Before April 4, Beginning with the Number Four and Belief
I began the live broadcast on April 1, 2025, with the news that three days later, on April 4, the Constitutional Court would deliver its decision on the impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol. The coincidence of April 4 reminded me of the old custom of marking the fourth floor as F rather than 4 in elevators. People attached an ominous meaning to a number merely because the Korean pronunciation of four is the same as the Chinese character for death. It is funny that human beings load an unrelated sound with meaning and then avoid it, but examining exactly how such belief operates became the starting point for the questions that evening.
I did not want to give the date a mystical significance. What I hoped was that, through the approval of impeachment, those who justified or refused to reflect on insurrection—and the faction of the People Power Party and the far-right churches supporting them—would be held accountable. I qualified that not everyone could be condemned as a single mass, but I clearly criticized the current that repeated claims about election fraud and Chinese intervention while defending Yoon’s conduct. I also mentioned far-right Christians, including those associated with Busan’s Segyero Church, gathering as one axis of the anti-impeachment movement.
I said that Korea had never properly cleared away the remnants of colonial collaboration and authoritarianism, and that this unfinished past was repeating itself in the present. Yet I also called it remarkable that a country reduced to ashes after the Korean War had continued to advance toward democracy in only seventy-five years. Even amid resistance from forces that had escaped historical reckoning, the desire to move forward had not gone out. I voiced the grave fear that, if the Court made the wrong judgment and dismissed the impeachment, public anger could explode into a bloody revolution or civil war. I did not want such a thing to happen; I wanted the impeachment upheld through the normal constitutional process.
This was a forecast made during the April 1 broadcast, when the result was still unknown. I said a spring would come to Korea, but no one knew what form it would take.
Do Not Believe Someone Merely Because They Are on Your Side; Ask Whether Their Conduct Is Right
I spoke directly to viewers who supported the People Power Party or Yoon Suk Yeol and asked them to change their minds. Supporting a person does not make that person right. You must keep doubting whether those you support are acting rightly and remain open to new information. If you watch only YouTube channels and leaders serving as trumpets for one camp, it becomes hard even to recognize that you may have been misled by lies. You must allow for the possibility that claims such as election fraud are wrong and seek information from the other side as well.
That did not mean the Democratic Party and the progressive camp were always right. Even if the Democratic Party took power, its mistakes would still have to be criticized. The point is not to decide whom to believe and follow, but not to believe and follow anyone. When a viewer said, “I believe the impeachment will be upheld,” I immediately answered, “How can you believe that? Do not believe it.” Hoping for a good result and knowing the actual result are different. We can want a good outcome, but we should not fix it in our minds as belief; we should judge by conditions and evidence.
A Political Turning Point and the Problem of Ownership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
I said that we did not yet know what sort of spring would follow the impeachment. The world has revolved around money, ownership, and power, producing extreme inequality. Rather than dividing everything only into the familiar categories of capitalism and communism, I viewed the deeper problem as an orientation toward ownership. If artificial intelligence changes the structure of knowledge and production, I expected the inherited system centered on money and ownership to retreat to some degree as well.
That did not mean I endorsed the opposite extreme of violently taking everything from those who possess it and redistributing it. When those determined not to relinquish ownership confront those determined to seize and divide it, war and violence follow. Even without a bloody revolution, the arrival of AI and the reorganization of information have already brought society to the edge of a volatile new era. We must ask what new thought, institutions, and culture to build and what mark Korea will leave in that transformation. What is needed is not another creed but Buddhist and critical thinking: a habit of continually looking back and asking again.
Reducing the Broadcast Delay for a Time of Questions
This was the promised “time for questions.” I had previously made six or seven broadcasts about AI and Buddhism, and after the two most recent episodes I wanted to continue the exchange with viewers. I acknowledged my habit of speaking alone for too long and promised not to spend an hour on each question, but to answer briefly and invite another question. Even if a short reply left some room for misunderstanding, viewers could ask again about what they did not understand and we could resolve it through dialogue.
