Buddhism through the History of Civilization, Episode 3 — Doubt Every Claim

The Starting Point Established in Episodes 1 and 2

As I begin Episode 3 of Buddhism through the History of Civilization, I first revisit the previous two episodes. In Episode 1, I discussed dependent arising. If there is a result, there is a cause, and to understand that cause we must observe. As Francis Bacon said, “knowledge is power”: when we know a cause, we gain the power to work with its result. The Korean saying that even brushing sleeves creates a connection should not be dismissed as mystical fate. A connection points us toward the links among causes and conditions. This is where I see Buddhism and science meeting. Rather than relying on mysticism, both closely observe phenomena and ask what gives rise to what.

In Episode 2, I said that even conclusions reached through observation must remain provisional. The fact that every swan I have seen so far was white does not let me declare that every swan is eternally white. The time, place, and range of my observations are limited. A single gray or black swan can change the conclusion. We therefore have to say, “According to what I have observed, this is how things appear so far.” Observation gives us conclusions, but new observations revise them. The moment we lose that flexibility and harden a temporary conclusion into an eternal, unchanging truth, both science and Buddhism stop.

The Task of Episode 3: Doubt Every Claim

The title of Episode 3 is “Doubt Every Claim.” I ask not only what we should doubt but how we should doubt it. From childhood, we are told to learn quickly and apply what we learn quickly. In school and society, we become accustomed to memorizing ready-made answers and putting them to use. In the process, we get no time to ask whether what we learned is actually right or where our judgments came from. Training in the critical examination of our thoughts, prejudices, emotions, and moods is missing.

Science developed by doubting conclusions that looked self-evident. People did not simply follow established answers about heaven and earth, motion, and gravity; they asked again. Buddhism is no different. I must question why I am angry now, why I hate or trust someone, and what grounds my judgment that something is right. This is especially urgent in the age of artificial intelligence. Humans infer from limited material, and AI forms conclusions from the data it receives. Either can produce an answer that is neither fact nor truth. Unless critical awareness becomes part of daily life, we will accept fast and plausible errors as truth.

The Person Bound in a Cave and Dogma

Dogma is a thought hardened into the claim, “This must be right.” I recall the first line of the first verse in the Guhaṭṭhaka Sutta: “Bound in a cave, covered by many things, and hardened, a person falls into delusion.” The cave is the frame of my own thought, and what covers me is accumulated experience and belief. Once I harden there, I cannot see outside. Doubt is therefore not an attack aimed only at someone else’s claims. It begins by seeing the cave that binds me and the tinted glasses I am wearing.

I strongly criticize people who say they are enlightened. If someone truly awakened, wisdom should appear in speech and conduct, judgment and relationships. If a person behaves foolishly in everyday life while speaking of awakening, that claim must be questioned. Buddhism is not the act of reading one book and remembering concepts. It must be applied to each moment of life, to movements of mind, and to the way we treat others. If my thoughts keep rolling while I fail to notice them, and emotion pulls my judgment while I say, “I know,” I have gone wrong from the start. Closely observing even my manner of thinking and asking, “Is that really, truly so?” is the foundation.

Two Tools: the Kālāma Sutta and Bacon

To explain this way of doubting, I take the verses of the Kālāma Sutta from Buddhism and Bacon’s Novum Organum from science. Bacon located the cause of mistaken human conclusions in the idols of the mind, the idola mentis. He held that the idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theater obstruct our pursuit of knowledge. Like an axe that cuts down a tree, we need a tool that breaks habits of mistaken judgment.

The short verses of the Kālāma Sutta are such a tool. I do not believe that scriptures were completed all at once in the exact form we now possess. Someone may have added stories and explanations around a core verse, and in that process material of uncertain truth—or material that, in my view, is nonsense—may have entered. This is my forceful refusal to stop doubting merely because something bears the name of scripture. In this series, I intend to place the ten statements of the Kālāma Sutta beside Bacon’s four idols and unpack, one by one, what hardens judgment. Without this foundation, people can study Buddhism for years or learn science while remaining inside their own dogma.

The Honest Question Asked by the Kālāmas

The scriptural setting is as follows. One day, Gautama Siddhartha comes to the village where the Kālāmas live. A tradition of wandering śramaṇas and bhikkhus with shaved heads already existed, and different practitioners each proclaimed their own teaching. In the Kālāmas’ eyes, Gautama Siddhartha was one among these many śramaṇas. They therefore asked honestly: “Whose words should we believe and follow?”

I regard that question and the verses as important. At the same time, I doubt the historicity of the stories attached before and after them. It is difficult to know who added what and when, and there is no reason to take a third party’s explanation as the Buddha’s actual words. Even if I call myself an arahant, if someone asks, “Between your words and another person’s, whose are right?” my answer should be the same. I should not tell that person to believe me; I should tell them to doubt my words too. That is how the Kālāmas’ question becomes our question today.

