Opening a Time for Conversation
On August 31, 2026, the last day of August, Busan was still under a heat advisory. I had intended to resume my Monday series, Liberation and Civilization, but after a break of about two weeks I was not ready to deliver the planned program. I therefore opened another free conversation with viewers. They could ask about Buddhism, society, economics, current affairs, or personal difficulties. They could tell me that something I had said in an earlier video seemed wrong or ask me to explain an unclear point. What I want is not a sermon resting on authority but a conversation in which questions allow all of us to revise our thoughts.
Because I scheduled the broadcast late, almost no one was present at first. While waiting for questions, I examined a recent artificial-intelligence story and then criticized the thumbnails used for Professor Jeong Sang-gyo’s lectures on Hello Buddha TV. The conversation later moved to whether martial arts can be a path to the Dao, whether the rule against killing must be obeyed in every circumstance, and how we should reevaluate historical figures whom we were taught to call great. These topics may look scattered, but they share one question: Have I directly observed and reconsidered the problems embedded in my own life, or have I merely believed words and authorities chosen by someone else?
Doom Runs on a Virtual CPU Designed by GPT-5.6 Sol
The first story concerned GPT-5.6 Sol moving beyond coding to design a virtual CPU on which the classic 1993 game Doom actually ran. AI computing researcher and technology influencer Angel Bogado presented Codex-R32, a processor designed by GPT-5.6 Sol inside the Turing Complete sandbox. The model connected logic gates, registers, memory, and an arithmetic logic unit, then used a version of PureDOOM compiled into RV32IM instructions to execute directly on the virtual CPU.
Doom ran very slowly. That is natural because the processor was being simulated gate by gate rather than running on a physical chip. The important point is not the speed of the game. The AI wrote not only software but also the computer architecture on which the software could run. When I studied computer engineering in the 1990s, students were assigned projects that involved designing and simulating simple CPUs in software. Work that once demanded lengthy study and implementation from students is now being performed by an AI agent.
The ability to design a virtual CPU suggests that AI can move more deeply into the design and verification of physical semiconductors. In an earlier broadcast, I introduced the report that OpenAI’s internal model Astra had been used in the design and verification of its inference chip Jalapeno. That does not mean AI has already handled every part of the design alone. It does show a direction in which capability is extending from software into hardware. The time may soon come when AI designs CPU and GPU structures more effectively than humans working component by component, while people define the goals and inspect the conditions.
AI stories are arriving in a flood, and I cannot introduce every article. I show examples like this not to advertise a product but to help viewers see how far the technology has already moved. AI game demonstrations that seemed astonishing only recently are now called ordinary; today Doom is running on an AI-designed CPU. We should not underestimate the speed of the transition.
The Thumbnail About Scriptures Born in a Secret Chinese Basement
Because no questions had appeared, I discussed several episodes I had watched from Buddhism: The More You Know, the More You See, a Hello Buddha TV series featuring Professor Jeong Sang-gyo. The lectures cover more academic material than one might expect, and the videos themselves are not completely one-sided. If I find an error, I can later identify the precise passage and explain why it is wrong. What concerned me that evening was not every claim in the program but its recurring thumbnail language.
The thumbnails said things such as ‘scriptures born in a secret Chinese basement,’ ‘five hundred years after the Buddha died, someone began rewriting Buddhism,’ ‘thieves who sold the Buddha’s name,’ and ‘traces of fabrication in fake scriptures that deceived us for two thousand years.’ These phrases make Chinese and Indian Mahayana texts look like covert fabrications, while everything before them appears to preserve the Buddha’s pure words. Many people judge a video without watching it, so we must ask where a thumbnail directs the viewer’s assumptions.
I do not deny that Mahayana sutras were written later. I have said so repeatedly. Some were composed in China, others in India, and mistranslation and reinterpretation also entered during transmission. Many long prose texts begin with ‘Thus have I heard’ and construct a scene in which the Buddha speaks to a named disciple in a named place. A large portion of this material is literature written by later people. I do not treat such writing as a historical record or the Buddha’s own speech merely because it is called scripture.
The problem begins when only Mahayana authors are called thieves who sold the Buddha’s name. If a later Chinese composition is apocryphal, does a later Indian composition become authentic teaching? People did not suddenly begin rewriting Buddhism around the start of the Common Era. Before that time, different schools had already edited and expanded bodies of teaching. They disagreed about rebirth, practice, awakening, and terminology. To imagine that only Mahayana was created later while every earlier document preserves the Buddha’s voice is to view history with one eye closed.
Chinese Translations and the Pali Nikayas Are Both Products of Transmission
Two large streams of Buddhist literature survive today. One is the enormous collection translated into Chinese and transmitted through China to the Korean Peninsula. It contains relatively old materials such as the Agamas, diverse Mahayana sutras, and works associated with several schools. So many texts survive in Chinese that Koreans speak of the eighty-thousand blocks of the Buddhist canon.
