Questioning the Goal of Complete Nondiscrimination
The thumbnail work did not go smoothly, so I scheduled the broadcast late. With greetings to those who waited, I begin this second critique of the monk Beopsang. We will again watch part of one of his videos, but the central criticism is clear from the outset: the delusion of complete nondiscrimination is ruining Buddhism. Constructing an imaginary picture of an awakened person and pursuing it traps us in delusion and leads us to impose that picture on others.
The delusion of complete nondiscrimination ruins Buddhism.
I often speak of breaking through concepts because people are disturbed by what catches in their minds and suffer through attachment to concepts they have made. But a small misunderstanding sends them into the opposite trap. They make it their goal to become someone bound by no concept and making no distinctions. They interpret liberation from birth and death as a state that does not distinguish life from death at all, and become attached to the claim that one was never born and never dies.
Breaking through concepts must be followed by recognizing reality. Once we see what held us, we also need to see the conditions within which we live and how we live. Losing sight of these two aspects leads to the pursuit of complete nondiscrimination. I see Beopsang’s explanations as resembling those of the Dharma teacher Kim Tae-wan in this respect. Such a goal can wreck not only society but one’s own life. It is distressing that many Buddhists regard this as Buddhism. Today I want to examine what is wrong with that direction.
The Claim That the Whole Universe Came from Me
The video we will watch is presented as a lecture on the Daodejing. It is lengthy, so I look for the passage relevant to today’s issue rather than watching it all. I think it is a problem to overlay every scripture or subject with one’s own explanation and tell the same story. Even the title speaks along the lines of “The whole universe came from me.” Without examining claims that the whole universe comes from oneself or that mind creates everything, studying Buddhism can lead deeper into delusion.
That delusion makes excessive demands on oneself and others. It asks us to become people who have no fear of life or death and no boundary between them. Someone who is unmoved by a cancer diagnosis and equally unmoved when told the diagnosis was mistaken is taken to be awakened. Even thinking of cancer as cancer becomes merely our discrimination. Some listeners may ask, “Is that not a Buddha? What is wrong with it?”
We must question the very idea that a complete absence of distinctions is Buddhahood.
Beopsang introduces a story about Byron Katie as an example of such a life. I do not know her well. What I am questioning is the story brought into this lecture and the way it is offered as an example of awakening. If making no distinctions is truly the aim, why not put a stone there instead? Why would such a person feel moved to love or pity another, change society, or help someone struggling in suffering?
You Are a Human Being with a Body
When misconceptions about awakening go too far, people try to transcend being human. They imagine a Buddha as complete nondiscriminating wisdom, a state without any remaining concept or any distinction between life and death. But you are human. If you cannot defecate, your stomach hurts; if you do not eat, you starve. The goal of becoming a being affected or caught by nothing ignores the conditions of a dependently arisen human life.
You are human—a being who starves without food.
I often discuss being wrongly caught by concepts, and Beopsang repeatedly discusses it too. But that does not justify making the opposite extreme—complete nondiscrimination—the definition of awakening. That goal is a desire to become another god. Imposing it on others as awakening gaslights people and makes fools of them, because they stop seeing their actual responses and believe they must conform to that state.
If it makes no difference whether one has cancer, what about someone else having it? If one makes no distinction when someone starves or a missile kills a child, what is there to grieve over? How would sympathy and compassion arise? Speaking of a compassionate life while seeing no difference at all between life and death is inconsistent.
Even After Questioning Dirt, We Must Stop the Child
Suppose there are no distinctions at all. Would it then be fine to defecate anywhere while walking down the street or eat something dirty? When I ask what dirt means, I am questioning the concept of dirt. I am not saying to stand by while a child picks up something rotten and crawling with ants from the ground and puts it in their mouth.
Breaking through a concept does not mean the concept serves no purpose.
If nondiscrimination means it makes no difference whether someone gets cancer or dies, would we also let the child eat that? These may seem like strange examples. But we have to follow the claim through to what it means in actual life. Merely letting the attractive phrase “eliminate all distinctions” pass leaves its contradiction hidden. Applying it to real situations reveals why we cannot live by it.
