This article interprets Woo Silha’s Hangeul Mandalas as a visual practice of his cultural thought and compares them with Lee Ungno’s calligraphic abstraction and People series. Its main sources are an unpublished edited interview with Woo, exhibition records, publicly available artwork images, and published research metadata and abstracts. Dongdo-donggi theory provides a method for recovering the internal grammar of cultural forms, while Woo’s worldview of trichotomy and his interpretation of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity offer a framework for examining differentiation and relational unity. In the Hangeul Mandalas, these concerns engage the letter-design principles of Hunminjeongeum through the arrangement of graphemes, cosmological diagrams, colors, and layered materials. The article calls this process the pictorial enactment of cultural grammar, an interpretive concept rather than Woo’s own designation. It also revises a rigid opposition between Lee’s bodily movement and Woo’s static cosmological order. Both artists bring bodily action, structure, and perceptual time into their images, although they organize these relations differently. Woo’s traditional music performances and journal-cover designs further connect his philosophy with practices beyond painting. His Eastern Renaissance is consequently read as a project of cultural translation and shared inquiry. The analysis distinguishes the artist’s historical hypotheses from documented formal features and the author’s aesthetic interpretation, locating the significance of the mandalas in the relationships they make perceptible and possible.

This study aims to examine the research on Korean traditional music and the music popularization activities of Woo Silha, who has expanded his scholarly scope from the history of social thought to Korean traditional culture, philosophy, and music and to investigate their significance in the history of cultural thought. Specifically, focusing on his conceptualization of the "World View of two differentiation" and "World View of Trichotomy," this paper examines his perspective on the thought system, yullyeo (chromatic pitch-pipes), and interval theory of Korean traditional music, as well as the impact of his work on research and practice in the field. Woo’s research on Korean traditional music can be broadly categorized into three aspects: his perspective on Korean traditional music, the worldview of ternary division alongside pitch and interval theories, and specific genres and musical principles. Critically reviewing the persistent influence of Eurocentric musical paradigms on Korean music education and perception, he emphasized the necessity of understanding Korean traditional music within its own native cultural and philosophical context. Furthermore, he interpreted Eastern musical philosophy and the yullyeo system through the worldviews of binary and ternary division, analyzing the rhythmic patterns (jangdan), vocal pronunciation, regional musical styles (tori), and aesthetics of Korean traditional music. In particular, he sought to elucidate the implicit thought system of Korean traditional music by linking the worldview of ternary division with the numerical system of the five pentatonic tones and twelve chromatic pitch-pipes. Woo's efforts extended beyond academic research. He continuously organized and managed traditional music performances at Gaonnuri, a traditional teahouse in Sinchon during the 1990s, holding approximately 300 Gukak Madang (traditional music gatherings) from 1989 to 1999. In addition, during his tenure as a professor at Korea Aerospace University, he consistently promoted traditional music lectures and performances, including "Gukak Madang with Aerospace University Members." These practical endeavors hold significant meaning as attempts to share traditional music with the public in everyday cultural spaces and university settings, rather than confining it to specialized performers or formal concert halls. Moreover, Woo’s research influenced subsequent studies surrounding Korean traditional music. This study examines this influence, focusing particularly on the fields of Pungmulgut (farmers' music and ritual) and Pansori (epic chant). In Pungmulgut research, his concepts of binary/ternary worldviews and fractals were utilized to analyze its compositional framework and aesthetics. In Pansori, Woo’s work served as a crucial philosophical resource for understanding the phonological system of Hunminjeongeum, the principles of short speech and sustained vocalization (eodanseongjang), rhythm, breathing, and vocalization techniques. Ultimately, Woo Sil-ha’s research and practical engagements with Korean traditional music carry profound significance as a cultural-philosophical practice that simultaneously pursued an independent, self-determined understanding of Korean traditional music and its popularization.

