[History Lives On – Silla Series] Episode 23: Wonhyo and Uisang – The Two Giants of Silla Buddhism

[History Lives On - Silla Series] Episode 23: Wonhyo and Uisang - The Two Giants of Silla Buddhism

역사는 살아있다 편집팀 Posted 2026/11/06 [09:33] Article No. 61454

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THE KOREAN TODAY

History Lives On

The Silla Chronicle

Episode 23: Wonhyo and Uisang – The Two Giants of Silla Buddhism

Two young monks set out on the same road. One turned back before he reached the sea; the other crossed it.

One of them later danced through village markets with a gourd in his hands. The other founded a mountain monastery and trained a school of disciples. Wonhyo (617-686) and Uisang (625-702) are the two giants of Silla Buddhism. Between them they made it possible to speak of “Haedong Buddhism,” the Buddhism “east of the sea,” meaning the Korean peninsula.

Is religion a scholar’s pursuit, or something that belongs to every farmer and fisherman? Western readers know a version of this tension from the era of Gregory the Great and the Anglo-Saxon missions. Silla’s answer was to do both at once, with two very different men.

🌍 Western Historical Parallel

While Wonhyo was writing, Bede (c. 673-735) was not yet born, but the Synod of Whitby (664) was already deciding which Christian customs England would follow. Wonhyo’s “harmonization of disputes” (hwajaeng) tackled a comparable problem, how rival doctrines can coexist, though his tool was philosophy rather than a church council. In the Latin West, a synthesis of this scope would arrive only centuries later with Thomas Aquinas.

◆ The Ancient Landscape

The seventh century was an age of war across East Asia. Silla destroyed Baekje in 660 and, with Tang help, Goguryeo in 668. It then fought the Tang itself and, by the mid-670s, held most of the peninsula. Amid mass death, ordinary people looked for consolation, and Buddhism offered it.

Both monks wanted to study in Tang China. According to the traditional accounts, they tried an overland route around 650 and were turned back at the Goguryeo frontier, then set out again in 661. Wonhyo had his famous awakening and abandoned the trip. Uisang went on alone by sea to study Huayan (Hwaeom) under Zhiyan at Mount Zhongnan. Sources differ on the exact dates of Uisang’s passage and return, so this article gives them only as “the 660s-670s.”

“Who will lend me an axe with no handle? I will carve a pillar to hold up the sky.”

– Source: Samguk Yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), Volume 4, “Wonhyo the Unbridled” (a song Wonhyo is said to have sung in the streets)

◆ Same Era, Different Worlds

🏛️ China

Under Emperor Gaozong, Chang’an was the capital of Buddhist learning. Zhiyan and his pupil Fazang (643-712) systematized the Huayan school, while Xuanzang translated scriptures brought from India.

🗿 Byzantine Empire

Under Constantine IV, Constantinople withstood the Arab siege of roughly 674-678, helped by “Greek fire.” A century after Justinian, the empire was fighting for survival.

⚔️ Western Europe

Merovingian Frankish kings ruled Gaul, and Anglo-Saxon England was converting to Christianity. Learning survived mainly in monasteries.

🕌 Islamic World

The Umayyad Caliphate began in 661 and ruled from Damascus, expanding across North Africa and Central Asia.

Two Paths: Attempts to Reach Tang China

TANG

Mt. Zhongnan (Zhiyan)

SILLA

Gyeongju · Bunhwangsa

Buseoksa (676)

Uisang: crosses the sea (660s)

Wonhyo: turns back

Wonhyo 617-686 · Uisang 625-702
c. 650 overland attempt fails → 661 second attempt → the roads part

[Schematic: the two monks’ attempts to reach Tang China and the main Silla temples (not to scale)]

🌙 Scene from That Day

“It was a rainy night. Parched in the dark, he fumbled for a gourd of water, and it tasted sweet and cool. At dawn he saw that he had slept in a tomb, and that the vessel was a skull.”

“Wonhyo’s stomach turned. Then he understood. The water had not changed overnight; his mind had. When the mind arises, all things arise; when it stills, skull and cup are not two. He saw no reason to travel to China and turned back.”

Note: The skull-water story is not in the Samguk Yusa. It comes from Chinese hagiographic sources such as the Song gaoseng zhuan (a Song-dynasty collection of monks’ biographies) and is legendary in character. The scene is reconstructed from that tradition.

◆ Uncovering Historical Truth

Wonhyo embodied the idea of being “unobstructed” (muae). The Samguk Yusa says he named a prop modeled on the large gourds that entertainers juggled “muae,” and sang and danced from village to village, so that even the poorest could chant the name of Amitabha. A faith once confined to aristocrats reached the common people. Think of the wandering friars of the later Franciscan movement, six centuries on. The actual words of his songs have not survived intact.

