Toeong Seongcheol

Toeong Seongcheol (退翁性徹, 1912–1993) was the most influential Korean Seon master of the twentieth century and served as the seventh Supreme Patriarch (Jongjeong) of the Jogye Order from 1981 until his death^[1]. Born Yi Yeongju on 6 April 1912 in what was then Korea under Japanese rule, he was a precocious child who reportedly read by the age of three and worked through the Chinese classics in his early youth before turning to Western philosophy and Eastern religion^[1]. His decisive turn to Buddhism came when he encountered Yongjia Xuanjue's Song of Enlightenment, an experience he later described as 'a bright light had suddenly been lit in complete darkness.' He took monastic ordination in March 1937 at Haeinsa under the recommendation of Seon Master Dongsan, receiving the dharma name Seongcheol, and reported a first awakening at Geum Dang Seon Center in 1940^[1].

Seongcheol's life as a monk became legendary for its austerity^[1]. He undertook eight years of jangjwa bulwa — long sitting without lying down — and from 1955 to 1965 sealed himself into a ten-year retreat at Seongjeonam Hermitage on Mt. Gaya, refusing virtually all outside contact^[1]. Visitors who later wished to meet him were famously required to perform three thousand prostrations before the Buddha; he applied this rule even to South Korean President Park Chung-hee, who never received the audience because he refused the prostrations. In 1967, after his appointment as Spiritual Head (Bangjang) of the Haeinsa Chongnim, he delivered the so-called 'Sermon of One Hundred Days' (백일법문) — two-hour daily lectures over more than three months that interwove Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Tiantai, Huayan and the Korean Seon record with references to modern physics, and that fundamentally reshaped Korean Buddhist preaching^[2]. His doctrinal banner was Dono Donsu (돈오돈수), 'sudden enlightenment, sudden cultivation,' which he defended against the gradual-cultivation reading of Jinul that had dominated the Jogye Order since the Goryeo period^[1].

When the Jogye Order elected him Jongjeong in 1981, Seongcheol famously refused to travel to Seoul for the enthronement ceremony and stayed at Haeinsa, where he continued to live as an ordinary monk in Toesoeldang, the same room in which he had been ordained, until he died there on 4 November 1993^[1]. His written legacy is substantial: through Haeinsa's Jang'gyung'gak imprint between 1976 and 1992 he produced eleven volumes of his own dharma talks together with thirty-seven annotated translations of Chan and Seon classics, including *Seonmun Jeongno* (선문정로, 'The Correct Path of the Seon School,' 1981), the *Baegil Beommun* edition of the Hundred-Day Sermon, and a Korean edition of the *Liuzu Tanjing*^[3]. His principal dharma heirs include Wŏntaek of Baekryeonam, who continues to oversee the publication of his collected talks, and a wider circle of Haeinsa-trained masters who maintain his sudden/sudden line within the contemporary Jogye Order^[3].