Why Must We Question Language and Concepts?
This discussion begins with the instruction, “Question language and concepts.” If we accept what we have seen, heard, and learned as simply the way things are, it becomes difficult to escape delusion. Language and concepts are not perfectly transparent vessels that carry the world intact. They were formed through convention and habit, and they are coated with ambiguous meanings and accumulated misunderstandings. I therefore examine the problem of language through the idol of the marketplace, one of Francis Bacon’s four idols of the mind. After the idols of the tribe and the cave comes the marketplace; the idol of the theater will remain for the next discussion.
A Market Requires Agreed Signs
A market does not arise from one person alone. Trade begins when two or more people meet to exchange rice and leather or buy and sell goods with money. To trade, they must exchange information. If spoken words fail, they may use fingers and gestures, but ordinarily they use language. Voice is not the only language. Facial expressions, hand gestures, circles, and crosses are languages insofar as they function as agreed signs.
What matters in the market metaphor is relationship rather than the merchandise. To exchange what I have for what you want, we must communicate quantity, price, and consent: “Let us exchange this many for that many,” or “I will not sell at that price.” If those meanings do not pass between us, trade does not occur. The idol of the marketplace is thus not merely an error arising privately in one mind. It arises in a network of two or more people. Misalignment can enter whenever I turn a thought into a sign and the other person interprets that sign through a different concept.
Those agreements change across times and cultures. A raised thumb may mean approval to us, could have been read as a signal to spare or kill in ancient Rome, and may function as an insult elsewhere. In a Korean funeral hall, decorating a portrait with chrysanthemums carries a customary meaning of mourning. If chrysanthemums celebrate weddings in another culture, the Korean funeral scene will look strange there. A yellow ribbon works the same way. In Korea it signals mourning for the Sewol ferry disaster; to someone who does not share that convention, it does not communicate the same meaning.
Language is therefore agreement, habit, and convention. It works only when people share concepts. Objects such as chrysanthemums and yellow ribbons can themselves become languages that carry human concepts. This is where the idol of the marketplace appears. Because the tool people made for communication is imperfect, misunderstanding and delusion enter through that very tool.
The Lens of the Tribe Shows Only What Humans Can See
Before the marketplace, recall the idols of the tribe and the cave. Human beings see through the tinted glasses of the human species. We experience light as the colors of the rainbow and say that RGB combinations produce many colors. Yet bees, dogs, dolphins, other animals, and even plants that turn their bodies and petals toward light detect it differently. The world’s light does not exist only as the colors visible to human beings.
We cannot directly see infrared or ultraviolet. AM and FM radio frequencies and mobile-phone signals occupy other ranges of the same electromagnetic spectrum, while humans recognize only one portion as visible light. Hearing is similar. Humans hear only the audible band their ears permit, while bats and other animals detect higher or lower frequencies. We receive not the whole world but the portion admitted by human sense organs. From sensation through the brain’s conclusions, perception leans in particular directions. This is the idol of the tribe, the lens of the human species.
A mobile phone emits signals, yet we do not see them with our eyes. Even light is a name attached to only the range of wavelengths humans can see; AM and FM are invisible to the human eye but occupy the same continuous spectrum. Bees see ranges humans do not, and bats hear ranges humans cannot. Plants turn their stems and petals because they too detect light. The fact that species differ both in what they detect and in how they construct a world from it prevents us from declaring the humanly visible appearance to be the world’s original form.
The Lens of the Cave Gives Each Person a Different World
Even within the species lens, every person differs. If the world has eight billion people, not one has a body, eyes, nervous system, and brain completely identical to mine. A person with 2.0 vision seeing an 8K-like image and a person with poor vision seeing a 360p-like blur cannot be said to see exactly the same scene. Even when two people watch the same sunset from the same place, they cannot occupy one point on top of each other, so their viewpoints, heights, and angles differ.
Bodies are not the only difference. Life experience, education, encounters, and objects of attention differ. Looking at one scene, I may notice a passerby while the person beside me notices a tree. I remember the person and the other remembers the tree. An inborn body and accumulated experience combine to form an individual lens. This is why fifty million people cannot hold an identical judgment of President Yoon Suk Yeol in 2024. Different experiences and standards yield different conclusions from the same event.
Looking at the same president’s words and conduct, one person calls him admirable while another considers him harmful to the country. This is not only because one side saw something that the other missed. Judgment also includes the life each person has lived, the information selected, and what each was taught to value. Differences that begin in bodily position and eyesight continue through memory, attention, and political standards. Before saying, “I see the facts while that person distorts them,” I must recognize that I too see through the lens of a cave.
After the lenses of species and cave, images, opinions, and representations form in the mind. To convey them to another person, we must then use the language of the marketplace. The moment we put an experience already altered by two lenses into imperfect language, another distortion and loss occurs.
The Taste of an Apple and the Boundary of a Tree Cannot Be Transferred Intact
How can I communicate the experience of biting crisply into an apple and finding it delicious to someone who has never eaten one? I can describe sourness and sweetness, moisture and texture, acidity and sugar, and offer a rough guess. I cannot transfer the bodily experience itself. Language cannot contain an experience or phenomenon exactly as it is.
