“Why Karma Is Scientific”—Without a Single Scientific Argument
This broadcast was the second session criticizing Dr. Jeon Hyeon-su. The first video was titled “Karma Is Not Pie in the Sky! Why Karma Is More Scientific Than Anything Else.” From the title, I expected at least some evidence explaining karma scientifically. Yet throughout the thirty-six-minute video, there was no scientific explanation at all. It simply recited ideas imagined by Abhidharma-era thinkers trying to explain how rebirth continues.
It mentioned rebirth-linking consciousness creating mind and matter, bhavanga as a life-continuum, and kalapas as units of matter, but never explained what had been observed, how it was observed, or what causal evidence supported the conclusion. If one wants to introduce such later speculation, “How the Commentaries Explain Rebirth” would be a more honest title. Calling it science only reveals a failure to understand science.
If someone promises a scientific reason but offers no observation, verification, or causal relationship and merely repeats ancient speculation, that is not science. It is superstition repackaged for sale.
Why Bother Criticizing Such Absurd Superstition?
In another video, Dr. Jeon described asking the Dalai Lama about rebirth and claimed that through meditative absorption he had seen past lives, heavenly beings, heavenly women, and tree spirits. I said that when such claims go beyond private delusion and are presented to others as facts and proofs of one’s special ability, they approach the territory of fraud.
There are two reasons to keep criticizing such videos. People who desperately want to believe in an afterlife and rebirth have difficulty escaping even when told that the claims are false. Groups such as Shincheonji and JMS, as well as fraudulent pastors and monks, continue to arise because they can exploit the desire to believe. But people who remain uncertain and lack information for judgment need to be shown specifically what is wrong and why it is false.
The purpose of criticism is not merely abuse. It is to give those wavering between superstition and truth a foothold from which critical thinking can help them escape.
The Claim That Body and Mind Vanish but Karma Remains
Dr. Jeon said he asked Sayadaw U Tejaniya what happens when a person dies. The Sayadaw answered that body and mind cease. Up to this point, the answer fits dependent arising: when the body disappears, a mind connected to it cannot continue separately. Asked what remains, he answered karma.
The root of karma means “to do,” and the word can refer to action or, more broadly, an event. Yi Sun-sin dies, but his actions and the events he caused continue to affect the world. The Buddha dies, but his words and deeds still affect us. There is nothing problematic about the influence of events remaining within material, dependent causal relations.
The problem comes next. We are told that karma moves by itself without a carrier, determines rebirth and the next life, and can be known through practice. The ordinary statement that actions leave effects is quietly turned into an unobservable rebirth system.
Even after a person dies, the effects of the events that person caused remain. But saying those effects become a lump of karma that seeks out the next “me” is an entirely different claim.
Where Is a Past-Life Memory Recorded?
The Dalai Lama reportedly answered that lamas like himself know rebirth because they remember past lives as children. They may say the memory was detailed when young and faded with age. But the word “memory” immediately demands a prior question: when, through what process, and where was that memory recorded?
Memory requires experience through eyes, ears, nose, and body. Seeing itself is a physical, dependently arisen event involving light, eyes, the nervous system, and interpretation by the brain. Seeing a past scene without eyes or a body makes no sense. Suppose instead that one did not actually see the past but recalled a memory. Memory too is recorded through physical, chemical, and electrical changes in the brain.
For experience from before birth to remain in the present brain, something like a soul carrying memories would have to enter a fetus and inscribe countless past lives into a barely developed brain. Information absent from sperm and egg would suddenly have to generate observable physical changes. How could a tiny fetal brain contain hundreds of millions of past-life memories? No such process has been medically observed.
Memory is an event occurring in the body and brain. A claim to remember life before birth fails to explain the physical process by which that memory was written into the present brain.
This problem is not limited to Dr. Jeon. The Dalai Lama’s authority cannot replace logic and observation. He is either lying, compelled to preserve the system for political and religious reasons, or caught in delusion himself. When questioning stops before a famous title, further falsehoods grow beneath that authority.
