True Common Base

True Common Base (참상대기준 / Cham Sangdae Gijun): The Ontological Ground of Give and Receive Action in Unification Doctrine

참상대기준 · 相對基準 · Common Base, Cham Sangdae Gijun

What Is the True Common Base?

The true common base is the God-centered condition of relation that must exist before a subject and an object can give and receive at all. It is not a bond, not a force, and not a result: it is the prior circumstance in which two beings share a common element, and without it, no interaction occurs, however close the two may stand. The Exposition of the Divine Principle makes this the hinge of its entire account of existence since give-and-receive action produces every force in the universe, and give-and-receive action itself requires a common base first.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon spoke of the ordinary common base throughout his Korean preaching, but he also spoke of a 참상대기준, a true common base, and he defined it by scope: the person whose mind is one with God, whose body is one with that mind, and whose relation to everything around him proceeds from that unity. Three joins, in a fixed order, form a single condition.

This entry argues that “true” in 참상대기준 names a centre and not a strength.

What makes a common base true is the identity of the element the two parties hold in common, which in the original design is God’s heart and the purpose established by that heart; a base can be intense, durable, and productive of enormous force while resting on a common element that is the self. The consequence is that the Fall did not destroy the human common base but relocated its centre, and restoration is therefore a work of re-centring rather than of rebuilding. Where the entry’s reading and its rival diverge, the evidence favours centre over degree.

Action precedes force. It does not arise in isolation, but requires subject and object partners.

— Sun Myung Moon (02/10/1999) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Two sentences that invert the ordinary picture. Physics is accustomed to treating force as primitive and interaction as what force does; Rev. Moon reverses the sequence and makes force the residue of a relation already established. Everything else in this entry follows from taking that reversal seriously, and the Exposition of the Divine Principle grounds it in the structure of God’s own being, where internal character and external form stand in give-and-receive action before anything is created at all.

The common base precedes force, and reversing that order overturns the universe

Moon treated the ordering question as decisive rather than technical, and pressed it on Korean audiences as a test they had to get right.

The question he put was simple: Which comes first, force or give-and-receive action? The Principle answers that the give-and-receive action produces force, not the reverse, and Rev. Moon warned that inverting the two turns the foundation of the universe upside down. His reasoning is compact. Action cannot arise on its own, since a wrestler alone in a hall generates nothing; action requires a subject and an object, and before subject and object can act, there must be something they hold in common. Force is therefore third in the sequence, not first.

for there to be action, there must be subject and object partners

— Sun Myung Moon (11/15/1981) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The claim is stronger than it appears, because Moon extends it upward without exception. If action requires a subject and an object, then God, as the origin of the universe, must possess within himself an internal character standing as subject and an external form standing as object in eternal coexistence.

The dual characteristics are not a curiosity of Unification theology but a requirement generated by the priority of relation over force. A solitary God, on this reasoning, could not have acted.

Unification Thought carries the sequence one step further back. Before a give-and-receive action, there must be a common base, and a common base is formed only around a common element; in God, that common element is heart, or the purpose of creation that heart establishes (Lee 2006). This is the point at which the term acquires its content. A common base is not proximity, not similarity, and not mutual need. It is a shared centre, and the shared centre is what the two parties are both oriented toward.

Moon added a link that pushes the origin behind purpose itself. Reversing the whole chain, he laid it out as a descending order: for there to be energy, there must be action; for action, there must be subject and object; and before subject and object there must be love (CSG, May 1, 1993).

before the subject and object partners there needs to be love

— Sun Myung Moon (05/01/1993) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Love, in this chain, is not the reward of a good relationship but the precondition of any relationship whatsoever. That places the entire weight of the doctrine regarding what the two parties hold in common, which is where the qualifier in 참상대기준 does its work.

What makes a common base true is its center, not its strength

If the common base is constituted by a shared element, then bases differ from one another by what that element is, and this is the thesis of the present entry stated at its narrowest.

Consider what the doctrine will not allow. Two positive charges brought together do not form a weak common base; they form none, and they repel. Rev. Moon and Unification Thought both draw the same conclusion from the same example: a give-and-receive action occurs only where the subject and object occupy different positions, and where they occupy the same position, repulsion appears instead (Lee 2006). Strength is not the variable. One may press two like poles together with any force available and produce nothing but resistance.

two objects that do not complement each other cannot interact or become one

— Sun Myung Moon (12/30/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The address adds the sentence that makes this a claim about ontology rather than mechanics: not even God himself can bring such a pair together. The impossibility is not a shortage of power. It is the absence of the condition that power would need to apply.

