A Question About Suffering Again After a First Awakening
Today I planned to watch Britt Hartley’s Why Seminary Made Me an Atheist and use it to discuss the problems of religion in Korea, especially Korean Buddhism. I thought it would be useful not merely to hear me, but to examine the experience of someone in another country who had confronted similar problems. Before starting the main video, however, I received a welcome and important question. The viewer said that they had once been absorbed in searching for a true self, but happened upon my videos, was influenced through dependent conditions, and underwent a first awakening. At the time, the experience was exhilarating. They felt capable of anything, even almost omnipotent.
That state did not last. The old lethargy, suffering, and frustration returned. The viewer tried tranquility, observation of the mind, dependent reflection, and the joint practice of calm and insight. The mind felt peaceful during concentration, but frustration returned after emerging from it. They could not understand how to observe in everyday life or what I meant by “looking more closely.” Should they consciously focus on breathing? How should they observe body, feeling, mind, and phenomena? Why did they remain attached to the peaceful state of concentration even while knowing that the attachment itself was a problem?
The disappearance of exhilaration and the return of instability after a first awakening do not mean that awakening has disappeared. The idea that one must always remain in that state may itself be another fixed image.
Why Exhilaration Cannot Continue
A first awakening is the breaking of one shell that held me. I learn what I did not know; part of my delusion and worldview collapses; new eyes open. In that sense, one can speak of entering the fruit of stream-entry, the current of awakening. Immediately afterward, because a binding has been released, the mind may be clear and peaceful. One may feel unimpeded, capable of anything, and filled with exhilaration. This may last a day, a week, several months, or a year. It differs from person to person according to how strongly one was bound and how much of the binding broke.
But the sensation cannot continue. Joy is recognized as joy only in comparison with a time without joy. Mind and emotion are not fixed substances; they are events produced by the brain and body under conditions. The strong sensation of a first cigarette or cup of coffee becomes ordinary through repetition. In the same way, it is nearly impossible to keep feeling the same state indefinitely. The claim that the mind must remain peaceful when a parent dies, a missile falls nearby, people starve or are injured, or one’s own body is in pain does not fit human conditions. Body and mind cannot be severed. When I am desperately hungry or suffering because I cannot even relieve myself, the mind does not float free in independent peace.
A human being cannot remain constant. The goal of Buddhism is not to become an eternally peaceful stone, but to break the fixed image that says, “I must always be this way.”
Buddhism has long spoken as if equanimity or an unmoving mind could continue forever and as if this were the goal of practice. But something does not become true merely because it is written in scripture or spoken by a monk. We must ask whether an actual human being can always remain equally peaceful. The desire to recover the mind of the first awakening becomes attachment to that experience. Instead of treating the loss of the state as the primary problem, we should first see the belief that it had to continue.
What It Means to “Look More Closely”
From the early days, I did not say, “Observe at every moment.” I said, “Look a little more closely.” It means examining my bodily state, sensations, emotions, mind, actions, and the concepts I take for granted with a little more detail than before. To put the Buddhist formula of body, feeling, mind, and phenomena in very simple terms: observe and question my body, feelings, mind, and concepts. To obtain an answer, reflect.
We normally cannot step back because we are immersed in an emotion or thought. When anger arises, anger becomes me; when a standard comes to mind, I take it as fact. Metacognition begins when I ask, “Why did this emotion arise?”, “Where did it come from?”, “When did I begin thinking this way?”, and “Is this standard really right?” I begin to think about my own thinking.
Looking more closely is not a technique of forcing attention onto the breath at every moment. It is a habit of life in which I step back and question my body, emotions, thoughts, and standards.
There is no need to recognize everything in the very moment of a quarrel. Two or three days after fighting with my wife, I may look back and see, “I was trapped in my thought that things had to be done this way, and that is why I became angry.” Even if it takes a month or a year, the capacity to turn the light around and examine one’s emotion and conduct is already Buddhism. When this review is repeated, something once noticed a week later may be noticed the next night, then a few hours later, and eventually while the anger is occurring. It is like learning to ride a bicycle: at first we repeatedly fall, but after the body recognizes the pattern, riding becomes natural.
The point is not to eliminate anger unconditionally. If anger is never expressed, someone may treat a parent, friend, family, or even the nation with contempt. Sometimes I must recognize that there is no need to be so angry; at other times I must deliberately express anger to stop injustice. The purpose of close observation is not to erase emotion but to understand the conditions and standards from which an emotion and action emerged.
