Boncheron (본체론 · 本體論 / Ontology): The Theory of the Original Substance and the Embodiment of the Principle in the Late Teaching of Sun Myung Moon
본체론 · 本體論 · Ontology, Theory of the Original Substance
What Is Boncheron (Ontology)?
Boncheron (본체론, 本體論) is the Unification theory of the original substance—the ontology that asks what the fundamental reality is from which everything that exists derives, and answers that it is God, understood as a being of harmonized dual characteristics.
It appears most often in the fuller phrase Wonli Boncheron (원리본체론), the theory of the original substance of the Principle, which presents the Divine Principle not as one doctrine among others but as an account of being itself.
The Exposition of the Divine Principle supplies its foundation in the Principle of Creation, where all existing things are shown to be substantial expressions of the internal nature and external form united within God.
The reading defended below is that Boncheron marks the point at which the Divine Principle passes from a doctrine to be explained into an ontology to be embodied—locating the original substance of all being not in an abstract first principle, as Western ontology does with form and matter or the unmoved mover, but in a personal, heart-centered God whose substance becomes fully manifest in the True Parents.
The thesis is specific in naming the sequence and the move it completes, it is defensible from the Principle of Creation, from Unification Thought, and from Rev. Moon's own late sermons, it is falsifiable against a rival reading that treats the term as mere philosophical systematization, and it is confessionally permissible because Rev. Moon himself identifies the lived life of the True Parents as the original substance of the Principle.
This origin is that of dual characteristics, incorporating original internal nature and original external form.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, August 2, 1970) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The sentence gives the ontology its first premise: whatever exists rests on a source that is not simple but paired, an inner nature and an outer form held together in one being.
Everything that follows unfolds what that premise means, why Unification teaching calls it substance rather than mere existence, and why the tradition holds that an ontology of this kind can only be completed by being lived.
Methodology Note
This entry reads the 1996 English Exposition of the Divine Principle for the Principle of Creation, the English Cheon Seong Gyeong for Rev. Moon's dated teaching, the online edition of Sang Hun Lee's Unification Thought at uthought.org — its Theory of the Original Image and its Ontology chapters — for the philosophical structure, and the title-level record of the local Korean speech archive for the term's chronology. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not attempt a full exposition of Unification Thought's system, nor a bibliographic account of the systematic text known as Wonli Boncheron, whose authorship and publication details are not asserted here. Passages from the Cheon Seong Gyeong are quoted from the official English edition and cited by date; the two sermon titles cited as dated evidence are verified at the level of the local-archive filename for date, Korean title, volume, and sermon sequence.
The Word Names Substance, Not Bare Existence
The choice of word is itself an argument. Korean has a ready term for ontology in the academic sense — jonjaeron (존재론, 存在論), the theory of existence—but Rev. Moon's term is boncheron (본체론, 本體論), the theory of the original substance.
The two graphs of boncheron carry the weight: bon (本) is the root or origin, and che (體) is body or substance, so bonche (本體) names the underlying reality that stands behind appearances, the classical East Asian counterpart to essence or noumenon in the pairing of substance and function (體用).
To speak of boncheron rather than jonjaeron is to say that being is not a bare fact to be catalogued but a substance to be traced back to its root.
That root, in Western ontology, has been sought in an abstract structure. Aristotle analyzed every existing thing into form (eidos) and matter (hylē) and traced motion back to an unmoved mover—a first cause that is pure thought, the thinking of thinking.
Unification Thought draws the parallel itself, matching Aristotle's eidos and hylē to seongsang and hyeongsang, and then marks the break: for Aristotle, prime matter stands independent of God, leaving his ontology dualistic, whereas Unification teaching holds the two to be expressions of one divine source (Lee, “Divine Image”).
Its first principle is thus not an impersonal structure or a self-thinking intellect but a personal God with an inner heart. That the tradition means substance concretely, and not as an abstraction, is shown by the Principle's own family of terms—substantial world, substantial embodiment, substantial object—in which substance always names the Principle made real (Lee, “Divine Image”).
The full phrase makes the ownership explicit—wonli boncheron (원리본체론), the original-substance theory of the Principle—claiming that the Divine Principle, and not a borrowed metaphysics, supplies the true account of what substance is.
He unquestionably needs the realm of substance.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, March 27, 1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The line marks why the theory is of substance and not of bare existence: the incorporeal God does not remain a self-sufficient idea but requires a corporeal, substantial world in which His internal nature can be expressed. Being, for Boncheron, is complete only when it has become substance—which is already the seed of the claim, developed below, that the ontology is fulfilled in embodiment.
The Original Substance Is God's Dual Characteristics
The content of the ontology is the doctrine of dual characteristics as set out in the Principle of Creation (EDP 1996).
God is the incorporeal First Cause, the being of harmonized internal nature (seongsang) and external form (hyeongsang), and of masculinity and femininity; and because every created thing is a substantial expression of that paired origin, the whole universe exists in the mode of subject and object, giving and receiving.
