Bonseong (본성, 本性): Original Nature as the God-Derived Root of the Mind and the Ground of Restoration
What Is Bonseong (Original Nature)?
Original nature (본성, bonseong, written 本性) is the Unification term for the primordial, uncorrupted nature of the human being as endowed by God at creation—the God-given root of the mind that orients a person toward goodness, true love, and union with God. It is not the empirical character a person happens to display but the original design beneath it: what a human being was meant to be, and in the depths still longs to be.
In the Exposition of the Divine Principle, this original nature expresses itself operatively as the original mind (본심, bonsim), the inner voice that impels toward goodness and struggles against the fallen inclinations of the body.
The concept carries a claim about origin that the word itself is meant to enforce. In one of his addresses on the subject, Rev. Moon draws a careful distinction: the English word “nature” names an observed result, the way things happen to appear, whereas bonseong points instead to a cause—to where that appearance came from.
The original nature is not the phenomenon but its source, and its source is God. For this reason, Rev. Moon suggests that “original mind nature” renders the term more exactly than “original nature” alone, because what is at stake is the root of the mind, not the surface of behavior.
This entry argues that bonseong functions as a causal and ontological category rather than a merely moral one. I argue that it names not the “good side” of a person but the retained created image itself—the God-derived root of the mind, inherited through the lineage from God, which precedes the individual’s birth and outlasts his death.
This causal framing does two kinds of work at once: it makes the original nature the decisive refutation of materialism, since a nature oriented to the infinite cannot have arisen from matter, and it makes it the ground of salvation, since this nature survives the Fall—rendered powerless, but never extinguished—as the one point in fallen humanity through which God can still reach and restore.
The reading defended below is falsifiable in principle: the alternative, that bonseong is simply an innate moral disposition or the empirical “nature” of human beings, is what the primary sources will be shown to reject.
Methodology Note
This article reads Rev. Moon’s teaching on original nature across the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong, cited by date, especially its treatment of the original mind, the conscience, and the struggle of mind and body; the framework of the Exposition of the Divine Principle (DP 1996), particularly the created human being as the image of God and the workings of the original mind; and the systematic account in Unification Thought’s Theory of the Original Human Nature.
Passages surveyed from the Korean primary archive were verified against the corpus index for date, volume, and canonical title before citation.
The source base is well attested at the level of titles across the whole ministry. The word bonseong titles seven addresses from 1957 to 2010—from “Seek the Original Nature of Goodness” (1957) to “Return to the Original Nature” (2010)—while the operative term bonsim, the original mind, titles none, living instead within the exposition, and the broader bonyeon, the original or intrinsic state, titles some forty-seven.
The original nature is thus a lifelong theme, named in sermon titles across five decades and expounded, in its operative form, throughout the corpus.
One citation hazard applies here as elsewhere. The compilations that gather these passages attach thematic labels that are editors’ subheadings, not canonical address titles; two of those consulted for this entry proved, on checking the archive, to belong to differently titled sermons, while a third matched. Only verified address titles are cited below.
Etymology
The Sino-Korean bonseong (本性) joins 本, root or origin, with 性, nature—literally the root-nature, the nature at the source.
The second character is itself telling: 性 is composed of 心, the mind or heart, beside 生, to be born or to arise, so that “nature” in this tradition already means, at the level of the graph, that which arises from the mind’s root.
Rev. Moon exploits exactly this: bonseong is the root of the mind (마음의 근본), not the observable disposition that grows from it.
The distinction he presses is between cause and result. The everyday word for nature—whether the Korean jayeon (자연) or the English nature—names an observed outcome, the way things have come to be. Bonseong names instead the origin from which that outcome derives. To call the human being’s deepest orientation its “nature” in the empirical sense would misplace it among results; to call it bonseong is to locate it at the level of cause.
This is why Rev. Moon proposes that “original mind nature” translates the term more precisely than “original nature,” and it is the hinge on which the whole doctrine turns: the original nature cannot be studied as one more phenomenon of the natural world, because it is the phenomenon’s cause.
Two neighboring terms fill out the field. Bonsim (본심), the original mind, is the operative voice of the original nature—the inner “watchman” that directs toward goodness. Bonyeon (본연) names the original or intrinsic state, the condition of things as they were meant to be. And soseong (소성), the innate quality, names the raw endowment that makes the highest aspiration possible at all.
Across these, bonseong is the deepest and most causal: the God-derived root from which mind, conscience, and aspiration all proceed.
Original Nature Names a Cause, Not a Result
The doctrine’s foundation is the refusal to treat the human being’s deepest orientation as an observed fact rather than a caused one.
In the address “The Deep Wish of the Original Nature” (1982-02-14, vol. 117), Rev. Moon insists that bonseong belongs to the order of cause, not of result—that the aspiration toward the highest, which every person carries, is not a phenomenon nature threw up but the trace of an origin.