The Claim That Absorption Reveals Past Lives and the Direction of Buddhist Practice
The second alleged basis for knowing past lives was that meditative absorption makes them visible. But absorption is not a technology for producing mystical powers. If the mind is wholly immersed in a game, washing dishes, eating, reading, or drinking tea, that too is absorption. The ordinary expression “lost in a book” shows that people long understood this.
Concentrating on one object does not automatically create wisdom or reveal the past. If someone experiences heavenly beings, souls, past lives, energies, or a sensation of floating during absorption, that may be a delusion produced by the brain, not evidence of supernatural power. If such things appear, one should stop instead of clinging to them as great experiences.
Buddhist practice is not seeing past lives or acquiring supernatural powers. It is noticing what delusion binds me and becoming liberated from it.
A Buddha, as I understand the word, is a person who keeps doing precisely that. Critical thinking has become habitual, so the person observes whether he is speaking nonsense again, falling into another thought or emotion, and where that thought came from. Repeating ancient superstition like a parrot merely because it appears in scripture is not Buddhism.
The Third Possibility: The Scripture Itself Is False
Dr. Jeon said he believed rebirth was certain because the Nikayas contain stories of historical people becoming heavenly beings and visiting the Buddha after death. He saw only two possibilities: if rebirth is false, the Buddha lied; if the Buddha did not lie, rebirth must be true.
There is a third possibility. Later people may have inserted a false story into the scripture. Buddhist scriptures, like Christian scriptures and historical records, may be filled with pseudepigrapha, mythology, contradiction, and invention. Once the conviction that every sentence one reads is the Buddha’s word is fixed in the mind, this simplest alternative becomes invisible.
We need not be trapped between “the Buddha lied” and “rebirth is true.” We should first consider whether a later person placed the story in the scripture.
I went so far as to say that ninety-nine percent of scripture is made of falsehood, fairy tale, and contradiction. Finding wisdom in scripture is like finding a jewel in a garbage heap. If we accept it blindly because it is called scripture, we end up transmitting mutually contradictory stories as Buddhism.
Seeing Heavenly Beings in Order to “Send” Loving-Kindness
Dr. Jeon said that loving-kindness practice sends loving-kindness first to oneself, then to liked, neutral, and disliked people, and finally to all beings. Since heavenly beings are among those recipients, he claimed that he came to see them. He could not send loving-kindness to the dead but had to send it to living heavenly beings, so he saw them.
Loving-kindness is not a letter or substance. It is the arising of a mind that loves, cares, and suffers with another being. We do not have to see people on the other side of the earth in order to care about their suffering in war. We can raise compassion while thinking about Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, an Iranian dictator killing citizens, or the war between Russia and Ukraine.
He described tree spirits attached to every tree like plaques, a huge heavenly being in the sky above a Gangwon temple, a harmonious male deity in the clothes of an East Asian scholar-official, and flawlessly beautiful heavenly women. The description itself projects human culture and desire into heaven. Why must a deity look like a human male, wear East Asian elite clothing, and be accompanied by women beautiful to human eyes?
A deity dressed as a scholar-official and a beautiful heavenly woman are not objective heavenly forms. They are projections of human culture, gender concepts, and standards of beauty.
Ancient people sacrificed food and animals to gods because they projected the human logic of receiving gifts and returning favors. If someone sees a self-created image and believes it is a real deity, it is delusion; if the person did not see it but claims to have done so, it is falsehood. Religious media that broadcast such superstition without verification also bear responsibility.
The Contradictions in the Executioner’s Karma Story
The video claiming karma is scientific tells of an executioner who beheaded prisoners throughout his life. Dr. Jeon judged that killing people could not have been good karma. Yet if society decides execution is necessary and assigns someone to perform it, is it right to put all bad karma on that individual? It resembles eating meat while despising only the butcher. Having someone else spill blood does not remove our responsibility for slaughter or execution.
