만유의 존재는 나를 위해서 · All Existence Is for My Sake · Cosmic Self
What Is “All Existence Is for My Sake”?
Manyu-ui jonjae-neun na-reul wihaeseo (만유의 존재는 나를 위해서, the teaching that everything that exists is ordered toward the completion of the human person) is the anthropocentric claim in Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s thought that the created cosmos exists for the sake of the human being, its fruit and purpose. It holds that the person is not one item within nature but the center around which nature is arranged, the point at which the whole of creation reaches toward God.
In the Exposition of the Divine Principle, this claim is the subjective face of the Third Blessing, the human being’s dominion over creation (Gen 1:28).
The formula sounds, on first hearing, like an assertion of ownership or entitlement. Rev. Moon takes it in the opposite direction. He always pairs it with its mirror, the principle that nothing was made to serve itself, and reads the two together as a single relational structure.
I argue that “all existence is for my sake” is not an egoistic claim but the first-person face of the “living for the sake of others” ontology: the created world is ordered teleologically toward the completion of the individual person, the cosmic self (우주적 자아), so that “everything exists for me” and “I exist for everything” are the two poles of one structure grounded in the Third Blessing—a reading confirmed, not contradicted, by Rev. Moon’s insistence that nothing was created for its own sake.
the universe is created to reach that central point
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 12/18/1985) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The “central point” is the human being. Creation is not a static inventory but a movement, and the person is the place toward which the movement runs. That directedness is what the aphorism names, and it is grounded in the Third Blessing of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, where dominion over creation completes the human vocation (EDP 1996).
Methodology Note
This entry reads the 2003 Cheon Seong Gyeong (CSG) in its official English edition together with the 1996 Exposition of the Divine Principle and orients the argument against a title-level scan of the local Korean speech archive covering volumes 16 through 498. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their liturgical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not attempt a philosophical defense of anthropocentrism as such, nor a comparison with modern environmental ethics. All Rev. Moon passages are quoted from the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong and cited by date; no author translation of Korean is presented in the block quotes, and the one local-archive sermon named below is verified at the filename level for date, title, volume, and sequence.
Etymology: 萬有, 爲, and the Grammar of “For the Sake Of”
The phrase turns on three Sino-Korean elements whose ordinary senses already lean toward the theological reading. Manyu (만유 · 萬有) is a compound of man (萬, ten thousand) and yu (有, that which is, that which has being); literally “the ten thousand existents,” it is the classical East Asian way of saying “all that is.”
Jonjae (존재 · 存在) is “existence” or “a being.” Wihae (위해 · 爲) is the ordinary Korean verb of purpose and benefit, “for the sake of,” the same 爲 that anchors Rev. Moon’s entire ethics of wihaeyo sam, living for others.
The grammar matters. In everyday Korean, na-reul wihaeseo (“for my sake”) is unremarkable self-interest. Rev. Moon’s usage inverts the everyday sense while keeping the grammar: the “me” is not the appetitive ego but the completed person, so that “for my sake” comes to mean “for the sake of the point at which the cosmos reaches God.”
The maxim Rev. Moon repeatedly invokes in the same breath, manmul-jijung yu-in-choegwi (萬物之衆 惟人最貴, among the myriad things only the human is most noble), locates the phrase within a long Confucian-influenced tradition of human centrality, which the etymology of manyu already presupposes.
There is thus a gap between the common meaning and the theological meaning, and the gap is the whole point. The word for self-interest is made to carry the opposite of self-interest because the completed self is defined by what it exists for.
The Human Being Is the Point at Which Creation Reaches Its Center
The claim rests on the Divine Principle doctrine that God created the natural world before, and for the sake of, the human being.
In the Exposition of the Divine Principle, the Third of the Three Great Blessings is dominion over creation, and dominion here is not exploitation but the completion of a relationship in which the human being, resembling God in internal nature and external form, becomes the center that gathers all things toward their source (EDP 1996). Creation is arranged around the person the way a body is arranged around its life.
