What Troubled Me in Dr. Jeon Hyeon-su’s Interview
At the start of the March 17 live broadcast, I brought up a video I happened to watch over the weekend. Dr. Jeon Hyeon-su had appeared on Hyusimjeong Jo Hyeon TV for an interview about past lives, rebirth, heavenly beings, and tree spirits. What I saw was so absurd and gave me so much to criticize that I hardly knew where to begin. I even left a comment on the video saying, in substance, that it was shameful to post stories steeped in delusion under the name of Buddhism without understanding even its foundations.
In one sense, it is natural that people fail to understand one another. To someone who practices faith-based Buddhism, Jeon’s attitude may even look like the default position. Something is written in scripture, so one believes it as written, talks about gods, hell, and former lives, and fits personal experiences into that scriptural world. A psychiatrist, however, ought to have studied deeply at least once the illusions produced by human psychology and the brain. Anyone who has done that work should not bind speculation and groundless confidence together and present them as facts. What especially dismayed me was that a person identifying himself as a psychiatrist said he saw tree spirits in trees and an enormous god in the sky, that male deities dressed like ministers in a historical drama, and that female deities were dazzlingly beautiful. To put it harshly, these sounded like claims for which he should receive counseling before treating anyone else.
This does not mean I hate Jeon Hyeon-su as an individual. The problem is that a channel watched by many people introduces these statements as Buddhism without examining them, while Buddhist broadcasters such as BBS and BTN also give him a microphone. Wrong information thereby spreads under the name of Buddhism. I had regarded some aspects of Jo Hyeon’s channel favorably because its interviews with Christians sometimes featured post-religious ideas that moved a little beyond conventional belief. Strangely, however, its Buddhist guests often cannot move an inch beyond the beliefs of ordinary Buddhists. I cannot know the channel’s private intentions or ultimate purpose, but it should at least have examined the limits of the claims made by its interview subject.
Miracle remarked that some professors also advocate an afterlife or out-of-body experience and hold extraordinarily strong beliefs. I answered that the problem was not private certainty but the wide dissemination of wrong information. Our conversation also mentioned Buddhist figures such as Gwang-u, Jahyeon, Pomnyun, and Beopsang. I said there were too many errors in Jahyeon’s explanations, while I regarded Pomnyun as someone whose words rarely contained a major problem and whom I could call a monk. I saw Beopsang’s language as closer to Seon Buddhism, Rajneesh, and Eckhart Tolle, and therefore distant from the Buddhism I describe. Positions differ greatly under the single name of Buddhism, which makes examining one another’s words all the more necessary.
The Moment One Believes the Pali Nikāyas Are Early Scriptures
Jeon casually calls the Buddhist texts he reads early scriptures. I wish that people who say they study Theravāda texts would stop equating the Pali Nikāyas with early scriptures. The Nikāyas are full of gods and demons, splitting earth, hells, past-life stories, superstition, and literary narratives. Such material reveals texts created later rather than the words of Gotama Siddhārtha preserved exactly as spoken. Some people dismiss Mahāyāna scriptures as not even scripture while believing that only the Nikāyas are early, but their dates of formation and the superstitious elements within them do not permit such an absolute line between the two.
The larger problem is that a binary Buddhism has already been constructed inside those texts. There is supposedly a separate purity, a separate transcendent state, a perfect Buddha, a certain truth, and an unquestionably real cycle of rebirth. It becomes a religion of belief that repeats, “It exists, it exists, it exists.” Scripture says not to engage in sexual misconduct, so one must never do it; it says not to kill, so killing is forbidden under every circumstance; lies and alcohol are prohibited in the same fashion. The moment people obey commands as written without asking about context and reality, Buddhism ceases to be living wisdom and becomes a binary system bound to doctrines and precepts.
Entering concentration or stopping thought does not automatically make something Buddhist either. Experiencing the four meditative absorptions of the form realm, quieting the mind, or memorizing a passage of scripture does not produce wisdom. Without questions, one cannot even recognize a contradiction as a contradiction. Belief closes the questions, “Is this right or wrong? Could it perhaps be mistaken?” Once questions close, reflection stops; once reflection stops, scripture and experience form a closed circle in which each supposedly proves the other.
I used literal non-killing as an example. If we follow “do not kill a mosquito” exactly, we cannot act even when mosquitoes torment people; if we prohibit eating meat, we must explain how to live without killing life. Follow the belief that “killing sends you to hell in the next life” to its end, and because people kill countless living things from birth to death, believers themselves cannot be reborn human. Yet people imagine that they will be born as gods or in a favorable realm. They fail to see the contradiction not because the precept is perfect, but because belief has stopped thought. I did not claim that every criticism I make is correct or that I know everything, but I said that contradictions like these must be questioned.