To make that dialogue faster, I reduced YouTube’s broadcast latency to its lowest setting. The aim was to shorten the time between my saying “Please ask a question,” the words reaching viewers, and their chat responses returning to my screen. Image quality might fall slightly, but communication would speed up. When a viewer watching on a phone said it seemed better than usual, I decided to keep testing it. This technical explanation was not merely a broadcast notice. Instead of delivering a finished sermon in one direction, I wanted to create a conversation in which questions arrived and answers could be revised.
The Question of Annihilationism and the Self-Contradiction of the Samaññaphala Sutta
The first question concerned non-self and annihilationism. I cited the Samaññaphala Sutta, the discourse on the fruits of the contemplative life, as a scripture that discusses annihilationism especially clearly. Its title itself asks what benefit comes from becoming a renunciant. I saw this not simply as a later Buddhist question about the merit of becoming a monk, but as a trace of a period when Buddhism was understood as one among several śramaṇa traditions.
Yet I strongly criticized the discourse’s method of argument. It introduces the words of other thinkers after the questioner has already attached a negative judgment to them, and then a speaker using the Buddha’s name dismisses them by saying Buddhism is “neither eternalism nor annihilationism.” The problem is that the same discourse actively accepts rebirth and the six higher knowledges. It treats as fact a power to see former lives and know countless eons of past existence. If something continues after death and keeps being reborn, the argument has effectively assumed some enduring continuity. It denies eternalism in words while building it into the content, so its logic does not fit together.
For that reason I harshly called the Samaññaphala Sutta an “eternalist scripture,” even a “stupid scripture.” It ridicules annihilationism for saying everything ends at death while erecting rebirth and supernatural knowledge of former lives in its place. I interpreted this as writing from an era when rebirth beliefs had already entered Buddhism so deeply that authors felt compelled to defend them. The point was not to ignore a logical contradiction merely because a text bears the title of scripture.
Materialism and Dependent Arising: Mind Is Not Separate from Body
Here I said plainly, “Annihilationism is materialism, and materialism is Buddhism.” Materialism can sound as if it means that only matter exists and mind does not, but that was not my meaning. Mind, too, arises and appears from bodily and material conditions. When the mind is injured the body is affected; when the body has a problem, memory, emotion, and thought are shaken. Dependent arising means seeing them not as two independent substances but within a relationship of mutual influence.
If we say that soul, time, space, or mind exists alone, independent of other conditions and eternally indestructible, we have left the observation of dependent arising. The person I am now is a form of material change, briefly manifesting life and mind for a short span. My body cannot exist without parents, food, water, and air. I die if I cannot breathe for a few minutes, and I cannot live if food and water are cut off, yet I forget those relationships and imagine a separate substance called “me.”
I criticized stories that arrange rebirth, good and bad karma, former lives, and future lives as the extreme of human imaginative play. Even the statement that “I” disappear at death can conceal an assumption that a fixed I first existed. Thus, when understanding annihilationism, we should not remain with a picture of a solid self that comes into being and then vanishes. We must also see that from the beginning I am a process arising and changing within relationships.
The Emaciated Ascetic Image Is Evidence of Folly, Not Awakening
When people do not understand the relation of body and mind, they disparage the body and try to transcend it. I saw Gotama Siddhartha’s pre-awakening austerities—starving until his ribs showed and damaging his body by sitting for long periods—as emerging from that very idea. Many people still revere the emaciated ascetic image and think he became the Buddha because of those austerities, but I called it evidence of folly before awakening. It expresses the fantasy that the body is dirty and subordinate and that one can defeat its needs and limits to gain something beyond it.
After awakening, he did not recommend asceticism. If one understands that mind manifests on the basis of the body, one cannot recklessly destroy the body. Just as a damaged brain can erase memory or produce dementia, the connection between body and mind is immediately observable. Overeating is the opposite but equivalent extreme. If one pursues only the pleasure of eating and consumes more than the body can bear, one abuses the body again. Starvation and excess point in different directions, but both are extremes.
