Taming the tiger of <i>hwadu</i> absolutism: Kanhwa Sŏn/Chan practices understood from the perspective of ritual practice and experience
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".