Rev. Moon presses the point through the body’s own design. The eyes presuppose light, the nose presupposes air, the ears presuppose sound; each organ was formed for something outside itself and before itself.
Read forward; the same logic makes the whole created environment a preparation for the being that would come last and stand at the center.
The entire universe was created for the sake of love.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 11/20/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Because the universe is for love and love requires a partner, the created order requires a being capable of loving and of being loved by God. That being is the human person, and this is why the Cheon Seong Gyeong can speak, in its section headings, of humankind as the center of all created beings. The anthropocentrism is real, but its axis is love rather than power. This distinction carries the rest of the entry.
“Everything for Me” and “I for Everything” Are One Structure, Not Two
The reading offered here stands or falls on a single move: that the aphorism cannot be understood apart from its mirror image. Rev. Moon never lets “all exists for me” stand alone. He states it alongside the flat denial that anything was made for itself.
Nothing was created for its sake alone.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 08/10/1997) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Placed against the aphorism, this looks like a contradiction: if nothing exists for its own sake, how can everything exist for mine? The resolution is that the “me” of the aphorism is not a self among selves but the relational center of the whole.
Everything exists for me precisely because I do not exist for myself; the moment the self turns inward, it forfeits the position that made the claim true. Rev. Moon’s ethics of living for others is not a second teaching added on but the condition under which the first teaching means anything at all.
This is the root of the creation and of the formation of the cosmos.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 03/10/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The “this” is living for the sake of others, which Moon here calls the root of creation itself, adding that even God exists for the sake of others. The structure is therefore symmetrical all the way up: God lives for the human, the human lives for creation, creation lives for the human, and the human lives for God. “For my sake” is one reading of that circle, taken from the standpoint of the person; “for others’ sake” is the same circle read from the standpoint of the act. They describe one relationship, not two.
This is also where Moon parts company with a reading he explicitly rejects. He denies that nature is governed by survival of the fittest (약육강식) and reframes what looks like predation as a love-mediated ascent: the mineral is taken up into the plant, the plant into the animal, the animal into the human, and the human into the love of God.
Lower creation, on this account, seeks to be absorbed upward to reach, through the human being, the love it could not reach on its own. The human is thus the bridge, and the aphorism describes the direction of the whole traffic.
The Created World Is the Human Being’s Third Parent
A distinctive and less familiar element of the teaching is Rev. Moon’s claim that the material world is the human being’s third parent. The reasoning is physical before it is theological: the body is built entirely from the elements of the earth, drawn in through food, water, air, and light, so that not a particle of it originates in the person. The human being is a microcosm, a small universe (소우주) that gathers and synthesizes the elements of the entire.
From this Moon draws a striking filiation. God is the origin; the mother and father are the second parents who transmit the seed; but the flesh that the seed becomes is supplied by the material cosmos, which is therefore, in his phrase, the third parent that raises the body. Creation does not merely surround the person; it composes the person. The aphorism then reads not as a boast but almost as a debt: everything exists for me because everything has, quite literally, become me.
This is why the confident self-declaration Rev. Moon authorizes for his members is not arrogance in his mouth but the recognition of a completed relationship.
I am the lord of the universe, the greatest in the universe.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 10/26/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The lordship named here is the lordship of the being through whom the cosmos returns to God in love, the microcosm that can gather all things and offer them. It is the Third Blessing spoken in the first person.
The transition from that objective doctrine to this subjective declaration is the whole distance the aphorism travels.
Internal Doctrinal Development
A title-level scan of the local Korean speech archive yields a diagnostic result. The exact lemma “manyu” (만유) appears in no sermon titles across the indexed corpus of 6,118 addresses, and the phrase “cosmic self” (우주적 자아) appears in none. The aphorism is not, and never became, a titled topic.
This is itself informative: the teaching lives inside the body of the sermons as a recurring interpretive device rather than being foregrounded as a subject in its own right. No frequency chart is warranted at this scale, and none is drawn.