Where the natural scientist sees a result and asks how it arose from prior matter, the doctrine sees a cause and asks whose it is.
The answer is that the original nature is God’s, given and inherited. Moon presses the ordinary reply—that a person’s nature came from his parents—back through the generations to the first ancestors and, beyond them, to God: the original nature is transmitted through the lineage from its divine source. And because its source is not the individual, the original nature is not the individual’s to begin or end. It was there before one was born and remains when one has gone; it is inherited, not invented.
This is why the original nature, rightly understood, points beyond the person who bears it. The one who follows it finds the universe opening before him—a claim that only makes sense if the nature in question is keyed to something larger than the self.
you should listen to the words of your original mind.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 09/06/1959) Cheon Seong Gyeong
To listen to the original mind, in this teaching, is to attend to something wiser than any external teacher because it speaks from the causal root rather than the acquired surface—a point the entry returns to in its treatment of the conscience.
The Original Nature Precedes and Outlasts the Individual
If the original nature is a cause rather than a result, it follows that it transcends the individual in whom it appears. In the address “The Original Path of Intrinsic Purpose” (1984-07-08, vol. 133), Rev. Moon argues that the original nature reaches beyond the self to connect with the world and the universe and beyond the present moment to connect past, present, and future—that its center transcends history and transcends the cosmos.
The self who bears the original nature is finite; the nature itself is not bounded by that self’s span.
The evidence Rev. Moon offers is the shape of human aspiration. Every person, across every age, wishes to be first, to be great, to be even larger than the universe—an aspiration that does not diminish with time and does not appear in any animal. A monkey, however clever, never conceives the wish to exceed the universe. That the human being alone carries an aspiration proportioned to the infinite is, for this teaching, the fingerprint of a nature whose origin is infinite.
The desire to be highest is not vanity misread; it is the original nature reaching, however blindly, toward the God who is its source.
Because the aspiration is unchanging across the ages—the same in the ancient person, the present person, and the person tens of thousands of years hence—it cannot be a product of evolution or of history, both of which change what they touch.
The constancy of the original nature is itself an argument that it stands outside the processes that would otherwise explain it. It is inherited from God and returns toward God, and the individual is the temporary bearer of a relation older and larger than himself.
Against Materialism: Nature Cannot Come From Matter
The causal framing of the original nature makes it, in Rev. Moon’s hands, a direct refutation of materialism—and this polemical edge is not incidental but central to how the term was deployed.
If the original nature is a cause whose source is God, then it cannot be a result thrown up by matter, and the whole materialist account of the human being collapses at its root.
The argument proceeds by the impossibility of the alternative. Matter, Rev. Moon argues, contains no element that could originate the aspiration to goodness, the reach toward the infinite, or the capacity to love; no accumulation of physical process, however long, endows a stone or a cell with the wish to exceed the universe.
The categorical gulf between the human being and the animal makes the point vivid: the human is not, in this teaching, an evolved animal but a different kind of being, whose original nature was invested from a source above the material order.
To derive spirit from matter, as materialism does, is to reverse cause and result—to make the higher issue from the lower, which the doctrine holds to be impossible in principle.
This is where Unification Thought supplies the systematic frame the sermons assume.
Its Theory of the Original Human Nature studies what the human being would have been had the Fall not occurred, describing the original person as a being bearing the Divine Image and the Divine Character—a being of Heart, Logos, and creativity, made in the likeness of God (“Theory of the Original Human Nature”).
Unification Thought developed this account explicitly against Marx’s materialism, arguing that the materialist reduction of human consciousness to the relations of production mistakes the human being’s very essence, and that the societies built on that reduction ended by violating the human nature they claimed to liberate (“Theory of the Original Human Nature”).
The original nature, on this account, is precisely what materialism cannot explain and cannot honor.
Rendered Powerless by the Fall, Yet Never Extinguished
The doctrine’s most consequential claim is that the original nature survived the Fall. It did not remain intact—it was rendered powerless—but it was never wholly extinguished, and this remainder is the ground on which salvation becomes possible at all.
The Fall, in this teaching, transmitted a false lineage at the root: the body came to carry the adversary’s inheritance and to repel God, so that in the fallen human being the physical order no longer serves the divine.
The human body inherited Satan’s lineage.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 11/07/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Yet the original nature was not lost with the body. In the address “True Parents and I” (1986-06-15, vol. 146), Rev. Moon describes the original nature as rendered powerless by the Fall—present but unable to prevail—surviving in the depths of the mind as the original reproach that will not fall silent.
What remains is the original mind, and it behaves exactly as a surviving remnant would: it never leaves, and it never stops calling the person back.
the conscience follows you around until death.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 08/14/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The original mind is not merely a faculty among others; it is the vertical presence of God within the person, standing over the acquired self as its true center.