Ten Items Are Introduced, but Only Three Are Explained Here

The common command in the verses is unmistakable: “Do not believe and follow it merely as it is.” Ten grounds then follow. Do not believe something merely because you have heard it repeatedly, because it has been handed down, because you heard it as rumor, or because it is written in scripture. Do not follow it merely because inference makes it appear so, because it is a conclusion derived from an axiom, because it is an image that arose during meditation, because it is an already-considered concept, because the speaker appears authoritative, or because this śramaṇa is your teacher.

The scope must be precise. The video lists all ten items and says four will be unpacked, but the detailed explanation actually proceeds through the first—repetition—the second—tradition—and the third—rumor—before ending. The fourth, scripture, appears only in the list, and the fifth through tenth receive no detailed treatment in this video. I will not insert material the speaker did not discuss. I now follow the three items the video actually examines, in their given order.

First: Do Not Believe It Because You Heard It Repeatedly

Humans are vulnerable to repetition, and repetition is also how we learn. Our lives are short and we cannot verify everything from the beginning every time, so we use repetition to embody language, skills, and everyday habits. We memorize multiplication tables the same way. The problem is that once something repeatedly heard settles into the body, we accept it as naturally given without asking why it is right. The strength of learning becomes a trap in judgment.

Pavlov’s dog is the representative analogy. At first, a dog hears the footsteps of the person bringing food, anticipates that food is coming, and salivates. Later, a bell is repeatedly linked to food, until eventually the bell alone produces saliva even without food. A bell is not food, but the body has bound them together. Our beliefs work similarly. When the same word, image, and conclusion repeatedly appear together, we mistake that association for reality itself.

Musical Memory and the Dissolution of Conditioning

When someone in middle age hears music they often listened to at twenty, scenes and emotions from that period return. Memories were not intrinsically attached to the music; repeated experiences linked them. The example shows how deeply conditioning remains in body and mind. At the same time, it shows that the link is not eternal.

In Pavlov’s experiment, if the bell keeps ringing but food no longer follows, the dog eventually stops salivating at the sound. The formed association dissolves. This matters. A belief created through repetition can change when repetition stops or when different experience is joined to it. “This is simply who I am” and “The world has always been this way” may also be histories of conditioning. To doubt is to trace those histories and test whether the link remains valid now.

How Smoking Cessation and Advertising Alter Conditions

We also see conditioning in the example of quitting smoking. If the association between cigarettes and pleasure or comfort is already strong, shocking pictures that evoke disease and death are placed on cigarette packs to form a new association between cigarettes and aversion. The attempt is to make bad consequences, rather than pleasant feelings, arise whenever cigarettes are seen. The point is not that this method works identically for everyone, but that it tries to replace one repeated association with another.

Advertising works in the opposite direction. I do not place monetized advertisements in my videos, though YouTube may display ads. Images repeatedly tell us that cola is delicious, a luxury bag is desirable, and a particular car is sophisticated. Large companies spend enormous sums to expose us again and again to the same brands and scenes. Before we have eaten or used the product, a feeling arises: “That must taste good,” or “That must be wonderful.” Advertising does more than provide information; it conditions desire. I must doubt how much of what I feel I want is the result of repeated exposure.

Repetition in Rebirth and Society Is No Exception

Repetition is powerful inside Buddhism too. When stories of rebirth occur throughout scriptures and people hear them continuously from childhood, they come to think that Buddhism cannot stand without rebirth. If asked, “Have you undergone rebirth? Have you observed it directly?” they cannot answer, yet they react immediately against anyone who questions it. I harshly compare this behavior to Pavlov’s dog. I am not newly proving here whether rebirth is right or wrong. I am saying that the fact that a claim has been heard repeatedly cannot be sufficient grounds for believing it.

We must examine in the same way our views of capitalism, history learned from textbooks, judgments repeated by TV news, and ways of living that a culture calls normal. Once people hear the same statement for long enough, they resist different accounts. But frequency is not evidence of truth. The more natural a thought feels to me, the more I should trace when, from whom, and through what medium I repeatedly heard it.

Doubt the Images of Zen Practice Too

Someone long exposed to Zen Buddhism may repeatedly learn an image in which an awakened person must answer a question instantly. Stories of Bodhidharma’s nine years facing a wall, Seongcheol’s practice of never lying down, and being identical in waking and sleep are also repeated. Long sitting, overcoming sleep, and instant answers then harden into evidence of awakening. If someone offers another interpretation, listeners become angry or reject it before examining the content.