The other major stream is the Pali Nikayas preserved by Theravada through Sri Lanka and other southern regions. Theravada is one branch of sectarian Buddhism, and the Pali Nikayas are the literature preserved by that tradition. Yet Theravada often names its own transmission Early Buddhism and pushes Mahayana aside through the doctrine that Mahayana was not spoken by the Buddha. Once that frame becomes fixed, the Pali Nikayas turn into pure Buddhavacana and only the Chinese Mahayana scriptures remain false.
I reject that frame. The Majjhima Nikaya, Digha Nikaya, Khuddaka Nikaya, and the other collections contain layers from different periods. A very small number of old verses may belong to relatively early strata, but even there we cannot establish who first composed them and when. Much of the remaining prose, like Mahayana literature, was written and edited by later communities. Later texts also tend to be much longer, so they account for most of the literary volume.
That is why I say that the Nikayas are not Early Buddhist scriptures either. The possibility that old material survives inside them is entirely different from the claim that the entire collection contains the Buddha’s own words. If we criticize myth, fiction, exaggeration, later doctrine, and literary construction in Mahayana texts, we must subject the Nikayas to the same standard. Protecting one side as authentic teaching while attacking the other is a tilted playing field.
I acknowledge that the actual lectures are less one-sided than their thumbnails. I also do not know how much control Professor Jeong personally exercises over those phrases. But even if the aim is simply to attract clicks, a Buddhist broadcaster should not repeatedly frame Mahayana with malicious language. A program promising that knowledge allows us to see more should place Mahayana sutras and the Nikayas together as historical literature and examine when and how material entered both.
Does Long Practice in Martial Arts Lead to the Dao?
A viewer then said that he had practiced several martial arts from high school until the age of forty-four but still did not understand why arts designed to strike people were said to correspond to the Dao. His teacher often referred to Laozi’s Daodejing and said martial arts could lead to Daoist insight, harmony with nature, and self-completion. This was not an abstract question. It had been tested in the viewer’s body and life for decades.
Long practice can lead a person toward mastery of the martial path. Just as a surgeon with extensive experience is likely to operate more skillfully, a martial artist can observe the limits of the body and joints, stop forcing movement, and learn to move more quickly and naturally. If one continuously asks how to punch with less strain, how to control an opponent, and how to handle fear and excitement, depth develops within that field. Patterns learned there may also illuminate problems elsewhere in life.
Yet martial skill does not automatically produce an understanding of Laozi, philosophy, politics, or economics. It does not explain why prices rise, teach liver surgery, or automatically tell a soldier what to do when ordered to drag legislators away and prevent a vote. A potter may discover a path through clay, fire, and the movement of the hands. A painter may learn naturalness and efficiency in forming a single stroke or completing a canvas. It is strange to make one particular discipline the exclusive gateway to self-completion.
Different forms of expertise can reveal shared patterns, an idea sometimes expressed as many streams returning to one source. Observation, repetition, bodily limits, efficiency, balance, and aesthetic judgment may transfer from one field to another. That does not make the whole person complete. It is more honest to say that we have improved than that we have been completed. We move more naturally, see a little more deeply, and recognize one more error than we did yesterday.
Self-Completion Does Not Occur Alone in a Closed Room
Our lives are not separate from other people and society. A restaurant owner must decide whether to tell an employee to wear the uniform, why the employee ignores instructions, and whether the owner’s hesitation comes from weakness or from reluctance to command carelessly. Harsh speech does not make someone courageous. When a powerful leader drives away every person who disagrees and keeps only flatterers who say the leader is always right, the leader has not become strong. He has entered the ideal conditions for becoming a fool.
I sometimes surprise myself when I return to my old broadcasts. In one video I may think I said something genuinely worthwhile; in another I hear myself speaking recklessly and using far too much abuse. Even if I intended to criticize wrongdoing, I must alter my method when listeners remember only the profanity and miss the substance. The opposite error is to remain like a doll in situations that demand anger because one has learned that anger must never be expressed. The study of life consists in observing situations and consequences and continuing to correct oneself.
This is why no single martial art, meditation technique, or koan can produce an immaculate and complete self. I remain connected to society, and my judgments collide with family, work, politics, economics, and education. Sitting alone in a room does not automatically teach me how power operates or how suffering is produced in society. This is not an attack on specialists. It is a refusal to exaggerate mastery in one field into completion of the entire human being.
The Rule Against Killing Is Not an Absolute Command
Another viewer referred to the film Tears of the Sun. Enemy soldiers are massacring civilians, and one of them pours fuel over a person and prepares to set the victim on fire. Bruce Willis shoots the soldier first. Must the Buddhist rule against killing still be obeyed? I answered that discipline and rules arise because they are needed. A rule against killing is necessary to stop people from stabbing someone over a trivial insult. It is an agreement that allows a community to live together.