Freeing ourselves from unnecessary distress caused by concepts differs from refusing to judge what harms the body. Recognizing our attachment to a concept should not mean abandoning recognition of and response to reality. This is the distinction I am asking for. Invoking nondiscrimination to remove distinctions human beings need causes us to lose Buddhism’s direction.
An Arahant Grieving a Younger Cousin’s Death
Not long ago, my younger cousin died of lung cancer. Does calling myself an arahant mean I should feel no heaviness in my chest, sadness, or sorrow? I hurt and grieve. I regret being unable to help. Using the name arahant does not erase those feelings before my cousin’s death.
I grieve that my younger cousin died of lung cancer and regret that I could not help.
If I am saddened by my cousin’s death, I will also be saddened by people killed by Hamas missiles in Israel. If I get cancer, I may lament it: “Oh no, how did this happen?” At the same time, I can reflect that just as others get cancer, so can I. I can reconsider being too tightly held by something beyond my control. Feeling grief and trying not to remain endlessly bound by it can go together.
My cousin was not the only person who could get cancer; anyone can fall ill. Someone may even be hit by a bus while walking. I ask us to see both sides: feel the pain and also examine it from another direction. Making complete nondiscrimination the goal instead buries us in one side, repeating “It all comes from mind.” People who keep hearing this think they too must be that way and end up deceiving themselves.
Why Teach Awakening If You Make No Distinctions?
A viewer calls it a state of deceiving oneself, and I agree. Someone may believe they make no distinctions, but why then appear before others and urge them to awaken? If there truly are no distinctions, where does the distinction between awakened and unawakened people come from? Why does someone indifferent to the presence or absence of cancer distinguish the presence or absence of awakening? Is that not their thought too?
If there truly are no distinctions, where is the distinction between awakened and unawakened people?
The moment one asks others to watch a broadcast or tries to communicate something, judgment is already present. One distinguishes what is better, what should be known, and the other person’s condition. Claiming complete nondiscrimination while doing this means failing to understand one’s own words. I strongly criticize that attitude as gaslighting, because it speaks as though awakened without showing wisdom and binds people to an impossible goal.
A gentle voice does not make the content wise. I go so far as to criticize the attitude that treats such indifference as awakening as psychopathic. Believing it to be the appearance of a Buddha prevents people from reconsidering its strangeness. Even talk of breaking through concepts can go this way with a slight misstep. That is why I question the actual attitude the words point toward.
The Explanation That Embracing Death Means Living Forever
In the video, Beopsang introduces Katie’s interpretation of chapter 33 of the Daodejing: remaining at the center and embracing death wholeheartedly means living or enduring forever. He adds that this is the center of nonduality, with no separate center and periphery. I focus on how this explains liberation from birth and death. It moves toward not distinguishing pain from its absence and taking life and death as one.
Speaking of breaking through concepts differs from demanding that humans transcend birth and death.
Beopsang explains that life and death are not two, that they are one within mind, and that fully embracing and becoming one with death reveals the teaching in which birth and death are alike. Although he is introducing Byron Katie’s account, he is endorsing it himself. We cannot dismiss this as merely reading someone else’s words. Choosing an example of awakening and explaining its meaning reveals one’s own teaching.
When explaining neither arising nor ceasing, I have discussed breaking through concepts of birth, death, and cessation. But I am saying not to turn that into a demand that human beings transcend birth and death. Examining the conceptual aspect of words is not the same as demanding that living humans make no distinction between life and death. I criticize such explanations as perfectly suited to trapping people in delusion.
How Should We Read the Story of Laughing at a Cancer Diagnosis?
The story Beopsang reads goes like this: a doctor who took a blood sample returned looking grave and said there was bad news—cancer had been found. Katie says she could not help laughing and asking, “Bad news?” The doctor seemed surprised. She adds that not everyone understands such laughter. Later it turned out not to be cancer, and that too was good news.
In Beopsang’s explanation, news of cancer and news of no cancer become news that does not differ.
Beopsang explains that the event of cancer and the event of no cancer are news that does not differ. I think this passage alone reveals the central issue. Again, I do not know Byron Katie well. Beopsang often discusses her and Eckhart Tolle, and in a lecture billed as being on the Daodejing, he is actually reading her commentary. In my judgment, that commentary does not properly understand the Daodejing.
