Taming the tiger of hwadu absolutism: Kanhwa Sŏn/Chan practices understood from the perspective of ritual practice and experience

Abstract

Kanhwa Sŏn has often been perceived as iconoclastic and impervious to theorizing. Furthermore, its critique of “hermeneutical rigidity” and “hwadu absolutism” point to the impossibility of a meaningful dialogue between its practitioners and scholars of Buddhism. It has even been argued that such characteristics of kanhwa Sŏn have compromised the possibility of its practice becoming adoptable in contemporary life.

But kanhwa Sŏn practiced in the summer and winter Sŏn/Chan retreats has all the trappings of ritual. In an effort to build a methodological bridge, this article attempts to provide the grounds for discussing kanhwa Sŏn practices from the perspective of social science. With this in mind, this article will highlight the experiences of the practitioners in the context of ritual practice while perceiving those experiences as socially determined manifestations.

The reason for this attempt is that there seems to be much similarity in the soteriological structure of kanhwa Sŏn practice with the structure of ritual practice that involves constructing and eliciting transformative experiences. Further similarities are in the motif of returning from the ritual/retreat having been transformed into a person with a new identity. By framing the practice of kanhwa Sŏn as ritual practice and experience, one can bring the discussion of kanhwa Sŏn into the wider discourses of the academic study of religion.