Is Buddhism Atheistic? First Ask What “God” Means
The next question was whether Buddhism is atheistic. Rather than simply answering, “There is no god,” I said Buddhism is a religion that asks back, “What do you mean by god?” Using one word does not mean everyone refers to the same object. The Christian Yahweh, gods in Korean shamanism, gods in Japan and China, and India’s many deities change in appearance and character from one time and place to another. If they are real and immutable beings, why do they keep changing with human societies?
I also criticized Avalokiteśvara as, in effect, a form of god. My explanation was that believers mixed elements of existing Indian faiths, including ideas associated with Shiva and Vishnu, and created an imagined deity to draw people into Buddhism. The same process can be seen when the dead Guan Yu becomes revered as a martial god, when general-gods arise, and when cultures create Greece’s Zeus and Apollo or India’s Brahmā, Śakra, asuras, suras, and rākṣasas. Human beings imagine an invisible agency at work behind events and project the wishes and fears of their culture onto its form.
I said that even the god within the Bible is not consistent. The god Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount and the god presiding over destruction and judgment in Revelation appear entirely different under the same name. Binding contradictory writings into one volume and calling them “God” does not eliminate the contradictions. I bluntly criticized the Bible as literature that reflects human contradiction just as it is.
The Natural God of the Sermon on the Mount and the Question “Do Not Judge”
I interpreted the god in the Sermon on the Mount as closer to a god of nature than to a personal deity. Nature does not give sunlight only to good people or withhold rain from bad people. Categories of good, evil, and justice are made by human beings according to the standards of their own group. “Do not judge” contains a request to question first the laws and standards by which you pronounce someone bad. If you measure others by a yardstick you created, you too will be judged by that yardstick.
An immortal, omniscient, omnipotent personal god directly conflicts with impermanence and non-self. Conversely, if we call a being that appears, disappears, and has a finite lifespan a god, we must ask again how it differs from other beings in nature. I suggested that instead of continuing the game of imagining gods, we recognize concepts as concepts and observe the laws by which nature changes.
Why Fortune-Tellers Seem Right: The Selection of a Frog in a Well
When a viewer said people continually visited a supposedly accurate fortune-teller nearby, I replied that if every visitor truly became rich and enjoyed success in all things, everyone would line up. In reality, people who need something to lean on and are desperate enough to grasp at a straw seek a mysterious answer. Even if a prediction is wrong for nine out of ten people, if it happens to fit one person, that person believes the shaman. The single hit that concerns oneself looms larger than the nine misses.
I called this the field of vision of a frog in a well. Whether the speaker is a pastor, a shaman, or a fortune-teller called a “bodhisattva,” do not accept the words as they stand; doubt and question them. The harder task is to doubt even my own thoughts and the experience I claim to have seen directly. The conviction that I saw something with my own eyes is powerful, but human senses, memory, and interpretation all remain within the walls of the well.
Claims of Seeing Celestial Gods and Maidens: Do Not Mistake Perception for Fact
I raised the example of psychiatrist Jeon Hyeon-su reportedly saying that in meditation he had seen a gigantic celestial god and a celestial maiden in the form of a beautiful woman. I laughed that I could not help mocking it even if I did not want to, and acknowledged that people who liked him might be angry to hear me. But my purpose was not to abuse one individual. I said the larger problem was a Buddhist establishment soaked in this superstition and a structure of Buddhist broadcasting and publishing that offered it a microphone without criticism.
Whether an image forms in my open eye or arises when my eyes are closed, it is a representation within my perception. Even the sequence of colors we call red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet is not the world in itself but an appearance produced within the range human eyes receive. Seeing a ghost, Avalokiteśvara, a Buddha, an angel, or a halo does not immediately make it an external reality. This is why Zen says, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch,” and why I said the Kālāma Sutta teaches that ten things should not simply be believed and followed, including representations arising during meditation.
