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

This paper reconstructs the hwajaeng (reconciliation of disputes) of the Silla monk Wonhyo (元曉, 617-686) as a resource for addressing conflict in contemporary Korean society. Situating hwajaeng in seventh-century East Asia, an age of war and doctrinal fragmentation, it stresses that Wonhyo’s reconciliation addressed primarily exclusivistic disputes over the interpretation of Buddhist doctrine. This distances the argument from the “ecumenical Buddhism” and nationalist readings that collapse hwajaeng into an ideology of social unification.
Even so, in reconciling particular doctrinal disputes, Wonhyo developed principles of broader generality, reconstructed here as three: acknowledging the conditional validity of each position; recognizing the relativity of language; and interlinking differentiated meanings on the basis of the “One Mind,” understood not as a fixed origin but as a site of emptiness and potentiality. “Opening and integrating” and “neither identical nor different” are not logical forms separate from these principles but a language describing how views, precisely because none is complete in itself, open onto and overlap one another. Wonhyo’s integration thus rests not on identity but on emptiness-as-difference. His reconciliation of the disputes over buddha-nature and the three bodies further shows that hwajaeng is not a static consensus but a generative movement in which differences become one another’s conditions and yield better differences.
On this basis, the paper redescribes ideological polarization, regional depopulation, development-versus-conservation disputes, and the polarized digital public sphere. The proposal is neither to suture nor to abandon conflict, but to identify the conditions under which each position has its own partial validity; to distinguish differences that should be respected in themselves from claims and practices subject to public evaluation; and to design the conditions under which differences can move toward mutual generation. This hwajaeng pluralism offers an alternative to the limitations of existing pluralisms. As a methodological limit, however, hwajaeng cannot be completed through formal procedure alone: once procedure replaces disposition, hwajaeng itself becomes another formalism.