The Provocation: Do Not Even Believe the Buddha
The title of this fourth episode is “Do Not Even Believe the Buddha.” I know it is provocative and likely to be condemned. People may even curse, “What kind of strange man is this? You are no disciple of the Buddha but a spy for another religion.” Yet I say that not a single grain of blind belief should enter Buddhism. If all we do is believe and follow the Buddha, it is not Buddhism.
Buddhism is not a religion of believing in a Buddha but a path of becoming one. To become a Buddha, I must break out of my own frame, and to do that I must think for myself. To escape my illusion, I first have to recognize for myself what that illusion is. Believing the Buddha’s words does not awaken me. I must doubt, observe, and reason. Only then can I break out of my frame.
The Starting Point of the Kālāma Sutta
In the previous episode I introduced the Kālāma Sutta. The Kālāmas asked, “People come to us, each insisting that he alone is right. Whom should we follow?” Had the Buddha answered, “Everyone else is wrong and only I am right, so believe me,” Buddhism would have become another religion of belief and obedience. His answer, however, points the other way: do not simply believe and follow; think critically and observe.
We previously examined the first three of ten points. Do not believe something because you repeatedly heard it, because it is a tradition handed down for generations, or because it reached you as rumor. Humans are vulnerable to repetition. We treat familiar claims as facts and respond automatically like Pavlov’s dog salivating at a bell. We therefore need to question and observe whether repetition has conditioned us into an automatic response.
Points One Through Four Concern Received Information
Repetition, tradition, and rumor all share one feature: they are information heard from other people. The fourth point follows the same line. Do not accept something merely because it is written in scripture. A scripture records someone’s thoughts, knowledge, and view. In essence, that is no different from receiving another person’s speech.
Even if we suppose that the Buddha himself spoke this verse while alive, it is unlikely that what we now call “Buddhist scripture” had already been completed in his lifetime. Some people therefore escape by saying that the warning refers only to scriptures of other religions, while Buddhist scripture may be believed. That is hypocrisy: “My words are right and only other people’s words are wrong.” If Buddhism amounts to “It is romance when I do it and adultery when someone else does,” it is no different from the claims of other śramaṇas and cannot be a philosophy of depth.
An objection follows: “If you say that even your words should not be believed, is the statement not self-contradictory?” But “do not believe” is not a new doctrine ordering thought to stop. It is a request to examine my words against material and experience and judge them for yourself. The instant we narrow it to “Our scripture is right; doubt only theirs,” the blade of questioning stops at our own side.
Scriptures Too Are Books Written by People
Was the Bible thrown down as a finished object by God, or written by people? It was written by people. Buddhist scriptures were not created by the Buddha’s supernatural power either; people wrote them after his death. Every book in the world is written by a person and contains human thought. A sentence does not become absolute truth or fact because it appears in a book. Scripture too must be questioned line by line and read critically.
You may then ask how I know that the verse I quote from the Kālāma Sutta is truly the Buddha’s word. I do not. I only claim that it offers a foundation close to dependent reasoning, impermanence, non-self, awakening, and liberation. I do not proclaim it to be a fact. My claim must also be examined critically. Without understanding this difference, a person may study Buddhism for ten, twenty, or thirty years and remain tightly bound to something.
Admitting that I do not know whether the historical Buddha spoke a sentence is not abandoning study. It means exposing what I do not know and then examining how dependent reasoning, impermanence, and non-self become intelligible when the sentence is applied. I therefore propose this verse as a Buddhist foundation, but I do not demand that viewers believe even that proposal.
Points Five Through Eight Concern Human-Made Judgments
If points one through four concern information received from others, points five through eight concern the ways humans think and create conclusions. Point five is a conclusion from conjecture, point six a conclusion from axioms and logic, point seven an image arising in meditation, and point eight a concept regarded as thoroughly considered. Their methods differ, but none thereby becomes truth automatically.
Point Five: Inductive Inference, Rabbits, and Swans
Suppose a domestic rabbit is fast, a wild rabbit is fast, and every rabbit I have seen is fast. It is easy to conclude that all rabbits are fast. Yet when I discover a very slow rabbit, that conclusion changes. Within the limits of the time and place I observed, I inferred that rabbits are probably fast. I did not obtain an eternally unchanging fact.
The same is true of swans. This swan is white and that swan is white, so I say that all swans are white. One black swan collapses the conclusion. The sun has risen every morning, so I can expect it to rise tomorrow, but if Earth or the sun disappeared, or rotation stopped, it would not. A rule that worked through today is not guaranteed to work tomorrow. Inductive conclusions and conjectures can be useful without being facts themselves.
Point Six: Axioms and Deduction Depend on Their Premises
Take “All humans die” as an axiom and accept “Socrates is human” as true. We can then deduce “Socrates will die.” If the two conditions are true, the conclusion appears true as well. This is one form of deductive reasoning.
The problem is that the axiom serving as premise may be wrong. If the premise is false, a conclusion can be false even when the logical development is perfectly elaborate. A conclusion cannot be blindly accepted merely because it looks logical. We must first ask what was installed as the axiom.
Point Seven: The Avalokiteśvara My Mother Saw
When I was preparing to retake the college entrance examination, my worried mother went to a temple she did not usually visit and prayed, calling on Avalokiteśvara. One day Avalokiteśvara appeared vividly in a dream or her mind. She felt relieved, thinking, “I saw Avalokiteśvara, so my son will probably pass.”
Did she see an actual Avalokiteśvara, or a representation produced by her brain? Did she observe an object before her eyes, or see a shape arising in a dream and mind? Images arising in meditation generate countless illusions. Some people practicing meditative absorption say that they reached a stage, saw something, or had a special experience. I tell them not to turn their eyes toward such things. They may be tricks of the brain with nothing to do with meditative absorption.