The positive form of the same principle appears in Moon’s account of why giving and receiving continue at all. He illustrated it with a street in San Francisco, observing that nobody walks down to the market each day to lose ten cents and that people keep coming only where the exchange leaves both parties better than before.

Where a relationship stops producing benefit for both, action ceases. This is not commercial cynicism; it is the claim that the common element must be genuinely common. A purpose held by one party and imposed on the other is not a shared centre, and a base built on it will stall.

The scope of 참상대기준 as Rev. Moon described it makes the same point structurally. He named three unions: mind one with God, body one with mind, and then relation with everything the body meets. The order is not arbitrary and cannot be entered in the middle. A person whose mind is not joined to God may still achieve remarkable unity of mind and body and may still relate powerfully to the world, but the base that results is centered somewhere apart from God. It is a common base. It is not a true one.

Correspondence is not contradiction, and the common base rules out the dialectic

The clearest way to see that the center is doing the work is to look at what Unification doctrine rejects, because the rejection is unusually precise.

Rev. Moon addressed the Hegelian and Marxist scheme directly. The relation of subject and object, he insisted, is not the thesis-antithesis-synthesis relation in which opposition generates advance. His objection is not distaste but a charge of logical contradiction: an idea of opposition cannot be what gives rise to force, since force arises from correspondence. Two parties in genuine opposition hold nothing in common, and holding nothing in common they have no base, and having no base they cannot act at all. What looks like productive struggle is, on this reading, either a hidden correspondence misdescribed or a genuine deadlock.

Unification Thought formalizes the distinction with a pair of terms. Two beings engaged in a harmonious relation centered deliberately are correlatives; two beings engaged in struggle are opposites; and development occurs only among correlatives, while opposites arrest it completely (Lee 2006). The chaos of the modern world, in this analysis, follows from relations that have become subject-to-subject rather than subject-to-object, which is to say, from the multiplication of pairs that cannot form a base.

Moon allowed one refinement worth preserving since it prevents the doctrine from becoming naive. He distinguished correspondence action from the action of repelling, and observed that repulsion is not simply evil. Once a partner is determined, a third party arriving at the same pole is pushed away, and that pushing is protective. Seen from within, repulsion looks like hostility; seen from the standpoint of the ideal being it guards, it is auxiliary. Good and evil," he said, "are defined from exactly this point, and a repulsion that protects the good is not a bad thing.

This is a considerable concession to complexity, and it strengthens rather than weakens the argument. The doctrine is not claiming that everything harmonises. It claims that whatever harmonises does so through a shared centre, and whatever repels does so because the shared centre is absent or already occupied.

The Fall did not destroy the common base; it moved its centre

The decisive evidence for the centre reading is the Unification account of the Fall itself, and it is worth stating carefully because it is easy to state carelessly.

If a common base were constituted by strength or by degree of union, then the Fall would have to be described as a weakening: a base that failed to reach completion, a relation that fell short. That is not how Rev. Moon described it. In his Korean preaching he pressed the opposite point with some force. The outward form was the same. Adam and Eve loved; the shape of what they did was the shape of love; and yet what should have followed did not follow, because the realm of resonance was never established. The base was present and functioning. Its centre was Satan.

This is why the doctrine speaks of a false parent rather than of no parent, and of a false lineage rather than of an interrupted one. A false thing is a real thing with the wrong centre. Rev. Moon made the point about persons in a sentence of unusual bluntness.

When you insist on yourself, you destroy yourself, your reciprocal partner, and God

— Sun Myung Moon (01/06/1989) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Three casualties, from one substitution. Insisting on the self does not remove the relation; it installs the self where the shared centre belonged, and the relation then works against all three parties at once. Rev. Moon added the theoretical consequence in the same address: from such a place no theory of unity can be discovered. Not merely no unity, but no theory of it, because the conceptual resources have been spent.

Restoration accordingly takes the form the diagnosis requires. Unification Thought describes the remedy for social confusion not as constructing relations where none existed, but as re-establishing the original four-position foundations, inner and outer (Lee 2006).

