How Do We Practice Dependent-Origination Thinking in Everyday Life?
This “Learning Buddhism Through the History of Civilization” series began with a viewer’s comment. In one video after another, I had raised doubts and questions and insisted that we must think in terms of dependent origination to resolve them. Then someone asked how, exactly, we could practice that kind of thinking in everyday life. It was a perfectly fair question. I had told people to question and think in terms of dependent origination without sufficiently showing why we should do it, how it works in practice, what examples there are, what it requires, and what it can accomplish.
At first, I intended to discuss only science. As I developed the idea, however, I found that we also had to examine the history of human civilization. Living in South Korea in 2024, when artificial intelligence has arrived, we enjoy the benefits of modern scientific civilization without knowing very well how that civilization came about, how society may change, or what efforts countless people accumulated along the way. Too many people live without asking “why” and “how,” and consequently fail to understand Buddhism, scientific civilization, or even their own lives. That is why I decided to trace how modernity arose.
One may ask what learning about modernity has to do with Buddhism. I believe Buddhist influence strongly affected the emergence of modernity in Western society. The Buddha’s awakening 2,600 years ago was not merely an instance of personal liberation; it was a vast moment of awakening with social effects. His insight did not end with one person. His teaching spread widely, moved through many regions according to conditions, and eventually influenced the rise of Western modernity. Understanding modern society can therefore also help us understand Buddhism.
The Core of Buddhism Is Dependent Origination and Observation
The Buddhist characteristics I want to hold on to here are dependent origination and observation. Dependent origination means that something arises from conditions. A result appearing now has arisen because of something, in relation to something, with something serving as its cause and conditions. We must investigate whether there is one cause, two, or many, but dependent origination tells us that no result arises alone, unrelated to everything else.
Without dependent-origination thinking, one can neither understand Buddhism nor awaken. If someone says that awakening means having no thoughts, or that non-discriminating wisdom means living without making any distinctions at all, that person speaks from ignorance of Buddhism. The Buddha’s teaching shows how we, too, may become buddhas, and dependent-origination thinking cannot be removed from that path.
Then how do we discover the cause that produced a result? We observe. If I suffer or hurt, if war breaks out, or if any of the many personal and social problems arise, that result must have causes. There may be one cause or several intertwined factors. To solve the problem and alter the result, we must know the cause; to know the cause, we must observe.
This is precisely where Buddhism differs from religions centered on metaphysics or a world after death that you and I cannot jointly verify. Buddhism places before us an object that both you and I can see, something universally observable, and discusses causes and results on that basis. It seeks to solve actual problems by understanding their causes. This is one reason Buddhism has been described in the West as an anti-religious or post-religious religion.
The Omitted Second Half of “Knowledge Is Power”
Let us now call upon Francis Bacon, a figure who played an important role in the history of civilization. Everyone has heard the expression “knowledge is power.” It condenses a Latin sentence in Bacon’s Novum Organum.
Human knowledge and human power meet in one, because ignorance of the cause prevents us from producing the effect.
The crucial part is the latter clause, which people usually omit. What is it that we know? We know the cause: why and how the result before us came about. Why does fire catch? Why does water fall? Why does an apple fall toward Earth? Why does the moon shine? If a ball is thrown, why does it fall, and where will it land? By asking “why” and “how” and learning the cause, we can produce a desired result. If we do not know the cause, we cannot produce the result.
Animals also act by using causes and results to some extent. But the human power Bacon describes is the power to understand the laws of nature intellectually and use nature more freely. The better we understand how nature works, the greater human power becomes. In Chinese characters, the “in” of cause and the “gwa” of result form cause-and-effect, in-gwa. Insert yeon, the condition between them, and we have in-yeon-gwa: a result arises through causes and conditions.
