A short video featuring the late Professor Kim Seong-cheol appeared in my YouTube feed. In it, he declares that Buddhist awakening occurs not in the desire realm but only from the form realm upward, and that a person whose mind remains in the desire realm can never become an arhat. He says that the arhats in the early texts were people who had stopped sexual activity, that the most important task in Buddhist practice is to end it, and that even if one cannot do so now, one must at least resolve to stop someday. He cites the detailed Vinaya rules on sexual conduct as evidence.
I found almost every sentence in that short clip open to criticism. Yet Professor Kim has died and cannot answer for himself, so I want to moderate the way I speak about the person while criticizing the public claim without ambiguity. The first issue is not whether somebody has sex. The prior questions are what an arhat is, what a Buddha is, and what awakening and liberation actually mean.
Beginning with the possibility of dialogue
Before reaching the main subject, I mentioned an email that I had belatedly found while preparing the broadcast. A lay Buddhist named Ubo invited me to join a panel at a gathering called Yadan Beopseok in Daejeon. He described it as a discussion of meditation, awakening, Dharma, and truth in connection with texts including the Discourse on Setting the Dhamma Wheel in Motion, the Discourse on the Characteristic of Not-Self, the Great Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness, the Middle Treatise, the Diamond Sutra, and the Heart Sutra. Ubo would present first; panelists would identify doubts or gaps and request clarification; then the other participants would join in examining the truth of the subject.
I welcomed that structure. I have criticized many people, but almost nobody has tried to speak with me directly. A setting where the criticized person can respond, where questions can be exchanged, and where mistakes can be examined together is valuable in itself. This culture of dialogue and mutual testing is exactly what the Buddhist world lacks. Rather than bowing to a speaker’s title and status, we need a culture in which claims are questioned and answered. My criticism of Professor Kim’s clip begins from the same concern.
The claim that one must stop sex to become an arhat
The argument in the clip is unmistakable. Awakening occurs in the form realm or above; therefore, a mind in the desire realm cannot attain arhatship; and escaping the desire realm requires ending sexual activity. If one cannot stop now, one should vow to do so in a future life or at some later time. Without even that intention, Professor Kim says, a person who joins Buddhist groups and studies scriptures is not truly a Buddhist. He also argues that sexual activity is included among the gravest Vinaya offenses and is regulated in detail because abandoning sexual desire is exceptionally difficult.
But I have to question the premise. What does it mean to stop “sexual misconduct” completely? Does it mean no intercourse, no masturbation, and not even nocturnal emission? Must every sexual response of the human body be removed before awakening becomes possible? If that is awakening, how is it different from saying that an old person who has lost sexual function automatically stands closer to enlightenment?
I said plainly that I masturbate. Does that make arhatship impossible for me? I ask so bluntly for a reason. Once sex is first defined with a word meaning “obscene,” people enter a world of prohibition and guilt without questioning the definition itself. But if awakening means noticing one’s errors and delusions and becoming free of them, the speaker must first explain why the fact of sexual activity has any necessary relation to that work.
Do not turn the arhat and Buddha into nonhuman beings
An arhat is someone who has seen through something, recognized mistaken understanding, and become liberated from delusion. I have repeatedly argued that liberation is not a single event that finishes everything forever. Human beings can continue to see and judge wrongly, and each time we must discover the delusion and become free of it again. In this sense, awakening has no necessary connection to whether a person engages in sex.
Professor Kim’s argument reveals the being he imagines an arhat or Buddha to be. Once the Buddha is imagined as someone who has eliminated human desire, emotion, and bodily conditions, the path to Buddhahood becomes a program for stripping away one human quality after another. Sexual desire must disappear, appetite must disappear, joy and sorrow must disappear, and even during sleep one must never be disturbed. The Buddha then ceases to be a living human being and becomes a god outside the human body.
But if the Buddha was an actual human being, he would have tasted delicious food and known that it was delicious. He would have felt an absence after losing a close companion. I referred to a story in which the Buddha shows loneliness when looking at the empty places left after Sāriputta and Moggallāna died before him. If a person feels nothing when a companion who shared the same purpose is gone, is that wisdom? The belief that every human feeling must be removed is a phantom produced after deifying the Buddha.