Why I Reject the Argument That Everyone Should Follow Their Own Belief
Under the name of Buddhism stands a very wide range of people: those who center the Lotus Sutra, those who read the Prajñā collection or the Avataṃsaka Sutra, followers of the Mantra school, and speakers in the style of Seon Buddhism. Some therefore say, “I believe in my school and you follow your path. Let us not criticize one another.” I disagree. Buddhists must criticize one another. If one uses the names of Śākyamuni Gotama Siddhārtha and Buddhism, others must be able to ask what departs from Buddhism and say that what is not Buddhist is not Buddhist.
If criticism stops, people can practice fortune-telling and divination and call it Buddhism, read omens or predict the future and call it Buddhism, and proclaim rebirth and supernatural powers as wisdom. Even someone showing no trace of awakening or practice can simply announce that he practices Buddhism. In such a condition, “everyone believes something different” is not tolerance but an excuse to abandon examination. Criticism is not meant to hate a person. It exposes errors spreading under the name of Buddhism.
I asked the viewers to post questions, but for a while no one did. I prodded them: “More than ten people are here and none of you has a single question? Do you know everything?” I joked that I would sit still until a question appeared. At last, Dauseu asked me to explain heuristics, jumping to conclusions, and illusion. That question connected precisely with the problem I had raised about Jeon’s interview.
A Heuristic Is a Discovery Method That Finds an Answer from Sparse Clues
“Heuristic” is commonly translated as a discovery method. It is a convenient mode of inference that reaches an answer quickly when limited information and time make a fully rational judgment difficult. It is not a technique used only by specialists. Human beings live by heuristics from birth to death. We must make countless judgments in little time, cannot check every piece of information, and therefore have to infer a whole from small clues.
Think of a scene with Sherlock Holmes. A gentleman opens the office door, sets down his hat, and challenges the detective to identify where he came from and what work he does. Holmes examines the dirt on the man’s shoes and clothes, his worn sleeves, the calluses on his hands, his face and age, his accent, and his bearing. From these tiny clues, he infers the man’s occupation and place of origin, his current state of mind, and even the purpose of his visit. It may be excellent reasoning grounded in observation, but it remains an inference rather than fact itself. It may be right or wrong.
Heuristics are indispensable because they efficiently produce conclusions from little information. The problem begins when an answer we discover is immediately turned into truth. Like a frog in a well, we see only fragments within limited space and time. A conclusion based on those fragments may not be fact even if it has worked until now. We may reason that because the sun rose today and yesterday, it will rise forever, or that because every swan we have seen is white, all swans must be white. Experience supports the conclusion but does not guarantee it absolutely.
The same applies to another person’s inner motives. We hear someone speak and, as though we were an insect inside his mind, declare, “He must have spoken from this particular intention.” It began as a guess, but after repeating it the speaker himself comes to believe it as fact. Prophecy, possession by a spirit, and visions of gods can follow the same path. A person attaches an interpretation to a small clue or a single experience, becomes certain of that interpretation, and then uses the certainty as further evidence for the experience. Human beings thus live in illusion without realizing it.
Why the Kālāma Sutta Says Not to Believe
The ten verses from the Kālāma Sutta that I often introduce tell us not to accept and follow anyone’s words as they stand. Whether something is written in a book, spoken by a teacher, asserted by a prestigious person, or even concluded in my own mind, it may be a human discovery and inference. The same applies whatever name we give it: doctrine, concept, image, mental representation, view, or knowledge. Because we cannot be certain that a statement is truth and reality, we must observe, compare, and ask again.
Statements explaining gravity, Earth, and the sun; stories about gods and an afterlife; and claims about where we go after death are all conclusions made in human language. Ancient inferences also reside in language and concepts handed down from antiquity. The conventional use of a word does not make the entity to which it points exist. People created terms such as ātman, true self, Brahman, soul, and karma, and then thought that because the words existed, the things themselves must actually exist too.
This does not mean inference itself can be eliminated. Without inference we cannot awaken either. Our intelligence and thought begin and end with guesses, finding answers by recognizing patterns. The important realization is that my conclusion may not be correct and that I cannot be certain it is truth. Once I understand that I am a frog in a well, I can examine not only my view but every book and every statement by teachers and experts with the same eye.
Jumping to conclusions is indispensable to life. But the moment we believe a guess is fact, it becomes illusion. Buddhism is the leaving of illusion.
