Do Not Believe Something Merely Because It Is Written in Scripture
In the previous two broadcasts, I said that we should not desire a state without signs, a state called no-sign or no-thought. Human beings cannot avoid forming signs, and we must first abandon the idea that the absence of signs is enlightenment. A viewer then commented that arahants or Buddhas seem to have the cessation of perception and feeling, and that the Doctrinal Questions and Answers Sutta describes it. The viewer asked whether it was therefore wrong to reject entirely the instruction to make no-thought the guiding principle. That comment is where this discussion begins.
The cessation of perception and feeling is not a phrase absent from Buddhist scriptures. It is also called the attainment of cessation and is described as the final stage of the nine successive attainments and the highest level of Buddhist meditation. That is precisely the problem. Rebirth is written in scriptures, and scriptures also contain myths claiming that after the Buddha died, relics far exceeding the volume of his body appeared. The fact that something is written in scripture is not evidence that it is true. A scripture was written by someone, and that person may not have copied the Buddha’s words but expressed the ideas and claims of a later age.
We do not know whether the historical Gautama Siddhartha existed or exactly what he said. If we throw away every scripture, however, we lose the materials with which we can discuss Buddhism. Yet if we practice Buddhism in the twenty-first century, we must not believe novels imagined by ancient people simply because they are called scripture. We must ask whether a claim is actually possible, whether it makes sense, and whether it agrees with observable experience. If a scripture says that the sun rises in the west, we cannot practice while waiting for a western sunrise. I regard the cessation of perception and feeling as that kind of goal.
What Is the Cessation of Perception and Feeling Supposed to Be?
In this expression, perception refers to a sign, representation, or recognition that arises in the mind, while feeling refers to sensation and affect. According to the standard explanation, this attainment is a meditation in which both perception and feeling disappear. Mind and mental factors stop, and not only coarse thoughts and sensations but even subtle mental activities are said to become temporarily and quietly suspended. The attainment of cessation, which suggests that everything has vanished without remainder, is used as nearly the same expression.
The explanation does not stop there. It calls this the highest meditative attainment reached after passing through the realms of form and formlessness, connects it closely with nirvana in which defilements have subsided, and finally links it with the disappearance of greed, anger, and ignorance. Once the final meditative stage and nirvana are tied together in this way, some people claim that they have entered the attainment of cessation, and others accept the claim as evidence of enlightenment.
I criticized as fraudulent Yun Hong-sik’s claim that he had entered the attainment of cessation. When someone says that he has entered the cessation of perception and feeling, I see two possibilities: he is selling words that he does not understand, or he is speaking a falsehood that he himself believes. People trained in conventional Buddhism may find this criticism disturbing. They may ask how someone who denies the attainment of cessation and the nine successive attainments can still call his view Buddhism. Yet I do not assume that even the four meditations, the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path are all direct statements of the historical Buddha. They may be systems constructed later. We therefore have to examine them through observation and reasoning rather than authority.
If There Is No Thought and No Sign, Where Does Wisdom Come From?
In the video I previously discussed, Venerable Pomnyun explained no-thought as the guiding principle, no-sign as the basis, and non-abiding as the essence. I responded that it is impossible not to form signs. The viewer who commented asked whether a person needs signs while first learning to ride a bicycle but later lets the body ride without signs. Yet familiar bodily movement is not the same as the complete disappearance of signs. While riding, one continues to see the road, avoid obstacles, and maintain balance through perception and recognition.
Let us ask the more basic question. If no-thought and no-sign define the state of an arahant or a Buddha, where does wisdom come from? Without thought or any sign, how can one understand another person’s words? What can one realize, whom can one pity, and how can compassion arise? What can one ask or answer? To tell someone to leave a mistaken way of life, one must recognize that person’s condition, think of what to convey, and choose words. All of those are thought and sign.
Nor is only verbal language a sign. When a dog barks or gestures to warn its guardian of danger, there is recognition of a smell and situation, an intention to alert the guardian, and a direction in its action. Even without human sentences, communication of information and intention rests on signs. If there were truly no sign at all, there would be no conversation, teaching, compassion, or wisdom. If that state is called a Buddha, we might as well call an insentient stone a Buddha.
