Beginning Again with Montaigne’s “What Do I Know?”
This episode returns to the question that closed the previous installment of Liberation and Civilization. As printing made Greek and Roman texts available again, Montaigne read Epicurean, Stoic, and Pyrrhonian works and asked, “What do I know?” This is not merely an elegant quotation. It asks us to distinguish what we know from what we remember, infer, believe, or mistakenly assume we know.
I described this as metacognition. Knowing a claim is not enough; I must also know whether my confidence is justified. When something is uncertain, I should be able to say that it is uncertain. I called this “faithful uncertainty”: refusing to decorate ignorance with confidence.
The question matters in the age of AI hallucinations, fake news, political certainty, and religious authority. If personal liberation is the repeated process of breaking out of one’s own delusions, civilization also advances by recognizing the limits of what humanity knows.
Personal metacognition is the individual escaping delusion; humanity’s metacognition is civilization escaping superstition.
A Question Begins Only When We Admit That We Do Not Know
Questions stop when people assume they already know. A statement feels true because it is written in scripture, learned from a teacher, or repeated by a crowd. Yet what we possess may be memory, belief, or a plausible guess rather than knowledge. A useful intuition becomes prejudice, misunderstanding, or delusion when it is wrong.
Skepticism does not mean denying everything or surrendering to nihilism. It means examining what supports a conclusion and remaining prepared to revise it when that support fails. Wisdom begins when I can say that I do not know—and even acknowledge that I may not know what I do not know.
This is also how I understand liberation. Liberation is not becoming divine or entering another world after death. It is repeatedly noticing and shedding beliefs, fixed views, and the husk of certainty in the present. A question is the first crack in that husk.
Skepticism Is the Common Ground of Buddhism and Science
I had planned to connect Francis Bacon’s four idols with the verse of the Kalama Sutta. The explanation of Galileo and Bacon took longer than expected, so the detailed treatment of the idols was postponed. This episode instead establishes why both Buddhism and science begin from skepticism.
Science does not exist because an authority hands down correct answers. It asks whether what appears known is actually true and tests it by observation and experiment. Buddhism likewise ceases to be distinct from a religion of belief if it demands submission simply because a claim is attributed to the Buddha, scripture, tradition, or a teacher.
Skepticism leads to questions, observation, reflection, comparison, and verification. It leaves judgment open to revision when new facts appear. That openness separates science from superstition and makes Buddhism a path out of fixed views.
Buddhism and science do not begin by believing an answer. They begin by asking whether the answer we hold is actually true.
Two Different Scenes in Joseon and Europe in 1616
I placed Galileo’s story in the concrete year 1616. Gwanghaegun ruled Joseon not long after the Japanese invasions. Ming power was weakening, Nurhaci had established Later Jin, and Ming demanded troops from Joseon. The kingdom faced a difficult choice between competing powers.
The firearms Japan had brought to Korea were themselves connected to Western navigation and trade. Printing, navigation, commerce, and new instruments were changing European society. In that same year of 1616, the Roman Church subjected Galileo Galilei to his first religious judgment.
These scenes are not a simple tale of a lone European genius inventing modernity. War, political power, religious conflict, printing, instruments, and changing ways of sharing knowledge were entangled. Different conditions were opening different historical paths.
A Telescope Shattered an Ancient Cosmos
Around 1610 Galileo began observing the sky through a telescope. He did not invent the first telescope, but after hearing that such instruments were being made in the Netherlands, he ground glass and built one himself. What he saw contradicted inherited common sense.
The Moon was rough, with features resembling mountains and valleys. Moons circled Jupiter, which troubled a system in which every heavenly body should circle Earth. Sunspots appeared, and new stars challenged the belief that heaven was perfect and unchanging. The supposedly immutable celestial realm was visibly changing.
Galileo published the small Sidereus Nuncius soon after his observations. His importance lay not in inventing a more attractive idea inside his head, but in using an instrument to reveal what others could also examine through the same method.
Authority may call heaven perfect for thousands of years, but one sunspot and one rough lunar surface can break the premise.
The Church Silenced the Observer Instead of Correcting Its Explanation
The observations challenged both Aristotelian cosmology and a Christian geocentrism built from literal scripture. The proper response would have been to examine what Galileo saw and identify, point by point, any errors in his reasoning. Evidence and argument would then allow others to judge.
Instead, on February 26, 1616, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, acting under Pope Paul V, ordered Galileo not to hold, teach, or defend heliocentrism. Galileo accepted the order and promised not to advocate it in order to avoid punishment, though he later wrote again on the subject.