The Zhuangzi’s warning against cutting a crane’s legs because they are long, or the Daodejing’s discussion of the Way and emptiness, does not tell us to live like this. Does writing such an account establish someone as a master of the Way or an awakened person? We need to ask whether appearing untouched by one’s own life and death, and never becoming angry, is truly evidence of wisdom.
I Get Angry and Grieve—Even a Stone Changes with Conditions
I often get angry. I feel anger, pain, sadness, and the full range of human emotions. A viewer asks why I keep bursting out angrily. But is anger itself wrong? Should I not be angry when Yoon Suk Yeol declares martial law? Must I show no response to teachings that lead people in a mistaken direction?
Even a stone is worn by wind and water and changes.
Of course this is not Beopsang’s fault alone. Scriptures can readily invite this misunderstanding, and people have indeed advocated it. They describe Buddhahood as a life that has left everything behind and is affected by nothing. It sounds like telling us to become stones. Yet even a stone is worn by wind and water and changes size. How strange to speak of dependent life while demanding that a human respond to nothing.
Let us not make it a human goal to smile faintly both at news of cancer and news of no cancer. Idealizing an absence of sadness and anger prevents us from seeing our actual minds. Study instead involves seeing why anger arose, what hurts, and which conditions are operating. We should reconsider the very framework that treats the presence of emotion as proof of not being awakened.
When I Entered Deep Meditative Absorption
When I once became deeply immersed in meditative absorption, I felt almost psychopathic. I looked at both the world and myself very coldly. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage of the absorption I experienced. Having thoughts stop and gaining distance does not make that the state of an awakened person. An experience that has moved in one direction should not be taken as the whole of Buddhism.
Buddhism does not stop at meditative absorption. Nondiscrimination must not become the goal.
My objection is to promoting that state as awakening and imposing it on others. I call it the yogi’s account of absorption. Mistaking an unaffected mind for an awakened person removes the question of returning to reality and living. Nondiscrimination may be a temporarily experienced state, but defining it as the completed appearance of a Buddha binds us to an imagined picture again.
If indifference to cancer and its absence is taken to its conclusion, should there be no distinction between being clothed or naked, defecating in public, exposing oneself, or having sex in the street? People may object to these harsh examples. But I am asking where complete nondiscrimination leads when applied to reality. Rather than presenting one selectively attractive example, we should examine the rest of the principle being advocated.
Empathy and Teaching Also Involve Distinctions
Distinctions are essential to human life. We live through agreements, learn emotions, and learn empathy. Feeling another person’s pain is, in fact, an inference through our own experience. Watching a drama, we cry and think, “I have experienced something similar; how sad they must be.” That is how we consider the grief of someone whose mother or child has died.
Making distinctions is essential for human beings to live.
What happens if all of that is dismissed as a trick made by mind, with an instruction to be moved by nothing? If even saying someone has or does not have cancer is nonsense, writing a book no longer makes sense either. Why lecture on the Daodejing or teach another person? Is it not because one judges that one’s own state is comfortable and good, that the other person suffers, and that this method should be shared?
The motive for writing already contains several judgments: that one’s state is good, that the other person is unhappy, and that teaching them would be better. Writing a book on those judgments and then claiming nondiscrimination is contradictory. When someone describes being unaffected even by their own cancer, I cannot help asking what interest they would have in people dying in war or going hungry.
Pursuing a completely unaffected mind and complete nondiscrimination is the pursuit of param, of transcendence, that I have criticized. Becoming such a person is not Buddhism’s goal. We need to examine critically what both Beopsang’s explanation and the book he cites are directing us toward.
“Love Cancer” and “Love Your Enemy”
The video presents the statement that one cannot love God before loving cancer. I criticize this as another piece of fantasy that Beopsang is reading as a lecture. Here let us consider the instruction to love one’s enemy in the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount. Other people too love their neighbors, so it asks people to love enemies as well as neighbors.
Do not try to become a god. Becoming a god is not the human goal.
The instruction not to divide neighbor from enemy contains nondiscriminating thought. It is valuable because it asks us to reconsider loving only those close to us and hating those far away. It makes us ask where we distinguish excessively. But can you love your mother and someone else’s mother on the other side of the planet in precisely the same way? Turning the instruction into a goal that must be perfectly realized leads to the delusion of becoming a god beyond humanity.