What the scan does surface is the teaching’s liturgical home. The related lemma manmul (만물, all things) reaches thirty-five titles, of which twenty-four belong to addresses for the Day of All Things (만물의 날), the annual holy day on which Moon most consistently returned to the theme that creation exists for the human being. These addresses span the whole arc of the ministry, from 1966 (복귀역사와 만물의 날, vol. 16, sermon 15) through the late 1980s (만물의 날과 해방, vol. 178, sermon 8, 1988) and early 1990s (만물의 날과 사랑의 결실, vol. 217, sermon 9, 1991) to the mid-1990s (만물의 날과 화동의 주인, vol. 285, sermon 7, 1997) and into the Cheon Il Guk era (2003, vol. 408; 2005, vol. 498). The teaching is thus best read as festal doctrine, delivered where creation is being thanked and reoffered.
Across these periods, the emphasis shifts in a traceable way. In the earlier addresses, the accent falls on restoration, on recovering the dominion over creation lost at the Fall.
From the late 1980s, the language turns increasingly toward liberation and settlement, as the title 만물의 날과 해방 (the Day of All Things and Liberation, 1988) already signals.
In the late-providential period, the reciprocal formula is absorbed into the vocabulary of ownership and the settled cosmos, so that “everything exists for me” is spoken less as a claim to be recovered and more as a condition to be inhabited.
The developmental arc runs from dominion-to-be-restored toward ownership-to-be-lived.
Practical Dimension
For a Blessed Family, the teaching is not speculative but a discipline of gratitude and stewardship.
If the created world is one’s third parent, then the ordinary supplies of life—the water one drinks, the air one breathes, the light one works by—are not commodities but the ongoing gift of the cosmos, and the fitting response is thanks rather than complaint. Rev. Moon frames the mature person not as a debtor of the universe but as its grateful owner and locates the whole difference in the state of the heart.
someone to whom the entire universe is indebted, instead of its debtor
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 01/28/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The underlying address was delivered on January 28, 1990, at the Korean headquarters church under the title 빚지는 자가 되지 말자 (let us not become debtors; vol. 198, sermon 4).
Its practical charge is concrete: to become the kind of person the universe honors, one lives in service to nature and neighbor without complaint, cherishing the given world.
The teaching therefore issues directly in care for creation—Rev. Moon in the same register urges the planting of trees, the keeping of clean water, and the refusal to spoil the green world—because the person who knows that everything exists for his sake cannot treat what exists as disposable. Anthropocentrism, in this practical key, produces stewardship rather than plunder.
Inter-Religious Resonance
The teaching that the world was made for the human being has close analogues in several traditions, though each grounds the claim differently.
In Christianity, the parallel is the crowning of humanity in the Psalms and the dominion mandate of Genesis. The psalmist marvels that God is mindful of so small a creature and yet sets him over the works of creation.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.
The resonance is strong, yet the difference is real: for the Christian tradition, dominion is stewardship of a world that remains apart from the human, whereas Unification doctrine makes the person the microcosm through whom creation is composed and returned to God in love.
In Judaism, the verbal parallel is remarkably close. The Mishnah teaches that each person is obligated to say, “for my sake the world was created” (bishvili nivra ha-olam, Sanhedrin 4:5), precisely to impress upon the individual the infinite weight of a single life. The rabbinic phrase and Rev. Moon’s aphorism nearly coincide in wording, and both intend the same reversal of scale, though the Mishnah draws from it the sanctity of life and its judgment, while Rev. Moon draws the cosmic centrality of the completed self.
In Islam, the human being is God’s viceroy, and the created order is placed at humanity’s service under the divine trust.
And He hath made of service unto you whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth.
The Qur’anic khilafa (viceregency, Q 2:30) shares with Unification thought the conviction that creation is entrusted to the human being, but it keeps an absolute distance between Creator and creature that Unification’s language of absorption into God’s love does not preserve.