Unification Thought sets this out in two stages: the Theory of the Original Image describes the paired structure within God, and the chapter it titles Ontology, a theory of being, describes how each created thing is an individual truth being resembling that Original Image (Lee, “Divine Image”).
The decisive claim is that the pairing is not a dualism. Unification Thought holds seongsang and hyeongsang to be, at their root, “two forms of expression of one homogeneous element”—a single divine attribute that is at once mind-possessing energy and energy-possessing mind, so that the original substance is neither the pure spirit of idealism nor the pure matter of materialism nor the split substances of Descartes, but one reality showing two faces (Lee, “Divine Image”).
This is why the tradition can call its position a theory of oneness and why the original substance can ground a world of both spirit and matter without dividing into two.
There must be a central being who never moves along with them.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, October 5, 1964) Cheon Seong Gyeong
The stationary center at the heart of a moving universe is close to Aristotle's unmoved mover in form and far from it in content: it is not a thinking that thinks itself but a personal Origin who is the source of love.
This is why the original substance is described as dual rather than simple. A single, undifferentiated first principle could ground existence, but not relationship; only a substance already internally paired—nature and form, masculine and feminine—can be the origin of a world made for love.
The dual characteristics are therefore not an odd feature of God but the very structure that makes a relational creation possible, the reason there is a universe of partners at all.
The reach of this ontology extends past being into value: because everything bears the paired structure, Unification Thought treats ethical law as a law of seongsang and natural law as a law of hyeongsang, the two corresponding as inner to outer, so that the original substance grounds not only what is but what ought to be (Lee, “Philosophical Ground for Absolute Value”).
Boncheron Completes the Principle: From Exposition to Embodiment
Rev. Moon set the term within a sequence, and the sequence is the key to it. The Principle was first given as Wonli Haeseol, the explanation of the Principle, and then as Wonli Gangnon, the discourse or exposition that became the Exposition of the Divine Principle; the third and final form he named Wonli Boncheron, the original substance of the Principle.
The progression moves from explaining the Principle, to systematizing it, to embodying it—and the embodiment, in his teaching, is not a further book but a life.
Adam is God's body represented substantially.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, January 31, 1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong
If the unfallen Adam was to be God's substantial body—the invisible original substance made visible in a person—then the ontology of the Principle points beyond doctrine to a substantial embodiment of it, which Unification teaching finds realized in the True Parents.
This is the sense in which Rev. Moon could say that the life centered on the True Parents is itself the original substance of the Principle: Wonli Boncheron is fulfilled not when the Principle is best explained but when it is most fully lived, so that God, looking at that life, would recognize His own substance in it. Ontology, on this account, terminates in a person rather than in a proposition.
A Term of the Final Period
The chronology confirms the reading. The doctrine of substance itself runs through the whole corpus—the word for substantial being, silche, stands in the titles of some thirty-five sermons—but the meta-term boncheron surfaces as a sermon title only at the very end of Rev. Moon's ministry and only twice: in an address whose title is a demand that the ontology come forth (Moon 2008, vol. 596) and in a reflection on a providential ontology and the culture of the homeland (Moon 2009, vol. 609).
The term is not early vocabulary that grew; it is a late crystallization, the name given at the close to what the entire teaching had been building toward.
It should be added in the Divine Principle that God is the source of true love.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, November 24, 1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong
That Rev. Moon could speak in the 1990s of what should still be added to the Divine Principle shows that the Principle was understood as a living deposit, capable of being carried to a fuller form.
Boncheron is the name of that fuller form: the point at which the account of God's dual characteristics is completed by the disclosure that their center is Heart and their end is love, and at which the systematic Principle is recognized as an ontology whose truth is finally substantial.
The demand that the ontology must come forth, made near the end, is the demand that this recognition be made explicit before the work is done.
Inter-Religious Resonance
The claim that all being rests on a single origin is shared widely; what Boncheron adds is the shape of that origin.
Christianity grounds all things in the Logos through whom they were made and in whom they hold together.
He is before all things, and by him all things consist.
Unification ontology keeps this grounding of being in a personal God and specifies its inner structure as dual characteristics centered on Heart.
Judaism names the ground of being as sheer existence itself, the God who is what He is (Exod 3:14 KJV)—the source from which all contingent being hangs. Islam calls God the First, al-Awwal, before whom nothing was and from whom all existence proceeds (Q 57:3, Pickthall); Boncheron shares the affirmation of one absolute Origin while adding the internally paired structure by which that Origin becomes a Creator of relationship.
Confucian cosmology offers the closest structural parallel. The Great Appendix of the Book of Changes derives the manifold world from a single fertile source that divides into a complementary pair.
In the Yi there is the Grand Terminus, which produced the two elementary Forms.
The Grand Terminus (太極) generating the two forms of yin and yang runs remarkably parallel to the one divine attribute expressing itself as internal nature and external form, and the Neo-Confucian pairing of principle and material force (理氣) parallels the same structure.
