Abstract

The Seed Thoughts by YU Youngmo and HAM Sukhun each may be summed up in “People are a May-fly seed” and “Seeds embodies the eternal meaning”. They used “seed” to refer to humans or people on the one hand and placed the notion of seed in the holistic context of the Eastern Asian tradition. Then, I seek to connect the anthropological notion and the holistic notion via cheng or integration. 『The Doctrine of the Mean』 says that any ultimate integration (至誠) reflects a total nature of objects involved (盡性) by showing that self realization and all other realizations are one and not two (成己成物) and by arriving at the stage ofholiness (聖). Then, I may be allowed to say that cheng is a mind or a power not only of humans but also of all other things. Important elements of cheng intentionality can be read out of two thinker’s various conceptual aspects. YU’s interpretation of history to be internalistic, his view of Hangul (Korean written language) as a revealational medium, his hermeneutics of Christian God as the Vacuum cannot be understood on the dichotomous model of humans-nature. HAM’s seed holism, his beliefs that humans’s minds are the heavenly mind and that all things under the heaven should come to be unified are best to be understood on the model of cheng intentionality of integration.