The Question That Escaped Ātman and the Jain Karma System
In the Buddha’s time, people said that an unchanging ātman or true self dwelled inside us and that discovering it would unite us with Brahman and transcend birth, aging, illness, and death. Jainism, meanwhile, spoke of an eternally living soul called jīva and of everything else as ajīva. It explained that karma created by action clung stickily to the jīva and kept rebirth going. This was a framework in which one had to observe the vows, relinquish possessions, and cease action so that karma would not attach, thereby becoming pure and liberated. As I explained during the broadcast, I saw much in common between the Buddhist and Jain sets of vows, with non-possession replacing the Buddhist vow against intoxicants.
Follow that framework to its end and starving to death also becomes a path to liberation. If eating and moving accumulate karma, one must finally stop every action so that karma no longer sticks to the jīva. Gotama Buddha also wanted to escape birth, aging, illness, and death; he fasted, practiced asceticism, and sought ātman and a true self. At some point, however, he must have turned around and asked, “What in the world is karma? What is a true self? What am I? Why did I believe the claim that such things exist?”
I explained awakening as that very change of direction. It is recognizing that what one sought by driving oneself into suffering for years was a concept without substance, and that the doctrines promising purity, perfection, and transcendence were also human-made conditioned phenomena. Seen through relationship and dependent origination, no concept stands alone as an absolute entity. Liberation, therefore, is not the acquisition of something perfect but release from false human-made doctrines and illusions. The Buddha was not a person who established existing beliefs more firmly; he was the person who broke the unquestioned assumptions that made those beliefs possible.
A Practice of Critically Reexamining My Thoughts and Scripture
The greatest problem in Jeon’s statements was not the experience itself but his certainty. He declares, “What I saw was a god. The beings attached to every tree were tree spirits. I saw exactly what the scriptures describe.” Scripture, however, is a text written by human beings and a conditioned phenomenon containing human perspectives and inferences. If one fits an experience into scriptural concepts without the slightest doubt about the text, a cycle arises in which scripture proves the experience and the experience proves scripture in return.
To practice Buddhism, we must read scripture with critical thought, critically inspect our own thoughts and minds, and revisit our judgments about others. The mental representations and images in my head are inferences either made by me or absorbed from parents, school, books, and society. If I never reexamine them and simply say, “I saw it, so it is fact,” there is no way out of delusion. Practice is recognizing an illusion as illusion, understanding it, and looking again.
For those who wanted a fuller explanation, I introduced Artificial Intelligence and Illusion, a book I wrote with Yun Deok-jun. I said it could be read for free through a link in the channel description, contained about 200,000 Korean characters including spaces, and had not been revised since the first edition was completed on December 16, 2023. I had explained in detail what inference is and how far it operates in order to help readers understand human beings, artificial intelligence, and Buddhism. I even showed how to print it, noting that double-sided A4 printing produced about eighty sheets. Explaining every layer of heuristics on the broadcast would take too long, so I asked people to consult the book.
Does the Precept Against Sexual Misconduct Make Human Sexuality Dirty?
A viewer then asked whether abstaining from sexual misconduct or adultery, in connection with the five precepts, was possible in real life. I first distinguished sexual misconduct from sexuality itself. An act forced upon someone who does not consent, an act that harms another person like sexual violence, or an act that violates a social commitment clearly should not be done. But if the precept means prohibiting all sexual activity, that is a different matter. A command never to have sex goes against human nature. Sex is neither dirty nor clean; it is a basic element in the life of organisms and the continuation of humanity.
The customs of a practice community 2,500 years ago are a separate issue. Buddhism in the twenty-first century should not merely repeat an ancient rule word for word. It should ask what harm arises in lives and relationships today. Social agreements and common sense change with time and place. We must judge by consent and harm within contemporary sexual norms rather than imagining sexual activity itself as sinful and dirty.
People seeking transcendence easily think they must make bodily desire dirty in order to appear elevated. That too is a human-made binary. Sexual activity is not intrinsically good or evil; concrete relationships and consequences are what matter. This question also connects with the earlier discussion of heuristics. If we look only at the sentence of an old precept and believe we have immediately discovered a universal answer, real people and real harm disappear, leaving only abstract purity.
The Self-Contradiction Revealed by Past-Life Regression Hypnosis
I played part of Jeon’s twenty-three-minute interview at about 1.5 times normal speed. He said he had practiced past-life regression hypnosis in earnest for about a year and had handled roughly fifty subjects. When a broadcaster helped check the facts people reported, few cases matched historical records; errors were common, including incorrect birth years and one person describing several different lives even under the same hypnosis. Up to that point, this was an important observation. It showed that an experience someone called a vision of a former life might be a story produced under hypnosis rather than an actual recovered memory.
