Should We Believe a Scripture That Says the Buddha Spoke of Deathlessness?
I made this video after watching Professor Lee Jung-pyo interviewed on the Jo Hyun TV Hyusimjeong channel. The interview explained why the Buddha supposedly said that he had become deathless. I wished Professor Lee’s critical awareness had gone just one step further. Instead of assuming that the Buddha actually said something merely because a scripture contains the sentence, we must first ask whether it could have been the Buddha’s words at all.
Of course, both “the Buddha spoke of deathlessness” and “the Buddha never said such a thing” are conjectures. We cannot be certain that the scriptures transmitted to us record historical facts as they happened. They are filled with later authors’ positions and propaganda, moral coercion, threats of hell, and promises of a favorable next life. In my view, most Buddhist scripture consists of stories made in this way. My point, therefore, is not that you should believe my conjecture as a new doctrine. It is that you should not begin interpreting a scriptural sentence after first believing it to be the Buddha’s own word.
The fact that a sentence appears in a scripture is not evidence that the Buddha actually said it. Before belief comes the question of whether the statement fits the Buddha’s teaching.
The Vinaya’s Deathless and Perfect Buddha
Let us follow the narrative in which deathlessness appears. After awakening, the Buddha considers whom to teach first and remembers his former teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta. With the divine eye, the story says, he discovers that both have already died. He therefore heads toward Varanasi to meet the five ascetics who had left him. On the way, he tells a wandering ascetic that he awakened alone without a teacher, is completely pure, has attained the deathless, and is going to beat the drum of deathlessness. In Chinese translation, deathlessness is also rendered as “sweet dew,” and the Pali term is amata.
I do not read this story as history. The claim that he verified their deaths through the divine eye is already a deifying fiction. The Vinaya had a major influence on such narratives. The very texts written by people recording the precept against lying contain enormous lies about the Buddha’s supernormal powers and divinity. To make rules absolutely binding, they had to promise hell, rebirth, and merit, and they had to turn the Buddha from an ordinary human being into a perfect being.
Yet if the Buddha saw dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self, he could not have declared himself completely pure, utterly unmoved, and beyond death. Mind and body keep changing within conditions and relationships. There is no perfect immovability or eternally unchanging mind. We must leave a life absorbed in sensual pleasure, but we must also leave the desire to obtain perfect purity and transcendence. People actually die. When journalist Jo Hyun asked, “Is that not just a mental victory?” the question was more accurate than the interpretation.
A narrative in which a teacher of dependent arising and impermanence declares, “I am completely pure and have attained deathlessness,” reveals later generations’ desire for deification better than it reveals the Buddha’s wisdom.
Stop the Favorable Interpretation and Face the Question
When a sharp question appears, we must not cover it with a favorable meaning. In the Milindapañha, when someone asks what is reborn if there is no self, we should hold onto the question as it is. The moment we add a clever interpretation that forcibly reconciles non-self and rebirth, we destroy the question’s force. Deathlessness is the same. If people actually die, why call it deathlessness? One may say that someone has escaped the linguistic concepts of birth and death, but that still does not explain why he would proclaim himself deathless.
Even if we pull in the Heart Sutra’s “neither arising nor ceasing” to interpret deathlessness favorably, the problem remains. Would a person who had gained such insight really go around saying, “I have attained deathlessness”? I am asking Professor Lee to take just one more step of doubt before the scriptural sentence. Before interpretation begins, we must ask, “Did the Buddha truly say this?”
Producing an interpretation better than the dream itself is not critical reading. We must not kill the question in order to save a scripture’s words.
From the Aṭṭhakavagga to Later Four Truths and Twelve Links
Professor Lee interprets the Buddha as having awakened by fully understanding the twelve links from ignorance through birth, aging, and death in forward and reverse order, and as having spoken of deathlessness on that basis. I, however, do not regard the twelve-link formula itself as the Buddha’s own speech. The old verses remembered by monks after the Buddha’s death contain what we now call non-self, impermanence, dependent arising, and name-and-form, as well as the warning not to seize anything as supreme. Several texts in the fourth chapter of the Sutta Nipāta have the character of later commentaries expanding those old verses.
In one sequence asking about the causes of suffering and conflict, fighting and suffering arise because there is an object of attachment. The object arises from desire; desire arises from the pleasant or unpleasant feeling that something is good or bad; feeling arises from contact; and contact arises from name-and-form, our naming of and attribution of meaning to the world’s material and experience. This short causal sequence—covering sense organs, recognition, judgment, emotion, and attachment—is an early account of the arising of suffering.
It contains neither a separate truth of the path nor the Noble Eightfold Path. Later people made the way out of suffering into a separate truth and systematized it as eight factors. After rebirth entered the structure, they expanded the series to twelve by linking birth with aging and death. One may reinterpret the later twelve links as a process of cognition rather than rebirth, but one must not project that system back as the content of the Buddha’s awakening. Interpreting a later structure favorably and asking whether it is historically the Buddha’s word are different tasks.
The brief causal explanation of suffering that began in the old verses is not identical to the later Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, and twelve links. We should not project a later system back as the Buddha’s first teaching.
Was the First Turning of the Wheel Really the First Sermon?
What is called the First Turning of the Wheel is not a single text. There are at least seven or eight versions in different traditions, varying in length and degree of deification. The smallest form is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta in the Pali Saṃyutta Nikāya. Dhamma means law or teaching, cakka means wheel, and pavattana means setting it forward. The title means the discourse on setting the wheel of Dhamma in motion; it contains no word meaning “first.”
