Wonhyo Quotes on Truth
Wonhyo (617–686) — the seventh-century Korean Buddhist monk whose extensive commentarial works synthesized the disparate Mahayana doctrinal traditions transmitted from China — gave Korean Buddhism its founding philosophical statement and shaped the subsequent East Asian engagement with the Awakening of Faith and the Yogacara, Tathagatagarbha, and Madhyamaka traditions. The central project of doctrinal harmonization (hwajaeng) — the philosophical demonstration that the apparently incompatible doctrinal positions of the Mahayana sutras and treatises are reconcilable at a higher level of understanding — frames Wonhyo’s treatment of truth as the One Mind in which the absolute and conventional truths are non-dually unified. The framework grounded the development of distinctively Korean Buddhist thought and was transmitted to Heian Japan through Wonhyo’s voluminous commentaries.
Quotes
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“All things are made by the mind alone; outside the mind there is nothing to be sought.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“The Buddha and the ordinary mind are not two; only the recognition of this is two.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“Doctrines fight only when their followers do not yet understand.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“What you take for a pure spring in the dark may be a skull in the morning; the spring is in your mind.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“When mind arises, all things arise; when mind ceases, all things cease.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“All things flow from the One Mind.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“Skull water taught me that all is mind.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“Quarrels among the schools of Buddhism arise from the limits of language, not from the truth itself.”