After the Garden, Before the Forest: Wŏnhyo’s Hwajaeng Method and the Question of Totalitarianism in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Gnostic Study of Religion

Abstract

Jeffrey J. Kripal’s ten monographs—from Kālī’s Child (1995) to How to Think Impossibly (2024)—have done as much as the work of any single American scholar to put mystical, paranormal, and altered-state experiences back at the center of religious-studies inquiry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2008), in the most theoretically substantive review article devoted to that work, has charged that Kripal’s gnostic vision, however liberatory in intention, “would inevitably degenerate to some kind of totalitarianism.” This essay takes Hanegraaff’s charge seriously without endorsing it and reformulates the disagreement through the methodological resources of seventh-century Korean Buddhism—specifically, Wŏnhyo’s hwajaeng (和諍, “harmonization of doctrinal disputes”) method as developed in his fragmentary Simmun hwajaeng non. The argument is that Wŏnhyo’s explicit refusal of doctrinal classification (panjiao 判教) provides a third methodological path that neither Kripal’s gnostic synthesis nor Hanegraaff’s empirical agnosticism can supply on its own—but that adopting this third path requires Kripal to revise three of his twenty Secret Body “gnomons” (the Filter Thesis, the Traumatic Secret, and the Super Story) in non-trivial ways, and requires Hanegraaff to recognize a determinate scope within which his methodological agnosticism does not exhaust the discipline’s descriptive task. This essay is offered as a contribution to the comparative philosophy of religion.