Why the Confession About Caring for His Mother With Dementia Is Admirable
A viewer commented on my previous video that Monk Go Gwang is also capable of looking skeptically at his own studies. As an example, the viewer cited Go Gwang’s confession that while caring for his mother after she developed dementia, he realized in just a few days that what he had believed to be practice did not actually work in real life. I regard that part of his account itself as highly admirable.
If someone who had read scriptures, meditated, and considered himself a longtime practitioner saw himself become angry and shaken when faced with the reality of caring for a close family member, that would be a valuable observation. It is not easy to admit that the learning one has accumulated may have been a mess. An honest confession that accepts through lived experience that life is larger than doctrine deserves respect.
But one admirable act of self-reflection does not make every explanation that follows correct. Go Gwang still distinguishes and defines numerous Buddhist concepts while treating the doctrinal framework he learned as fact. Doubting one’s former practice and skeptically examining the sources and validity of every concept one uses are two different things.
Confessing that one’s practice collapsed when confronted by life is admirable. But genuine skepticism must go beyond a single experience and question the whole system one thinks one knows.
Skeptical Thinking Means Separating What We Know From What We Do Not Know
Being skeptical does not mean automatically rejecting everything or refusing to believe anything. It means distinguishing what I actually know from what I do not know, separating observed facts from interpretations I have added, and not presenting a guess as fact. Above all, I must be utterly honest with myself.
I must keep asking, “Do I really know this?”, “Am I merely repeating something someone taught me?”, and “Did this conclusion come from evidence, or from what I want to believe?” A person who keeps open the possibility of being wrong does not casually proclaim one-hundred-percent certainty. When new information appears, that person can revise an earlier conclusion.
Only with these distinctions is discussion possible. If I separately identify what has been verified, what is a likely inference, and what remains unknown, I can hear a rebuttal and find what needs correction. If I instead regard every guess as truth, a rebuttal feels only like an attack, and I come to believe that my well is the whole world without realizing I am trapped inside it.
Skeptical thinking does not begin with “I will believe nothing.” It begins by distinguishing what I know from what I do not know, and where fact ends and conjecture begins.
Question the Certainty That “The Buddha Taught the Noble Eightfold Path”
Go Gwang categorically says that samatha and vipassana are not Buddhism, whereas the Noble Eightfold Path was taught by the Buddha. I begin by questioning that certainty. Was he sitting at the historical Gautama Siddhartha’s sermon and did he hear the Noble Eightfold Path directly? Is anyone among us today able to verify the very sentences the Buddha spoke during his lifetime? No.
One may object that scriptures remain. But scriptures were not complete transcripts from the beginning. Verses were transmitted for a long time; explanations, stories, and doctrine were attached before and after them; and, as time passed, editors and theorists added their own systems. We cannot determine which sentences were spoken by the historical Buddha.
Strictly speaking, therefore, one should say that the Noble Eightfold Path is written in a particular scripture, or that later Buddhism transmitted it as the Buddha’s teaching. The sentence “The Buddha said it” turns an unverifiable supposition into fact. Skeptical thought stops the moment one borrows scriptural authority to make one’s doctrinal choice absolute.
The fact that something is written in scripture differs from the claim that the historical Buddha said it himself. The moment unverifiable words are certified as his direct teaching, conjecture disguises itself as authority.
What We Should Seek in Scripture Is Wisdom, Not Authority
Does the inability to verify the Buddha’s direct words mean we should discard all of Buddhism? No. Among the verses transmitted over a long period and the scriptures from many eras, we should examine whether there is wisdom that frees us from delusion, helps us observe dependent arising and non-self, and makes us look again at our own thoughts.
The value of scripture does not lie in its author being a transcendent being. It lies in the questions its sentences open in actual life and observation. One scripture may contain wise verses alongside later superstitions and mutually contradictory doctrines. Rather than treating the entire book as sacred, we must compare and examine it sentence by sentence.
The question “What is Buddhism?” also cannot be answered with a completed list. Among the many sentences left by people in the past, some multiply illusion while others help break it. We must look at the direction in which a sentence leads us, rather than at the name “Buddhism.”
Scripture is not a vault preserving the Buddha’s authority. We must discern, among records from many eras, the wisdom that still gives rise to questions and observation today.
Buddhism Begins With the Ability to Look Back at One’s Own Thoughts
A person who claims to practice Buddhism must first be able to look back at his or her own thoughts. The question of whether the definitions I learned, the conclusions I reached, and the practices I long believed in are actually true must live within me. If I cannot embody the possibility that “I may be wrong,” no amount of memorized scripture will break the self.
