The Pure Land of the One Mind in Wŏnhyo’s Thought

Abstract

Pure Land teaching, being the practical Buddhism of East Asia, aims to maximize the possibility that all living beings might be reborn in the Pure Land. The Silla monk Wŏnhyo saw that the accomplishment of these kinds of aspirations was the consummation of the bodhisattva path of the Mahāyāna and said that he sought to firmly construct a view of this kind of pure land on the basis of his thought on the one mind. In this way Wŏnhyo made the “pure land of the one mind” function as the source of the liberation of living beings in the process of resolving such things as the issue of the scope and method of rebirth in the Pure Land and the problem of the existence and true character of the Pure Land. Thus the distinctive feature of Wŏnhyo’s Pure Land thought lies in the positive explanation of the basis of rebirth of all living beings in the Pure Land on the foundation of the one mind. This position is clearly differentiated from the more or less negative attitude of the Pure Land thinkers Tanluan and Daochuo; in other words, an approach that either emphasizes only the quick attainment of buddhahood after distinguishing between a difficult path and an easy path or putting in place a temporal or timely path of practice that corresponds to the period of the decline of the Buddhadharma. Furthermore, Wŏnhyo’s doctrinal learning of the Pure Land is set on the basis of the one mind, which means that the two aspects of the mind of great compassion, or the tainted nature of the pure land of true thusness, and the tathāgatagarbha, or the untainted nature of defiled lands, are interfused by means of the one mind. It does not mean a pure land of mind-only, in which a pure land exists only within the mind. Rather, it was Wŏnhyo’s conviction that all pure lands combining one’s own gratification land and the gratification lands of others are actual worlds that exist in a concrete manner, and that all living beings could be reborn in the actually-existing Pure Land of Extreme Bliss due to the buddha’s mind of great compassion and the tathāgatagarbha of ordinary beings. Through him, a pure land based on the one mind became the source of liberation for all living beings.