Indemnity, the Blessing, and the change of lineage are all operations on the centre of a base that is already there. This is why the tradition can hold two things that would otherwise conflict: that fallen human beings are genuinely capable of love, loyalty, and sacrifice, and that these are nonetheless bound to a false centre until re-centred.

Mind and body are the first common base a person must build

The doctrine would remain abstract if it stopped at cosmology, and Rev. Moon did not stop there. The first common base any person is responsible for is the one between mind and body, and he treated its failure as the root of every other failure.

His formulation of the problem was direct: throughout history mind and body have been in constant conflict, and if God had intended that at creation, such a god would be humanity’s enemy. He answered the implied question about God plainly, saying that God’s own mind and body are completely united, and that as founder of the Unification Church he had reached that state and could speak on the matter (CSG, November 20, 1991). Whatever one makes of the claim, its function in the argument is clear. Mind-body division is not the human constitution; it is the human wound.

Peace, happiness, freedom and hope exist only on the basis of unity.

— Sun Myung Moon (02/14/1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The order is worth noticing because it is the reverse of the order most people assume. We usually treat peace and freedom as conditions under which unity might become possible. Rev. Moon treats unity as the base and the rest as what giving and receiving produce on it. A person whose mind and body are at war will not find freedom by rearranging circumstances, because the deficit is at the level of the base rather than the level of the result.

The practical guidance is correspondingly concrete. Rev. Moon told members that governing the body must become habitual within three to five years and that his own first goal was dominion over the self before any thought of dominion over the universe. He described the geometry of it as a right angle: mind as subject, body responding at ninety degrees, with the vertical relation to God establishing where the perpendicular falls. For a Blessed Family, the same structure then repeats outward. Husband and wife form a common base only if each has one internally, which is why Rev. Moon said that a man and a woman may need seven years to become genuinely one and that if seven do not suffice, fourteen or twenty-one should be spent rather than the attempt abandoned. Two people who eat differently, speak differently, and hear differently do not become one currently when they meet.

Resonance is the common base becoming audible

Moon reserved a particular image for the moment a true common base is fully formed, and it is worth treating as doctrine rather than decoration, because he used it with technical consistency across four decades.

Resonance means vibrating at the same frequency.

— Sun Myung Moon (12/13/1987) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The tuning fork is the image he returned to most often. Strike one prong and the other sounds, not because the first pushed the second but because both are tuned alike. Applied to the person, the spiritual self and the physical self resonate when love acts on the mind and the body answers of its own accord.

the state in which the body resonates in harmony with the conscience

— Sun Myung Moon (11/20/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

What makes the image analytically useful rather than merely pretty is that it isolates the variable this entry has been arguing for. Two tuning forks of identical size sound together; two of different pitch do not, however hard either is struck.

Frequency is a matter of what a thing is tuned to, not of how much energy is applied to it. That is the centre, expressed acoustically.

Moon drew the theological conclusion himself and drew it against the alternatives one might expect a religion to favor. It is not God’s wisdom that brings mind and body into resonance, nor his power, nor his might.

His love is the focus and benchmark for everything.

— Sun Myung Moon (01/24/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong

From this, Rev. Moon derived a definition of the Fall and of salvation in a single acoustic figure. The Fall is a fall that occurred before the human being reached the realm of resonance with the absolute being; salvation is the historical work of repairing a tuning fork that can no longer sound and restoring it as a body capable of resonance in love.

The definition is exact, and it belongs to the centre reading rather than the degree reading, since a fork that is out of tune is not a fork that has been struck too gently.

The corpus never names the common base and never stops presupposing it

The Korean archive returns a result on this term that would be embarrassing if it were not so precisely informative.

Across 6,118 indexed sermons, the number of titles containing 상대기준 is zero.

The number containing 참상대기준 is zero. So is the number containing 수수작용, 이성성상, and 만유원력. The whole vocabulary in which the Divine Principle states the structure of existence is absent from the level of the sermon title, across fifty-four years of preaching in which that vocabulary is used constantly inside the addresses themselves.