Even the minimal version begins with the declaration “Thus have I heard” and the setting of the Deer Park at Varanasi, then presents the middle way beyond the extremes of mortification and pleasure, the Eightfold Path, and the Four Noble Truths. I think this structure was produced only after the truths and the path had already been systematized. In longer versions, prose and embellishment multiply: former Buddhas, the title Tathāgata, perfect awakening, supernormal powers, and declarations of deathlessness. We should expect the shorter form to be earlier and the longer forms filled with ornament and myth to be later.
Once scriptures adopt the logic of skillful means—the idea, illustrated by the Lotus Sutra’s burning house, that lying is acceptable for a good purpose—lies can keep multiplying. The Vinaya and later scriptures piled up rebirth, hell, merit, previous-life tales, and miracles to enforce rules and deify the Buddha. The result, in works such as the Avataṃsaka Sutra, is a paradise of fiction overflowing with gods, bodhisattvas, and marvels. We should not mistake a longer and more extravagant story for an older and truer scripture.
The title Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta contains no word meaning “first.” Even the name “First Turning of the Wheel” hardens a later historical narrative into supposed fact.
Remove the Blinders of Attachment to Buddhism
People say that love puts blinders over one’s eyes. Buddhists likewise struggle to step back from their own religion, ideas, and habitual interpretations. We criticize another person’s error like a knife yet become generous toward our own beliefs. This double standard is deeply embodied in human beings. Buddhism, however, must not evade precisely this difficulty of objectifying oneself.
Consider the birth legend of “I alone am honored above and below heaven.” The Buddha descends from Tuṣita heaven, is born from his mother’s side, walks seven steps immediately, and proclaims himself uniquely honored. People reinterpret it favorably as meaning that all of us possess dignity and should live as masters of our lives. I learned such explanations after joining the Buddhist student association at Pusan National University in 1994. I had undergone a major turn in my life after reading that suffering comes from wishing what is impermanent not to be impermanent; I later described that experience as entering the stream. Wanting to meet people who studied this astonishing Buddhism, I joined the association, chanted the Heart Sutra, bowed, and learned the Buddha’s life.
From a distance, however, I now see that the author of that birth legend was not teaching universal human dignity. The author meant to deify the Buddha to a degree that made him scarcely human. The sentences claiming that the Buddha was perfectly pure, had ended every desire, and had attained deathlessness serve the same intention. Ignoring that intention and laying today’s noble meaning over it is an interpretation better than the dream itself.
Before beautifying a scripture’s deifying sentence for modern readers, we must honestly see what the person who wrote it was trying to do.
Questioning Avalokiteśvara and “Form Is Emptiness” Again
We should not automatically receive Avalokiteśvara, the opening figure of the Heart Sutra, as a good Buddhist term. We often learn to read the first Chinese character as observation and the rest as freely seeing oneself. Yet in Avalokiteśvara, avalokita means looking down and īśvara means lord or god. The Chinese name Guanzizai carries the character of a self-existing divinity. Its form changed by region and period, but elements of Śiva, Viṣṇu, and ancient sky gods entered its prototype.
A self-existing and eternal god does not fit dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self. Everything arises and disappears in relationships and cannot exist as an independent, unchanging substance. Even if we assume that a god exists, that god too must change within conditions. I therefore see an anti-Buddhist element in the first name of the Heart Sutra. Instead of interpreting it favorably by force, we should recognize it as a trace of Hindu and popular elements entering Buddhism.
I also call “form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form; form itself is emptiness; emptiness itself is form” a mistranslation. Until a month before his death, my father wondered how form and emptiness could be the same, and that became one subject of our last conversation. The problem arose from translating both śūnya and śūnyatā with the single Chinese character for emptiness. The emptiness of the five aggregates means that their self-nature is empty: form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness have no independent self-nature. We should not make this unknowable through translation, turn it into a riddle equating form with emptiness, and then bring in quantum mechanics to interpret it.
If a scripture on dependent arising and non-self opens with the name of a self-existing god, and if “empty of self-nature” becomes an identity between form and emptiness, we must question the composition and translation themselves.
The Diamond Sutra’s Four Notions and a Standard for Reading Scripture
The Diamond Sutra’s notions of self, person, being, and life are another example of repeated mistranslation and misinterpretation. They are often explained as “self” meaning me and “person” meaning another, followed by a lesson not to distinguish self and other. Yet all four are different expressions for imagining some “I” that exists apart from the body. The passage tells us not to hold the notion that a soul, mental entity, ātman, jīva, or sattva leaves the body and continues to exist. Xuanzang’s use of the transliterated pudgala for “person” was also intended to prevent readers from mistaking it for “another person.”
Even so, ask the head of the Jogye Order today and he will probably still explain self as me and person as another. A translation problem known for more than a decade remains unupdated while the same lesson is repeated. Deification and fiction accumulate on one side, while mistranslations and clever attempts to rescue them accumulate on the other.
Therefore, do not believe Buddhist scripture. Study it with questions, doubt, and critical awareness. A useful standard is whether a statement is dependently arisen, whether it speaks of impermanence, and whether it speaks of non-self. What is not consistent with dependent arising should not be treated as the Buddha’s word. The Buddha did not speak of deathlessness, and the so-called First Turning may not have been the first sermon. Even the twelve links that we memorize as a finished doctrine may not be what the Buddha taught. A Buddhist should not be a person who protects scripture through belief, but one who lives through doubt.
Believe neither scripture, translation, nor teacher. Question through dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self; observe from a distance; and correct what proves wrong.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.