Why Continue the Critique of Yoon Hong-sik to a Third Episode?
This broadcast is the third installment of my critique of Yoon Hong-sik. After I uploaded the earlier videos, his followers flooded in with all kinds of comments. Some said he might be a great person who had seen his true nature and that I had no right to criticize him carelessly. Others demanded that I first disclose whether I had seen my own true nature. I therefore decided that this time I had to explain even more clearly why I call Yoon Hong-sik a con man.
A con man cannot easily hide the structure of his con. To deceive people, he must talk about what cannot be seen and pretend that he possesses a special ability. If someone unrelated to awakening wants to pose as awakened, he inevitably brings up unverifiable things such as gods, ghosts, souls, and spiritual energy. If he talks about visible reality, other people can check it; if he talks about an invisible world, he can insist that only he knows it.
The moment someone invokes the invisible and says only he can perceive it, a teaching of awakening turns into the sale of unverifiable authority.
Where Does the System of Saju Go Wrong?
I previously criticized together the monk Jahyeon’s alleged divine sight, the monk Mungwang’s saju, and Yoon Hong-sik’s talk of the true self and the soul. Saju is not a system created by statistically collecting data over a long period. It is a deductive system built brick by brick on top of prior philosophical guesses about yin and yang, the five elements, and cosmic cycles. Yet its very foundation does not fit reality.
There is no evidence that the universe is divided precisely into five elements, nor is there an absolute basis for declaring a certain year the gapja year in the sexagenary cycle. People merely guessed that, because spring, summer, autumn, and winter recur within a year, the universe and human lives must also recur with the same qualities every sixty years. They assign qualities to the year, month, day, and hour and say that the moment of birth determines a person’s character and fate, but there is no observable evidence showing that connection.
When the foundational premise of a deductive system collapses, the whole system collapses. Saju may have elaborate tables and terminology, but it is an old superstition founded on things that were never observed.
Complexity does not make a system true. No matter how finely one combines the sexagenary cycle with yin, yang, and the five elements, it tells us not even a speck about a person. Yet when people see a complex system, they mistakenly assume there must be statistics and science behind it. This is why saju becomes even more dangerous when Buddhist monks and spiritual leaders discuss it. Religious clothing and difficult words lend authority to a groundless system.
Why “Have You Seen Your True Nature?” Is Not a Rebuttal
Early in the broadcast, when I criticized Yoon Hong-sik’s claims, one viewer first asked whether I had seen my true nature. But whether Yoon Hong-sik is right or wrong to say that gods, ghosts, souls, and an afterlife exist has nothing to do with whether I have seen my true nature. Asking first about a critic’s qualifications when examining the logic and evidence of a claim is a way to evade its substance.
If someone points out that a con man’s claim is nonsense, the response must identify what is wrong in that criticism. Asking, “Have you seen your true nature?”, “Another master has seen his,” or “Why do you speak that way?” answers nothing. Anyone claiming to recognize enlightenment must first say by what standard and whose enlightenment they can judge. Bringing in some unknown person and demanding that we believe he is enlightened merely installs one more authority.
Before asking about a person’s status or the label of enlightenment, examine whether what that person said is factual and logical.
Yoon Hong-sik’s Remarks on “Spiritual Intelligence”
We then watched a short video in earnest. The question was: “How can I refute the claim that believing in gods, ghosts, souls, and an afterlife is stupid because they cannot be scientifically proven?” Yoon Hong-sik answered that the nonexistence of gods and souls cannot be proven either, so belief is a personal choice and not stupid. He went on to say that scientists are lucid when discussing science, but their eyes cloud over and they cling to their convictions when spiritual matters arise.
He creates a hierarchy of spiritual intelligence. A person with bright and clear energy hears an invisible spiritual claim and recognizes its self-evident truth. The person in the middle is an agnostic who says he does not know, while the murky person below is an atheist who denies first despite having no evidence. His claim is that no matter how high one’s IQ is, one’s spiritual intelligence can be at rock bottom, and low spiritual intelligence leads toward atheism.
Defining people who believe you as spiritually intelligent and those who doubt you as spiritually deficient is not a theory of intelligence. It is a guru’s device for sorting followers and turning doubt into inferiority.
When someone speaks about invisible things, Yoon calls the feeling that “it somehow seems right” a self-evident judgment. But that is belief, not knowledge. Adding the labels clear energy, dark energy, or spiritual intelligence does not make the unobservable observable. The moment he calls his own intuition a special intelligence and brands dissenters as murky, all criticism is shut out.
Who Bears the Burden of Proof?
Those who say that gods, ghosts, and souls exist must prove that claim. The party asserting as fact something that cannot be seen, heard, or observed by everyone using the same method must provide the evidence. It cannot demand that others first “prove that it does not exist.”