Remaining in Concentration Is Different from Awareness
Concentration does not refer only to a special state of sitting and watching the breath. Whenever a person is focused and absorbed in something, that too is concentration. If all my attention is absorbed by pain in the bathroom, worries about money and other matters may not arise at that moment. Because focus temporarily pushes aside suffering unrelated to the immediate object, it can feel peaceful.
That does not mean we should try to remain concentrated at all times. Under the name of constant samadhi, that would amount to trying to become a stone in ordinary life. If human beings are to think, anticipate, relate to others, and live toward the future, emotional fluctuation and frustration naturally arise. Concentration can provide a pause when the mind is shaking too violently and can make it easier to see how one’s own thought is producing suffering. I spent my life studying Buddhism while keeping too far from concentration, and therefore experienced unnecessarily long periods of instability. That is why I recommend combining concentration and observation after a first awakening. I do not recommend grasping the comfort produced by concentration itself.
Concentration is a precious gift that gives us time to rest, but remaining in its comfort and becoming aware of one’s life are different matters.
Instability Opens the Door of Liberation
One awakening does not wipe every lifelong internal standard clean. Standards of beauty, success, money, good and evil, and other people were formed through family, society, drama, film, and countless experiences. Even if one particular delusion has shattered, innumerable other standards remain. In meeting people, working, and living, we inevitably collide with them. That is why we become depressed, angry, sad, and frustrated.
We need only avoid remaining lost in the emotion forever. Even a little later, if I ask, “Why was I shaken?”, “Which standard inside me was struck?”, and “Why did I take it for granted?”, a journey inward begins. Sitting in a temple room and practicing seated meditation twenty hours a day for ten years does not automatically make anyone a Buddha. Only when we meet worldly people and our desires and standards collide does what is inside us become visible.
Without instability, there is no liberation. The emotion that shakes me is not an obstruction to practice but the key that reveals the fixed images within me.
A person may feel comfortable playing games at home while living on money sent by his mother. A person may abandon family and society, enter a temple, and avoid being shaken for a while through exclusive absorption in seated meditation. But if anger explodes at one remark after returning outside, the inner world has finally been exposed. Buddhist study is the study of human beings, of myself and the world. We must learn how mind, body, and emotion move within real relationships.
Do Not Rush or Try to Teach Others After a First Awakening
After a first awakening, do not rush. Direct experience alone cannot reveal everything. I learned from direct experiences such as my father’s death and quarrels with my wife, but I also learned from the information network of other people’s experiences and books. Reading many books critically, with the standard that the point is to break oneself, is immensely helpful. One must also avoid attachment to the liberation of mind—the clear and peaceful state—experienced at the first awakening.
There is another important warning: as far as possible, do not try to teach the people around you. When I was only half-awakened, I caused a great deal of suffering. My father tormented the family throughout his life with what he thought he understood, and I repeated the same error. Excitement over having understood a little conceals the many standards one still cannot see and drives one to correct others. For the first several years, it is better to read, watch worthwhile material, talk with people, and study further.
When a half-awakened person tries to teach others, awakening becomes violence rather than wisdom. First examine yourself sufficiently.
The Faith Britt Hartley Lost in Seminary
Now let us return to the video I prepared. Britt Hartley entered seminary to know God better and draw closer to God. In theology, she encountered the complexity of the Bible, multiple interpretations, mysticism, history, culture, and comparative religion. Yet the more she learned, the less her faith hardened. She began to see that the God of the Bible appeared differently according to era and society. The same Yahweh spoke and acted one way in one period and very differently in another. When society changed, the character and commands of God changed as well.
At first, religion said that good people would be blessed and evil people punished in this life. Reality showed evil people prospering and good people dying without reward. The reward and punishment were then postponed to an afterlife. This is not only a Christian story. Buddhism likewise transfers events that cannot be explained in this life to a next life and karma. Religion preserves faith by postponing unverifiable promises until after death.
If the image of God changes whenever history and society change, we must ask whether God made human beings or human beings made a God suited to their conditions.
The More We Compare and Study, the More We See Humans Making Gods
Hartley says that when she knew a society’s agriculture, hierarchy, flooding, weather, culture, and personality patterns, she could predict what kind of God that society would create. A person with strong moral disgust reads the same disgust into God. A highly empathetic person reads an empathetic Jesus, while a person who prizes loyalty and authority finds a God who commands those values. People project their psychological and social conditions onto gods.
The question then arises: “What if God did not make us, and we are the beings making God?” Buddhism must be viewed the same way. If we study only Buddhism, we do not know Buddhism; if we study only Christianity, we do not know Christianity. Comparison shows what is similar, what is distinct, and what came from animism or the surrounding culture. Korean Buddhism contains contradiction and superstition yet produces little doubt because it does not teach people properly and discourages questioning.