I compare this to a frog in a well. The frog thinks the small patch of sky it sees is everything. Because it has never seen the boundary called the well, it does not even know that the boundary exists. Likewise, when people remain within the doctrine they learned for a long time, they forget that it is one perspective and mistake it for the world itself.
Breaking concepts does not mean entering a state of having no thoughts. It is a process of asking where my concepts came from and what they omit, then revising them when I encounter other perspectives and information. Only with such questioning and doubt can I avoid building the tower of illusion higher while reading books, watching videos, or thinking alone.
Awakening does not begin by perfecting the answers I possess. It begins with the capacity to see that those answers may be wrong and to turn back on myself.
Why Buddhism Rots Without Criticism
When an unawakened person claims awakening, or someone who has not investigated enough spreads personal certainty through Dharma talks and books, the harm does not end with that individual’s mistake. It draws others into the same delusion and brings disorder to Buddhism as a whole. In an authoritarian culture where no one calls an error an error, organizations, societies, and religions all rot.
I say the Jogye Order rotted because it lost a network of criticism and information. Even when new textual research and alternative interpretations appear, they are not properly shared among monks, who do not want to revise doctrines they heard from childhood. When a high-ranking person speaks, junior monks and believers take notes instead of asking questions.
Criticism is not an act intended to humiliate someone. It is a condition that shows one another our wells, shares previously unknown information, and enables revision of our conclusions. A network of dialogue and shared information is itself the community of fellow practitioners, the Sangha. A community in which questions can be exchanged is more necessary for practice than a teacher immune to criticism.
Without criticism, mistakes become doctrine and authority becomes corrupt. A relationship in which we identify one another’s errors and share information is a living Sangha.
The Twelve Links Are Not a Universal Formula for Tracing Suffering
Go Gwang defines the twelve links—ignorance, formations, consciousness, name-and-form, six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, and aging-and-death—one by one and says they trace the arising of suffering. People often say that the Buddha awakened by contemplating the twelve links in forward and reverse order, or that reversing and severing the chain frees one from birth and death. I regard this very explanation as a tower of illusion erected by later doctrine.
The structure that begins with ignorance and ends in birth and aging-and-death was assembled to make escape from rebirth and the cycle of birth and death the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It resembles a Frankenstein monster stitched together from concepts of different eras. Instead of observing suffering amid its actual conditions, it forces every experience into twelve predetermined boxes.
It is not wisdom for one person to interpret a diagram made in the past according to another guess, then teach that interpretation as the Buddha’s answer. Memorizing the twelve links in greater detail does not automatically explain our present suffering. We must concretely examine which relationships and events, desires and memories, are tormenting us now.
A twelve-box doctrinal chart cannot trace suffering for us. Do not turn a later diagram into the Buddha’s universal formula; look at the actual conditions here and now.
The Error of Dividing the Five Aggregates and Twelve Sense Bases Into Ultimate and Conventional Truth
Go Gwang says that explaining the totality of experience through the five aggregates is a conventional truth for ordinary people, whereas the twelve sense bases reveal ultimate truth. In this distinction, I see signs that neither the five aggregates nor the twelve sense bases have been properly understood. The two systems do not form a hierarchy of what is more or less true; they differ in direction and method of classifying the world and the human being.
The five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness—examine our body, sensations, representations, impulses, and awareness. The twelve sense bases pair eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects to examine how a sense faculty meets its object. One is not fiction while the other is reality. They are tools that divide the same relational phenomenon according to different questions.
The five aggregates and twelve sense bases are themselves human concepts. Their elements do not exist like independent objects; they operate in dependence on one another. Classification is a convenience that aids understanding, not the absolute structure of the world itself. Ranking these tools as ultimate and conventional truth turns tools into objects of worship.
The five aggregates and twelve sense bases do not form a hierarchy between the real world and an easier explanation. They are provisional tools for examining the same dependently arisen reality from different directions.
How the Classification of Sense Faculties Expanded
Explanations from older strata mainly discuss the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Later, mind was added to make six faculties, and sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects were paired with them to form the system of twelve sense bases. This change itself shows that the classification was not a table completed all at once by the Buddha, but a set of concepts organized and expanded in later periods.
In one era people examined a person through the five aggregates, while in another they paired sense faculties with their objects. The emphasis changed according to need. If we ignore those historical differences and fix the completed twelve-part system as the Buddha’s direct teaching, we mistake later doctrine for timeless truth.
