Won Hyo 617 – 686

Won Hyo was a Korean Buddhist philosopher and monk and the most influential figure in the early development of Korean Buddhist thought. According to tradition, he abandoned a journey to China to study Buddhism after a midnight realization that the water he had drunk in the dark from a skull-cup tasted no different from any other water, that the difference lay in the mind alone. He produced more than a hundred works, of which over twenty survive, including the Treatise on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, in which he sought to harmonize the rival Buddhist schools of his day under the principle of the One Mind.