Korean contains many expressions inherited from Buddhism. Our meeting is a connection, and even brushing sleeves is said to be a connection. The phenomenon of our sleeves brushing now is itself a result brought forth by numerous past causes and conditions. Thus, if we were to render Bacon’s “knowledge is power” in Korean, it would become “even brushing sleeves is a connection.” This is not a mere pun. What must we know? We must know the relation between causes and results—in other words, dependent origination.
In this sense, understanding scientific method is also a way of understanding Buddhism. We fail to understand science because we fail to understand Buddhism properly, and we fail to understand modern civilization and contemporary society because we fail to understand science. That is why I discuss them together.
Knowledge Arises by Observing and Dividing
The word for “knowledge” used by Bacon can be pronounced scientia, and it eventually leads to the English word “science.” Today, science mainly denotes the sciences, but what it originally indicates here is knowing and knowledge. How, then, does knowledge accumulate? It always begins with observation.
Consider mushrooms. If pigs and dogs eat a mushroom without ill effects, a person may try it as well. But if someone eats a similar mushroom with red spots, feels his stomach churn, and becomes very sick, people begin to call it a poisonous mushroom. They compare what can be eaten with what cannot, observe differences in shape and characteristics, and classify them. As their experience of the wider world grows, the kinds and classifications of mushrooms also multiply. The earliest knowledge must have accumulated through experience and observation in this fashion.
Science and scissors can be explained as etymologically connected to a root meaning “to cut” or “to divide.” Scissors are a cutting tool, while science is knowledge accumulated by separating and classifying observed differences. Knowledge is the work of examining the world and distinguishing what may be eaten from what may not, and how one thing differs from another. As the method for obtaining such knowledge developed, it became established under the name of science.
To Observe the Mind, We Must First Pay Attention
Now apply the same principle to my own problems. To solve a problem of my mind, I must observe my mind. I must watch depression, anger, jealousy, despair, sadness, distress, joy, and other feelings arise and disappear. Yet just as visual information entering my eyes does not remain in memory if I do not attend to it, the mind and feelings simply pass by when I take no interest in them.
The heart of observation is attention. I must attend to the fact that I am suffering in order to solve it, but people often move while being swept away by emotion, merely saying, “I’m miserable,” or “I’m depressed.” If I want to know why my emotions dart around against my will, I have to look at them with interest. Noting—paying attention—makes observation possible.
Attention begins with doubt. Why did I become angry? Why did I suddenly lash out at my child or my wife? Looking back, even I think I overreacted—why did I do it? Without these questions, interest does not arise. If anger, depression, and joy are all dismissed as simply natural, we cannot examine their causes deeply. Dependent-origination thinking begins when we question what is taken for granted.
Science Observes Nature; Buddhism Also Observes the Self
Bacon’s main concern was nature. He sought to discover causes and results in natural phenomena and find laws by which anyone following the same procedure could produce the same result. If it cannot be reproduced, it is difficult to call it science. The center of early natural science was observing nature, identifying causes and results, and discovering “how.”
Today, the human mind and intelligence have also become objects of science through fields such as linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and artificial-intelligence research. But when Bacon wrote the Novum Organum in 1620, the idea of viewing our own feelings, suffering, and thoughts in the same way was not prominent.
Buddhism, however, looked at the human body, sensation, mind, thought, and world through causes and results 2,600 years ago. The four establishments of mindfulness are described as body, feeling, mind, and dhammas because these are what one observes. Observation is not performed merely for the sake of looking. We observe to understand causes and results and to derive the principle at work.
Do Not Speak of What Cannot Be Observed
The object of observation is not metaphysical imagination but reality that human beings can feel and experience through the senses. Bacon’s empiricism likewise asks us to understand the world on the basis of what we can experience. I say that this is also fundamental to Buddhism.
People say the afterlife can be observed only after death. But we are alive and therefore cannot observe it. Even if someone claims to have died, returned, and seen the afterlife, that is not a universal observation that anyone can repeat and verify. We cannot even know whether that person was truly dead or only believed so. A story told by one in a thousand or ten thousand people cannot count as universal observation of reality.
