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

What really results through the contact between a foreign thought and the native cultural tradition is not the understanding or interpretation of the foreign thought but that of the native cultural tradition itself. As it were, the idea to be expressed via the adoption already exists within the tradition itself, and the incoming philosophical system is utilized for its unique and more efficient interpretation, expansion, or merely its embellishment of the preexisting idea.Buddhism is indeed interpreted differently by East Asian Buddhists in the Wei-Chin era and Western scholars of modern times. The former developed Buddhism as a religious philosophy destined to spiritual freedom, while the latter transformed it as a empirical rationalism. This difference has arisen not because they each encountered a different Buddhism, but because their own individual inclination as well as the nature of the culture to which they belonged were completely different. Transcendentalism balanced with concern for the ordinary world was the very philosophy which the people of the Wei-Chin era were seeking, while empirical rationalism is the predominant philosophical trend of modern Western culture. Both people created the very philosophies responding to the trendy questions of each society.