Wonhyo’s Middle Path

The more information we have, the murkier “truth” becomes—a paradox fit for our polarized times of fake news and intentional floods of misinformation. So what are we supposed to do with all these truths? 

Buddhism does challenge fixed truths, but it doesn’t abandon them entirely. Skillful means are still means: useful and yet provisional. As any East Asian meditation master or poet turned Bruce Lee enthusiast will tell you, don’t mistake the finger for the moon.

But if “emptiness” is our philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card, we should ask how to practice it without slipping into a fortune cookie variety of mass-marketed Zen—endless paradoxes, sudden shouts, and the occasional imaginary cat murder. Beyond that, we need tools for both thinking and unthinking. And here’s where the 7th-century Korean scholar-monk Wonhyo becomes relevant. His ideas might help us now, especially when it comes to holding truth lightly, without letting it slip entirely through our fingers.

The Life and Legend

Like many early dharma teachers, what remains of Wonhyo is a mix of myth, legend, and history. We can—albeit imperfectly—piece together a story of his life from his voluminous writings, a few historical records, the 13th-century Samguk Yusa account of the period, and the biography of his friend and fellow scholar-monk Uisang (625–702). 

Born in 617 and having died in 686, Wonhyo lived during a pivotal era: The Tang dynasty (618–907) was consolidating power in China, while the Buddhist kingdom of Silla (57 BCE–935 CE) accelerated its conquest of the Korean Peninsula. Ordained at 15, he quickly demonstrated remarkable intelligence. He mastered Yogacara thought, with its focus on analyzing mind and consciousness, but also studied Madhyamaka reasoning and absorbed every major Mahayana current known in East Asia. By the end of his life, Wonhyo had written about eighty works in more than 200 fascicles (sections of larger works that often circulated independently). Tireless and never sectarian, he refused to wed himself to any single Buddhist school or to the monastic precepts. Despite—or because of—this renegade streak, his writings were widely respected.

Among Koreans and Buddhist experts, however, Wonhyo is best remembered for his enlightenment tale. He and Uisang set out for Tang China to study the newly translated Yogacara texts brought back by the monk-traveler Xuanzang (602–664). Tang was the ultimate learning destination for East Asian monks in the 7th century. But somewhere along the way, Wonhyo turned back. Why is explained in legend: Caught in a downpour, he and Uisang sheltered in a pitch-dark cave, drinking from what seemed like gourds of fresh water. At dawn, they saw that the cave was a tomb, and the gourds were human skulls filled with fetid water. Horrified, Uisang recoiled. Wonhyo, instead, awakened. The taste of the water hadn’t changed; only his perspective had. Enlightenment, he realized, was not in some distant monastery but right in front of him. So he returned to Silla.

Or so the story goes. Inspiring as it is, there is no solid proof beyond later legends, which circulated in several versions. The skull story may have been embellished, even if Wonhyo decided he didn’t need to continue to Tang. Implausible? Yes. Impossible? Not entirely.

But if we read the tale as practice rather than biography, its truth lies in the lesson it offers. Here, Wonhyo’s own method of argumentation is useful: We can accept that he meant to go, reject the skull story as fantasy, and still find value in it. Fiction gives us space to think through the things that trouble us. Taken this way, the story teaches that awakening is not elsewhere but in our immediate experience. There is “truth” in this story, “from a certain point of view.”

Harmonization and the Middle Way

Wonhyo’s method of argumentation—affirmation, negation, negation of the negation, and finally the affirmation of both—appears throughout his works, from his theory of mind to his commentary on the Vajrasamadhi Sutra. His aim was not to pit doctrines against each other but to harmonize them, an approach known in Korean as hwajaeng (“harmonization of disputes”). No single doctrine was complete, but each revealed a facet of truth. 

This harmonizing bent reflects an East Asian philosophical concept known as essence-function (Ch.: tiyong; Kr.: cheyong), which holds that reality itself is the source while particular manifestations express it. In Mahayana Buddhism, this means one ultimate dharma truth, with many schools expressing its facets. While others might wield this as a polemic, arguing that one school is the most authentic, Wonhyo emphasized instead the merits and limits of every perspective. All things are “empty” not because they have no value but because each must be reevaluated when reasoning hits its limits.