The fact that the classification developed does not mean it is entirely useless. We can still use the five aggregates and twelve sense bases as tools for questioning. But we must understand how those tools were made and where their limits lie, and use them only to the extent that they aid actual observation. Falling into a pool of concepts and merely redefining its categories is not Buddhist study.
The progression from five senses to the addition of mind and then their pairing with objects to make twelve bases is the history of a classification. Do not freeze a later table into eternal truth.
The Five Aggregates and Twelve Sense Bases Are Both Present in the Single Event of “Seeing”
Seeing does not occur merely because an eye exists. An eye, light, an object, the brain, previous experience, and attention must enter into relation for visual experience to arise. Neither matter alone, nor the eye alone, nor consciousness alone completes the phenomenon of seeing. This is what it means to view sensation through dependent arising.
In the language of the twelve sense bases, this single phenomenon can be explained as the meeting of eye, form, and consciousness. In the language of the five aggregates, it can be seen as the body, feeling, representation, volitional movement, and consciousness operating together. In actual experience, form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness do not move separately like detached parts. They are all connected.
It is therefore foolish to choose between “Is everything the five aggregates or the twelve sense bases?” The central question is how we sense, perceive, and create images in our minds. Instead of memorizing categories, we should observe what operates together at the actual moment of seeing.
The five aggregates and twelve sense bases are not competing answers. They are dependently arisen explanations that unfold the single event of “seeing” from different angles.
Without Temporal Causality, Dependent Arising Cannot Explain Suffering
Go Gwang leans toward explaining dependent arising as the interrelation of relative concepts and does not adequately consider temporal causality. The way concepts appear through differences, as with brightness and darkness or self and other, is one aspect of dependent arising. But if we omit how something passes through particular conditions and leads to a later result, we cannot explain change and suffering in actual life.
Today’s anxiety arises from a chain involving yesterday’s experiences, the condition of the body, economic circumstances, words heard in a relationship, and one’s present interpretation. We can see what might be changed only by examining these connections. Merely saying that words are relatively defined through one another cannot reveal why a particular suffering recurs or which actions reinforce it.
Conceptual relation and temporal causality are both important, but neither can replace the other. Especially if one claims to “trace suffering,” one must examine the flow of actual causes and conditions. Concretely observing the conditions connected in one person’s life is closer to dependent arising than attaching names to the categories of the twelve links.
Dependent arising is not only a relation in which words rely on one another for definition. We must see the flow through which causes and conditions lead to results over time if we are to explain suffering and change.
Do Not Separate the Noble Eightfold Path From Samatha and Vipassana by Authority
Go Gwang elevates the Noble Eightfold Path as the Buddha’s teaching while describing samatha and vipassana almost as non-Buddhist practices. I see this opposition itself as the error of making terms and systems of practice organized in later periods look like a choice made by the historical Buddha. The Noble Eightfold Path was likewise systematized in later texts and cannot be certified as his direct teaching.
Moreover, when discussing the Noble Eightfold Path’s morality, concentration, and wisdom, one cannot detach concentration and wisdom from the processes of focusing and observing through which they arise. Rejecting the labels samatha and vipassana does not solve the problem of practice. We must look beyond names to what is actually done and what changes occur.
Religious belief makes people unable to revise classifications heard since childhood. Even when new research and different explanations appear, they block them with the phrase “because it is the Buddha’s word.” Belief without knowledge is superstition. To preserve Buddhism, we must question both the familiar name of the Noble Eightfold Path and the names of practices we dislike by the same standard.
Question the authority that divides the Noble Eightfold Path as the Buddha’s pure way from samatha and vipassana as non-Buddhist. Look beyond names to how practice actually works.
The Illusion of an Absorption One Enters and Never Leaves
Go Gwang speaks of “an entering from which there is no emerging,” as though once one entered a certain absorption, the state continued forever. He imagines an awakening from which one never comes out, a state that is never shaken and is always maintained. I regard this as one of the greatest misconceptions Buddhists produced after deifying the Buddha.
The Buddha too was human, and a human being is dependently arisen. Body and mind continue to be affected by food, sleep, weather, relationships, and events. Just as a boat on water is rocked by wind and waves, a person is shaken according to conditions. Becoming a Buddha does not place the body and brain outside relationships or make them remain in one state forever.
If awakening is made into a perfect and permanent state, human change becomes failure. People think that becoming angry or sad even once means returning to the state of the unawakened. But wisdom is not becoming an unshakable stone; it is the ability to notice the conditions that shake us and regain our direction. A practice that promises permanence contradicts impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising alike.
The Buddha too was a human being rocked like a boat amid wind and waves. Awakening is not an absorption one never leaves, but the ability to look again and correct one’s course when shaken.