But one sentence cannot cover every situation, including an attacker trying to kill one’s family, a soldier continuing to massacre civilians, or a person who will cause greater harm if no one intervenes. If a serial murderer enters the house intending to kill again, one may break the rule and kill the attacker. Monastics are human beings too. Korean monks once formed militias during invasion; reality can require people to violate a rule in order to protect life.
If we do not know why a rule exists, commands never to kill even a mosquito, never to eat meat or delicious food, and to abandon sexual desire can become a noose rather than wisdom. Is it truly non-killing to leave mosquitoes untouched while they spread deadly disease? We must reflect on why a rule was created, whom it protects, when it should be observed, and when breaking it prevents greater harm. Precepts are conditional human agreements for living together, not absolute commands from a transcendent realm.
Life’s Fifth Adolescence: Asking Again About Learned Concepts
I call this process a fifth adolescence. Just as an adolescent asks parents, ‘Why must I do that?’ an adult must ask what good and evil mean in society, what one learned in order to acquire present language and desire, what one believes to be right, and why one lives in a particular way. We were taught that one correct answer exists, but actual conditions conflict. Instead of remaining tied to inherited lists of duties and prohibitions, we must dismantle learned concepts and rebuild them within our own lives.
A koan supplied by someone else does not automatically become my question. If I have no interest in whether a dog possesses Buddha-nature or what the cypress in the courtyard means, holding those phrases because a teacher orders me to awaken is not examining the thorn in my own neck. For a person who practiced martial arts for decades, ‘Is martial art truly a path?’ and ‘What did my teacher mean by self-completion?’ are living questions. For a restaurant owner, ‘Should I tell this worker to wear the uniform?’ and ‘Why can I not speak?’ arise from real life.
We must find the thorn caught in our own neck: what we desire, what we believe must never be done, what we call right, the words by which we name ourselves weak or strong, and our assumptions about love, possession, money, and family. We should replace ‘I suppose that is true’ with ‘Is it truly so?’ Then we conduct thought experiments, observe outcomes, speak with other people, and reflect. This fifth adolescence can come at fifteen, twenty, sixty, and then return again.
A person who repeatedly passes through this fifth adolescence is a buddha. Liberation is the repeated departure from concepts one previously possessed. It is not a transcendent state completed in a single event. Capitalism and money, possession, a spouse, love, speech, action, feeling, desire, and anger all become objects of continuous observation and correction. The Buddhist formula of body, feeling, mind, and phenomena points not to a distant mystery but to observing our bodies, feelings, minds, thoughts, and the concepts and rules that organize them.
Do Not Believe What You Were Taught About Nations and Heroes
When I was young, the national anthem would play in the evening and children were instructed to stop, face the flag, and place a hand over the heart. We obeyed before possessing any ground on which to judge why it was required or whether it was right. Martial-arts tournaments and public ceremonies still demand the same posture. I smell fascism in compulsory forms of collective obedience. Loving one’s community is not the same as unthinking submission to a ritual chosen by the state.
Genghis Khan killed vast numbers of people and permitted rape and plunder by his forces, yet he is called a great conqueror. Lee Choon-jae killed far fewer people and is treated as a monster. Does killing at imperial scale transform a murderer into a great man? Buddhists praise Ashoka as a king who turned the wheel of Dharma and spread Buddhism, yet he too was a conqueror responsible for mass death. A standard that forbids killing a mosquito while praising a king who slaughtered human beings contradicts itself.
Some people want a memorial hall for Syngman Rhee and call him the great first president of South Korea. I see a man responsible for massacring his own citizens and call him a mass murderer and trash. As children, we read Columbus in books of great figures; after learning how he enslaved Indigenous people and used violence against them, the judgment changes. We must ask from whose perspective greatness was recorded and who was killed or crushed behind a celebrated success. Documents written by victors and lessons repeated by schools do not become reality itself.
One More Step of Awakening Instead of Perfect Enlightenment
The affairs of the world are not always resolved by one correct answer. That is why we must observe more and converse longer. A few lines in a live chat cannot reveal another person’s entire life and intention, and I can easily answer in a direction the questioner never intended. We need different perspectives and the ability to revise our judgments.
Do not seek perfect and final self-completion. Move one step further, awaken one more time, and leave behind one more belief that seemed unquestionably right yesterday. This is what I call becoming a buddha and living Buddhist wisdom. It does not mean believing the name of a scripture, teacher, nation, or hero. It means grasping the thorn in one’s own life and asking, ‘Is it truly so?’ The fifth adolescence does not end once. It is the process of liberation beginning again every day.
Do not condemn only Mahayana sutras as fabricated while protecting the Nikayas as pure Buddhavacana. Do not promise self-completion through one martial art, meditation, or precept. Instead of believing an answer supplied by others, observe and reflect on questions arising from your own life. Liberation is life’s recurring fifth adolescence, the repeated act of leaving learned concepts behind.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.