Korea Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

The aim of this paper is to inquire critically Jung Do-Jun's critic of Buddhism and to clarify the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Confucianism in the metaphysical point of view. Through this study I arrived to this conclusion; Confucianism regards理 or 性, which is endowed in human mind, as the mind-independent objective absolute principle of the cosmic world, while Buddhism considers 理 or 性 as the relative principle, which is proper only to the appearance-world or transmigration-world. And in Buddhism the transmigration-world is constructed and exists only upon the karma(業) of the living mind. In Buddhism the human mind is regarded as the transcendental being, 眞如, which can be delivered from the world-attachment and can be made free from the transmigration. Based on that conclusion I suggest to categorize Confucianism as objective essentialism, which assumes the existence of the objective world, objective principles of nature and absolute principles of ethics, whereas Buddhism is subjective spiritualism, which denies the mind-independent objective existence of the world and takes all kinds of principles as subjective and relative. The absolute being in Buddhism is only the self-consciousness of 空, namely the pure mind or 眞如.