Western Buddhists, who were introduced to Korean Seon (Jp. Zen, Ch. Chan 禪) Buddhism through Seung Sahn sunim (1927-2004), might find it surprising that gong’an (Jp. kōan 公案) meditation practice is taught quite differently in Korea from the way Seung Sahn sunim trained his disciples in the West. For instance, Seon masters in Korea generally do not ask their student to resolve a series of different gong’an gates like the way Seung Sahn sunim did. Instead, meditating on a single gong’an is considered sufficient in itself to bring the student to full awakening. It is also not a common practice to allot one-on-one private interview (Jp. dokusan 独参) time with a Seon master as part of the daily training schedule in a Korean monastery; although students can certainly meet with their teacher after having a breakthrough experience or when facing a difficult internal obstacle outside the regular monastic schedule. For native Korean Buddhists, it has been an open secret that Seung Sahn sunim heavily adopted the Japanese Rinzai Zen style in his teaching of gong’an practice, which was familiar to his Western disciples, but foreign to most Korean Buddhists. In this paper, I would like to introduce the other side, the teachings of gong’an practices by contemporary Korean Seon masters in Korea, which would be familiar to Korean Buddhists, but probably new to many Western readers. I choose to focus on the teachings of three masters─Songdam sunim (b. 1929), Seongcheol sunim (1912-1993) and Subul sunim (b. 1953)─not only for their eminence and scope of influence among contemporary Korean Buddhists, but also for their range of different interpretations and approaches to the gong’an practice. Various English verbs have been used to describe the act of “investigating into,” “ruminating upon,” or “concentrating on” the critical phrase of a gong’an, called hwadu (Ch. huatou, Jp. wato 話頭)1. I am particularly interested in examining the precise meaning of the act of “meditating on” a hwadu according to these Korean masters. In addition, in spite of the ruling orthodoxy of “sudden enlightenment” in the Korean Seon tradition, which disparages any attempt to present the path to enlightenment in a gradual way, Korean masters, nevertheless, have expounded different stages that most practitioners experience prior to sudden awakening. I will discuss their descriptions of the pre-enlightenment experience while arguing that a student’s awakening is often tested by their Seon master, not based on what happened after enlightenment, but rather based on the experience leading up to enlightenment. Lastly, I will visit the contemporary discussion of gong’an practice in the West and discuss the pitfalls of imagining a uniformity of gong’an practices largely based on the Japanese Rinzai Zen model.