Was There a Beautiful Celestial Maiden One Hundred Million Years Before Humans?
I offered a thought experiment. If a celestial maiden has the appearance of a beautiful human woman, what did she look like one hundred million years ago when there were no humans? Matching the life of that age, was there “a beautiful monkey maiden going ook-ook,” I joked. The beautiful woman, the celestial god dressed as a Korean scholar-official, and the brilliant halo are all images made by human culture. A god cannot have been waiting in scholar-official robes before that form of dress existed.
If a psychiatrist cannot regard his own vision as a human construction and instead certifies it as a divine realm, his professional title does not automatically become authority. I strongly criticized those who bring such claims onto broadcasts, introduce books about them, and transmit them without scrutiny as equally unprepared to judge. Before the names of scripture, title, or broadcaster comes one’s own ability to ask whether the pieces fit together.
At the same time, I clearly drew a boundary: I do not know whether Jeon Hyeon-su sincerely believes what he says or whether he is lying. I cannot know because I have not entered his mind. I also rejected the claim that an arahant or an enlightened master can read another person’s mind just by looking at a face. I must say that I know what I know and do not know what I do not know. What can be criticized is the public claim and its logic, not an inner intention that cannot be verified.
Who Created the Creator? A Thought Experiment About God
I proposed that we assume the Christian Yahweh created the Earth and the universe. The question “Then who created Yahweh?” remains. If a story of creation is said to solve the beginning of everything but questioning stops only when it reaches the creator, the logic is incomplete. The very expression “personal god” may be evidence that human beings have projected their own personality and power onto the universe.
With even a little development of thought, gods such as the god of the Old Testament or the Greek Zeus—who become angry, punish those who disobey, and desire as humans do—look far too human. The same holds for Odin and other gods. As time passes and philosophical thought deepens, god loses personality and moves toward the whole of nature, pantheism, or at times a concept close to atheism. I saw the god of the Sermon on the Mount as one example of that movement.
Dreaming and imagining are not wrong in themselves. The problem is failing to know that a dream is a dream, and selecting only the passages one wants from contradictory scriptures while insisting they are the pure original teaching. Both the Bible and Buddhist scriptures contain periods and claims that conflict with one another. When the name of authority makes questioning stop, we become trapped in imagination.
Why Following a Nimitta Is Not Samādhi
A viewer asked what I thought about the Pa-Auk tradition’s explanation that, while observing the breath, a representation called a nimitta appears and one then concentrates on it to enter samādhi. I answered flatly, “That is not what samādhi is.” Deep concentration on almost anything can produce absorption. But if you initially chose to observe the breath, I asked, why abandon the breath and become captivated by another image that happened to appear?
A nimitta is also a representation produced by mental activity. Following it resembles chasing a scene inside a dream. The reason for concentrating on one breath is to avoid being shaken by emerging images and emotions. When a representation appears, do not cultivate it as a special revelation; return to the object originally being observed. I criticized reports of seeing an angel, Avalokiteśvara, or a halo during meditation as the consequence of being led away by precisely such representations.
When a viewer joked, “How much must he normally have thought about celestial maidens?” I said imagination cannot escape the materials and limits stored in one’s own head. Cultural images—what a maiden or a celestial god is supposed to look like—are projected into one’s fantasy. Without the foundations of Buddhism, even long practice can fill one not with wisdom but, as I put it crudely, with “nothing but shit.” The foundation of asking and doubting matters more than a résumé of practice.
Placebo Rather Than Spiritual Power: The Mind’s Real Effects on the Body
When asked whether shamanism or a mysterious power of cultivation like that believed in by Kim Keon-hee’s family was real, I answered, “There is no such thing.” There are, however, observable ways in which mind affects body. A representative example is the placebo effect. In a drug trial one group receives the actual medicine while another receives something that looks like medicine but contains no active ingredient. Even people who take the placebo can show more improvement than those who receive nothing if they believe they have been given a treatment.