Without doubt, the path toward awakening cannot be seen. When we question, compare, and study critically, the shell of belief begins to break.
The Lens of Religion as a Human Project
Even after the personal God of the Bible becomes difficult to believe literally, one can move to a vaguer faith: every religion may be seeing a different facet of the same diamond. Faith can survive for a time through the idea that each person accesses one higher power through a different lens. Hartley also remained at that stage. But when she tried the lens, “What if religion and God are human projects, projections of the human mind?”, more phenomena began to make sense.
A near-death experience can be regarded not as evidence of an actual journey through the world after death but as a vision produced by the brain. There was a time when schizophrenia was interpreted as demonic possession; today it is approached as a mental disorder arising within conditions of brain, body, and environment. If psychiatry and scientific information explain the phenomenon better than demons, there is no reason to cling to a supernatural explanation. Microorganisms, viruses, and environment also affect human mind and behavior. A human being is not an independent soul but a being moving amid innumerable conditions.
If truth exists, it should be able to withstand the questions of a tiny human mind. A truth that survives only by preventing questions is not truth but a shield protecting belief.
When a Life Built on Faith Collapses
Hartley did not want this conclusion. Her husband, family, and community were within faith. She was raising her child in church, and her identity, purpose, morality, meaning, and decision-making were all built on the existence of God. She even taught the Bible to teenagers. Losing God did not mean changing one proposition in the mind; it meant the collapse of the foundation of her entire life.
When the time came to write her dissertation, she could no longer lie to herself. The view that there was no God and that religion was a human project explained things better. She did not write the dissertation, left seminary, and had to rebuild her life. Nor was she alone in entering seminary to find God and drawing closer, only to lose God in the process. As this repeated among those who actually studied the Bible, some churches began considering education designed to preserve belief. That does not mean teaching properly; it means supplying only information that will not cause faith to collapse.
We Must Question the Authorship of Buddhist Scripture as We Question the Bible
Understanding authorship is one major cause of faith collapsing in seminary. The Bible is not a divine book dropped from the sky. People wrote it in particular periods and from particular viewpoints; later scribes and translators added and altered material. Nor was it written by eyewitnesses taking notes while walking beside Jesus. Even when a name such as Matthew or John is transmitted, we must ask whether that person was the actual author. Contradictions are inevitable when multiple authors and eras are mixed.
Buddhist scripture must be viewed in exactly the same way. We must teach who wrote a text, when, with what purpose and subject, what was added, and why passages contradict each other. Opening with “Thus have I heard” does not make a text the Buddha’s direct speech. Most scriptures now transmitted were made, altered, and expanded by later people. This does not apply only to Mahayana texts; the Theravada Nikayas cannot simply be identified wholesale with the Buddha’s spoken words. Yet monks and lay Buddhists are not taught this academically known problem and continue to believe that the whole canon is the Buddha’s word.
When scripture is seen through the eyes of belief, contradiction is concealed. Only by asking who wrote it, when, and why can we distinguish wisdom, fiction, and superstition within scripture.
If someone takes only the Avatamsaka Sutra and talks about it for a lifetime, or discusses nothing but Yogacara, or pulls out a passage from the Kevatta Sutta to justify a personal claim, the conflicts across scripture disappear from view. Cult leaders can exploit religion precisely because scripture is filled with supernatural claims and superstitions from different eras. It is absurd when someone brings one mistranslated or sectarian verse to instruct a person who has critically studied the canon. We must first know the historical layer from which the sentence came.
The Problem of Evil and the Value Called Faith
Philosophy and religious studies cannot avoid the problem of evil. If an omnipotent and good God exists, why did animals spend millions of years being eaten alive and starving? This suffering did not even teach human beings a moral lesson. Why was God silent through most of human history, when most people never heard of the supposedly correct God? If the genocide, slavery, sexism, and violence in the Bible are God’s will, then either God lacked the power to affect the text or was not good.
Buddhism must face the same questions when it speaks of good and evil and karma. Does keeping precepts automatically make someone good? What are good and evil? How can anyone verify that present suffering is punishment for a former life? As we examine morality deeply, a simple cosmic system of reward and punishment collapses. Yet religion places faith above honesty, love, and compassion. A religion that teaches belief without evidence as the highest value ultimately sells superstition.
A religion that elevates faith can easily sell superstition. Before speaking of faith, Buddhism must ask why something unseen and unheard is being declared a fact.