Yet even after seeing those results, he continued to use the name “past-life regression hypnosis.” He had not shown that the method traveled back through time and revealed a real former life, but the name itself already assumed that former lives existed. He said with his own mouth that no past-life case had been proven anywhere in the world. The first conclusion, then, should have been that a claim of seeing past lives under hypnosis could not be trusted. Reading many books and owning many books about past-life hypnosis is not evidence. Something does not become fact because it is printed in a book.
He also said he discovered a danger that hypnosis could mislead present relationships. Someone in conflict with another person may imagine under hypnosis, “That person persecuted me in a former life,” and thereby harden a present emotion by blaming a past life. From the perspective of psychiatric treatment, he therefore judged it dangerous and stopped using hypnosis. Yet after making that judgment, he moved to the conclusion that past lives should be verified not through hypnosis but through the practice taught by the Buddha.
That is exactly where another premature conclusion begins. How does a result showing that hypnosis cannot confirm former lives become a conclusion that practice can confirm them? The answer is presumably that he read it in a book he believes to be early scripture. But that scripture is also a book written by other people. How can he be sure it records the Buddha’s own words? Concluding, after seeing only a few conditions, “This must be the Buddha’s teaching” is itself a heuristic. If one cannot doubt even once that it may not be the Buddha’s own word, the approach is neither Buddhist nor scientific.
If Past Lives Could Be Remembered, Human History Would Have to Be Overturned
The interview also mentioned a story that the Dalai Lama clearly remembered a former life as a child but that the memory grew hazy like a bank of fog as he aged. I strongly criticized that as another illusion and delusion. Suppose that hypnosis, concentration, or practice really could recall countless former lives. Even one person who demonstrated such an ability could overturn human history. If scriptural claims were true, human beings would have lived countless lives stretching billions of years into the past and personally undergone many phases of evolution.
Those memories could reveal missing links, forgotten languages and scripts, and unrecorded prehistory. If a person remembered a life as a cockroach or as a trilobite crawling across the seafloor, scientists and historians would rush to test it. If it were actually possible, humanity would pursue past-life verification with desperate intensity. Yet among all the people said to be awakened, no one has specifically revealed and undergone verification for a life as a trilobite billions of years ago.
The memories described by people claiming former lives revolve, strangely, around the human-centered gods, hells, and rebirth stories found in scripture. Although humans appeared very late in Earth’s history, gods always look human, and male and female deities conform to human standards of beauty. Were beautiful heavenly maidens present when dinosaurs roamed and no humans existed? Laughing, I asked, “Were the gods dinosaurs then?” The joke strikes the center of the problem. These gods are not visions of the universe but imaginative drawings in which humans projected their own appearance onto the sky.
Gods and Karmic Reward Are Fiction Written from a Human Viewpoint
The Pali Nikāyas contain stories in which gods and asuras descend, the earth splits, and people fall into hell. Every scene is organized around the premises of human life and judgment. Gods dress like humans and live by human units of time, while their beauty is judged by human eyes. Dividing sexuality into dirty and sacred, then arranging beauty and ugliness, happiness, health and sickness, prizes and punishments as rewards for good and evil, is likewise a human value judgment. Such passages in scripture reveal who wrote them and from what perspective.
Nature has no human-made concept of good and evil. I recalled the passage in the Bible where Jesus says that the sun shines without distinguishing the good from the bad, and rain falls without distinguishing the righteous from the unrighteous. I read it to mean that the universe does not judge while holding a human table of precepts. But once human standards are turned into cosmic karma, stories emerge in which sexual misconduct brings one punishment and killing causes rebirth as a lower being.
Apply that logic to fish. When a large fish eats a small fish, will it be reborn as a worse fish or a bigger fish? Life cannot survive without living beings eating one another. During ice ages, humans could not directly digest grass and survived by eating reindeer, deer, mammoths, fish, and other organisms. If killing were intrinsically cosmic evil karma, the entire human species should have lost the qualification to be born human. Go farther back, to the period when animals lived in the sea, and large creatures continually ate smaller ones; the ridiculous conclusion is that all life accumulated nothing but evil generation after generation.
One more step of critical thought reveals how thoroughly the scriptural framework of karmic reward is a human-centered imagination. Stories in which a person is born rich because of goodness in a past life and ugly because of past evil are not laws explaining the world. They are fiction projecting the desires and discrimination of human society onto the cosmos. We may read such literature as literature, but critical thought stops the moment someone believes that its gods and hells physically exist and becomes certain that he has seen them.
