在近代時期韓國一些佛學界知識分子積極地接受了西方 哲學的概念和理論，並建立了近代意義上的佛教哲學。他們認為佛 學從根本上把真如或心看作是本體，是一種說明人間和世界的哲學 性宗教，因此他們把佛教哲學看作是一種形而上學，並把「現象和 實在」之類的形而上學模式適用於佛教哲學之中。他們認為西方哲 學從唯物論發展到了唯心論，而在唯心論内又從客觀唯心論發展到 了絕對唯心論。他們把這種西方哲學的發展模式原封不動地應用到 了佛學之中，把佛學作為唯心論的發展史來理解。其結果是他們試 圖對各種佛學教理進行新的判教，並將與絕對唯心論相符合的佛學 教理看作是其發展的最高境地。另外他們依據佛教哲學所獨有的特 徵而提出了「現象即實在論」，強調實在並不是現象背後的獨立存 在，而是現象上的直接表現。

Professor, Department of Buddhist Studies, Dongguk University, Korea Abstract: In the early modern Korea, some Buddhist intellectuals actively adopted concepts and theories of Western philosophy, and established the modern sense of Buddhist philosophy. They considered Buddhist philosophy as a form of metaphysics. As they thought that Buddhism is basically a philosophical religion that explained human beings and the world using suchness (tathata) or mind as the substance. Hence, they deployed the schema of metaphysics such as “phenomenon and reality” to understand Buddhist philosophy. They understood Western philosophy to have developed from materialism to idealism, and within the sphere of idealism, from objective idealism to absolute idealism. Such developmental schema of Western philosophy was applied directly to Korean Buddhism to comprehend it in terms of the history of development of idealism. As a result, they made diverse attempts to make a new doctrinal classification of various Buddhist doctrines, through which they treated the Buddhist doctrines that best corresponded to the ideas of the absolute idealism as the most advanced. Furthermore, they extracted the idea of “phenomena as reality” as the characteristics of Buddhist philosophy, and emphasized that reality does not exist behind the phenomenon, but is expressed directly through the phenomenon.