This is diagnostic rather than disqualifying, and it fits what the term is. A common base is a condition, and conditions are what a discourse presupposes rather than what it announces. One does not title a sermon with the premise; one titles it with the claim the premise supports. The absence is therefore evidence for the entry’s reading of the term’s grammar: 참상대기준 does not name a thing that can be preached about; it names the state of affairs that must obtain before anything can be preached about at all.

What the corpus does foreground is the family of terms in which the common base becomes visible once it has been formed. Titles containing 사위기대 number eight, 심신 seven, and 공명 six; twenty-one addresses in all.

The distribution repays attention. The four-position foundation appears once in 1963 and then not again at the title level until September 2000, after which it recurs steadily to 2008. Mind-body unity enters in 1991 and clusters heavily in 2002 and 2006. Resonance enters latest of all, in August 1998, and every one of its six titles falls in the final eleven years of the indexed corpus, running to March 2009.

The arc is legible. Across the late period, Rev. Moon moves from the structural vocabulary of the foundation toward the experiential vocabulary of resonance, and the two are joined by mind-body unity, which is the point where structure becomes experience in a single person.

Read against the argument of this entry, that is, a movement from the base to what the base sounds like when it is finally in tune, and it belongs to the years in which Moon was speaking of settlement rather than of construction.

Inter-Religious Resonance

The common base is a rare case in which four traditions have each produced a compact saying about the same structural point, and the sayings can be set side by side without strain.

Judaism. The prophets state the principle as a question that answers itself.

Shall two walk together, except they have agreed?

Agreement here precedes the walking rather than emerging from it, which is the ordering the Principle also insists on. What Amos does not supply, and what Unification doctrine adds, is an account of what the two must agree upon; the prophetic text leaves the common element unspecified, whereas the Principle names heart and the purpose established by heart.

Christianity. Paul frames the negative case, asking what fellowship righteousness can have with unrighteousness and what communion light can have with darkness (2 Cor 6:14 KJV). The question presumes exactly the doctrine argued here, that a relation requires a shared element and that certain pairings possess none. The positive form appears in the high priestly prayer, where the unity asked for among the disciples is patterned on the unity of Father and Son (John 17:21 KJV), which is to say that the shared centre is a person rather than a proposition. The unification doctrine affirms both and specifies further, holding that the resulting unity is substantial and generative rather than solely spiritual.

Islam. The Qur’an offers what may be the most exact single parallel, calling the People of the Book to come to a word held in common between them, that none be served but God (Q 3:64, Pickthall). A common word is a common base, and the verse specifies its element in the same breath, naming God alone as the centre around which agreement can be formed. The point of divergence is not the structure but the relation permitted at the centre: Unification teaching holds that the shared centre is a Father whose heart is the common element, whereas Islam guards the centre against any language of parenthood.

Confucianism. The Analects give the principle its most compressed statement, holding that those whose ways are different cannot lay plans together (Analects 15.39, Legge). The saying is practical rather than metaphysical, and it draws the same boundary: shared direction is the precondition of shared work, not its product. The Confucian tradition then locates that shared way in the ordered relations of household and state, whereas unification doctrine locates it in God’s purpose of creation and treats the household as the first place that purpose becomes visible.

What is distinctive in the Unification account is neither the observation that relation requires commonality, which all four traditions make, nor the moral seriousness with which they make it. It is the claim that this condition is the mechanism of existence as such, so that the same requirement governs a proton and an electron, a husband and a wife, and the internal character and external form within God. The four traditions state a rule for human company. The Principle states it as the law by which anything at all can be.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis was that “true” in 참상대기준 names a centre rather than a strength.

Five lines of evidence converge on it. The term is defined by its common element, and Unification Thought identifies that element in God as heart and the purpose heart establishes. Like poles do not form a weak base but no base, which removes strength as the operative variable. The rejection of the dialectic turns on the claim that opposition supplies no shared element, not that it supplies too little of one.

The Fall is described as a relation whose outward form was intact and whose centre was wrong. And resonance, the image Rev. Moon used most consistently for a completed base, isolates tuning rather than force as the condition of sounding together.

The strongest internal objection reads “true” as an intensifier rather than a specifying qualifier. On this alternative, a true common base is a fully formed one: the base a person has when growth is complete, as against the partial base of someone still in the growth stages. The reading has real support. Rev. Moon speaks constantly of degree, telling members that the extent to which the absolute world resonates with a person varies according to how high and how pure the degree of mind-body unity has become. He gives the seven-year figure for a couple, and extends it to fourteen and twenty-one. He sets a three-to-five-year horizon for making bodily self-government habitual. This is the vocabulary of a quantity being accumulated, and the intensive reading 참상대기준 simply marks the top of that scale.

