불연 이기영의 분황 원효 인식

초록

This article analyzes Bulyeon(不然) Lee Gi-young (1922–1996) — one of twentieth-century Korea’s foremost humanists and Buddhist scholars — and his interpretation of Wonhyo (617–686). Korean intellectual history in the modern era has often been cast as a tension between inherited tradition and imported methodologies, and between adjudicative scholarship and creative scholarship. Moving beyond mere adjudication, Bulyeon looked back to Wonhyo’s seventh-century “creative hermeneutics” as a paradigm for renewing scholarship today. Bulyeon inhabited two intersecting vocations: the historian-philosopher who seeks knowledge and the lay dharma master who cultivates wisdom. As a professor he authored 138 works collected in 66 volumes; as a practitioner he organized the Korean Buddhist Research Institute and the Gudohoe (Seeking-the-Way Association). Inspired by Wonhyo’s bodhisattva ideal, he aimed to turn realized understanding into the transformation of others. Formed by wartime conscription under Japan, deprivation in the North, and broad training in Europe, Bulyeon made Wonhyo’s Silla Buddhism the focal case through which to integrate knowledge and wisdom “within a single circle.” He construed One Mind as the ontological ground of self and world and as the psychological, logical, and ethical basis for life, to be dedicated through the bodhisattva virtues and the ten pāramitās. Reading the Exposition on the Vajrasamādhi Sūtra (with its teaching of One Mind as both source and the world-sea through three kinds of emptiness) together with the Commentary on the Awakening of Faith (which enjoins “seeking the Buddha-Way above and teaching beings below”), he pursued a principled convergence of theory and practice. For Wonhyo, to “return to the One Mind Source” was to arouse the mind and realize awakening; recognizing that achievement as indebted to countless others, he vowed to “benefit sentient beings.” This vision decisively shaped Bulyeon’s integrated life as scholar and lay dharma master and remains a live challenge for scholars today.

키워드