Whether it is Buddhism, study of mind, or a New Testament statement, we should examine why the statement is made. What attachment is it meant to loosen? Offering a helpful direction differs from demanding a perfection impossible for human beings. Missing that distinction turns what seemed a good teaching into another delusional goal.
To Those Who Cherish Their Children and Harm Others’ Children
There are gangsters who treasure their own mothers and sons while hitting someone else’s mother, threatening someone else’s children, and extorting money. Is it only gangsters? Some capitalists and business magnates abuse subordinates with foul language while indulging their own children. Such people need to be shown how the distinction they draw between their children and others’ children becomes a reason to mistreat people.
Helping someone step back from excessive distinctions differs from demanding complete nondiscrimination.
Buddhist and Christian teachings can work as tools for asking people to step back from excessive attachment to that distinction. Distinguishing this from a religion discussed as belonging to a particular people, such as Judaism, I explain that religions which spread globally include such nondiscriminating thought. They speak of universal love and ask us not to confine ourselves to those close to us. I am not saying that intention is meaningless.
The problem is imagining that such love can be realized with absolute perfection. The Sermon on the Mount’s questions about whether rain distinguishes good people from evil ones, or sunlight the just from the unjust, also illustrate nondiscrimination. But can you become the sun or rain? Trying to make that image literally into a human state amounts to trying to become a god.
Will You Refuse to Distinguish Harm from Help?
If you refuse all distinctions, then perhaps you need not distinguish Yoon Suk Yeol, Kim Jong Un, and a Buddha. Would you treat someone who harms your wife, puts a knife to your throat, and tries to rob you exactly like someone who is kind and tries to help you? Faced with such concrete questions, can a state without any distinctions still be the answer?
Do I truly make no distinctions about anything?
Sitting at a desk with a Buddha image behind one does not make one’s words Buddhist. I criticize this explanation as profoundly un-Buddhist. Beopsang has failed to think critically about both his own claim and Byron Katie’s writing. He should ask whether it is really so, whether people should be told to live that way, and whether he himself actually does.
The video continues by saying that people who love only pleasant events and want unpleasant ones removed are still far from this study. It discusses prayers at temples asking that good things come to oneself and the Buddha take bad things away. But I stop playback here. A long video containing valid observations and a video presenting the right goal of awakening are separate matters.
Useful Statements Do Not Make the Goal Right
I am not saying Beopsang’s words contain nothing worthwhile. People distinguish and cling even where distinctions are unnecessary, hurting themselves and others. An explanation that helps them see how their thoughts and concepts generate that suffering can help. Beopsang’s discussions of breaking through concepts include such passages. In the broadcast I even laughed that the monk Jahyeon, whom I do not particularly like, sometimes says useful things too.
Having many useful things to say does not justify directing people toward a mistaken goal.
But that fact does not justify the judgment “This is a Buddha; this is an awakened person.” Explaining awakening and identifying someone as awakened requires clarity about the goal first. If the goal is mistaken and people are led toward it, many suffer because the wrong direction is mixed among useful statements. I criticize this as driving people into hell while promising transcendence.
Taking an attractive sentence from a spiritual writer’s book does not establish that writer as awakened. Accepting it without asking whether it fits actual human life or contradicts the speaker’s own behavior merely spreads the same delusion. What I am criticizing is not the number of useful statements, but where people are ultimately told to arrive.
A Buddha Too Depends on Food and Conditions
A Buddha is human. Sitting too long hurts the back; eating requires going to the toilet; hunger requires food. Consider also that a bhikkhu is someone who lives by begging. I explain bhikkhu and the English word beggar as belonging to the same etymological family. Discussing Sanskrit and Pali in the context of the Indo-European language family, I emphasize the point that this is a human who lives through food received from others.
A Buddha is human.
Even receiving alms requires another person to give food. If the people around me are hungry, I may go hungry with them. Will we say there is no distinction between hunger and its absence? If it is fine for others to hunger, hurt, and grieve, I say not to practice that kind of Buddhism. What use is a Buddhism that ignores the conditions of humans living in relationships?
Everyone wants a long and healthy life. Yet health can fail, cousins and parents can die, and people can develop dementia. While feeling the pain, we can reconsider and recognize that grandparents and great-grandparents also died. Anyone may eventually die or encounter an accident. We can feel profound sadness while reflecting that we should not remain bound only by it. Both sides need to be seen together.
