Wonhyo 617 – 686

Wonhyo was a Korean Buddhist philosopher, monk, and one of the most important figures in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Famed in legend for an awakening attained when, in the dark, he drank from what he took to be a pure spring and discovered in the morning that it had been a skull, he renounced his journey to study in Tang China and dedicated his life to teaching among ordinary Koreans. His commentaries on the Awakening of Faith, the Vajrasamadhi Sutra, and the Nirvana Sutra developed a powerful synthesis of Madhyamaka, Yogacara, and tathagatagarbha thought, while his Treatise on the Ten Approaches to the Reconciliation of Doctrinal Disputes exerted a lasting influence on the syncretic temper of Korean Buddhism.

Wonhyo (617–686) was the most important philosopher of the Korean Silla Buddhist tradition. Born to a minor aristocratic family in what is now North Gyeongsang Province, he and his lifelong companion Uisang set out together for Tang China in their forties to study Buddhism at its source.

The famous story has Wonhyo and Uisang taking shelter overnight in what they took to be a tomb. Wonhyo woke thirsty in the dark and drank from a vessel of cool water; in the morning he discovered the vessel was a skull and the water rainwater pooled in it. The realization — that what had been refreshing had become repulsive only by his own changed perception — led him to abandon the journey to China and return to Korea, where he spent the rest of his life teaching Buddhism among ordinary people rather than within institutional schools.

Wonhyo's surviving works include commentaries on the major Mahayana sutras and treatises developing his distinctive philosophy of the One Mind, which sought to reconcile rather than choose among the rival Mahayana schools. He fathered a son with the Silla princess Yoseok and walked the Korean countryside in lay clothes, breaking the conventional separation of monk and layperson. His integrative philosophy shaped Korean Buddhism for the next thirteen centuries.