His real weapon, though, was the brush. Over a dozen of his works survive, and his commentary on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana was read in China and Japan so widely that it was nicknamed the “Haedong Commentary.” Its core ideas are “One Mind” (ilsim) and “harmonization of disputes” (hwajaeng): everything arises from one mind, so quarreling doctrines, seen from higher ground, fit together. His Treatise on the Ten Approaches to Harmonizing Disputes attempted exactly this, though only fragments survive.

Uisang took the other road. After studying Huayan under Zhiyan, he returned and composed the Diagram of the Dharma Realm of the One Vehicle of Hwaeom, a 210-character poem laid out as a winding diagram, the whole teaching compressed into one image. The Samguk Yusa records that he founded Hwaeom temples in mountains across Silla, and the Samguk Sagi records the founding of Buseoksa in 676, in the 16th year of King Munmu. Hwaeom’s vision, in which “one is all and all is one,” suited a newly unified kingdom that needed to bind many ranks and regions into a single order. Uisang also promoted Avalokiteshvara and Amitabha devotion, which brought him close to ordinary believers. Structurally, a network of monasteries bound by a master’s teaching resembles the Benedictine system in the West, though Silla’s was tied closely to royal patronage.

Period

Late 7th century CE (unification era)

Key Figures

Wonhyo (617-686), Uisang (625-702)

Core Ideas

One Mind and harmonization / Hwaeom “one is all”

Legacy

A distinct Korean Buddhism, popularized for all

🔍 International Academic Perspectives

Korean/Asian Scholars

Most treat Wonhyo as the great synthesizer and popularizer, and Uisang as the architect of a Hwaeom school, complementary rather than rival figures. Wonhyo’s commentaries are also credited with influencing Fazang’s own writings on the Awakening of Faith.

Western Historians

Scholars of Buddhist studies caution that the skull-water tale and the Princess Yoseok romance are later legend. Some research also notes that certain Wonhyo works reached China only after a delay, so claims that he “instantly transformed” the mainland deserve care.

📖 Key Terms Explained

Hwajaeng (和諍): “Harmonization of disputes”: Wonhyo’s method of reconciling rival Buddhist doctrines under a higher unity.
Hwaeom (華嚴, Huayan): A school based on the Flower Garland Sutra, teaching that all things are mutually interpenetrating.
Muae (無碍): “Unobstructed”: freedom from attachment, also the name of Wonhyo’s gourd and song.
Silla (신라): Ancient Korean kingdom (traditionally 57 BCE-935 CE), which unified most of the peninsula in the 670s.

◆ Lessons for Today’s World

Wonhyo asked, “Whose religion is this?” He lowered the threshold of a difficult tradition with song and dance, much as public lectures and open online courses try to do now. His hwajaeng offers a way to read a polarized society: ask not “who is right?” but “what do we hold in common?”

Uisang asked, “How does an idea last?” His answer was people, places and institutions, a community of disciples and a mountain temple that still stands. Neither man simply copied what he learned in China; both remade it for Silla. Independence of thought, they suggest, comes from digestion rather than isolation, which is a useful reminder for any country absorbing global ideas.

Aspect	Silla Era	Modern Parallel
Social cohesion	One Mind and hwajaeng to mend a war-torn people	Dialogue across generational, regional and ideological divides
Absorbing foreign ideas	Learn Tang Buddhism, then reinterpret it as Haedong thought	Adopt global knowledge and recreate it as distinctive content
Culture	Street songs and mountain Hwaeom schools	Public lectures, online humanities, temple stays

Two Streams, One River: Silla to Today

Wonhyo
People · Harmony · Freedom
Uisang
System · Hwaeom · Order

Haedong Buddhism
Intellectual independence

Knowledge in plain words
Dialogue across difference
Communities that endure

[Schematic: how Wonhyo’s popularization and Uisang’s systematization shaped Haedong Buddhism, and what it asks of us today]

📚 Diving Deeper

Buseoksa in Yeongju, founded in 676 by Uisang on royal orders, is one of the Sansa, Buddhist Mountain Monasteries in Korea, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018.
Legend says the maiden Seonmyo, who loved Uisang, became a dragon to protect him, and the temple’s name means “floating rock.” This is folklore, not a historical record. Compare it with the way medieval European hagiography embroiders saints’ lives.
Read Samguk Yusa Vol. 4 (the Wonhyo and Uisang chapters), Samguk Sagi Vol. 46 (the Seol Chong biography), and the Chinese Song gaoseng zhuan side by side, and see how each tells the story differently.

The Voice of Living History

Wonhyo lowered the threshold; Uisang sank the roots. Because the force of the crowd met the force of the system, Buddhism became Silla’s own. The power to weave difference into unity is what makes a society’s thought.

“One gourd echoed through the streets; one mountain stood for a thousand years – the spirit of Silla endures.”

Previous Episode

Episode 22: Seokguram – The Thousand-Year Smile

Next Episode

Episode 24: Seol Chong and Gangsu – Learning in Silla

The Korean Today “History Lives On” Series
The Silla Chronicle (35 Episodes)
Bridging Ancient East Asia and the Modern World

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