Suppose someone in the Buddha’s day asked how vast the universe is or what the afterlife is like. The Buddha had not observed the whole universe or died and returned after checking the next world. When asked about something unknown and unobservable, he could only say he did not know. The Buddha answers about the real world and this very moment.
This attitude was not solely a stroke of genius that the Buddha suddenly invented alone. From roughly the seventh to the fifth century BCE, diverse philosophical currents—including skepticism, materialism, and denials of morality—flared across China, India, ancient Persia, Egypt, and Greece. The Buddha, too, emerged within that current. Thus, he did not answer unobservable metaphysical questions. The core of what is commonly called the fourteen unanswered questions does not lie in memorizing a list of fourteen. We must see why he did not answer.
Do not speak of what cannot be spoken.
My explanation, too, may only be a conjecture. I am not the Buddha himself, so how could I know his mind completely? Even so, the direction we can infer is clear. People commonly talk even about what cannot be spoken of, but the Buddha’s concern moved away from mythic and religious ideas of rebirth, soul, afterlife, and karma. His concern was the five aggregates and the six sense bases—our body, our mind, and this very moment.
The Tools of Awakening Are the Real Body and Mind
The tools on the path to liberation are not unknowable, mysterious doctrines. They are the reality I can perceive, my mind, thoughts, emotions, body, and natural phenomena. Do people die? They do. Does the body decay? It does. Is there a perfectly and eternally clean body? There is not. Observing what is not clean is contemplation of impurity and contemplation of the skeleton; at the same time, it is an understanding of humanity and nature.
Later Buddhism, however, tries to turn itself into a strange religion that longs to become something perfectly pure. The Buddha instead tells us to look directly. Is the human body completely clean? No. Observation examines even the human concepts of cleanliness and filth, as well as mind, spirit, and world. Buddhism therefore does not place an unobservable god, karma, rebirth, hell, heaven, or celestial realm at its center as literal fact. It excludes them, saying, “That is not my concern.”
In Mahayana Buddhism, people seek Amitabha and the Pure Land, call upon Avalokiteshvara, and speak of Ksitigarbha saving people in hell. If a battlefield or a suffering mind in this world is called hell, and saving beings there is a symbolic or literary expression, I can accept it. But if one believes they are actual places and beings beyond observable reality, one has failed to understand the most basic point of the Buddha’s teaching. Both awakening and dependent-origination thinking must rest on reality that you and I can experience.
If someone asks whether prayer can grant a wish or move dead parents from hell to heaven, recall the Buddha’s analogy of trying to make a rock thrown into a river float. The rock sinks. Even if we pray, “Rock, rise,” it does not rise an inch or a centimeter. No matter how much more we pray, it remains there. We can all observe that prayer cannot move even a rock. What, then, do we claim prayer will do for dead parents?
Science Is Therefore Buddhist
Buddhism is a religion against religion, a religion of liberation, and a religion that moves beyond religion. Yet many Korean Buddhists and monastics still understand Buddhism as religious ritual. I do not mean everyone, but if blessings and transcendence are placed at the center instead of observable reality, the name Buddhism should be removed. That is not what the Buddha taught.
Observation takes as its object what you and I can verify through body and senses. Buddhism derives principles there, discovers causes, understands causality and dependent origination, and solves problems. Bacon’s empiricism likewise observes the natural world as it is and derives principles on the basis of what we can experience.
The conclusion returns to the opening sentence: “Knowledge is power.” What must we know? Because we cannot produce a result without knowing its cause, we must understand the relation among cause, conditions, and result. The saying “even brushing sleeves is a connection” points to causes, conditions, and results—to dependent origination itself. Everything in this world arises in relation to other causes and conditions. Nothing exists alone, unrelated to everything else, entirely unaffected by others, and eternally imperishable. That is the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination. At this point, dependent origination and science converge. Science is therefore Buddhist.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.