646 henrik h. sørensen
Ch’ŏnt’ae school was the other important denomination of Korean
Buddhism that had become absorbed into the Sŏn school at the time
of the merger in 1424 C.E., and it is likely that specific practices related
to this tradition were still in vogue in Sŏn circles during Chŭngsuk’s
time. In any case, it is should be borne in mind that Esoteric Buddhist
practices had been part of the general curriculum of Ch’ŏnt’ae Bud-
dhism long before it was formally introduced to Korea, so it is not
so surprising to find great similarities between esoteric Ch’ŏnt’ae and
Esoteric Buddhism. Again the identity between the kongan practice
and the contemplation of the letter a is brought up, and both are fused
into the “shortcut method,” a designation usually reserved for the kon-
gan or hwadu practice of Sŏn Buddhism.^62
The introduction to the Manyŏn Temple edition of the Chinŏn chip
offers, as we have seen, a highly interesting perspective on the rela-
tionship between the kongan practice of Sŏn and traditional, Esoteric
Buddhism as seen in a seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist context.
Whether the practical grounds for making the contemplation of the
letter a and hwadu practice compatible are present or not, it is a clever
move on the part of the author of the introduction to utilize the doc-
trine of universal emptiness symbolized by the letter a as the link to
the “wordless” Sŏn meditation. Through this hermeneutical feat he
succeeds in establishing a plausible ideological basis for both types of
practice. Hence we may see Chŭngsuk as following in the footsteps
of Hŏung Pou in the process of making Esoteric Buddhist practices
compatible with, and eventually identical to, Sŏn meditation.
Esoteric Buddhist Cults
In addition to the more common, exoteric forms of Avalokiteśvara,
such as Suwŏl Kwanŭm and Paegwi Kwanseŭm
, a number of Esoteric Buddhist forms of the bodhisattva were
also in vogue in Korea during the Chosŏn. Among these were of
course that of the thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Avalokiteśvara;
Ekādaśamukha; and that of the Ṣaḍaksaravidyạ̄ , the four-armed form
of the bodhisattva that also became popular in Tibet from the medi-
eval period onwards.
(^62) A discussion of this can be found in Buswell 1987, 321–80.