One example comes from Wonhyo’s analysis of the Vajrasamadhi Sutra. Shariputra puzzles over Buddha’s claim that the myriad dharmas are merely “verbalization and locution” and therefore meaningless. Why preach at all if this is the case? Wonhyo unpacks the paradox: First, affirmation—conventionally, there are thirty-seven constituents in the path to enlightenment; second, negation—they are not ultimately distinct; third, clarification—even negation is provisional. In the end, the claim remains a helpful guide. 

Wonhyo’s point is summed up in another comment on the same text: 

While it says that ‘the real is void,’ it does not obviate the principle of its real characteristic; therefore, it says ‘and yet not void.’ Although it does not involve the real, it also is not devoid of the real; therefore, it says that ‘voidness is real and yet unreal.’ This means that explaining the principle of true voidness involves the real. 

In other words, question truisms, but don’t imagine we can do without them.

Truth, Emptiness, and the Two Truths

Wonhyo’s approach does not dismiss truths altogether but insists that any truism retains value only if it remains open to reevaluation. Dismissing everything as “empty” might feel clever, but it only replaces one absolute with another. Truisms can be negated as empty because they depend on other concepts—including their opposites—for meaning. But the negation itself also depends on the original claim to have force. Stopping here, though, only leaves us stuck; the initial proposition can still be helpful in specific circumstances.

Wonhyo illustrates this with a pithy paradox of his own: “The horns of an ox are not existent, and the horns of a rabbit are not nonexistent. Thus, what you cling to are only words.” Oxen clearly have horns, and rabbits don’t—though recent reports in Fort Collins, Colorado, of cottontails sprouting wartlike, hornish growths under a Shope papilloma virus infection almost accidentally prove that “rabbit horns” are not nonexistent. Viral oddities aside, the very phrase “rabbit horns” grants them existence in concept. Likewise, calling ox horns “not existent” shows that the word itself is arbitrary—change the label, and the phenomenon remains. 

Wonhyo does not deny objections to these paradoxes; he acknowledges they can be reasonable, even if they miss the point. His aim is not an “agree-to-disagree” shrug but a push to keep the argument moving. By forcing both sides to reassess, he avoids easy absolutes while leaving space for provisional truths.

Rethinking Truth

Wonhyo most likely intended his analytical method to resolve Mahayana doctrinal disputes. But it still speaks to our age of polarization, when we need to take a step back and reexamine truth claims without clinging to them. His fourfold method shows how: First, make a truth claim; second, negate it by exposing its limits—its emptiness; third, recognize that this negation, too, is dependent and thus empty; and, finally, avoid the impasse by acknowledging the claim’s limited but still valuable insight. By refusing to dismiss or absolutize, Wonhyo pushes debate forward. And while this might sound like 7th-century monk business, the same logic shows up in our own Buddhist arguments today.

Take D. T. Suzuki or Seung Sahn—pioneering Buddhist teachers who helped bring Buddhism to the West but often shaped it to fit what they thought Westerners wanted. In many ways, their presentations were distortions. Using Wonhyo’s method, first, affirmation: They elevated meditation and rationalized spirituality. Second, negation: Critics are correct that this was incomplete, even misleading, narrowing Buddhism to what could be marketed. Third, negation of the negation: Yet dismissing them outright or finding the need to correct would itself be empty, since they shaped how countless people first encountered Buddhism and served as important gateways to the dharma. Finally, affirmation of the negation: Their teachings, flawed as they were, still contain useful insights that can be reexamined and used differently today.

Buddhism, as an intellectual practice, emphasizes reevaluating judgments without discarding them outright, while being aware that they may still prove useful elsewhere. For Wonhyo, this was the middle path: Never negate so completely that no possibility of truth remained. What seemed like an impasse was, for him, a chance to keep questioning, to open more angles of understanding. As the Jedi master Yoda said, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” Wonhyo would agree—though he’d remind us that after unlearning, we’d better be ready to rethink it all over again “from another point of view.” Argument and analysis were meant to move us forward, expanding our awareness rather than shutting down the conversation.