The Doctrinal Questions and Answers Sutta Must Also Be Read Critically
The text cited in the comment, the Vedalla Sutta or the Doctrinal Questions and Answers Sutta, belongs to the Majjhima Nikaya. The Nikayas are commonly called Early Buddhist scriptures, but I regard that label itself as a problem. They are Pali scriptures transmitted through one among many schools, the Theravada or School of the Elders. They are later documents preserved and edited by one school, not a complete record of the historical Buddha speaking in person. Most of the long, middle-length, and topically grouped discourses are prose and bear traces of later editing and storytelling.
Writing ‘Thus have I heard’ at the beginning does not make a text an eyewitness record. It may instead be a device by which a later author attaches the Buddha’s name to a story and gives it authority. It is like a text written in the name of a god that did not actually come from a god. The Vedalla Sutta says that the Blessed One stayed in Jeta’s Grove at Anathapindika’s monastery and that Mahakotthita went to see Sariputta for a dialogue. I see such a scene as a literary dialogue rather than a historical record.
The discourse begins with insight and then moves through recognition and feeling, the bases of infinite space and infinite consciousness, signlessness, and the cessation of perception and feeling. It says that bodily, verbal, and mental activities subside for a monk who has attained cessation, and it connects signless liberation of mind with the ending of greed, anger, and ignorance. Because it is written that way, people think such a level really exists and that reaching it is the goal of Buddhism. But a premise being written in a text is entirely different from that premise being established in reality.
The First Contradiction in Assuming Such a State
Let us assume that the cessation of perception and feeling really exists. Suppose someone enters a condition in which every feeling and all five senses disappear and no thought or representation arises. He later emerges and says, ‘I entered the cessation of perception and feeling. I experienced the highest state in which greed, anger, and ignorance vanished.’ How does he know that he entered it?
Knowing is already a sign. To know ‘I feel nothing now,’ ‘this differs from my ordinary condition,’ or ‘this is the cessation of perception and feeling,’ one must compare the previous condition with the present one. One must distinguish feeling from no feeling and signs from no signs. That distinction, comparison, and recognition are themselves signs and mental activities. Therefore, at the moment a person knows that he has entered the cessation of perception and feeling, he is not in the state described by that doctrine.
The mind may become quiet and sensation faint in deep concentration. A person may briefly doze off or awaken from anesthesia with a blank in memory. Naming that blank afterward as the cessation of perception and feeling, however, is a sign formed afterward. The experiencer has no way to prove that there were absolutely no signs within the experience. The testimony of someone who says that he was there conflicts with the claim itself.
The Second Contradiction in Assuming Such a State
The second problem is simpler. If every sensation and mental activity truly stopped, how could anyone leave that state? One could not feel how much time had passed, think that it was time to awaken, or receive a signal from the body. By what criterion would one decide to emerge? With no sign, feeling, or thought, neither recognition of entering meditation nor an intention to leave it could arise.
The doctrine calls the cessation temporary because taking the idea of total stoppage seriously leaves no path by which a living person can return. According to the definition, one could not know that one had entered, and once inside, one could not emerge by oneself. One would simply remain like a stone forever. I therefore regard the cessation of perception and feeling not as an exact description of an actual experience, but as a later story added by people who deified profound quiet.
Concentration Is Absorption, Not Enlightenment
I am not denying concentration itself. When we become absorbed in one object, other thoughts diminish and the mind gathers. Anyone can experience this. When playing basketball intensely, one is absorbed in basketball; when playing a deep game of Go, the board fills one’s attention. Samadhi, a gathered state cultivated through samatha, can be understood as an extension of such absorption. Defilements may arise less often, and quiet may be felt.
Quiet is not total cessation. Recognition that the mind is quiet remains, and so do the object and direction of attention. Once concentration ends, we are shaken again in everyday life. That is natural for living human beings. But when the Buddha is deified as a perfect and unshakable being, later people ask, ‘How can he be perfect if thought remains?’ and ‘How can greed, anger, and ignorance be gone if signs remain?’ They then imagine a realm where every mental activity disappears. It is one fiction piled on another.
