Jinul

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.

In 1190 Jinul and a group of companions formed a society for the joint practice of concentration and wisdom, on a compact drawn up years earlier at an examination gathering where the participants had agreed that the monastic order had lost its way. The society was a deliberate withdrawal. Goryeo Buddhism was wealthy, closely bound to aristocratic patronage, and involved in politics to the point of maintaining armed monks; the compact proposed that a small group should simply leave and practise.

The community grew and moved to a mountain in the south, where the temple was renamed and became the centre now known as Songgwangsa. Sixteen national preceptors came from it in succession, and it is counted among the three jewel temples of Korea as the one representing the community itself.

Late in his life Jinul added a further element. He encountered the writings of the Chinese master Dahui and adopted hwadu practice, the sustained holding of the critical phrase of a case until conceptual thought is exhausted, and he set it above his own earlier method for those capable of it. Korean Seon has kept both ever since, which is why it can look from the outside like two traditions housed in one building.

The Jogye Order, formally constituted in the twentieth century, names Jinul as its progenitor, and his combination of meditation, scriptural study and communal retreat remains the pattern it claims.