Why command “Do not look” rather than explain “This is wrong”? Because the observation could not simply be covered over. If scripture and inherited philosophy could be wrong, the institution claiming interpretive authority could also be wrong. Power could not remove Jupiter’s moons, so it tried to silence the person describing them.
The Index Is a List Modern Readers Should Examine
If a public figure lies or commits fraud, the proper response is not merely to forbid people from watching. One should show precisely which claims are false and why. Then people can recognize the deception. A bare command not to read or watch often reveals that authority cannot defeat the claim through explanation.
In that sense, the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books can become a list that modern people should investigate. Which beliefs did those books challenge, and what did power fear? If scripture says Earth is the center of the universe while observation says otherwise, calling the passage divine does not make the explanation correct.
Breaking out of what one wrongly believed is liberation from superstition. The Index tried to prevent that liberation: believe what is written, avoid competing books, and do not ask questions. Such a command protects authority, not knowledge.
A forbidden-books list can become a map to the questions authority feared because it could not answer them.
Religious Conflict Hardened Authority and Silenced Speech
The Church had not always been equally rigid. But Protestant criticism of Catholic corruption and the call to return to scripture intensified conflict. Protestant scripturalism and claims of biblical inerrancy helped drive Catholicism toward a more defensive rigidity of its own.
Religious wars and witch hunts followed. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome after speaking of an immense universe in which distant stars were suns like our own. Religious power bound the mouth that expressed a different cosmos and destroyed the person who spoke.
Religion in this form did not free people from superstition; it became a power dragging society into darkness. Science and Buddhism have a liberating character because they break delusion. Power defending superstition answers with anti-intellectual commands: do not think, look, ask, or observe—just believe what cannot be seen.
Novum Organum Was a New Tool for Knowing
Four years after Galileo’s first trial, the English philosopher and jurist Francis Bacon published Novum Organum in 1620. A conventional East Asian translation can sound like “new organ,” but organum also means a tool or organized method, while novum means new.
The word scientiarum on the title page concerns knowledge and knowing and lies behind the modern word “science.” The title can therefore be understood as a new tool for knowledge or a new method for science. Science begins by distinguishing what is known from what is not.
Bacon challenged the deductive structure inherited from Aristotle’s Organon. His work consists largely of compressed aphorisms and was only one part of a larger, unfinished project. Even so, it deeply affected how later generations thought about building knowledge. In the broadcast, I also mentioned reading Latin and English versions with help from modern AI translation.
Deduction Becomes an Elaborate Falsehood When Its Premise Fails
Deduction draws a conclusion from premises taken as true. “Socrates is a man; all men die; therefore Socrates dies” is formally neat. Yet if either premise is wrong or its terms are misunderstood, form alone cannot guarantee truth. We must still ask what “man” and “death” mean and whether the universal premise is justified.
Aristotelian cosmology began with premises: the earthly realm is imperfect, the heavens are perfect and eternal, and perfect motion is circular. An intricate system can be constructed from them. But the perfection of heaven was an assumption, not an observed result.
Sunspots, a rough Moon, moons circling Jupiter, and newly appearing stars contradicted the premises. What seemed a new star could later be understood as part of a star’s death, but to earlier observers it showed change in an allegedly changeless heaven. Once the premise broke, conclusions built upon it also collapsed.
If a premise is wrong, every elegant deduction built on it can also be wrong. We must first ask, “Is the premise actually true?”
“Knowledge Is Power” Means Knowing Causes and Operations
“Knowledge is power” does not mean memorizing more claims for a higher score. It means that when we understand how nature operates under particular causes and conditions, we can predict and use the result by arranging those conditions again.
I connected this with causal and dependent-arising thought. A result does not appear independently; we examine why it occurred and what conditions supported it. Science and Buddhist dependent arising come from different histories, but both turn attention toward causal relations rather than isolated essences.
We must still resist premature certainty about causes. Knowledge does not descend complete from one authority or book. It grows through careful observation, criticism, error detection, and correction. Bacon’s new tool was meant to organize this process while reducing individual delusion.
Induction Begins with Experience but Stops Before the Black Swan
Against deductive dogmatism, Bacon emphasized induction. If this duck, that duck, and every similar duck I have seen are blue, I infer that all ducks of that type are blue. If a footballer wins game after game, I predict that he is the best and will win the next one. General conclusions grow from repeated observations.
Yet winning in the past does not guarantee victory next time. Europeans once saw only white swans and concluded that all swans were white. The discovery of one black swan destroyed the universal statement. Ten or a hundred matching cases cannot rule out a different case in a place and time I have not observed.