Human Beings Are Dependently Arisen
When Buddhism forgets the roots of greed, anger, and ignorance and turns those three words into poisons that must simply be removed, it becomes a religion of transcendence. Instead of observing why desire, anger, and ignorance arise, people desire a state in which they have completely disappeared. Yet humans are animals, living and dependently arisen beings. We eat when hungry, use the toilet when the body calls, have sex or masturbate when sexual desire arises, and pass gas when gas comes. Without feeling, we could not know hunger or the body’s signals.
Demanding that such a human being become completely without feeling and never be shaken is like waiting for the sun to rise in the west. A sincere observer sees that concentration brought quiet but ordinary life brought movement again, and asks why the ideal does not work. A deluded person or fraud instead declares that he entered cessation and eliminated greed, anger, and ignorance. An impossible goal turns practice from wisdom into self-deception or an instrument of authority.
Anger raises the same issue. If Chun Doo-hwan tramples people with guns and blades, if a foreign army kills our neighbors, or if Yoon Suk Yeol orders soldiers sent to defend the people to aim their weapons at those people and suppress the National Assembly, should we feel no anger? We cannot make numbness our goal without asking what ignorance is and under what conditions anger arises. We must examine the very desire to become a flawless stone or god.
Leave Both Ora and Param Behind
An old formulation that I consider important says, ‘Leave both ora and param behind.’ It is often translated as leaving this shore and the other shore, or this world and the other world, but that wording hides the point. I read ora as attachment to worldly desires and values, and param as the desire to transcend humanity and become something perfect. Do not cling to worldly desire, and do not cling to transcendent desire either.
Suppose Gautama Siddhartha existed and, as the tradition says, left the life of a prince. He left worldly life, sought something perfect beyond aging, illness, and death, and practiced starvation to cut off even bodily desire. What he would have learned at the end of austerity is that humans are dependently arisen beings and that mind, body, aging, and death occur through conditions. In that case, the emaciated ascetic image is not a triumphant model to worship but an image of the foolishness committed while trying to transcend humanity.
Buddhist wisdom is not the acquisition of perfect purity, an absolutely highest level, or a condition in which greed, anger, and ignorance are utterly gone. It lies in observing the self that desires such a condition and recognizing the futile action of following scriptural words without even knowing what one seeks. Telling people not to pursue the cessation of perception and feeling does not mean telling them not to practice. It means not making impossible transcendence the goal of practice.
Buddhism Is Insight, Not the Absence of Signs
Insight means penetrating understanding. Understanding is a mental activity, and knowing is also a sign. Buddhism should therefore not be a religion that eliminates signs, but a process of wisdom that observes and understands oneself and the world. When I recognize which delusion made me pursue something futile, I can leave that delusion. When I see that I have lived believing in complete enlightenment and a perfect state, I no longer need to chase them.
We must not believe something merely because a book, scripture, or teacher says so. Lies, nonsense, and delusion fill textbooks, the media, and ordinary speech. Buddhist scriptures are no exception. We must observe, understand, discuss, and question. Do not believe without observation, and do not pursue without questioning.
Belief in ideas such as the cessation of perception and feeling makes people easy prey, on one side, for those who boast that they have experienced cessation and nirvana and, on the other, for storytellers who sincerely believe their own fabrications. Concentration is not Buddhism. Buddhism is wisdom. Without wisdom, observation, and reflection, people believe and pursue the wrong things and flounder in delusion.
Do not try to eliminate signs. Without signs, you cannot converse, understand, act compassionately, or use wisdom. Observe which signs bind you, and question whether they are true.
Speaking, teaching, and conversing require signs, thoughts, and intentions. If someone calls the cessation of perception and feeling the state of a Buddha and then explains and teaches that experience, at that very moment he is discriminating, thinking, and using concepts. His speech contradicts his claim. Please think in terms of dependent arising. Do not seek perfect numbness; observe the mind, body, and relationships arising now, and continue to question.
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