The Tower of Illusion Called the Nine Successive Attainments
Go Gwang explains the nine successive attainments—the four absorptions of the form realm, four stages of the formless realm, and the attainment of cessation—and speaks as though he has experienced those states. I do not regard these nine stages as the words of the historical Buddha either. Later people gathered various ideas about practice into a hierarchy and then taught the hierarchy as though it were a cosmic map that practitioners had to traverse in reality.
Statements that space entered inside him or that he experienced the sphere of nothingness and the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception turn names for experiences into evidence of reality. During concentration, one may have an altered sense of space or feel as though nothing exists. But “I had such a feeling” and “I entered an objective stage of the formless realm” are entirely different claims.
This is not Go Gwang’s fault alone. Scriptures and commentaries of the past described these stages as absorptions, and countless people repeated the descriptions. That is precisely why we must reexamine them by the standard of observation rather than traditional authority. An imagination does not become fact merely because it has been repeated for a long time.
Do not turn feelings during concentration into nine objective worlds. The nine successive attainments may be not a map of experience, but a tower of illusion built by later imagination.
The Formless Realm Is Not Mystical Absorption but Reflection That Breaks Concepts
I do not view the formless realm as a deep stage of absorption. Older sayings about the formless realm should be read as a process of using reflection to break the phenomena and concepts I took for granted. Rather than making sentences such as “space is infinite” and “there is nothing” into destinations of mystical experience, we should ask what our ideas of space, possession, and existence are.
If one imagines a world in which nothing exists in order to experience the sphere of nothingness, or dreams of a special state of consciousness in order to enter neither perception nor non-perception, it becomes yet another desire for transcendence. Words meant to break concepts become a new palace of concepts. The essential point is realizing, “Ah, this too was a thought I had made.”
If we mistake a destination that should be reached through reflection and questioning for an experience of immersion, we confuse an intense feeling with wisdom. A feeling is a feeling, and an imagination is an imagination. Whatever experience one has, one must ask again whether the interpretation attached to it is factual. Skeptical thinking disappears the moment experience becomes authority.
Do not turn the language of the formless realm into a staircase of mystical experiences. Read it as reflection that sees how the concepts of space, possession, and existence I grasp may also be illusions.
Absorption Offers Temporary Rest but Does Not Guarantee Wisdom
Absorption certainly has an effect. Even a person tormented by worries and afflictions a moment earlier thinks only about moves on the board when deeply absorbed in a game of baduk. Worries about one’s wife, parents, or personal misfortune temporarily disappear. By experiencing how the suffering of the previous moment vanishes when thought moves elsewhere, one can bodily understand that one’s own thoughts had been causing torment.
Sitting quietly and concentrating on the breath or a single object can also let the mind rest. It is akin to advising someone to stop tormenting oneself without pause, take up a hobby, and become absorbed for a while. This brief rest is valuable. It shows that affliction is not a permanent entity, but appears and disappears according to conditions.
Yet absorption is only absorption. Concentration does not automatically revise mistaken standards in the mind, and immersion does not yield more accurate knowledge of history or doctrine. If one emerges still clinging to the same fixed ideas and authorities, wisdom has not arisen. The effect of rest must not be exaggerated into the completion of awakening.
Absorption provides temporary rest from the whirlpool of thought and reveals that suffering is conditioned. But concentration itself guarantees neither wisdom nor awakening.
My Conclusion in Critiquing Monk Go Gwang
I have not watched every video by Go Gwang. The claims I confirmed in three videos were enough for me to judge that criticism was necessary. His confession that caring for his mother with dementia made him reconsider his practice is admirable, but that honesty does not make all his explanations of the twelve links, the Noble Eightfold Path, the five aggregates, the twelve sense bases, and the nine successive attainments correct.
He writes books and gives Dharma talks and lectures without adequately distinguishing what he knows from what he does not know, or fact from conjecture. He certifies doctrines created in later periods as the Buddha’s words, and builds a more elaborate tower of concepts rather than breaking concepts. He speaks of deep experiences but does not question again the interpretations he has attached to those experiences.
Liberation is not climbing to the top of a tower of illusion. It means breaking the words I learned, the conclusions I drew, and the states I believe I experienced through questions, observation, and reflection on dependent arising. Criticism is a stimulus that tears down the tower and a condition that lets us help one another see beyond the well. Buddhism begins when we question rather than believe.
The depth of Buddhism does not lie in explaining a great deal of doctrine. Only a person who distinguishes what is known from what is unknown and endlessly questions personal concepts stands at Buddhism’s starting point.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.