We cannot inspect every point in space and time. Inductive conclusions are therefore not eternal truths but the best fit with experience so far. Deduction can collapse with a false premise, and induction can meet an unseen counterexample. Knowledge must remain cautious and revisable.
The strength of science is not preserving yesterday’s answer forever, but being able to say “I was wrong” when a black swan appears.
Scientific Method Is a Shared Procedure for Reducing Delusion
Should everyone then draw private conclusions from personal experience? No. Perception, memory, and judgment are fallible. Bacon wanted an organized way of building knowledge that would reduce error and prevent an individual’s delusion from determining the conclusion.
He did not complete that method alone. Across generations, people developed controlled experiments, comparison, repetition, and procedures for checking whether the same conditions yield the same results. Modern scientific method is a collective tool refined through repeated failure and correction.
This separates authoritative from scientific knowledge. Authority says, “Believe this because I said it.” Science says, “Here is the method; try it and examine the result.” Who spoke matters less than whether others can reproduce the observation.
The Alps and an Afterlife Are Not the Same Kind of Claim
People sometimes answer empiricism by asking, “You have never visited the Alps, so why do you believe they exist? You trust doctors and antibiotics, so why reject an afterlife?” I said that I had heard this argument many times. It misunderstands observation.
Observation here is not limited to what I have personally seen once. It is universal observation. Anyone who goes to the Alps can see them. At an appropriate time and place, anyone using Galileo’s method can observe Jupiter’s moons. If Galileo alone had seen them while nobody else could, his private report would not have changed the world.
I may never have developed an antibiotic or vaccine, but many people can publicly test effects and limits under stated conditions. We do not believe that every treatment works perfectly; we examine how often it works, against what, and under which conditions. This is not worship of a doctor.
Universal observation does not mean that I have already seen it. It means that others and I can confirm it by following the same method.
Can a Method Be Given for Observing Gods, Souls, Rebirth, or Powers?
Ask the person asserting an afterlife: can I follow a method and observe the same afterlife? If you saw God, can I see that God with you? If someone used supernatural powers, can the procedure be taught and reproduced? A private claim without a method leaves everyone else unable to check it.
The same applies to a true self, soul, karma, rebirth, heaven, hell, past lives, and supernatural power. Scripture, a famous monk, or an intense meditative feeling does not turn them into universally observable facts. If the same method cannot yield the same result for others, Buddhism and science have no grounds for accepting the assertion as knowledge.
I did not soften my language here. A claim made without any observable method is, from the standpoint of Buddhism and science, simply nonsense. “You say only you saw it, but I cannot know or verify it—what am I supposed to do with that?” Buddhists themselves must first step away from such superstition.
If someone claims that gods, souls, or an afterlife exist, the question is whether a universally available method of observation can be given.
The Kalamas’ Question Is Still Our Question
I then turned to a Buddhist text. The Kalama Sutta, also associated with Kesamutti or Kesaputta, is introduced as a discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya. In the narrative, the Buddha visits the Kalamas of Kesaputta, who ask which teacher to follow because wandering teachers offer conflicting doctrines.
The question remains alive. One person asserts rebirth while another denies it. Someone claims a true self and an afterlife; another declares himself an arahant and demands obedience. I also say many things that differ sharply from other Buddhists. So how should listeners decide whether I am right?
The answer is not “Believe me because I am the Buddha,” nor does it name another teacher to follow. The ten-line verse repeatedly says not to accept claims blindly. To the religious expectation “Whom should we believe?” it gives the radical answer: do not simply believe anyone.
I Regard the Ten-Line Verse as the Core of the Kalama Sutta
I made clear that I do not treat the entire prose narrative as a historical transcript. A memorized verse was likely transmitted first, while later writers placed stories before and after it about the Buddha visiting a village, receiving a question, and explaining his answer.
Later prose discusses benefits, the possibility of an afterlife, and freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion. Yet parts of that prose conflict with the uncompromising meaning of the verse. Material bound in the same scripture need not have been spoken by one person in one period.
For me, the alpha and omega of the discourse is its ten-line verse. We cannot even prove that the historical Buddha spoke it. We can say that Buddhists preserved and recited a remarkably important verse. Its uncertainty should be acknowledged while its warnings are examined.
Repetition, Tradition, Rumor, and Scripture Are Other People’s Conclusions
The first four cautions say: do not accept something merely because it has been repeatedly heard, handed down, rumored, or written in scripture. Repetition makes familiarity feel like truth. If parents, teachers, and ancestors all said it, the claim seems to carry a reason of its own.
Hearing a thousand times that hell is beneath the ground does not put hell there. Ancestral transmission does not create fact. A rumor repeated by a crowd cannot substitute for observation. Advertising can make a drink seem delicious, but repetition does not prove the judgment.