On the day the executioner retired, he offered a meal to Sariputta and heard a teaching. He had violated non-killing throughout his life, yet the story praises generosity and precepts and says his great merit and wisdom from past lives enabled him to reach high insight easily. If he possessed so much past merit and wisdom, why was he born as an executioner? The story contradicts itself.
On his way home, he was gored to death by a demon disguised as a cow. Because his final thought vividly recalled his offering and the teaching, he was said to be reborn in Tusita Heaven. If one final good thought outweighs a lifetime of killing, one could live badly and think well at the end. Conversely, if a bad final thought sends someone who lived well to hell, the system is neither ethical nor coherent.
The teaching that one’s last thought determines the next life keeps a person bound to the profit of a future life until the very moment of death.
Is telling a terminal cancer patient to create good karma at death so as to be reborn well really liberation? It keeps attachment to existence and personal advantage alive to the end. Buddhism should free people from present attachment, not bind them at death.
Who Observed Rebirth-Linking Consciousness?
Abhidharma explanations say that immediately after death consciousness comes rebirth-linking consciousness, which determines the place and body of the next birth according to past karma, followed by bhavanga or life-continuum. Generative karma is then said to create the first mind, mental factors, matter, and kalapas. An arahant supposedly has no karma producing another life, so the chain simply ends.
But every movement of a living person is an action and event. We step on microorganisms, eat, defecate, sleep, and constantly affect the world. An arahant does not cease to act. The contradiction arises because “karma” has been quietly changed from action into a transcendent power producing rebirth.
The deeper question is observation. If body and mind die and disperse, who saw death consciousness, rebirth-linking consciousness, and bhavanga continue? With no eyes, ears, sensory organs, or brain, what performed distinction and cognition? Who observed this process and reported it to the living? Saying that practice reveals it does not explain a method of observation.
After body and mind have both dispersed, who observed rebirth-linking consciousness, with what sensory organ, and by what method? Without an answer, the word “scientific” has no place here.
Momentary arising and ceasing, rebirth-linking consciousness, and life-continuum were not observations of early Buddhism. They were concepts created by later schools and Abhidharma thinkers to explain rebirth. Adding concepts to explain the inexplicable does not turn them into facts.
Karmic Retribution Joins Morality to Profit as an Instrument of Training
If karma means action, the core of karmic retribution is the claim that a return must follow the action. This is not physical action and reaction. It means that good conduct must benefit me and evil conduct must harm me. The Korean lament “What sin did I commit in a past life to deserve this fate?” contains the entire structure.
Events themselves produce results through causes and conditions. But karmic rebirth joins the human evaluation of good and evil to profitable and harmful outcomes for the self. It resembles training a horse with carrot and stick: obey and receive a carrot; disobey and receive a beating. Linking morality with reward and punishment has been used to train livestock, slaves, subjects, and believers to follow authority.
The belief that good must bring profit and evil must bring loss is not a law of the universe. It is a carrot-and-stick system for training people.
Good conduct does not guarantee a beneficial return, and bad conduct does not guarantee personal harm. The belief may function as one way of teaching morality, but calling it an objective cosmic system or Buddhist truth turns it into falsehood.
Whose Standards Determine Morality and Reward?
Good and evil change with period, society, and position. The Ten Commandments prohibit coveting another person’s slave while treating slave ownership itself as normal. In an ancient society, taking someone’s slave was evil; today we call freeing a slave good. Yi Sun-sin killed countless Japanese soldiers but is a hero because he defended his country. Is killing always calculated as the same karma?
Animals deceive as well. A deep-sea fish lures smaller fish with a glowing bait and eats them. The structure resembles lying, but human precepts cannot simply be applied to the fish. Projecting human morality onto all life and the universe is already anthropocentric.