It is the vertical you.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 02/01/1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The whole soteriological weight of the concept rests here. Because the original nature survives, God has something in the fallen person to appeal to; the work of salvation is the strengthening of a nature that is present but weak until it can once more govern the body.
The original mind, in the sermons, is like a power station connected to God, sending current the body would rather ignore—and restoration is the day the body at last obeys it.
restore the original state where body and mind can unite.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 02/13/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Internal Doctrinal Development
Within the movement’s own teaching, the concept shows both a striking constancy and a developing frame.
It is constant in that bonseong is titled across the entire ministry.
The earliest, “Seek the Original Nature of Goodness and Escape the Retribution of Sin” (1957-07-21, vol. 2), already casts the original nature as the nature of goodness to be sought against sin; the latest, “Return to the Original Nature” (2010-05-02, vol. 622), fifty-three years on, still frames the whole task as a return to it. Between them the theme recurs steadily—“The Deep Wish of the Original Nature” (1982), “The Family of Original Nature and the Present Family” (1987), “Human Original Nature and True Love” (2001)—so that the original nature is one of the few terms present at both ends of the corpus.
Its developing frame is chiefly the anti-materialist and systematic one. The passages that most sharply oppose the original nature to matter cluster in Rev. Moon’s addresses of the early and mid-1980s, delivered in the United States at the height of the confrontation with communism, where the doctrine of the original nature does explicit polemical work against the materialist account of the human being.
In the same period, the concept received its systematic elaboration in Unification Thought’s Theory of the Original Human Nature, which set the original person—the being of Divine Image and Divine Character—over against the anthropologies of Feuerbach and Marx (“Theory of the Original Human Nature”).
The Exposition of the Divine Principle supplies the doctrinal substrate throughout, in its account of the original mind and its lifelong struggle with the body (EDP 1996).
The arc runs from the original nature as the nature of goodness to be sought (1957), through its systematic and polemical articulation against materialism (1980s), to the late summons simply to return to it (2010).
Practical Dimension
For the ordinary believer, the doctrine of the original nature resolves into a single discipline: to follow the original mind, and to strengthen it against the body until it prevails.
The original mind is not a distant ideal but a present voice, and Moon insists it outranks every external authority a person might otherwise obey.
The original mind stands in the stead of parents, teachers, and masters.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 11/28/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Because the original mind precedes and outranks parent, teacher, and master, the first practical act is to stop drowning it out—to return, again and again, to listen to it rather than to the louder claims of the body or the world.
The second is to strengthen it deliberately, since after the Fall it is present but weak; the traditional means of prayer, fasting, sacrifice, and service are understood here as ways of shifting power from the body to the original mind until the body can, at last, follow it without resistance.
The original nature’s own orientation gives the discipline its direction. Its deepest wish is not for advantage but for true love, and its native motion is toward others rather than the self.
tries to connect us to true love.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 04/09/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong
To live from the original nature, then, is to live for the sake of others in the direction of true love—which is why the same teaching that describes the original nature as the God-given root of the self also describes the good person as the one who exists for the whole rather than the self.
Inter-Religious Resonance
The conviction that human beings possess a God-given original nature, obscured but not destroyed, is among the most widely shared of religious intuitions, and the Unification concept converges with the great traditions at their most characteristic points.
The Confucian resonance is the closest of all, and Rev. Moon’s own polemic echoes it. Mencius held that human nature is originally good, arguing from the spontaneous alarm anyone feels on seeing a child about to fall into a well that compassion is innate rather than acquired—the doctrine of the four sprouts of virtue present in every person from birth.
The Doctrine of the Mean grounds this nature in Heaven itself: “What Heaven has conferred is called the nature” (Doctrine of the Mean 1, Legge)—a nature received from above, exactly as bonseong is received from God.
Buddhism affirms an innate Buddha-nature in all sentient beings, obscured by ignorance and craving but never lost, which spiritual discipline recovers; the human being’s task is to realize the awakened nature already present within.
The structural parallel to an original nature rendered powerless yet recoverable is direct, even as the Unification account roots that nature in a personal God rather than in emptiness.
The Christian resonance lies in the image of God and the witness of conscience.
Genesis teaches that “God created man in his own image” (Gen 1:27 KJV), and Paul describes the law as written on the heart, the conscience bearing witness within (Rom 2:15)—while his account of the inner self that delights in God’s law against the law at work in the members (Rom 7) closely tracks the Unification struggle of the original mind against the fallen body.
Judaism speaks of the pure soul God places within a person and of the good inclination, the yetzer ha-tov, contending against the evil inclination—the same drama of an original goodness at war with a fallen tendency.
Islam offers a term of remarkable exactness in fitrah, the primordial God-given disposition in which every person is created and toward which conversion is a return: “the nature (framed) of Allah, in which He hath created man” (Q 30:30, Pickthall).