I ask us to look at that reaction itself. Why does questioning never lying down make me uncomfortable? Why can the conduct of past patriarchs not be seen from another angle? Repeated practice stories are material to investigate, not certificates that prohibit doubt. Even the word awakening does not escape my conditioning. Asking how the images I consider Buddhist were made is itself a foundation of Buddhism.

Second: Do Not Believe It Because It Was Handed Down

The second item is tradition. Repetition and tradition overlap, because a custom repeated for a long time acquires the name tradition. People speak of Confucian ancestral rites, the idea that men continue the family line, and the rule that a woman must obey her father, husband, and son as though they were an extremely ancient order. I explain, however, that many such customs hardened only in the middle and late Joseon period and are merely several centuries old. Before that, there were also arrangements in which a man married into and lived with the woman’s household. The assertion “It was always this way from ancient times” can itself be wrong.

This does not mean that every tradition must be destroyed. It means that we should examine, through dependent arising, why a tradition began and under what conditions it persisted. If something written down, or done by one’s father and grandfather, is imposed on children for that reason alone, one is increasingly likely to become the rigid elder commonly called a kkondae. Had science never taken a single step beyond tradition, there would have been no new discoveries; if Buddhism only repeats old interpretations, wisdom hardens. There are countless people who call themselves awakened while remaining sunk in tradition. The claim that something has been handed down is precisely where questioning should begin.

Third: Do Not Believe It Because You Heard It as Rumor

The third item is rumor. Humans are social animals and readily follow the judgments of those around them. As in the Korean saying about following a friend all the way to Gangnam, when many people move in the same direction, that choice looks safe and right. When a father says something, friends repeat it, and broadcasts echo it, material never directly verified takes root as though it were my own judgment.

I use the example of a rumor that people from a certain region are bad. Have the people repeating it met everyone from that region? Does the fact that several people say the same thing guarantee fact and truth? They may simply be passing along a rumor heard from someone before them. Television, YouTube, advertising, and a friend’s words can put tinted glasses over my eyes. A rumor does not become true because it is widespread or loud. Rather than asking merely who said it, I must ask what I observed and what grounds my judgment.

Like a Rhinoceros Horn, but Not Unconditionally Alone

Here I bring out the teaching, “Go alone like a rhinoceros horn.” I read it as an instruction not to be easily shaken by other people’s words: like wind not caught in a net and a lion not startled by sound. It is an attitude that refuses to entrust itself to rumor and majority opinion and instead looks closely with its own eyes. I also mention, in the same spirit, the image in the Christian Sermon on the Mount of choosing the narrow road rather than the broad road traveled by the many.

But I do not read this as a command to abandon everyone and isolate oneself without exception. If there are wise companions who can criticize one another and move together in a right direction, go with them; if no such companions exist, then go alone. What matters is not whether one is alone or in a group, but whether one is swept along or examines. I can remain observant and questioning among others, or I can remain captive to old rumors while alone. The rhinoceros horn is not an ornament of loneliness. It is a request for independent judgment.

The Buddha’s Answer to “Whom Should We Believe?”

The Kālāmas asked whose words they should believe and follow. If other śramaṇas all said, “My view is right; follow me,” and Gautama Siddhartha had done the same, he would have been merely one more competing śramaṇa. Yet the answer in these verses runs in the opposite direction. It is not “Believe me,” but “Do not believe and follow merely as given.” It asks us to doubt, question, reason, and observe repetition, tradition, rumor, and the remaining grounds to be addressed later.

I see this as a foundational core of Buddhism. The foundation collapses the moment doubt is blocked by the Buddha’s name or scriptural authority. The title of a person speaking about Buddhism, years spent practicing, and a self-proclaimed awakening are not exemptions. My own claims are no exception. Viewers should not accept them because they believe me. They should observe and test them in their own lives, then provisionally accept or reject them. Only when thought becomes flexible can we genuinely discuss one another’s words.

Liberation Is the Attitude of Leaving Conditions in Every Moment

Let us not think of liberation only as a single event after which everything is finished. I ask us to see each moment: the moment desire moves after an advertisement, the moment the word tradition silences us, the moment we mistake a rumor repeated by many for our judgment, and the moment anger rises when someone challenges a familiar Buddhist story. We must notice, “I am caught in repeated conditioning now; this is my delusion.” Seeing it and releasing it is liberation within life.

This is why the video stops after the first three items. Do not believe something because you heard it repeatedly, because it was handed down, or because you heard it as rumor. Scripture and the later items remain only in the list, pointing toward the discussion to come. I strongly criticize the posture of going around talking about Buddhism without knowing this foundation. When we doubt every claim, observe closely, and remain able to revise conclusions before new facts, our cave opens. That flexibility is the critical thought taught by Buddhism through the History of Civilization, and it is the way to become free in each moment.