Rewards are equally relative. Wealth is the greatest reward for one person, while love or honor matters more to another. Standards of beauty differ between East and West, the Joseon period and today, and from person to person. Even if a god gives someone the “most beautiful” spouse as a reward, that person may find the spouse unattractive. We cannot even agree on the exact punishment deserved by a dictator who massacred thousands.
If neither good and evil nor benefit and harm have fixed standards, how can the universe match them precisely and administer reward and punishment?
A Complex World and Dependent Causality
The most important reason karmic retribution cannot be scientific is that the world is a complex system arising dependently. One result does not come from one cause. Planting a red bean does not guarantee a bean plant. Soil, nutrients, sunlight, rain, temperature, and countless conditions must cooperate. Whether a dandelion seed grows depends on where it lands, whether it is stepped on, disturbed by an animal, or finds enough soil and water.
Even if there had been a morally exemplary dinosaur at the end of the Cretaceous period, an asteroid striking the Yucatan Peninsula would kill it with the others. Its good conduct would not alter the asteroid’s orbit. If a larger asteroid destroyed Earth or the Sun vanished, where and how would the universe deliver the individual’s promised reward?
Human relations are the same. One may strike a person who, like Jesus, offers the other cheek. One may rescue a vicious person who turns around and attacks. One may return a wallet, remove a small amount, and be prosecuted for theft. Results are produced jointly by another person’s character, institutions, accident, environment, and countless other conditions.
Dependent arising is not a one-to-one equation saying, “I did this, so that result must come.” It is a complex system in which countless causes and conditions combine to produce unpredictable results.
Karmic rebirth also requires a “me” that continues after death to receive the reward. That is eternalism. From the standpoint of impermanence and non-self, body and mind disperse at death. As a rock becomes sand, “I” disperse into relations. Who then receives my allotted reward or punishment in another life?
An Anthropocentric Universe with the Name of God Removed
Karmic retribution, inevitable justice, and karmic rebirth imagine a divine system while omitting the name “God.” Someone must record every person’s good and evil in microscopic units, judge standards that differ by period and individual, and guarantee precisely tailored reward and punishment.
The universe is not interested in one human being’s morality. In the whole universe, we are less than dust upon dust. Just as I do not record the virtue and vice of one microorganism in my gut, no cosmic system calculates the moral score of each human being. We projected onto the world the wish that such a system existed.
Karmic retribution adds human moral standards and personal advantage to action, then presents the result as cosmic truth. That is why it is non-Buddhist, irrational, and unscientific.
Understanding a dependently arisen world frees us from the self-centered beliefs that good deeds must bring good fortune and bad deeds must bring punishment. That is a scientific attitude and the direction of Buddhism as I understand it.
An Angry Buddha and What Must Be Released Before Death
During the broadcast, a viewer criticized me as vulgar and said I became excited only when attacking others. I acknowledged that I often become emotional in criticism. I also said I react emotionally when examining my own wrongs. We should abandon the fantasy that a Buddha or arahant is always calm, gentle, and incapable of anger. Can a person whose emotions are dead empathize, become angry, and act compassionately in the face of war and massacre?
Deep concentration can make a person feel cold, almost like a person without blood, because thoughts and emotions are objectified. But that state should not be mistaken for awakening. Calmness that never becomes angry when anger is called for, never calls nonsense nonsense, and gives no answer to suffering is not proof of Buddhahood.
I too was deeply shocked when I understood that “I” do not continue. My father died and became bone ash. I wept as I scattered his ashes by the Nakdong River because I could never see him again. I recognized only a few years ago that I too will end and that the idea of a continuing self was a delusion. That is why I cannot casually condemn others for failing to accept the shock.
What we need before death is not a profitable thought about the next life. It is to love and live peacefully in this day that will never return.
The problem is that Buddhism rarely conveys this clearly. Scriptures mix contradiction and superstition, while religious teachers bind people to thoughts of gain in the next life until death. Buddhism should not be a religion that binds people this way. It should help them release countless false thoughts and attachments. What we need now is a Buddhism that helps people live today with happiness, peace, comfort, and love.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.