This is, almost word for word, the claim of bonseong — a nature framed by God and native to every human being.
What the Unification doctrine adds is its causal and providential specificity. Where the traditions affirm an innate God-given nature, bonseong is framed as a cause inherited through the lineage from God, rendered powerless by a lineage-transmitting Fall, and restorable only through the True Parents—an original nature set within the particular architecture of the Divine Principle’s creation, Fall, and restoration. The intuition is shared; the causal genealogy is the tradition’s own.
Analytical Synthesis
This entry has argued that bonseong is a causal and ontological category—the God-derived root of the mind, inherited from God and surviving the Fall as the ground of salvation—rather than a merely moral one. Two objections press against this reading, and the sources answer both.
The first objection is deflationary: that bonseong is, after all, just a name for the “good side” of human nature, the innate moral disposition every ethical tradition posits, dressed in theological language.
On this reading, the causal and cosmic claims are rhetorical inflation of an ordinary idea. The sources resist this precisely at the point of the cause-and-result distinction. Rev. Moon does not describe the original nature as a disposition observed within human behavior; he insists it belongs to the order of cause, not result, and cannot be located among the phenomena of the natural world at all. A moral disposition is a result—something a being has.
Bonseong is offered as a cause—the God-given root from which the being, its mind, and its dispositions all proceed. The claims that it transcends history and the universe, that it precedes birth and outlasts death, and that it is inherited through the lineage from God are unintelligible as descriptions of a mere disposition; they are intelligible only as descriptions of the created image itself.
The anti-materialist argument confirms the reading: one refutes materialism by identifying a cause matter cannot supply, not by cataloging a disposition matter might yet explain.
The second objection is theological: if the original nature survives the Fall, does the doctrine not minimize the Fall, verging on the Pelagian claim that fallen humanity retains the power to save itself?
The sources forestall this with a single, load-bearing qualification—the original nature survives rendered powerless. It is present but not potent; it calls but cannot compel; it is the ground of salvation but never salvation itself.
The body inherited the adversary’s lineage and holds the upper hand, and the original mind, though it never falls silent, cannot restore the union of mind and body. That restoration requires the True Parents and the change of lineage; the original nature is the material God works with, not the work.
What the doctrine claims is therefore narrower and more precise than either objection allows: that the created image was not annihilated in the Fall but retained, powerless, in the depths of the mind—enough for God to have someone to call, not enough for the called to answer unaided.
It is the survival of the original nature that makes salvation possible, and its powerlessness that makes salvation necessary.
Key Takeaway
- Original nature (bonseong, 본성) is the Unification term for the primordial, uncorrupted nature endowed by God at creation—the God-given root of the mind that orients a person toward goodness, true love, and union with God.
- Rev. Moon frames it as a cause rather than a result: unlike the empirical “nature” of the natural world, bonseong names the origin of human aspiration, and that origin is God—which is why “original mind nature” renders the term more exactly.
- The original nature precedes the individual’s birth and outlasts his death, inherited through the lineage from God, transcending history and the universe.
- The innate human aspiration to exceed the universe, absent in any animal and unchanged across the ages, is offered as evidence of a nature whose origin is infinite and therefore not a product of matter or evolution.
- Against materialism, the doctrine argues that matter contains no element that could originate the reach toward goodness and the infinite; Unification Thought’s Theory of the Original Human Nature systematizes this over against Marx.
- The Fall rendered the original nature powerless but did not extinguish it; it survives in the depths of the mind as the original mind and conscience, which never leave the person.
- This survival is the ground of salvation: God can appeal to the retained original nature, and restoration is the strengthening of the original mind until the body, which inherited the adversary’s lineage, at last obeys it (EDP 1996).
- Bonseong resonates with the Confucian nature conferred by Heaven, the Buddhist Buddha-nature, the Christian image of God, and the Islamic fitrah, but is set within the Divine Principle’s causal architecture of creation, Fall, and restoration.
References
- Cheon Seong Gyeong (official English), Sun Myung Moon. Passages cited by date: 1959-09-06; 1988-08-14; 1990-04-09; 1990-11-28; 1991-11-07; 1992-02-01; 1994-02-13.
- Exposition of the Divine Principle (1996), on the creation of the human being in the image of God, the original mind, and the struggle of mind and body.
- Unification Thought. “Theory of the Original Human Nature.”
- Korean primary archive (representative, verified against index and, for volume 117, confirmed on disk): 선의 본성을 찾아 죄의 보응을 면하자 (1957-07-21, vol. 2, sermon 22); 본성의 심원 (1982-02-14, vol. 117, sermon 4); 본연의 뜻길 (1984-07-08, vol. 133, sermon 2); 참부모와 나 (1986-06-15, vol. 146, sermon 6); 본성으로 돌아가라 (2010-05-02, vol. 622, sermon 1).