Sudden Awakening, Gradual Cultivation

Jinul's formula is not original to him. He took it from the Chinese scholar-monk Zongmi and made it carry more weight than Zongmi had. The claim is that awakening comes as an event, undivided and not built up by stages, in which one sees directly that the mind is already the buddha nature, and that everything of substance still remains to be done afterwards. Habits laid down over a lifetime do not dissolve because their groundlessness has been perceived. So cultivation follows awakening rather than preceding it, and it is gradual because habits are.

This settled two arguments at once. Against the doctrinal schools, who held that Seon practitioners despised study and mistook a flash of feeling for attainment, it insisted that awakening is intelligible and can be given an account of. Against Seon practitioners who held that any talk of subsequent cultivation betrayed the suddenness of the insight, it observed that the objection is refuted by watching what people actually do after their awakening.

Jinul supported the position with a reading of Huayan philosophy taken from the lay scholar Li Tongxuan, which allowed him to argue that the scriptural tradition and the meditation tradition describe the same thing in different registers. His short manual, the secrets on cultivating the mind, is still the standard introduction to Korean Seon and is read well outside it.