Scripture belongs to the same category. Books are written, remembered, edited, and transmitted by people. These four cautions concern conclusions made by others, whether ancient or contemporary. Buddhist scripture is not exempt from examination.
Repetition, tradition, rumor, and scripture are all conclusions received from others. Age and familiarity are not evidence of truth.
Inference, Axioms, Mental Images, and Reflection Put My Conclusions in Doubt
The fifth caution rejects acceptance based on inference or appearance. Seeing many white swans and inferring that all swans are white is a plausible inductive guess, but a black swan may reveal its limit because I have not inspected every place and time.
The sixth rejects a conclusion merely because it follows from an axiom, principle, or premise. One may assume that God created and destroys the world and then derive moral conclusions from that premise. But if the premise of God is unobserved, the deductions built upon it remain unstable. Logical appearance is not the same as fact.
The seventh cautions against images arising in meditation: energy pouring into the head, visions of God or angels, dreams of animals and dragons. They are images in the mind. The eighth cautions against deeply reflected concepts. Long thought and intense conviction do not erase error. Together, these cautions place conclusions made by my own mind under examination.
Authorities and Personal Teachers Are Not Exceptions
The ninth caution rejects a claim merely because its speaker appears authoritative: a supreme patriarch, president, legislator, professor, scientist, famous author, or celebrated monk. Position and reputation cannot replace observation and evidence.
The tenth says not to accept a claim merely because the speaker is my teacher. Respect and long familiarity make doubt difficult, but teachers remain human and fallible. Respecting a teacher is not the same as declaring that teacher infallible.
The structure of all ten cautions is now visible. Four concern other people’s conclusions; inference, axioms, images, and reflection concern my conclusions; the final two concern submission to authority. Do not blindly follow others, yourself, or power. Listen, then examine through universally available observation, experience, and reason.
Buddhism Is an Inquiring Philosophy, Not a Religion of Submission
Suppose a scripture says that before birth the Buddha lived in Tusita heaven and descended into his mother’s womb. I ask: where is Tusita, and who observed it by what method? The fact that a story is written in scripture does not turn an ancient imagination into knowledge.
This is why I repeatedly said that Buddhism is not a religion of believing and following. It is an inquiring, skeptical philosophy and a path out of superstition. The Buddha’s silence on questions about the universe or an afterlife should not be used to ban questions. It can be understood as refusing to pretend knowledge about what he could not observe and answer.
Assertions about heaven, gods, karma, past lives, rebirth, energy, and supernatural powers package metaphysical imagination as knowledge. What matters in Buddhism is not the strength of belief but the quality of one’s observation, questions, and thought. Nothing should be accepted blindly.
Buddhism begins not with “Believe me,” but with “Do not accept it blindly.” Even words attributed to the Buddha are no exception.
“Do Not Think or Discriminate” Cannot Sustain Buddhism
Near the end I strongly criticized the slogan “Do not think; do not discriminate” when it is repeated as if it were the essence of Buddhism. Science without thought is impossible, and philosophy without distinction is incoherent. Telling Buddhists to believe while abandoning thought and discrimination is equally incoherent.
Even to understand statements such as “there is no fixed purity or impurity” or “no fixed arising and ceasing,” one must think, distinguish, ask, and observe. One must examine what fixed essence is being rejected and how this appears in experience. Mindless repetition does not produce understanding.
Buddhism cannot exist without questions, observation, and reflection. Foolishness is chasing transcendence and afterlife because others call them desirable without knowing what I want or why. If the desire to escape ordinary desire becomes another transcendent craving, that craving itself must be observed.
The Kalama Verse Opens Free Inquiry
The ten short lines compress a remarkably skeptical wisdom and are often read as a declaration of free inquiry. Asked whose teaching to believe, the verse places even words attributed to the Buddha beyond automatic authority. Buddhist study should begin not with “This is the Buddha’s word,” but with “Was it, and is the claim actually true?”
If the Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, dependent arising, rebirth, or merit are first declared authentic and unquestionable, Buddhism falls into belief before inquiry begins. Without questions, people mistake superstition and transcendent desire for Buddhism. Questions lead to observation, and observation allows mistaken knowledge to be corrected.
After speaking for nearly two hours, I apologized for leaving no time for viewers’ questions and reflected that I should explain more briefly and leave more time for dialogue. Yet the destination of the long explanation was clear: do not blindly accept authority, tradition, others’ claims, or your own certainty. Ask, observe universally, and revise judgment before new facts. That is how individuals escape delusion and civilization escapes superstition.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.