I used the example of a flying pot-lid god. Suppose I claim that an invisible pot-lid god created the universe, watches every move every person makes, and sends each of us to heaven or hell after death. When someone rejects that story, I can answer, “Its existence cannot be proven, but neither can its nonexistence.” That is not an argument. By that method, one can invent infinitely many things, including a flying shoe god.
“You cannot prove it does not exist” is not evidence that it exists. It is merely wordplay that protects every arbitrarily invented delusion from rebuttal.
There is no need to chase after a person who simply says, “I believe in a soul because I hope my father remains somewhere after death,” and tell him not to believe. The problem begins when people claim to know what they do not know, teach it to others as fact, and insult nonbelievers as unintelligent. Personal consolation must be distinguished from a public claim.
What Is Superstition?
I define superstition as believing as fact what is unknown and cannot be observed. Groups such as the Unification Church, Shincheonji, and JMS hold people and take their money by talking about mystical powers, souls, heaven and hell, ghosts, and ancestral spirits. The Buddhist practice of claiming to deliver ghosts to Buddhahood and transfer their energy through the forty-nine-day rite has the same structure. They all sell the invisible.
Science does not establish a single creed that such beings absolutely do not exist. It simply does not accept as fact claims that cannot be observed and have no evidence. People once believed that heaven was above the sky and hell below the ground, but as observation expanded, we learned that no such places appeared. Superstition diminishes over time because observation exposes the mismatch between old claims and reality.
Leaving the unknown as unknown is not a confession of intellectual failure; it is the beginning of intelligence. Superstition begins the moment someone pretends to know the unknown.
Superstition Remains Superstition Even When It Is in Scripture
Something is not exempt simply because it appears in a Buddhist scripture. The Nikayas, too, are full of supernatural powers and later superstition. If someone cites an expression such as “consciousness without feature” in the Kevatta Sutta to claim there is a special entity that is neither mind nor body and that this is nirvana, the claim must be tested against observation and dependent origination. Its presence in scripture is not proof.
Buddhist scriptures contain wise statements, but there are also many passages later authors expanded into long prose and adorned with supernatural and transcendent elements. I sharply criticize most of those as heaps of superstition. Taking a scriptural line and using it to make modern people believe once again in an invisible entity does not revive Buddhism; it resells the superstitions of the past.
Scriptural authority cannot replace observation. Even if words are attributed to the Buddha, we must doubt them when they cannot be observed in reality and do not accord with dependent origination.
The Sophistry That “We Also Cannot Say Rebirth Does Not Exist”
When I say rebirth does not exist, some people answer, “We cannot say rebirth exists, but neither can we say that it does not.” Professor Kim Seong-cheol has said something along those lines as well. Yet if no one had claimed that rebirth exists, there would be no particular reason to say it does not. I rebut the claim precisely because someone insists that past lives and an afterlife are facts.
Anyone who wants to assert rebirth need only show past lives in a way everyone can observe by the same method. Once observation is possible, the controversy ends. Demanding instead that the opposing side prove absence reverses the burden of proof. The same applies to an afterlife, souls, supernatural powers, and karmic consciousness.
The party claiming existence must present observable evidence. A demand to prove absence turns logic backward in order to protect a belief.
Why Buddhism Does Not Deal in Metaphysics
“Metaphysics” may sound difficult, but what I criticize here is the assumption that an entity without form and beyond observation exists. If one first posits something whose definition is itself vague—such as consciousness without feature, atman, or soul—and then explains the world, anything can be said on top of that assumption.
Buddhism deals with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects, along with eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind—that is, with what we sense and how we recognize it. The five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness likewise examine the conditions under which matter, feeling, representation, action, and cognition arise. Rather than postulating gods and souls, Buddhism observes in reality the senses, the mind, and the process through which images take shape in the head.
Buddhism is not a religion that adds invisible entities. It is a religion that sees how I sense and recognize reality and create mental images.
Later Buddhism, however, cannot even explain karma in detail and yet turns it into “punishment because you did wrong,” while assuming souls and past lives. To say that rebirth occurs ultimately means that some “I” continues. That is the contradiction of positing a continuing self while preaching no-self. Shaving one’s head and wearing robes does not make something Buddhist. A monk who clings to invisible energy and karmic consciousness also lives inside superstition.
The Difference Between Universal Observation and Belief
Universal observation means something that I may not yet have seen directly but can verify for myself if I reproduce the same conditions and method. Even someone who has never seen Jupiter and its moons can observe them directly with a telescope and the proper method. One can follow the route of another observer and confirm the same object.
Gods, souls, and an afterlife are different. One person says he saw them; another says they can be known only after special practice; and when someone cannot confirm them, he is told that his spiritual intelligence is low. Because everyone cannot verify them through the same method, this is not universal observation. Demanding a leap of faith is not Buddhism.