Unification Thought itself invokes the Book of Changes here, and then draws a careful line: in the classical Orient, yin and yang are themselves the substances, whereas in Unification teaching, seongsang and hyeongsang are the substance, and yang and yin only their attributes (Lee, “Divine Image”).
This is where the distinction is sharpest: where the Grand Terminus and the pairing of principle and force are impersonal, the original substance of Boncheron is a personal God whose core is Heart, so that the vague terms of yin and yang, in Rev. Moon's judgment, cannot by themselves describe the personal Origin.
Such vague terms cannot sufficiently describe the personal Origin.
— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, May 4, 1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong
Buddhism forms the instructive contrast rather than the parallel: its teaching of emptiness denies any inherent substance behind appearances, so that the very notion of an original substance is what it sets aside. Boncheron stands, then, between an Eastern cosmology that has the pairing but not the person and a Western ontology that has the rigor but not the heart, claiming to supply what each lacks—a personal, heart-centered original substance, internally paired, and destined to be embodied.
Analytical Synthesis
The thesis is that Boncheron marks the passage of the Principle from doctrine to be explained into ontology to be embodied, grounding being in a personal, heart-centered original substance that is fully manifest in the True Parents.
The strongest internal objection is deflationary: that Wonli Boncheron is simply the philosophical systematization of the Divine Principle — a respectable metaphysics that restates the Principle of Creation in the idiom of substance and being—and that the language about a life embodying the Principle is devotional framing rather than the term's real content.
On this reading, Boncheron is an academic capstone, and the talk of embodiment is homiletic.
The evidence tells against the deflation while explaining its plausibility. It is plausible because Boncheron genuinely is, in part, a systematization: it does restate the doctrine of dual characteristics in ontological terms, and Unification Thought does supply a rigorous Theory of the Original Image. But two features resist reducing it to that.
First, the term is set by Rev. Moon within an explicit three-stage sequence—explanation, exposition, original substance—in which the third stage is distinguished from the first two precisely by not being a further exposition; if Boncheron were only better systematization, it would collapse back into the second stage rather than standing beyond it.
Second, its defining identification is not conceptual but personal: the original substance of the Principle is named as the lived life centered on the True Parents, and the tradition's own account of the unfallen Adam as God's substantial body gives this identification doctrinal, not merely rhetorical, force. A systematization does not culminate in a person; this ontology is said to.
The synthesis is therefore a distinction the deflationary reading collapses—between an ontology that ends in a concept of being and an ontology that ends in a substance that is lived.
Western metaphysics, on the tradition's telling, reached a first principle and stopped there, at form or at the unmoved mover; Boncheron takes the same question about the ground of being and carries it through to a claim about a substantial life.
This is why the term is late and why it takes the form of a demand that the ontology come forth: it is not the beginning of the teaching but its recognition, the moment at which the whole account of God's paired and heart-centered substance is seen to require, and to receive, embodiment.
The argument does not entail that the philosophical work of Unification Thought is dispensable, nor that Boncheron abandons rigor for piety; the ontology of the Original Image is its necessary structure.
What it entails is that in Unification teaching the theory of the original substance is not finished as a theory. Its last word is not a definition of being but a life in which being is made visible—the Principle, at last, not only explained but substantiated.
Key Takeaway
- Boncheron (본체론, 本體論), often in the fuller phrase Wonli Boncheron, is the Unification theory of the original substance, and this entry argues it turns the Principle from doctrine explained into ontology embodied.
- The term deliberately uses the word for original substance (本體) rather than the ordinary word for existence (存在), locating being in a substantial root rather than a bare fact.
- Its content is the doctrine of dual characteristics: God is the personal First Cause of harmonized internal nature and external form, and every created thing is a substantial expression of that paired origin.
- Unification Thought develops this as the Theory of the Original Image, the united structure of internal nature and external form centered on Heart, which every individual being resembles.
- Against Western ontology, the original substance is not an impersonal form or a self-thinking unmoved mover but a personal God whose core is Heart.
- Rev. Moon set Boncheron as the third stage after the explanation and the exposition of the Principle and identified its fulfillment as the lived life centered on the True Parents.
- The term surfaces as a sermon title only at the very end of his ministry, in 2008 and 2009, as a demand that the ontology finally come forth.
- Distinctively, Boncheron stands between an Eastern cosmology with the pairing but not the person and a Western ontology with the rigor but not the heart and claims an original substance that is personal, paired, and embodied.
References
Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed.
Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. Lee, Sang Hun. New Essentials of Unification Thought. Unification Thought Institute.
Online edition, uthought.org. “Divine Image” (Theory of the Original Image; “Philosophical Ground for the New View of Absolute Value” .
Accessed via the online edition.
Moon, Sun Myung. 2008. “본체론이 나와야 된다.” Sermon delivered August 31, 2008, vol. 596, sermon 13.
Moon, Sun Myung. 2009. “섭리적 본체론과 조국의 문화권." Sermon delivered April 8, 2009, vol. 609, sermon 11.