The objection is serious, and the intensive reading captures something the centre reading must preserve. Degree is genuinely present in the doctrine; a base can be more or less formed, and growth is real work over real time. But two features of the evidence favor the centre reading where the two diverge.

The first is the Fall. On the intensive reading, the Fall would be an incomplete base, and Adam and Eve would differ from perfected individuals in the way a half-built wall differs from a finished one. Rev. Moon’s own description forbids this. He says the form was the same and the resonance nonetheless failed, which is not the profile of incompleteness but of misdirection. A half-built wall is a wall; a wall built in the wrong place is a different kind of problem, and only the second requires the whole apparatus of indemnity, lineage change, and recentering that the doctrine actually deploys.

The second is that degree only becomes measurable once a centre is fixed. Moon’s own scale presupposes this. One cannot ask how completely a mind and body are united without first asking what they are united around, and his answer to the second question is never variable: God’s love is the benchmark, not his wisdom or power.

On the intensive reading, degree is the fundamental variable and centre is assumed; on the centre reading, centre is the fundamental variable and degree is what it makes measurable. The second ordering matches the way the doctrine actually argues, and it accommodates the first as a consequence.

Only when love is involved is life set in motion.

— Sun Myung Moon (02/07/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The same address adds that the basis of God’s continued existence is not life but love, which is the central claim stated at the highest possible level. Life is what a rightly centred base produces; it is not what makes the base right.

What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not entail that effort is unnecessary, since a rightly centred base still has to be formed and the corpus is full of instruction on how. It does not entail that relations outside the tradition are void, since a base centred on a genuine shared good is closer to true than one centred on the self, and the doctrine’s account of conscience assumes as much. It does not entail that repulsion is always failure, since Rev. Moon explicitly classes protective repulsion as auxiliary to the good. And it does not entail determinism, since the human portion of responsibility is precisely the freedom to establish the centre or to displace it.

What the argument does entail is a diagnostic. When a relationship is not producing what it should, the doctrine directs attention first to what the two parties actually hold in common and only afterward to how hard they are trying. That is an unusual instruction, and it is the practical form of the thesis.

Key Takeaway

• The true common base is the God-centered condition of relation that must exist before subject and object can give and receive at all.
• Give-and-receive action produces force, rather than force producing give-and-receive action, and reversing that order overturns the Principle’s account of the universe.
• A common base is formed around a common element, which in God is heart and the purpose that heart establishes.
• What makes a common base true is the identity of its centre and not its strength, since like poles form no base however forcefully they are pressed together.
• Unification doctrine rejects the dialectic on the ground that opposition supplies no shared element, and therefore no base and no force.
• The Fall did not destroy the human common base but relocated its centre, which is why restoration takes the form of re-centring rather than rebuilding.
• The first common base a person is responsible for is the one between mind and body, and Rev. Sun Myung Moon treated its failure as the root of every other failure.
• Resonance is the image for a completed true common base, since two tuning forks sound together by shared tuning rather than by applied force.
• Across the 6,118-sermon Korean archive, the terms 상대기준 and 참상대기준 appear in no sermon title, which is what one expects of a condition that every sermon presupposes.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Lee, Sang Hun. 2006. New Essentials of Unification Thought: Head-Wing Thought. Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1963. “심정의 사위기대를 이루자.” Sermon, January 18, 1963. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 151, sermon 9.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1991. “심신일체와 모자협조.” Sermon, November 7, 1991. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 222, sermon 8.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1998. “절대 공명, 절대 통일.” Sermon, August 27, 1998. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 306, sermon 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2000. “사위기대 심정 일체권.” Sermon, December 27, 2000. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 340, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2002. “삼대상목적과 사위기대 완성의 길.” Sermon, February 2, 2002. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 369, sermon 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2005. “사랑의 공명권과 절대신앙·사랑·복종의 길.” Sermon, February 2, 2005. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 485, sermon 8.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2009. “공명권과 최후의 정착의 자리.” Sermon, March 5, 2009. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 609, sermon 3.