In the Confucian tradition, the human is the noblest of the beings brought forth by Heaven and Earth and completes the triad of the three powers, Heaven, Earth, and Humanity.
Of all the natures produced by Heaven and Earth, man is the noblest.
This is the tradition nearest to Rev. Moon’s own idiom, since the maxim he cites, that among the myriad things only the human is most noble, belongs to the same Sino-Korean world of thought.
What Unification doctrine adds to the Confucian sense of human centrality is the personal God who loves through the human and the lineage of true love through which creation returns to that God.
Across all four traditions, the shared conviction is that the cosmos is ordered toward the person; the distinctively Unification claim is that this order is a circuit of love completed only when the person, living for others, becomes the channel through which everything comes home to God.
Analytical Synthesis
The reading defended here is that “all existence is for my sake” is the first-person expression of the living-for-others ontology, with the “me” identified as the cosmic self, the completed relational center rather than the appetitive ego. The body of the entry has assembled the pieces: the Third Blessing supplies the doctrinal ground, the mirror principle that nothing was made for itself supplies the corrective, the third-parent teaching supplies the physical basis, and the Day of All Things supplies the liturgical setting in which the theme is repeatedly worked.
The strongest alternative reading available within the tradition is the plain anthropocentric one: that the aphorism simply asserts human mastery, licensing either dominion-as-exploitation over nature or a self-centered entitlement in which the world is arranged for the individual’s gratification. This reading is not frivolous, since the words in isolation support it, and it is the reading the phrase would carry in ordinary Korean. The question is whether the corpus favors it.
It does not. Rev. Moon everywhere brackets the aphorism with its reversal, insisting that nothing exists for its own sake and that even God lives for others; he names the self-first life (나 제일주의) as the fallen inversion that ends in the trash heap rather than the center, and he grounds the “lordship” of the human not in force but in the capacity to gather and offer creation in love.
The very structure that makes “everything exists for me” true—the person as relational center—is dissolved the instant the person turns that centrality toward himself.
The egoistic reading, therefore, cannot be sustained against the texts because it destroys the condition it depends on. The relational reading, by contrast, holds every passage together without remainder.
What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not make the human being the measure of value in the modern philosophical sense, nor does it license instrumental use of nature; on the contrary, it issues in stewardship and gratitude. And it does not collapse the human into God: the person is the center of creation and the channel of its return, not its source. Within those limits, the aphorism stands as one of the most compressed statements of Rev. Moon’s entire cosmology, a single clause in which anthropocentrism and self-emptying are shown to be the same thing seen from two sides.
Key Takeaway
- The teaching that all existence is for my sake is the first-person face of Rev. Moon’s living-for-others ontology, with the “me” understood as the completed cosmic self rather than the appetitive ego.
- Its doctrinal ground is the Third Blessing of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, in which the human being’s dominion over creation completes a relationship of love, not of exploitation.
- Rev. Moon always pairs the aphorism with its mirror, that nothing was created for its own sake, and reads the two as one relational structure rather than a contradiction.
- The material world is, in Rev. Moon’s teaching, the human being’s third parent, since the body is composed entirely of the elements of the cosmos, making the person a microcosm.
- Rev. Moon rejects survival of the fittest and reframes the natural process as a love-mediated ascent in which lower creation is taken up through the human being toward the love of God.
- A title-level corpus scan finds the exact lemma in no sermon titles; the teaching is body-embedded, and its liturgical home is the Day of All Things addresses, delivered from 1966 through 2005.
- The claim has close analogues in Psalm 8, the Mishnah’s “for my sake the world was created,” the Qur’anic viceregency, and the Confucian nobility of the human, but is distinguished by its lineage of true love returning creation to a personal God.
References
Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003.
Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996.
Moon, Sun Myung. 1990. “빚지는 자가 되지 말자.” Sermon delivered January 28, 1990, at the Korean headquarters church, vol. 198, sermon 4.