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

Coexistence and harmony have now become central concerns of our time and society. In the modern context, where individuals premised on isolation and self-interest were established as primary subjects, society tended to be understood through contract theory as the product of agreements designed to secure the interests of those individuals. Korean society, which began to adopt these conceptions of the human and the social more fully through the formation of civil society following the June Uprising of 1987 that ended military dictatorship, has likewise become familiar with this perspective. However, as these notions of the individual and society were increasingly reduced to the economic human model of Homo economicus, they contributed to a crisis of coexistence and harmony, symbolized most acutely by contemporary ecological crises. In response, this paper proposes Homo indranetius as a model of humanity positioned as the subject of efforts to expand habitability. Homo indranetius is a practical being who not only perceives the self, society, the world, and the universe through the lens of networks, but also extends this perspective into practice through the will and capacity to confront and overcome crises threatening habitability. As an alternative view of humanity, Homo indranetius draws on the Hwaeom metaphor of Indra’s net to grasp the reality of existing beings, while also demonstrating affinity with the actor-as-network proposition emphasized in actor-network theory. This concept highlights that for anything to exist, it must secure dependent co-arising with other beings, and that such dependence constitutes the very condition enabling mutual existence. At the same time, each bead retains its own dignity and singularity (獨存) precisely by shining distinctly and thereby reflecting all other beads. The addition of the term homo serves only as a heuristic to emphasize the responsibility borne by human beings as a species. In other words, the responsibility for overcoming the fundamental destructiveness of modern civilization, which emerged with the rise of individualized subjects, rests uniquely with human beings who are capable of self-awareness and of assuming responsibility for action through the exercise of a certain degree of free will. If this alternative image of humanity can be shared, it is anticipated that such a shared perspective may be extended into a practical response to the crisis of habitability faced not only by humanity but by all beings.