considered an important precursor to the Chinese Hua-yen school.⁴⁷ Wonhyo's commentaries on major sūtras were not intended simply to explicate terms and theories according to the dogma of a particular sect; rather, his approach was to demonstrate the relationship between those texts and the whole of Buddhism by examining them from the standpoint of an ideal, the "one mind," which vivified each of them.⁴⁸ He also wrote outlines of the ideologies of the major Buddhist sects, again explaining them in ways that would lead to fraternal harmony, not sectarian controversy. In his treatise, the Ten Approaches to the Reconciliation of Doctrinal Controversy...