Being an Arahant Means Being Able to Reconsider
In Buddhist circles, one encounters people who ask whether others have transcended birth and death or say they have done so themselves. Because Beopsang keeps describing that appearance as awakening, I say I suspect he too would answer yes if asked. But let us first recognize the limits of being human and biological. I call myself an arahant because I am a human who knows he is human and someone who knows he is dependently arisen.
Practicing Buddhism means reconsidering, because I cannot be right one hundred percent of the time.
I also describe myself as an elementary school pupil who knows he is not very different from an elementary school pupil. I cry, laugh, grieve, and become angry. I get angry at things that call for anger, but if someone asks, “Was that really something to be angry about? Are you getting angry too often?”, I should be able to look again and acknowledge the point. I am not declaring my emotions always correct.
I reconsider because I cannot be right all the time. Yet Beopsang’s and Kim Tae-wan’s explanations present a complete state as Buddhahood, liberation from birth and death, and nirvana. They move toward the claim that discovering the true self eliminates all discrimination, then bring in spiritual books that seem to fit that goal. I do not call that the appearance of an awakened person. Buddhism should involve being able to look again at one’s own thinking.
Becoming Attached to Breaking Through Concepts
Today I am concentrating on one delusion about nondiscrimination rather than following the whole long lecture. I have often explained the Heart Sutra as an account of breaking through concepts. Yet when told to break through concepts, people begin pursuing a state bound by no concept at all. They create a new image out of an instruction to leave images behind. Since old scriptures and books contain many such explanations, it is easy to feel they must be correct.
Told to break through concepts, people become attached to breaking through concepts.
We need to get free of the delusion about nondiscrimination too. A broadcaster should first examine why they broadcast and what distinctions and judgments inform their speech. Failing to recognize the contradiction between actions full of distinctions and words proclaiming their complete absence leads to endless repetition. I invite objections to my criticism as well. Explaining what looks different allows us to examine it together again.
Viewer Questions: What Meditation Did I Practice?
A viewer called Pyeongbeom asks what meditation I used to enter absorption and what I think of Ramana Maharshi. I reply that I do not know what kind of person Ramana Maharshi was and have not even searched for him. I cannot pretend to know and evaluate someone I do not know. I did, however, read many books by Rajneesh when I was young. The limitation of absorption-centered practitioners and yogis that I discuss today is their desire to transcend and their belief that they have done so.
I practiced meditation by observing breathing in and breathing out.
What I practiced was breathing meditation: watching the inhalation and exhalation. Buddhism has anapanasati, and my experience also has connections with explanations from Rajneesh’s side. Among my father’s students were people I called uncles, one of whom had actually gone to study with Rajneesh. Those experiences were interwoven. I do not regard meditative absorption itself as something entirely different between them.
I explain the meditation I practiced in the channel’s Buddhist meditation guides. The recommended videos for newcomers include three parts on why to meditate, how to do it, and what to watch out for. In the broadcast I describe them as roughly seventeen, thirty-five, and thirty-five minutes long. I suggest considering purpose, method, and cautions together before practicing. Meditation is simple and easy; people sometimes do it without recognizing it as meditation. Absorption is not reserved for mysterious special people.
Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception: Seeing the Image of No Image
A viewer says this describes a problem they have felt with an acquaintance practicing Seon. Here I explain neither perception nor non-perception. We should not be bound by an image, but we also need to recognize that the state of being bound by no image is itself an image. That is why I say that pursuing non-perception thoroughly leads naturally to non-non-perception as well.
To avoid attachment to the absence of images, we must understand that this too is an image.
Hearing “Do not dwell in an image,” people construct a state of being caught by no image: unmoved by life and death, indifferent to cancer and its absence, and supposedly a Buddha. That is the new image they have made. Asking “What image held me? What did I mistake for a Buddha?” must illuminate that image too. In a dependently arisen world, we should not imagine and pursue a perfect being outside dependent arising.
I criticize the explanations of Byron Katie, Rajneesh, Kim Tae-wan, and Beopsang together on this point. They build a fantasy garden in their heads instead of adequately observing their actual selves. Insufficient reconsideration and questioning keep them trapped once they have fallen in. They repeat the same things for one year, two years, or ten without understanding what they are saying.
