Won Buddhism

• 1. Introduction

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  Won Buddhism was born from a single act of defiance against the modern world. On the 28th of April, 1916, a young man named Bak Jungbin - later known as Sotaesan - sat in deep contemplation in the southwest corner of the Korean peninsula and claimed to have reached enlightenment. He was twenty-five years old. His fellow villagers had already written him off as a lost soul. He had only two years of formal schooling, in the Confucian tradition. And yet from that moment forward, he would set about building something entirely new.

  His founding motto laid out the challenge plainly: "With this Great Opening of matter, let there be a Great Opening of spirit." Korea in the early twentieth century was caught between the weight of Japanese occupation, the fading dominance of Confucianism, the rising influence of Christianity, and the disorienting pace of material progress. Sotaesan believed that overemphasis on the material world created suffering, and he intended to do something about it.

  What emerged is Won Buddhism - a tradition whose very name signals its intentions. The Korean word won means "circle", and that circle, the Il Won Sang or One Circle Image, hangs above the altar in every Won Buddhist temple in the world today. There are now over five hundred temples in Korea alone, and more than seventy centers spread across twenty-three countries. How did a rural order founded by a poor farmer's son with two years of schooling become a global religion? And what exactly does Won Buddhism teach that sets it apart from the tradition it grew out of?

• 2. A Country Searching for Itself

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  Buddhism arrived on the Korean peninsula in the fourth century CE, making it one of the oldest established faiths in the region. But by the time of the Joseon dynasty, which ran from 1392 to 1910, Confucianism had displaced it as the dominant belief system, and Buddhism was actively suppressed.

  Christianity arrived next - first Catholicism, then Protestantism - in the late nineteenth century. When Japan occupied Korea beginning in 1910, Japanese-oriented Buddhism gained prominence, in part as a deliberate counterweight to Christian influence. The result was a religious landscape in flux, with established traditions jostling against colonial pressure and foreign imports.

  Into this environment emerged a cluster of new movements seeking to either reform traditional Korean Buddhism or replace it outright with something they called a "new Buddhism." Won Buddhism was one of these movements. Sotaesan grew up in this moment of contested religious identity, in a poor village with no access to formal religious instruction beyond his two years in a Confucian school.

  After his enlightenment in 1916, he did not immediately claim Buddhist allegiance. He examined several religions before reading the Diamond Sutra and finding himself drawn toward Buddhism. His thought also carried Confucian and Taoist elements, which would be woven permanently into the doctrine he built. The Korean monk Jinul, who lived from 1158 to 1210, would eventually be included in Won Buddhism's scripture, bridging the old tradition and the new.

• 3. The Nine Disciples and the Blood Seal

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  Sotaesan's path to enlightenment was not a quiet one. According to Won Buddhist tradition, he began asking questions about universal phenomena at age seven. He spent four years praying to mountain spirits. He sought out those considered enlightened teachers and found them lacking. He then spent several more years in harsh physical conditions, in deep observation and contemplation.

  After his enlightenment in 1916, he gathered a small group of followers around him and selected nine disciples. The early principles he set for them were practical and demanding: diligence, frugality, abstinence from alcohol and smoking, and the elimination of formal rituals and superstition. From the start, Sotaesan was less interested in ceremony than in daily life.

  To demonstrate this, he turned his community's energy toward tangible work. He established a thrift and savings institution and organized a year-long levee-building project to reclaim twenty-five acres of land from the sea for rice cultivation. The point was not spiritual theater but material improvement rooted in communal discipline.

  In August 1919, the nine disciples formalized their commitment. They pledged to follow the new movement even at the cost of their lives. When they pressed their thumbprints onto the paper recording that pledge, the prints were said to have turned red. Won Buddhists remember this event today as "The Miracle of the Blood Seal." In 1924, Sotaesan gave the community a formal name: Bulbeop Yeongu Hoe, the Society for the Study of the Buddha-dharma. It remained a small rural order based in Iksan, North Jeolla Province, for another two decades.

• 4. The Circle at the Altar

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  Walk into any Won Buddhist temple and your eye will go immediately to the circle. It hangs prominently above the altar - a large, plain disk called Il Won Sang, the One Circle Image. There is no statue of the Buddha. There is no figure to venerate. Just the circle.

  This is a deliberate theological statement. In the words of Won Buddhism's fourth Head Dharma Master, "The reason the Buddha is respected and venerated is not his physical body. The reason is his enlightened mind." Il Won Sang represents that mind - specifically the Dharmakaya Buddha, understood as the original source of all beings in the universe, the mind-seal of all Buddhas and sages, and the original nature of all sentient beings.

  The doctrine built around this symbol is organized into a Doctrinal Chart printed at the front of The Scriptures of Won Buddhism. Four Principles form the core: Awareness of Grace and Requital of Grace; Right Enlightenment and Right Practice; Selfless Service to the Public; and Practical Application of the Buddha-dharma. Two pathways - the Gateway of Faith and the Gateway of Practice - branch from these principles.