The expectation and feeling that “I have taken this medicine, so I will recover” can have a real bodily effect. This does not mean belief cures every disease; it means some effect can occur. That is why a genuine new drug must show a greater therapeutic benefit than the placebo group. I found it interesting that placebo responses can be strong enough to make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to prove that a new drug clears that threshold.
To illustrate that mental activity consumes substantial bodily energy, I mentioned the rough figure that the brain might use about thirty percent of the body’s energy, but I immediately qualified that I did not know whether the number was exact. The point was not to memorize a number as scientific authority. It was to observe in ordinary and clinical life that mental states such as anxiety, expectation, humiliation, and relief are not unrelated to the body. We should understand placebo not as paranormal power but as a testable relation between mind and body.
A Body Hearing Abuse Every Day and a Mind Growing Familiar with Advertising
I then looked in the opposite direction. If a company owner insults an employee every day by saying, “You useless bastard, taking your fucking paycheck,” can the listener truly remain unaffected? Repeatedly hearing bad, oppressive, and belittling words stresses the mind and makes the body ill. Because mind and body are not separate, negative language can become violence that wears away a life.
Advertising uses the same power of repetition. Before we have time to decide whether Coca-Cola is good, repeated exposure makes it familiar, and human beings tend to prefer the familiar to the unknown. If people often see commercials for Shin Ramyun, it somehow feels more familiar and appealing than a ramen brand they have never seen. Exposure colors judgment independently of whether the product is actually better. In that sense, a viewer and I discussed how advertising can approach indoctrination and violence.
Jokes among family and friends can also place a fixed, wounded image on a person when they are repeated. Continually throwing negative words and tones at someone under the excuse of teasing is violence. Conversely, words that give strength should not be flattering manipulation designed to move another person according to my will; they should help that person stand with dignity. Once we understand how readily human beings are colored by language, it becomes difficult to speak carelessly.
Buddhism That Does Not Apply to Life Is Not Buddhism
If someone who practices examining the mind can take one step back from words and emotions directed at them, the same stimulus need not sweep them away completely. This is not mysterious spiritual power but the difference that observation and understanding produce in life. I asked why one should practice Buddhism at all if someone claims to become a Buddha or an arahant yet differs in no way from a non-practitioner and receives no help in living.
Living wisely is connected to living with mental and physical health. I again rejected the six supernatural knowledges and paranormal abilities. The shamanism surrounding the president’s family was indeed absurd, but I saw it not merely as one family’s strange hobby. A culture of talismans, fortune-tellers, and occult masters has remained deeply rooted in Korean society and was exposed when it reached the center of power.
Do Not Attach Quantum Physics to Buddhism and Belief
There is much we do not know about the microscopic world, and quantum physics is an important means currently used by physicists to understand it. I briefly described the limits encountered when observation occurs through light and photons and when the act of observation affects a tiny object. Current theory may not be the final answer, but it is a physical attempt to solve observable problems.
But I said emphatically, “Please stop bringing quantum physics and attaching it to Buddhism.” Mixing one unknown with another unknown and dressing up “believe and it will come true” in quantum vocabulary is not explanation; it is a hodgepodge. I went so far as to tell viewers not to listen to people who bolt quantum theory onto Buddhism. Difficult scientific terminology does not turn superstition into truth.
Answer Briefly, Then Ask Again: A Method of Dialogue
That day I deliberately compressed my answers. Ordinarily I could speak for an hour on any one of god, annihilationism, or samādhi, but I reflected that excessive length can bore some listeners and make understanding harder. Short answers can create misunderstandings, but viewers can ask again. I chose a dialogue of questions and follow-up questions rather than one supposedly complete explanation.
As the scheduled ending approached, I checked whether I had missed any question and suggested that we finish by taking a few breaths together. My explanation of samādhi then grew long again, and the broadcast finally ran more than ten minutes over time. The fact that I became lengthy once more while promising brevity was itself part of the humor of the live exchange.