Precepts are not absolute conditions of awakening
Anyone who studies Buddhism soon encounters the problem of precepts. Many treat them as absolute laws that must be kept and assume that the degree of obedience determines the degree of awakening. I reject that view. Precepts and disciplinary rules are agreements that people made so that they could live together in a particular period, society, and place. Social agreements may matter greatly, but they do not matter because they are timeless and absolute truths.
Rules such as the old Korean prohibition on boys and girls sitting together after age seven, or the idea that ruler, teacher, and father form one authority, arose within a historical order. Our refusal to follow them today does not make wisdom impossible. In the same way, rules made so that an ancient celibate community could live together cannot simply be imposed on every person in the twenty-first century and turned into universal prerequisites for awakening.
I also raised an extreme question. If someone killed the person responsible for the death of a family member, would that person forever lose the capacity to recognize a mistake? Could Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who sent large numbers of invading soldiers to their deaths in war, ever grow wise? The question does not justify murder. It asks whether one past act permanently closes the possibility of later reflection and transformation. If awakening is merely a score for rule compliance, a human being could never recognize wrongdoing and change direction.
Disciplinary rules can also change with conditions. I recalled the story of Rāhula crying from hunger and a rule being revised so that children, elderly people, and those whose bodies were weak did not have to follow the one-meal-a-day discipline. If one meal a day were an absolute condition of enlightenment, it could never be amended. It was amendable because it was an agreement for communal life. Rules concerning sex are no different. The fact that the Vinaya discusses them at length does not turn them into universal and eternal conditions for awakening.
When the desire, form, and formless realms are held literally
Professor Kim says that nobody can awaken in the desire realm and that the body must turn into light and rise to the form realm. I regard this interpretation of the desire, form, and formless realms as mistaken from the outset. Buddhism is not a religion for escaping a location called the desire realm and ascending into a luminous world. It is a path for understanding what I want, what I crave, what desire actually is, and why it arises.
If desire is treated as contamination that must simply be eliminated, the human being cannot be understood. Desire arises within the conditions of a living human organism. The important task is not to deny its existence but to see how it arises and what effects it has on oneself and others. We should understand sexual desire rather than erase it, and understand appetite rather than pretend to have none. If people shout “discard it” without understanding it, desire may remain while guilt and hypocrisy grow around it.
The authority of having studied Madhyamaka and emptiness cannot answer these questions for anyone. Understanding emptiness is not memorizing scriptural sentences and producing fixed conclusions. It must connect to seeing that the concepts one holds arose dependently and to actually becoming free, even once, from their grip. If one cannot question the ideas that “sex is obscene,” “awakening is impossible in the desire realm,” or “the form realm is a world of light,” the number of lectures one has given on Madhyamaka is irrelevant.
Sex is a living process, neither good nor evil in itself
Sexual activity is a natural activity of a living being, as eating and breathing are. It is one condition through which life continues into another generation, and it is also a source of pleasure given to human beings. We do not watch flies, snails, or fish reproduce and judge their behavior obscene. When we attach that label only to human activity and make the activity itself evil, we forget that humans too are living organisms.
This does not mean that every sexual act is justified. Coercive sex and violence must be criticized and stopped. Criticizing an act that violates social agreements and harms another person is completely different from declaring sex itself evil. Even killing cannot always be judged through the word alone: aggressive murder and an act performed in defense of a community during war do not share the same context. Conditions, relationships, and consequences have to be examined.
Alcohol, ownership, and lying require the same kind of questioning. Is alcohol evil? Is possession evil? Is every lie evil in exactly the same way? If we place one name over diverse events and declare the whole category eternally good or evil, concrete reality disappears. Buddhist wisdom is not the attachment of moral labels to words. It is seeing the conditions under which an act occurs and the effects it has on those involved.
Different Buddhisms coexist within the scriptures
Sentences that support Professor Kim’s position can indeed be found in scriptures and disciplinary texts. That is precisely why a statement should not be followed merely because it appears in scripture. Some passages urge readers to become free of established concepts and images, while others deify the Buddha and remove every human desire and limitation from him. Stories of a Buddha who wields supernatural power, needs no food, and has lost all ignorance and emotion coexist with the former strand.
