The story of Won-Hyo
In the year 650, a Buddhist monk named Won-Hyo and his friend, Eui-Sang, were on their way to China to study with a famous teacher, Huan-Tchuang. It began to pour with rain and it was getting quite dark, so the two travellers took cover in a mountain cave, where they soon fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, Won-Hyo woke up feeling desperately thirsty. Reaching about in the darkness, his groping fingers found a bowl of fresh rainwater. He drank deeply and was refreshed.
‘How strange,’ he thought, drifting back to sleep: ‘the thing that we were running away from, water, is also that which we seek. We run from it, and then we run towards it. Is all life such empty business?’
Won-Hyo awoke at dawn. The rays of the rising sun pierced deeply into the darkness of the cave. He looked around him, and suddenly realised that the bowl from which he had drunk in the night was actually a blood-coated, smashed-in human skull - with strange insects and worms crawling about in the muddy water! He lurched to the cave entrance to be violently sick.
Then descended upon him a tremendous calm. The same thing that had tasted so good in the night now made him feel revolted: he realised that experience itself was neither good nor bad; only thinking made it so. Laughing, Won-Hyo gave up the idea of going to China. What was the need? He had already found enlightenment, there in the dawn of the mountain cave.
When he got home, he gave up being a monk. He got married, raised a son and wandered about the markets in tatters, singing and dancing. He created the ‘Consciousness Only’ school of Korean Buddhism, based on the idea that only consciousness matters. His name, appropriately, means ‘First Dawn’.
In the year 650, a Buddhist monk named Won-Hyo and his friend, Eui-Sang, were on their way to China to study with a famous teacher, Huan-Tchuang. It began to pour with rain and it was getting quite dark, so the two travellers took cover in a mountain cave, where they soon fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, Won-Hyo woke up feeling desperately thirsty. Reaching about in the darkness, his groping fingers found a bowl of fresh rainwater. He drank deeply and was refreshed.
‘How strange,’ he thought, drifting back to sleep: ‘the thing that we were running away from, water, is also that which we seek. We run from it, and then we run towards it. Is all life such empty business?’
Won-Hyo awoke at dawn. The rays of the rising sun pierced deeply into the darkness of the cave. He looked around him, and suddenly realised that the bowl from which he had drunk in the night was actually a blood-coated, smashed-in human skull - with strange insects and worms crawling about in the muddy water! He lurched to the cave entrance to be violently sick.
Then descended upon him a tremendous calm. The same thing that had tasted so good in the night now made him feel revolted: he realised that experience itself was neither good nor bad; only thinking made it so. Laughing, Won-Hyo gave up the idea of going to China. What was the need? He had already found enlightenment, there in the dawn of the mountain cave.
When he got home, he gave up being a monk. He got married, raised a son and wandered about the markets in tatters, singing and dancing. He created the ‘Consciousness Only’ school of Korean Buddhism, based on the idea that only consciousness matters. His name, appropriately, means ‘First Dawn’.