Belief accepts another person’s conclusion; observation independently checks the conditions and process that lead to that conclusion.
Buddhism Breaks Worldviews Rather Than Demanding Belief
Buddhism is a religion of breaking from the outset, so it stands opposite belief. Even if I say “rebirth does not exist,” you must not believe me. If you deny rebirth simply because you believe my words, you have only replaced one belief in rebirth with a belief in me. When someone who appears more authoritative comes along, you will follow that person next.
Our worldviews arise dependently through our parents, society, and embodied experience. The idea that the soul is eternal, the idea that heaven exists, and the idea that money is supreme are all learned images formed in this way. To escape those images, we must ask: “Is that really so?”, “Have I ever observed it?”, and “Why did I believe it?”
Buddhism is a religion that smashes my worldview. Without questioning, belief cannot move a single step outside the prison of concepts.
I call myself an arahant, but you must not believe that statement either. You should ask: “Why are you an arahant?”, “What did you awaken to?”, and “Do your words and actions fit that claim?” The same goes for anyone who calls himself the Buddha or the returned Jesus. A guru is born the moment questions disappear.
Superstition Is a Social Ill, Not Merely a Personal Matter
I criticize in rough language because superstition does not end as one person’s preference. We must think of the people whose lives collapsed after they fell into the Unification Church, Shincheonji, or JMS. In Korean politics, names such as Yoon Suk Yeol, Kim Keon Hee, Myung Tae-kyun, and Geonjin Beopsa have also appeared in connection with shamanism and prophecy. When clergy and monks talk about saju, supernatural powers, and predictions, society as a whole comes to accept them as normal wisdom.
Some people were uncomfortable with my attitude of laughing at con men. If I were truly doing nothing but venting anger, I would curse throughout the entire broadcast. Ridicule can also expose an absurd line of reasoning. I did, of course, apologize to listeners for excessive profanity. But a rough tone cannot substitute for judging whether a claim is right or wrong.
Superstition does not end inside the mind of a single believer. When it meets money, power, and religious authority, it becomes a social harm that drags people into a pit of hell.
Can Superstition Be Preserved in the Name of Skillful Means?
One viewer said that Buddhism’s superstitious explanations might be skillful means that ultimately return people to emptiness. In an era when few people could read or understand complex philosophy, perhaps some skillful means that did not reject everything at once were needed for people caught in superstition. Religion may also have survived by that method.
But this is the twenty-first century. It is time to cast those skillful means aside. If we continue talking about souls, the true self, energy, karmic consciousness, and forty-nine-day rites in the name of skillful means, people believe them as facts rather than expedients. Many monks I have met simply repeated such words because they appeared in books, unaware that they were superstition. Memorizing scriptures by rote is not observation; it is a parrot’s repetition.
One viewer said that, because his mother had died not long before, he found himself wishing that she might at least live in another good world. I answered that this feeling was utterly natural. It is natural to want a loved one to remain alive and to hope that the person is in a good place after death. But exploiting that grief and hope to sell an afterlife as fact and take money is another matter.
Yoon Hong-sik’s Past Actions and Lineage of Authority
During the broadcast, we confirmed that Yoon Hong-sik ran in South Korea’s 2017 presidential election. I also mentioned his lineage as a student of Kwon Tae-hoon, who was influenced by Dangun thought and ideas of cosmic renewal; the claim that he was a great master foretold by his teacher; and even the story that he was a later incarnation of Jesus. I criticized the conduct of preaching unobserved souls and gods as facts while speaking of conscience and constructing a lineage that makes oneself a special person.
Attaching Buddhist terms such as the six paramitas, the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the Sutra of the Ten Stages in one’s own way does not produce awakening. People sometimes pile up difficult concepts and ethical language to turn others into their meal. The attractive signboard of “conscience” does not turn repeated lies into goodness.
Fine words, grand lineages, a presidential candidacy, and philosophical and Buddhist terminology cannot replace evidence for a claim.
The Fiction of Cessation Attainment and Experiential Superiority
Yoon Hong-sik also speaks as though he has entered the attainment of cessation. But if sensation, emotion, and cognition have ceased, how does he recognize and explain that he entered and emerged from it? I strongly criticize those who speak of the nine successive attainments and cessation attainment as if they were special meditative states experienced one after another. Formless meditations should be understood as conceptual release that breaks concepts such as space, self, and consciousness, not as experiences of visiting mystical worlds.
Buddhism is not a religion in which everyone reproduces the exact same experience. I today cannot feel precisely the same rapture the Buddha is said to have felt 2,500 years ago. Our bodies, memories, eras, and ideas are all different. Buddhism operates as a condition that gives us an occasion for breaking conceptual frames. The feeling after they break differs from person to person.