When these different currents inhabit the same textual tradition, selecting one useful sentence and proclaiming it absolute truth is not reading scripture; it is projecting one’s own concept onto scripture. A person who understands impermanence, emptiness, and freedom from fixed images should also be able to question scriptural sentences themselves. “The scripture says so” begins an inquiry; it does not end one.
This problem is not solved by criticizing Mahāyāna texts alone. Near the end of the broadcast, I mentioned a professor producing dozens of videos arguing that Mahāyāna Buddhism is not the Buddha’s teaching. The same standards used to criticize Mahāyāna texts must be applied to the Nikāyas of southern Buddhism. Attacking Mahāyāna while leaving the southern canon untouched may simply replace one authority with another. Buddhism in the twenty-first century must critically examine the whole textual tradition, not Mahāyāna alone.
There is no wisdom without critical thought
My main point is larger than the error of one professor. Every idea and concept we possess must face the question, “Is it really so?” A claim does not become fact because it is written in scripture, heard from parents, taught by society, or spoken by a professor or monk. If we accept statements such as “communism is bad,” “the Buddha was like this,” or “a Buddhist must behave like that” without examination, we mistake conclusions made in our heads for reality.
Wisdom does not emerge without critical thinking. My forceful criticism of Professor Kim does not make my own words 100 percent true. I too may be deluded. Viewers should therefore question my words as well as his. They should think, discuss, and debate for themselves: Is sex truly bad? Does sex really make awakening impossible? What is a human being?
Neither-perception-nor-non-perception is not merely a remote mystical state. The work begins by breaking, at least once, an image that one had assumed was obvious. We must think deeply about whether what is written in a book is actually so and experience release from the concept we have been gripping. Without such work, learning and authority only enable a person to speak their delusion with greater confidence.
Delusion is strongest while it is not recognized as delusion
The defining feature of delusion is that we do not know we are inside it. Until a mistake is recognized, it does not appear mistaken; it appears plainly factual. For that reason, the stronger the certainty that “I know,” “I am right,” or “I am awakened,” the more carefully one should examine oneself.
Is sex bad? Is masturbation bad? Is appetite bad? Is sleep bad? Why is sleeplessness praised as practice, and why are continuous awareness or continuity through sleep described as if practice removed natural human conditions? If we construct a being who never laughs or grieves, remains identical at every moment, and is undisturbed even in sleep, and then try to become that being, we pursue a phantom that never existed. Such a Buddha is not human, and no human can reach it.
This is why Buddhism can go for generations without producing a Buddha. The Buddha has been raised so high and made so inhuman that nobody is permitted to become one. If everyone had to stop sex before becoming a Buddha, a society of Buddhas could not continue the human species. Is Buddhism a religion of human extinction? The absurd conclusion exposes how unrealistic the initial image is.
Buddhism is not escape from humanity but the path of a wiser human
Buddhism is not a religion for becoming a god, nor is it a religion for leaving behind the limits of the body and turning into a nonhuman being. It is a path on which a human being becomes somewhat wiser while remaining human: noticing a delusion, reconsidering a mistake, observing the world, asking questions, and repeatedly becoming free from error.
Sex is neither good nor evil in itself, and it neither obstructs nor guarantees awakening. The opposite claim, which elevates sex into a mysterious vehicle of enlightenment, makes the same error. One side prohibits it absolutely and another worships it as a special practice, but both add a fixed essence to sexual activity. It is a living process. Our real questions concern concrete relationships, conditions, and responsibility.
I have stated these principles many times in earlier videos, but principles alone may not show how they operate in life. That is why I examine particular examples one by one. The declaration that “a person who has sex cannot become an arhat” is a useful example of how a teaching about freedom from fixed concepts can be inverted into superstition and guilt. It may shock some listeners, but that shock can make us question what we had treated as self-evident.
The conclusion is simple. Do not push the Buddha outside humanity. Do not turn disciplinary rules into absolute truth. Do not stop questioning because a scripture, professor, or monk carries authority. Do not try merely to erase sexual desire; understand its nature and conditions. And do not believe my words merely because I say them forcefully. The attitude that examines today’s life, thinks critically, discovers an error, and becomes free of it again is what marks the Buddha’s path.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.