  The Gateway of Faith centers on the Fourfold Grace: gratitude toward Heaven-and-Earth, Parents, Fellow Beings, and Laws. These four beneficences define what Sotaesan believed no person can live without. The inclusion of Confucian values in this framework is deliberate; Won Buddhism never tried to erase the Confucian elements of Korean culture but wove them into its own structure. The Gateway of Practice teaches the Threefold Study: cultivating the spirit through meditation, inquiry into human affairs and universal principles, and choice in action.

• 5. New Religion or Reformed Buddhism?

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  Scholars have argued for decades about how to classify Won Buddhism, and Won Buddhists themselves describe their tradition in contradictory ways. Some say it is a new religion. Others call it a reformed Buddhism. The debate is genuine because the evidence points in both directions.

  On the side of continuity with mainstream Mahayana Buddhism: Won Buddhists believe in karma and rebirth, hold that the world's problems arise from and can be solved by our own minds, practice meditation including core Seon teachings, and share the goal of saving all sentient beings from suffering.

  On the side of divergence: Sotaesan made no claim of Buddhist training or direct transmission of teachings from an existing lineage. Won Buddhism draws on key concepts from non-Buddhist Korean traditions. Its core teaching holds that spiritual transformation should parallel - not retreat from - developments in the material world. The universalist message that all religions are essentially one sits uneasily with any tradition that claims exclusive truth.

  Sotaesan himself taught that "all religions are of one household although they have different names in accordance with the different times and districts of their foundation." Head Dharma Masters since have maintained that interfaith dialogue is central to Won Buddhist identity. This universalism is not incidental; it shapes everything from how temples are organized to how the faith approaches conversion. The religion Sotaesan built was designed to function across different traditions, not to displace them.

• 6. Equality in Practice and Doctrine

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  Gender equality in Won Buddhism is not an aspiration; it is written into the founding doctrine. Female clerics - called gyomunim, literally "someone devoted to the teaching" - hold the same status as their male counterparts. Women may be elected masters and sit on the Supreme Dharma Council, which is Won Buddhism's highest decision-making body. The Prime Dharma Master is elected by that council, which includes both senior and lay ministers who are themselves elected.

  But doctrine and practice have not always matched. In past years a culture developed in which female gyomunim were expected to remain celibate and to dress in traditional Korean clothing, while celibacy remained optional for male gyomunim, who could also wear contemporary dress. The source of this imbalance lay in the patriarchal social structure of the period, which held that women should not wear clothing that emphasized their form.

  Sotaesan recognized this as discrimination and sought to abolish it, but the tradition of women wearing traditional clothing persisted long after his death in 1943. The gap between the founder's stated principle and the lived reality of female ministers became a point of controversy within the community.

  In 2019, the Supreme Dharma Council passed a resolution ensuring equal marriage access for all ministers, regardless of gender. Female gyomunim have since begun to adopt both traditional and modern clothing. The 2019 resolution did not invent a new principle; it enforced one that Sotaesan had stated more than a century earlier. Won Buddhism's schools and social welfare centers in Korea, along with its medical missions to other parts of the world, extend the same logic: education and service are inseparable from the religion's founding commitment to genuine equality.

• 7. Scripture, Succession, and Growth

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  Sotaesan published his early treatise, the Treatise on the Renovation of Korean Buddhism, in 1935. He then expanded it into The Correct Canon of Buddhism, known in Korean as the Bulgyo Jeongjeon, in 1943, the year of his death. His successor, Cheongsan, published a new canon in 1962: The Scriptures of Won Buddhism, or Wonbulgyo Gyojeon. All were written in Korean, deliberately, to be accessible to as many people as possible.

  The Scriptures now incorporate the Dharma Discourses by the Second Head Dharma Master Cheongsan, alongside eight traditional Mahayana works. Among these is the Diamond Sutra - the very text that first predisposed Sotaesan to Buddhism - and Secrets on Cultivating the Mind by the Korean monk Jinul, who lived from 1158 to 1210.

  The community Sotaesan named in 1924 stayed small through the Japanese occupation. After Japan's departure in 1945, his successor Jeongsan renamed it Wonbulgyo in 1947, and membership grew markedly. South Korea's 2005 census recorded approximately 130,000 self-identified members, though Won Buddhist Headquarters estimates the worldwide number at over one million, on the grounds that many practitioners might identify on a census simply as "Buddhists." The question of how to count them remains open, a fitting ambiguity for a tradition that has always resisted sharp boundaries between itself and others. Won Buddhism's roughly five hundred Korean temples and seventy-plus centers in twenty-three countries hold weekly services on Sundays, typically including meditation, hymns, chanting, and a dharma talk - a format that draws as much from Protestant church practice as from traditional Buddhist ritual.