Cultivating Samādhi and Wisdom Together: Jeonghye Ssangsu and Everyday Absorption
The Buddhist path to wisdom is to observe, raise questions, and think them through. Alongside it is another tool tested through the body since ancient times: samādhi. I said Buddhist practice should include observation and reasoning together with absorption through complete engagement. In the Korean expression jeonghye ssangsu, jeong means meditative concentration and hye means wisdom; both are cultivated together. Wisdom grows through questions and observation, while samādhi arises when we devote ourselves wholly to one object and temporarily stop the stream of judgment and reactions to past and future.
Absorption is not restricted to breathing. Reading deeply, playing baduk or billiards, washing dishes, working, dancing, singing, drawing, exercising, gaming, and even sex or masturbation—the blunt everyday examples I used—can involve complete engagement without another thought. To follow the many branches several moves ahead in baduk, one must concentrate as though diving deeply into one place. Someone who has experienced one kind of absorption can more readily become absorbed in another object.
Yet I said to discard the display of sitting all day and boasting of permanent everyday samādhi. I did not say practice requires sitting for hours like a monk. What matters is to let the body learn the feeling of resting and concentrating, even for one, five, or ten minutes a day. Conversely, never using the tool of samādhi at all means missing a valuable piece of wisdom Buddhism has transmitted.
Stay with the Breath and Do Not Follow Emerging Representations
Ānāpānasati is the practice of knowing an in-breath as an in-breath and an out-breath as an out-breath. While observing the breath, a nimitta, light, trembling, hot energy, or an image of Avalokiteśvara or an angel may arise; I said not to follow any of them. The breath was the object first chosen. The representation is an illusion produced by my own mind, so ignore it and return to breathing, or stop the meditation if it becomes too strong.
I recommended three introductory Buddhist meditation videos on the channel and encouraged viewers to practice a little each day, before sleep or after waking. This did not mean sitting all day; it meant learning a short tool that can be used at any time. I made no sharp division between lay Buddhists and ordained monastics. People living ordinary twenty-first-century lives should be able to practice sufficiently in their free time.
Why Recommend a Separate Breath Practice When Other Forms of Absorption Exist?
Reading and baduk can be absorbing, but they consume physical and mental energy. Understanding a book, calculating moves, and exercising all expend effort on a particular task. Breathing continues automatically as long as I am alive, without my intending it. If I do not force or control that automatic breath but simply know it, I can remain awake rather than fall asleep while reducing energy spent on other calculations and actions. I described this as resting while remaining lucidly awake.
It is also different from blanking out. When blanking out, one is not wakefully engaged with one object; in breath samādhi, a wandering thought immediately reveals that the breath has been lost. One remains awake without struggling to manufacture anything. Repeating this state forms a habit in the body, so that even while walking or washing dishes one can return with a single breath to a brief, quiet absorption. At first one needs the intention, “I will attend to this,” but entry becomes quick with familiarity.
Explaining Buddhism in the Everyday Language of the Present
When a viewer thanked me for speaking in everyday language that was easier to understand than the language of someone who had practiced for a lifetime in a hermitage, I thanked the viewer in return. I said I try to explain Buddhism in the language contemporary Koreans ordinarily use, rather than in the translationese and authoritarian diction of the past. That is why I did not hide rough expressions such as “filling up with shit,” “a bastard taking his fucking paycheck,” or references to sex and masturbation. I chose intelligibility about what happens in life now over making the surface of my words look genteel.
The conclusion was simple. Do not follow scriptures, gods, shamans, scientific terminology, lights seen in meditation, or even my own words as matters of belief. Ask, observe, and reason. At the same time, do not only pile up thoughts: spend even a few minutes a day knowing the breath and letting the body learn absorption and rest. Anyone can do it, ordained or lay. After repeatedly urging, “Try it. Just do it,” I noticed I had gone over time again, hurriedly wished everyone awakening, said goodbye, and switched off the broadcast.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.