Tracing the Etymology of Geumgangsan, the Dhammugal Bodhisattva, and the Origins of Hoeamsa

I. Introduction

The recent visit of President Moon Jae-in to India^[2] has greatly stirred scholarly interest in the ancient cultural exchange between Korea and India. In this process, Gaya has been mentioned as a place of origin of Buddhism, and, together with the successive excavation of new materials through China's Northwest Project, a new clue to the origin of the name Geumgangsan has arisen. Although interest in Geumgangsan has been heightened by the unprecedented Geumgangsan fire,^[3] the present author has already, in 2016 at the Society for East Asian Ancient Studies, presented a paper on the origins of the etymology of Geumgangsan and Hoeamsa titled "A Study of Pocheon as a Center of Ancient East Asian Civilization." Whereas that earlier presentation was studied with its focus on the raising of the problem and the history of Pocheon, this paper seeks to examine the etymology of Geumgangsan, the Dhammugal Bodhisattva, and the origins of Hoeamsa on the basis of the newly discovered clues found through Gaya.

Even before President Moon Jae-in's visit to India, many of today's Indian intellectuals had continually emphasized the exchange between the ancient civilizations of India and Korea. Already during the Japanese colonial period, the Indian poet Tagore, a Nobel laureate, referred to Korea as the "Lamp of Asia," puzzling Koreans; and the director of the Indian museum whom Dr. Kim Byung-mo—an expert on "Heo Hwang-ok" who advocated the southern-origin theory of the Korean people—visited during his time as a UN researcher once mentioned the exchange between the ancient civilizations of India and Korea. The place name Gaya is likewise commonly mentioned in numerous places associated with Buddhist remains. Mentioning Gaya first in a paper on Geumgangsan is because Gaya plays a very important role in understanding Geumgangsan.

If one seeks the most international place name in Korea connected with India from ancient times to the present, it would be "Geumgangsan." As is well known, sightseeing at Geumgangsan was, from the time of the Yuan dynasty in the Goryeo period, a major gift for foreign envoys. That the Yuan court, which ruled the world, regarded Geumgangsan—the place most distant from India within Buddhism, the mainstream international culture of the Yuan period—as the Geumgangsan of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and that there were many visitors, is a problem that is very important in ancient cultural exchange yet has not received sufficient attention nor been clearly explained.

The name "geumgang" in Geumgangsan is a term derived from Buddhism, like the Buddhist scripture the "Diamond Sutra" (Geumgang-gyeong) or the "Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra," the original name of the Heart Sutra. "Geumgang" is commonly understood in the sense of a diamond because of geumgangseok, which means diamond, but in fact in Buddhism "geumgang" symbolizes "enlightenment" and "wisdom"—like a flash of lightning, derived from lightning. The Buddhist practice commonly called "Myeongsim Gyeonseong (明心見性)" comes to mean the bright mind like lightning and the mind-nature that is the ground of the mind, so that "geumgang"—that is, thunder—becomes a symbol of Buddhism. The origin of Geumgangsan's being designated as the Geumgangsan of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra is commonly regarded as the theory of Chengguan, the renowned eminent monk of the Tang dynasty. However, Chengguan's mention alone is insufficient to fully explain the exceptional case that Geumgangsan occupies in ancient culture.

Geumgangsan, together with Baekdusan, is for Koreans an object almost of faith in folk legend and belief, and continues to exert a great influence in national religions and the like down to the present. Yet the theoretical verification of its origin is still ongoing. This paper is a study that seeks to examine the origin of the etymology of Geumgangsan through Hoeamsa near Pocheon and the Dhammugal Bodhisattva. Hoeamsa is the largest-scale temple associated with the Dhammugal Bodhisattva of Geumgangsan and, at the same time, also the temple most distant from it.

Besides the name Geumgangsan, another link connecting Korea and India is the "Bodhisattva." There are many research tasks related to the etymology of "Bodhisattva." Together with the origin of the term "bul" (Buddha), the origins of Buddhism's truly core terms remain obscure. This study of the origin of the name Geumgangsan seeks to examine, with its focus on tracing the etymologies of "Bodhisattva" and "bul," newly illuminated through Gaya.