Preface

As humanity enters the AI era, it faces internal crises such as the threat of mass unemployment, and externally it confronts crises in which war scenarios that, before the AI era, remained mere possibilities are now being pushed to their extreme, as seen in the US-Iran war. Consequently, the re-establishment of human identity, together with mutual flourishing and connection through Hwajaeng (和諍, Reconciliation of Disputes), has become an essential task for human survival.

Just as the Eastern proverb says, "Even if the sky falls, there is a hole through which to escape," the West has Gödel's incompleteness theorems. This is the theorem that no matter how perfect a logic may be—like that of AI—there can never be a logic entirely without gaps (Kim Sang-il 2003). That humanity has an answer is certain; the key now is to find the method.

The re-establishment of human identity can be found in the method of Correlative Thinking, which sees the whole first. Much of the mass unemployment brought about by AI today stems from flawed decisions biased toward analytical methods that see the part before the whole. Humanity's traditional Correlative Thinking methods—which see the whole before the part—for example, the Eastern modes of ipche/transcendence (stereoscopic thinking), sunhwan (cyclical thinking), gonggam (empathy), and yunghap (convergence), can serve as methodological alternatives to the errors of AI's analytical thinking, which fails to survey the connected whole—errors such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. It is the same principle as how, when looking down at a mountain from its summit, one easily discovers what was never visible from the foot of the mountain. Furthermore, humanity's development of artificial intelligence goes beyond mere technological innovation; it amplifies conflicts among nations, groups, and classes, and gives rise to new forms of opposition. If ipche/transcendence, sunhwan, gonggam, and yunghap are theories of individual Correlative Thinking, then Hwajaeng, developed within Buddhism, can be called the application of Correlative Thinking as it relates to the community.

Hwajaeng has also developed in a differentiated manner within Buddhism according to circumstances. Hwajaeng first began from the binary relationship of arising-and-ceasing (生滅, saengmyeol) and suchness (眞如, jinyeo); later, with the emergence of Yogācāra (唯識, Consciousness-only), it became the Three-Natures (三性, samseong)—that is, a ternary relationship; and thereafter, with the rise of the Pure Land school (淨土宗) and others, it developed into a quaternary relationship. The problems humanity confronts today likewise ultimately arise from the collision of four economic theories, which can be resolved through the quaternary relationship of Hwajaeng. In Part I (Theory), this book presents the four modes of Correlative Thinking—ipche (立體, stereoscopic), sunhwan (循環, cyclical), gonggam (共感, empathy), and yunghap (融合, convergence)—and in Part II (Application), it links these to the Four-Gate (四門, Sammun) structure of Wonhyo's theory of Hwajaeng to present a method for a Symbiotic Connective Economy.

At the foot of Mount Wangbang, April 2026