Are Desires and Emotions Merely Tricks of Mind?
Pyeongbeom mentions a philosophy that says the Way is attained by cutting off desires and emotions, and points out that refusing sleep to eliminate the desire for it damages mind and body. The viewer also recounts a story of Linji crying when his teacher died and answering critics who asked why an awakened person cried by saying the crying eyes could not be helped. I reply that cutting off desires and emotions would kill you; that is not what a Buddha is.
Body and mind cannot be severed from each other.
Let us not imagine that desires and emotions were created solely by human thought or an abstract mind. Does a cat have no emotions? Does it not grieve or become angry? Does a dolphin not grieve? Monkeys too grieve when their young die, become attached, like, dislike, and grow angry. Deeper observation reveals that much of this is not exclusively human.
We need to consider the brain and body, development as mammals, and the development of empathy and thought together. These are not simply delusions made by mind. They arose in the course of needs and circumstances, and we live with those conditions. Erasing the relationship between body and mind with the single abstract word “mind” is not observing ourselves.
Would You Watch a Drama Without Emotion, and Why Do I Broadcast?
Would you want to watch a drama whose characters had cut off all desires and emotions and responded to nothing? Films and dramas contain events that stir emotions. That connects them to our lives. We may sometimes receive life and death calmly, but we cannot turn that into a state we must always maintain.
If I had no attachment or wish at all, why would I broadcast?
I broadcast frequently because I have a wish. I feel sorrow at seeing people pursue something mistaken. I too spent my life holding an imagined picture of what a Buddha must be, pursuing it without really knowing what a Buddha was. I am not saying that the whole process was bad. It gave me many opportunities to observe myself. But if the ultimate goal itself is wrong, that goal must change.
If an impossible state is made the goal, no one can actually arrive there. Otherwise, it produces only people deluded enough to believe they have arrived. That is how I see the situation in Korean Buddhism and beyond. Problems continue because a fantasy is installed as the destination and called Buddhahood. We must not confuse the benefits of self-observation along the way with the correctness of the goal.
Helping Grief Ease Is Not Demanding Its Absence
Followers of Beopsang may insult me after hearing this critique. They may say he offers many good teachings. Yes, he does say useful things. But who lectures on Buddhism for a long time without saying anything useful? The problem is accepting a mistaken goal because many good statements accompany it. Taking indifference to cancer and its absence as the model of a Buddha remains foolish.
We live amid distinctions and live as human beings.
If one makes no distinction about one’s own illness, one should also be unmoved when a wife gets cancer or a child or friend dies. I would not want to be with such a person. On the other hand, if someone has clung to a child’s death for ten, twenty, or thirty years until family life is devastated, we can help them reconsider that attachment. Helping someone understand what concept holds them, why this happened, and how to hurt a little less is Buddhism.
That differs from demanding that no distinctions be made. We should live as humans while remaining able to look again at ourselves. What angers me? What disturbs me? What am I pursuing, and how am I living? Let us be elementary school pupils who know they are pupils, humans who know they are human. Let us not try to become nonhuman beings or gods.
When It Is Time to Stop Teaching and Reflect on Oneself
Is awakening feeling no excitement at lively music, no sadness at sad music, and responding to nothing? Is that not a goal that ignores human conditions as much as claiming to eat without defecating? Would urinating anywhere in the street make no difference? If told to love cancer, should one also love the death of one’s child? These questions bring the claim of nondiscrimination into actual life.
Beopsang, you need to stop speaking and reflect on yourself.
When thinking flows deeply in one direction, people can fail even to recognize how strange their own words are. Asked to break through concepts, they become attached to breaking through concepts, to nondiscrimination, oneness, and suchness. They then continue talking about awakening, patriarchal Seon, and the Daodejing. If they cannot reconsider the meaning of their own words, those cannot be called the words of an awakened person. I ask Beopsang too to stop speaking and reflect on himself.
I end today’s critique here. Thanks to those who participated, I enjoyed an energetic discussion. I wish you a good weekend. I also ask Dao Sunim, whom I will meet offline the following day, to drive safely. I look forward to that time together, and wish you all Buddhahood.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.