This study investigates why gubangsim (求放心, recovering the lost mind) is positioned after simjae (心在, the presence of the mind) in the Simhakdo (心學圖) that Toegye Yi Hwang included in the Seonghak Sipdo (聖學十圖). Through this question, it examines the principles by which Toegye understood the diagram’s arrangement and the method of mind cultivation in sage learning. His commentary on the Simhakdo and his exchanges with Wolcheon Jo Mok, Yulgok Yi I, and other scholars show that the Mind Circle (心圈) and the Reverence Circle (敬圈) are organized according to different principles. The Mind Circle arranges various designations for a single mind according to their meanings and textual sources, while actual cultivation begins below it with yujeong (惟精) and yuil (惟一). In the Reverence Circle, the horizontal division represents the two orientations of restraining human desires (遏人欲) and preserving heavenly principle (存天理), while the vertical arrangement indicates a broad gradation in the depth and maturity of cultivation. The positions of gubangsim and simjae are therefore best understood according to this diagrammatic logic rather than as a temporal sequence of practice. The six designations in the Mind Circle are different names used by the sages for a single mind as it appears in different contexts and modes. Toegye explains the innately good mind (良心), the original mind (本心), the childlike mind (赤子心), and the mind of the great person (大人心) on the basis of the Mencius and Zhu Xi’s commentaries. He describes the human mind (人心) and the moral mind (道心) as arising respectively from physical embodiment and from one’s Heaven-endowed nature. Yujeong is the practice of carefully examining the distinction between the human mind and the moral mind so as to clarify the latter, while yuil preserves the correctness of the original mind so that the moral mind may assume rulership over the person. These two practices operate within both orientations of restraining human desires and preserving heavenly principle. The two orientations culminate respectively in budongsim (不動心, the unmoved mind) and jongsim (從心, following the heart’s desires without transgressing the norm). Reverence (敬) serves as the ruler of the mind that sustains both courses of cultivation. Yulgok regarded gubangsim as a comparatively coarse form of cultivation addressed broadly to learners and therefore held that it should precede simjae. Toegye also once considered reversing the positions of gubangsim and simjae. In explaining yangsim (養心, nourishing the mind), however, he came to understand it as a practice extending from the beginning of learning to the attainment of sagehood and applied the same insight to gubangsim. In its shallow sense, gubangsim is the initial practice of gathering a scattered mind. In its deeper sense, it is the refined practice of recognizing and correcting even the slightest deviation of a single thought. Gubangsim is thus practiced at the outset of learning and repeated throughout its course whenever the mind deviates. In the Reverence Circle, gubangsim stands on the side of restraining human desires, while jojon (操存, holding and preserving the mind), yangsim, and jinsim (盡心, fully realizing the mind) stand on the side of preserving heavenly principle, so that jonsim (存心), the practice of recovering and preserving the mind, unfolds in both orientations. The disagreement over its placement arose from two different readings of Mencius: Yulgok understood gubangsim primarily as an initial practice, whereas Toegye read it as extending across the entire course of learning. The Simhakdo presents the method of mind cultivation in sage learning by arranging various designations of the mind and practices taught by the sages within a single diagram. Throughout Toegye’s commentary and correspondence, the practice of establishing the rulership of the moral mind through yujeong and yuil and the practice of repeatedly correcting deviations of the mind through gubangsim can be seen as interconnected. Establishing the rulership of the moral mind and correcting its deviations provide the basis for self-cultivation (修己), which in turn serves as the starting point for governing others (治人).

This study asks how the process from the emergence of difference to the constitution of meaning and the conditions of social differentiation can be explained without treating human beings or consciousness as the ultimate constitutive ground of social meaning and order. To address this question, it connects Spencer-Brown’s form of distinction with Luhmann’s theory of self-referential systems and proposes a generative analytical framework of “execution of distinction (crossing)-meaning-attribution-differentiation.” This framework is not a developmental sequence explicitly formulated by Luhmann, but a theoretical reconstruction of relationships among concepts dispersed throughout his works. Its primary theoretical unit is the execution of distinction and indication rather than crossing as such; “crossing” is used here as an analytical term for the event-like and temporal aspect of that execution, not as a generalization of Spencer-Brown’s law of crossing. The execution of a distinction marks one side while leaving other possibilities in the background. When those other possibilities remain accessible as a horizon for subsequent selections, a formal condition for meaning operations is established. Meaning is not content bestowed on the world by a subject; rather, it is the unity of the difference between what is actualized and a horizon of other accessible possibilities, a medium through which psychic and social systems connect thoughts and communications, respectively. Attribution is not the sole principle through which meaning in general is actualized. Instead, it organizes whether the selectivity of an actualized meaning selection is related to the system or its environment, thereby making the selection observable as experience or action. Repeated meaning operations, communications, attributions, and the evolution of dissemination media (Verbreitungsmedien) such as writing and print do not initially create the factual, temporal, and social dimensions. Rather, they can contribute to an increased capacity to process these dimensions separately and recombine them selectively. This structural specialization does not directly cause functional differentiation. Rather, it is one of the general conditions that can expand the operational scope within which functional systems such as law and science process complexity according to their own codes and programs. The study thus reconstructs Luhmann’s systems theory as a generative social theory that explains the conditions under which recursively connected communications―from the execution of distinctions through meaning selection and attribution―can develop a capacity to process complexity in differentiated ways compatible with social differentiation.