Reason Is Paralyzed the Moment Someone Says “Believe”
Neither Jesus nor the Buddha taught people to believe blindly in him, yet later people who exploit religion say, “What is written here is truth, so believe it.” The moment belief is emphasized, doubt becomes sin and questions disappear. Once rational and critical thought stops, there is no difference in principle among believing in gods and rebirth, believing in Maitreya or Amitābha, and believing a cult leader who claims to be the returned Jesus or Maitreya.
We cannot blame individual cult members alone for the prevalence of cults in Korea. Established religions, including Buddhism and Christianity, trained people in belief for a long time. After mainstream religion teaches people not to question scripture and a leader’s word, it is unsurprising that someone who learned that habit is attracted to the certainty of another leader. A gentle tone does not make a person less fanatical either. If belief cannot withstand critical thought and rejects counterargument, it has the structure of fanaticism.
A viewer then remarked that Zionists absolutize a sentence in a book saying God gave them the land, insist that it belongs to them, and therefore cannot find common ground. If people claim to follow Jesus’ instruction to love an enemy as a neighbor while dividing enemies and neighbors absolutely, they cannot love an enemy. Debate and compromise become impossible inside such a stark binary, and war does not end. To someone who believes he already possesses the right answer, the other person’s words are not an opinion to examine but an error to eliminate.
I therefore said it again: the Pali Nikāyas are not themselves the earliest scriptures, and most of them are literary works written by later people. We must read them critically and distinguish words containing wisdom from those that do not. Buddhism becomes possible not by enthroning the whole book as the Buddha’s sacred word, but by observing and questioning in actual life and verifying what wisdom is.
An Education That Does Not Teach Critical Thought
This does not happen because Jeon is uniquely foolish. Most of humanity lives within belief and has never been trained in critical thought. From primary school through university, how many people are continually taught to critically examine their own thoughts, actions, and emotions? Korean mathematics examinations demand the ability to recognize a problem type quickly, apply a memorized solution, and produce an answer. In Korean, English, history, physics, and chemistry, students are also busy memorizing and finding patterns rather than questioning and testing.
A person trained only to memorize never learns how to examine statements blared on YouTube, statements by scholars and politicians, a shaman’s words, or fortune-telling. Such a person does not perform a thought experiment asking what result should follow if a claim is right and what would differ if it were wrong. Instead of seeking evidence and comparing an opposing explanation, he thinks it must be so because others say it is or selects what he wants to believe. We should ask what difference there is between Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon Hee believing shamans or folk religion and Jeon believing in past lives and rebirth and saying he saw beautiful heavenly maidens and tree spirits. Adding the label “Buddhism” or the title “psychiatrist” does not transform an inference into fact.
The more views and status a person has, the greater the responsibility of broadcasters that spread his words without examination. I said that a psychiatrist in the twenty-first century should study at least a little of how the brain and mind create illusions and stop making such statements. I know the language is harsh, but I did not want to soften my criticism while wrong claims were being widely circulated under the name of Buddhism.
Questions That Lead Out of a Life Bound in a Cave
Inference and illusion are central to my work. I recalled the first half of the opening verse of the Cave Octad from the Sutta Nipāta: a person bound in a cave, covered by many things, and hardened fast is lost in delusion. The cave is the place where I believe that what I habitually see is everything, that what I know and experience is all there is. Being covered by many things means being colored by ideas received from parents, school, books, and society without ever examining them critically.
We keep piling up what we receive and then race through life according to that accumulation. Without having considered right and wrong, we become certain: “This is good. I must do this. This is right.” If we succeed, we imagine that success was entirely our own achievement; if we fail, we assign every responsibility to ourselves and despair. Unable to see society and conditions, we live a life that runs diligently toward a wrong conclusion.
Critical thought—the ability to ask, reflect, and correct oneself—is a foundation of modern society. Buddhism should be that training too. I criticized Jeon at such length today not because I hate him, but because his case vividly shows inference becoming belief and belief hardening illusion. When I saw that the broadcast had run past schedule to 9:02, I laughed, apologized, and said I had gone a little too far. But my final point was clear.
Do not cling in belief to books, scriptures, and experiences. Question, observe, and reflect. Buddhism begins with knowing that I may be wrong.
Leaving illusion is not completed by one mystical experience. It means repeatedly examining the cave that colors me, noticing the moment an inference hardens into fact, and saying that I do not know when I do not know. Without learning that question, one cannot study even a single character of Buddhism. Once questioning begins, one can finally take a step toward wisdom rather than belief.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.