“You do not know because you have not experienced it” is the easiest authority for blocking verification. Buddhism’s goal is not a hierarchy of mystical experiences but release from concepts.
If someone says he experienced the absolute and tells others to believe and follow him, he becomes a guru rather than a companion on the path. A teacher’s role is not to hand down answers but to create occasions for students to think and question for themselves. People should act as conditions and companions for one another, not let one person rise above them through the authority of experience.
Without Critical Thinking, Even Ordinary People Fall into Cults
People who believe in the Unification Church, Shincheonji, or JMS can appear completely ordinary. Education and IQ do not automatically protect a person. Anyone can be hooked unless the habit of refusing blind belief and thinking critically has taken root. Korean society is full of people, including Huh Kyung-young, who sell spiritual authority and prophecy.
A philosophy degree does not guarantee safety. If someone stops at Plato or Kant and never learns conceptual deconstruction and modern criticism, difficult metaphysical vocabulary may instead help package superstition. The outward authority of a professor or monk is the same. In Korean Buddhism, philosophy, and religion, where criticism is scarce, people who explain things without even knowing what they do not know continue to gain authority.
Cults do not deceive only people who look foolish. They deceive people without the habit of questioning and people who lean on authority and experience.
The Heart Sutra and Superstition within Buddhism
I am not criticizing Yoon Hong-sik alone. I have said that the very name Avalokitesvara at the opening of the Heart Sutra reveals how many deities and superstitions entered later Buddhism. Guanyin Bodhisattva, Amitabha Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, the age of the decline of the Dharma, miraculous relics, and supernatural powers must be judged by the same standard.
Buddhism has so many cults and superstitions inside it that it cannot avoid self-critical examination. A monk’s claims of divine sight and hearing do not become wisdom merely because a monk says them, nor do scriptural claims of supernatural powers. If a Buddhist channel becomes angry when asked to abandon gods, it should first examine what it believes under the name of Buddhism.
The name Buddhism does not justify superstition. To put Buddhism right, we must be able to call its internal deities and supposed miracles superstitions.
Live Questions on Precepts and Their Violation
Late in the broadcast, questions also arose about Wonhyo’s violation of the precepts and the rule against drinking. I answered that awakening does have an aspect of breaking established ideas and rules, but that does not mean one may commit murder or harm society. Precepts are social agreements and laws created within a time and situation. A renunciant’s marriage and return to secular life cannot immediately be treated as evil.
The same applies to alcohol. I sometimes drink, but I dislike a life of addiction in which alcohol destroys reason. My family also suffered because of my father’s drinking. If someone established abstinence as a rule with his students, he must keep that agreement himself. Awakening cannot become an excuse that exempts him alone from the rules he made.
Examine the Substance of the Critique, Not Its Tone
One viewer agreed that Yoon Hong-sik was a con man but criticized me for speaking categorically as though I, too, had accomplished everything. I asked the viewer to identify the problem specifically. We can have a conversation if someone says which statement by Yoon I quoted incorrectly or what is wrong in my criticism of the burden of proof and spiritual intelligence. If the objection has merit, I can admit that I jumped to a conclusion and correct it.
Looking back at my own past videos, I discovered that while telling others not to sell the Buddha, I myself had sold the Buddha a great deal. I also admit that criticism can lead me to presume and overstate. But gentle and pleasant speech does not turn a lie into truth. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone can hide the structure of a con behind fine words.
If my criticism is wrong, rebut its substance. If you challenge only my tone and qualifications, the structure of the con remains intact and no dialogue can begin.
My lisp and Busan dialect may be unpleasant to some, and my profanity may be uncomfortable. These are weaknesses, and I am sorry for them. Even so, the first thing to hear is the content of the words. We must examine whether a person bearing the label of enlightenment speaks of dependent origination and no-self or sells invisible entities.
We Must Also Examine Language That Evokes Superstition
At the end of the broadcast, the conversation continued with a viewer using the handle “Cheongi Nuseol,” meaning disclosure of heaven’s secrets. I honestly said that the words sounded like a fortune-teller claiming to know heavenly secrets and therefore gave me a preconception. I also acknowledged that the viewer had not yet said anything wrong, so I should not judge the person by a handle alone.
Language creates our mental images. I, too, am not free of that problem while using a Buddhist name. Yet in the twenty-first century, we should ask whether words that evoke superstition—spirituality, heavenly secrets, energy, or master—need to be worn as ornaments of authority. The real substance matters more than the name, but the prejudice and authority created by a name also deserve examination.
Do not believe; question. Instead of following those who say they know the invisible, look to those who admit what they do not know and offer a path we can observe together.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.