Chakras, Angels, Near-Death Experiences, and the Same Question
Some people speak of Indian yoga and chakras and feel that a chakra opened and cosmic energy poured into their body. In Christianity people say they saw God or angels and encountered light. Someone whose heart briefly stopped and was revived by an electric shock may say they saw an afterlife; another claims an out-of-body experience in which they looked at themselves from outside.
I do not stop at denying that the person felt something. I ask whether it was an externally observed fact or an image the brain produced. Certainty that “I saw it” does not make it a fact. Do not invest an image arising in meditation with belief. Without this foundation, people who call themselves Buddhists chase absurd illusions every day.
Point Eight: Even Long-Considered Common Sense Changes
What about a conclusion reached not impulsively by one person but after repeated critical review and deliberation from many angles by many people? What we call current scientific fact or common sense is an example. Does deep thought and broad agreement make it one hundred percent truth?
It may not. Common sense has continually changed, and much of the past’s common sense was wrong. Things once called scientific facts have changed as well. Deliberation has value, but being deliberated does not turn a concept into an object of belief. We must not be shaken into obedience by common sense; we must think critically about it too.
My Conclusion Becomes Someone Else’s Information
Points one through four concern information received from other people. Points five through eight concern conclusions an individual creates by conjecturing, formalizing logic, seeing representations, and deliberating. Yet an individual conclusion is then transmitted to another person and becomes information of the first four kinds. The whole sequence can be compressed into one statement: do not simply believe and follow either my thought or another person’s.
Point Nine: The Person Who Appears Authoritative
Imagine a professor, doctor, celebrity, Nobel laureate, president, legislator, supreme patriarch of the Jogye Order, pope, Dalai Lama, or creator with two hundred thousand subscribers. Do title, fame, and recognition by many guarantee that the person always speaks correctly? No. We must not submit to authority.
Pressure arises: “Everyone recognizes that person, so why do you criticize him?” Yet we must throw off every authority and look critically at the content and grounds of a claim. Only by discarding the conclusion that an authoritative person must be right can we speak plainly about what we see.
Point Ten: Even If the Person Is My Teacher
The tenth point says not to believe and follow a śramaṇa merely because he is my teacher. There can be mentors, lineages, and schools, including a lineage associated with Seongcheol. Does that mean Gyeongheo, Bodhidharma, or the Buddha spoke nothing but truth? Did the Buddha say, “If you take me as teacher, all my words are right, so disobey none and follow them exactly”?
Rather, this verse tells us not to believe and follow even our teacher. If the historical Buddha truly spoke it, its severity is even greater. Buddhism is not a hypocritical religion that says, “I am entirely right and all of you are wrong.” Asked whom they should trust, the Kālāmas are told not to believe and follow but to reason dependently, think critically, and observe.
Pushing the Kālāma Sutta Outside Buddhism
Some people insist that the verse refers only to other teachings and exempts Buddhism. They almost seem to want to cut the Kālāma Sutta out of Buddhism and pretend not to see it. Read that way, the logic of hypocrisy throws a precious jewel into a cesspit. Buddhism is not belief even in the Buddha’s word. It is the path of thinking for oneself.
To escape my illusion, I must look critically at my own thought, experience, and emotion. Why did this feeling arise? Where did it come from? Why did I judge this way? What was my criterion? Even if a living Buddha stood before me, he would not command me to believe and follow his word as truth. To reason, observe, and look critically—that is Buddhism.
Do Not Believe the Speaker’s Claim to Be an Arahant Either
I have publicly called myself an arahant. That does not mean anyone should say, “He is an arahant, so let us believe and follow him.” You should be able to answer, “What makes you an arahant? Let me examine your speech and behavior. It does not look that way to me.” That critical examination is exactly what I want.
When belief and obedience begin, reasoning stops. Even watching my videos every day forever will not bring awakening unless one revisits old beliefs and thinks for oneself. If someone listens to me, examines their own thought, and realizes, “I was mistaken,” I did not pull that person out of the shell. They broke out by themselves.
A Shell No One Else Can Break for You
If one Buddha could break another person’s frame at will, every person in the world would have been made a Buddha. One person could make ten, and each ten could make ten more, multiplying a hundredfold. But wise people cannot be manufactured like products from a factory. Buddhism cannot force another person to awaken; it can speak of a method by which one awakens oneself.
The foundation of that method is “Do not simply believe and follow.” We cannot establish how much scripture preserves the Buddha’s word. Even the Kālāma verse must be questioned: did the Buddha really speak it, did it exist before him, did the Kālāmas actually ask these questions, and was the verse later altered or expanded? Unless we read scripture by questioning it from beginning to end, we gain nothing from it.
Enduring Discomfort and Observing Closely
I bring out the Kālāma Sutta because I think part of Buddhism’s essence is contained in it and that it offers a foundation for breaking one’s own shell. This too is my claim. Viewers must ask for themselves, “Is this really a Buddhist foundation? How is believing the Buddha’s word different from hearing it and reasoning for myself?” The two may sound similar, but they are entirely different.
If you try to believe everything merely because it is written, without critical reasoning, you cannot advance a single step. Scripture, monks, authorities, professors, videos, books, and my own thought must all be viewed critically. At first this can feel like ill-fitting clothes because reaching a hasty conclusion and believing it is comfortable. Yet as we embody the habit of refusing to rush into calling something perfect truth, thought across many areas becomes natural. Observation grows closer and finer. That is the conclusion of this fourth episode.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.