Buddhism Is Not More Special Than Other Religions
Serious theology reveals that Christianity is not more special than other religions. Buddhist studies should do the same. We should not imagine that Buddhism alone speaks the only answer or that Gautama Siddhartha alone spoke the truth. Buddhist scriptures preserve dependent, scientific, and wise statements, and the Buddha may have drawn an important line in history. Yet we cannot establish that every statement came directly from one historical person, or even that the Buddha existed exactly as transmitted to us. Much of the Buddha’s biography is fiction and myth created by later generations.
The Christian Sermon on the Mount also contains excellent words. If Jesus and the Buddha existed, both learned and awakened within the historical and cultural conditions of their times. Buddhism, like other religions, is full of superstition. Only someone capable of stepping back from Buddhism can become a genuine Buddhist. Buddhism says its goal is to become a Buddha, yet no one tries to become one because the Buddha has been turned into a god beyond human reach.
The moment we believe Buddhism to be a special and perfect religion, we lose the ability to see it. We must apply metacognition to Buddhism itself in order to preserve its wisdom.
Virgin Birth and the Myth of the Buddha’s Birth
Religions repeatedly attach extraordinary birth stories, such as a virgin birth, to important figures. The claim that Jesus was born without sexual intercourse, or Hak Ja Han’s attempt to link herself to an extraordinary birth, are not the only myths. The story that the Buddha emerged from his mother’s side, took seven steps immediately, pointed above and below, and declared, “Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am honored,” must be seen in the same way.
We must ask whether this is history or a fairy tale. Yet every Buddha’s Birthday, instead of calling the myth a myth, people labor to explain that “I alone am honored” really has a wonderful meaning. If the writer intended only a good meaning, we should ask why the expression “I alone” was chosen in the first place. Repetition and familiarity do not turn a statement into truth.
Doubt in Seminary and Certainty from the Pulpit
The great secret Hartley describes is that professors and pastors know, behind closed doors, that the Bible is complicated, cannot all be literally true, and supports multiple interpretations according to author, translation, and history. They themselves have doubts and perform complicated reasoning to preserve faith. From the pulpit, however, they give congregations the certainty they want. The questions and tools learned in seminary are withheld; complexity is simplified and inconvenient passages omitted.
There is some truth in the observation that congregants often come not to hear the complexity of truth but for comfort and definite answers. That does not justify a structure in which pastors trained in doubt perform certainty and hide relevant facts. Ancient scripture was shaped by politics, power, oral tradition, and the fears of people in its era, but this honest account does not reach the pulpit.
A two-tier structure that recognizes doubt and complexity inside scholarship while selling certainty to the public turns religion from a living question into a trade in authority and superstition.
How Money Protects Superstition in Korean Buddhism
Korean temples are no different. Forty-nine-day rites, hundred-day prayers, college-entrance prayers, and tales of supernatural efficacy continue because they make money. The moment religion clings to money, its wisdom disappears. Buddhist renunciants originally lived on alms. If too many people cannot live that way, some must starve or return to lay life. If someone sells lies and superstition to survive and excuses it as practical necessity, we should ask why that person became a monk. One should not decorate habitual lying with the word “skillful means.”
Korean monks should undergo in their education the same process Hartley underwent in seminary. If they properly learned textual history and authorship, Indian society and the renunciant traditions, comparative religion, and philosophy, they could not casually repeat claims about supernatural powers, souls, rebirth, karma, and forty-nine-day rites. Because they do not pass through that process, monks and lay Buddhists alike fail to see contradiction and call superstition Buddhism.
How Korean Buddhism Can Move Beyond Superstition
Information must be shared if shamanism, prophecy, afterlives, souls, supernatural powers, miracles, the Second Coming, Maitreya, Amitabha, Avalokitesvara, and miraculous relics are to stop causing harm in Korean society. Just as Hartley studied how the Bible was made, we must learn how Buddhist scripture was made. Only when we know that the canon is not all the Buddha’s speech can we set aside its contradictions, literature, falsehoods, superstitions, and ancient beliefs as products of their periods.
After removing those layers, we can ask which words remain observable wisdom today. The Buddhism attracting attention in the West is not the Korean Buddhism of worldly blessings and superstition about the afterlife. It is Buddhism as, so to speak, a “religion that is not a religion”: it does not posit a god, soul, or afterlife but investigates human beings and reality.
If Korean Buddhism is to live, it must call superstition superstition. It must go beyond believing scripture, continually questioning, comparing, testing, and breaking Buddhism itself.
Practice after a first awakening and the problem of Korean religion are not two distant subjects. Stepping back from my emotions and standards and stepping back from my religion and scripture are the same attitude. Just as we must break the fixed image that the mind should always be peaceful, we must break the image that Buddhism is perfect and every scripture is the Buddha’s word. Instability and doubt are not enemies to eliminate. They are the doors leading us into questioning and liberation.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.