Wonhyo was, above all else, a commentator. His range of scholarly endeavor covered the whole gamut of East Asian Buddhist materials and the some 100 works attributed to this prolific writer, over twenty of which are extant, find no rivals among his fellow Korean exegetes. Looking at the paucity of works written in Silla Korea before Wonhyo, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Wonhyo who created the scholastic tradition of Silla Buddhism.1 The vast majority of Wonhy's works are explicitly commentaries, and even those writings that are not commentaries are still strongly exegetical in character. The East Asian tradition itself also treats Wonhyo principally as a commentator, as seen, for example, in the Song-Gaoseng-zhuan's(Song Biography of Eminent Monks) listing of Wonhyo's biography among those of the "doctrinal exegetes"(yijie), together with a number of other Korean scholiasts who played important roles in the development of the learned schools of Sinitic Buddhism.2

To call Wonhyo a commentator is neither to deny the many other roles he played in his full and varied life, nor to disparage other aspects of his religious career, including those of pilgrim, philosopher, mystic, thaumaturge, and proselytist; rather, it simply acknowledges that the principal vehicle through which Wonhyo conveyed his philosophical and spiritual insights was scriptural exegesis. In this proclivity, Wonhyo emulates intellectuals active within most traditional civilizations, where much of spiritual and religious understanding was conveyed through exegetical writing. As John Henderson remarks, "Commentaries and commentarial modes of thinking dominated the intellectual history of most premodern civilizations, a fact often obscured by modern scholars denigration of the works of mere exegetes and annotators. Until the seventeenth century in Europe, and even later in China, India, and the Near East, thought, especially within high intellectual traditions, was primarily exegetical in character and expression."3 This traditional esteem for commentary is frequently obscured in contemporary treatments of religion, which valorize meditative experience over religious exegesis, or which misguidedly presume that things old and primary(viz. scriptures) are somehow superior to the new and derivative(viz. commentaries).4 The commentary that I have been translating for the "Collected Works of Wonhyo" is his Exposition of the Vajrasamadhi-Sutra(Kumgangsammaegyong-non), the longest work in Wonhyo's oeuvre. In this treatise, Wonhyo brings to bear all the exegetical tools acquired throughout a lifetime of scholarship to the explication of this scripture. Wonhyo's treatment of this text provides a seminal vision of the Buddhist doctrinal synthesis then emerging in Silla Korea. Rather than exploring his contributions to doctrine, however, in this paper I propose instead to examine the structure and style of Wonhyo's Exposition as a representative example of the East Asian commentarial form. In his virtuosity at manipulating the commentarial form, Wonhyo may be viewed not simply as a paragon of Korean scholarly achievement but as someone who was emblematic of the highest achievements of the Sinitic Buddhist tradition as a whole.

*Footnotes

1. The first Buddhist exegetical work said to have been written in Silla was the Sabunnyul kalma ki (Commentary to the Karman section of the Dharmaguptaka-Vinaya), by Chi-mymong (d.u.), ca. seventh century, but this work is no longer extant.  Wonhyo's friend )isang wrote but two or three shorter exegeses contemporaneously with Wonhyo, but Wonhyo still remains by far the earliest, and most prolific, of Silla's Buddhist exegetes. See discussion in Rhi Ki-yong,  'Wonhyo and his Thought " Korea Journal 11-1 (January, 1971), p. 5.
2. See Zanning's definition of "doctrinal exegetes," the second of the ten categories of monks listed in the Song-gaoseng-zhuan, at T.51, no.2061:500.710a. W&nhyo is also listed among　doctrinal exegetes" in the Kory-period Samguk-yusa.
3. John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 1.
4. See Jose Ignacio Cabezon's discussion about the contemporary mistrust of exegesis in his edited volume Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), Introduction. Note also Edward Conzes denigration of the new in his Buddhist Thought in India (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), preface, p. 8.