Adding more explanation does not finally solve the problem. The words sour and sweet work only if the listener already has comparable experiences. Comparing the apple with another fruit merely moves the blockage if that fruit is also unknown. Adding moisture, texture, and acidity sounds more precise, but it still borrows memories in the other person’s mind to approximate my experience. Communication is not the copying of experience but the coordination of incomplete guesses.
That is because language was made for convenience. Suppose we coined tree so that we could say, “Go gather wood from a tree and warm the room.” We call things with hard trunks, branches, and leaves trees and refine the concept by contrasting them with rocks, water, and grass. But where does a tree end and grass begin? Is bamboo a tree? Is there nothing at the boundary that is neither comfortably tree nor grass? If we distinguish plants from animals by movement, we encounter moving plants and animals that remain attached to one place. The world does not exist neatly sliced according to our boxes.
Rocks and stones are the same. We cannot draw a perfect line at which a stone becomes a boulder. Different people may name the same object differently. Words are convenient, but they do not guarantee clear essences or boundaries. Human beings put concepts into reality and produced the names tree, grass, animal, plant, boulder, and stone.
Even when a botanist offers technical criteria, those criteria are more carefully made agreements for research and communication. There is no absolute mark in the world engraved with “the true tree begins here.” Definitions of animal and plant, boulder and stone, are revised when counterexamples appear. Comparison makes concepts clearer while also exposing boundary cases. Language is therefore useful without being identical to absolute truth.
Names for What Does Not Exist and Unclear Names for What Does
Bacon divides the problem of names into two groups: names attached to what does not exist in the world, and names attached to what does. The first can include god, soul, afterlife, heaven and hell, rebirth and former lives, cosmic energy, chakras, and qi. The existence of a word is not evidence for the existence of its object. Humans can name an imagined thing and, because there is a name, feel that something real must stand behind it and fall into superstition.
I am not claiming that I inspected the entire universe and can therefore declare such things absolutely nonexistent. The standard I offer is universal observation that anyone can share. Books may describe souls and afterlives, or people may report former lives through meditation, absorption, out-of-body experiences, or hypnosis. Yet if the same phenomenon were universally observable under common conditions, it would already have entered scientific research. Buddhism and science observe and discuss what can be observed universally. Believing what cannot be observed is neither scientific nor Buddhist.
A private claim that someone saw something differs from an observation that multiple people can repeat under shared conditions. A written record or the authority of a famous practitioner cannot replace universal observation. Rather than making the omniscient declaration “It does not exist,” I argue that claims no one can jointly observe should not become foundations of knowledge or Buddhism. We reduce delusion by setting the unverifiable aside and beginning with experiences that can be checked.
The second group consists of words such as tree that point to real things but remain unclear. Philosophy and science must define terms precisely to reduce misunderstanding. Yet a dictionary’s definition of tree is itself composed of other words. Explaining those words requires still more words. Language supports itself through relations among words. We can refine a definition carefully and from many directions, but language alone has difficulty reaching an absolutely clear foundation. Bacon himself acknowledged this incompleteness.
A Korean reader can understand a dictionary sentence, but every word composing that sentence calls for another dictionary entry. One word rests on another, which rests on still another, forming a web. This is why philosophy and science state definitions, conditions, and scope in detail. Yet the final explanation remains language, so the possibility of misunderstanding cannot disappear completely. We must strive for precision while admitting that striving does not abolish the limits of language.
Social Conventions and Superstitions Brought Under the Name of Religion
A society needs agreements, customs, and laws that distinguish what people should and should not do. Just as people feel discomfort if an inappropriate flower appears where chrysanthemums are expected, living together requires some shared standards. Before law organized society as it does now, religion may have helped maintain order by creating agreements and warning, “If you do this, you will receive bad karma.”
Because of that historical function, I do not condemn every old religious norm without qualification. In societies where state law and institutions were weak, religion may have prevented murder, theft, and betrayal and helped people keep communal agreements. The problem begins when the reason for the agreement is forgotten and only a religious name and scriptural sentence remain. When a social norm hardens into a factual claim about unobservable heaven, hell, and karmic retribution, an agreement for order becomes mixed with Buddhist insight.
But traces of that role entering Buddhist scriptures and institutions do not make all of them Buddhist teaching. Stories of former lives, gods, rebirth, karmic heaven, and hell that cannot become objects of universal observation are not Buddhism as I define it. If we assume that a named object exists simply because a scripture contains the word, we live in delusion. I state forcefully that a large part of religion and scripture today contains social customs and superstitions transformed and inserted into Buddhism. We can understand their historical role without calling unobservable imagination Buddhism itself.
Fantasies Inside the Words Buddha and Awakening
People who never question the incompleteness of language reveal delusions whenever they speak about Buddhism. Ask what awakening is, what Buddha means, or what liberation, nirvana, and moksha are, and each person offers a vague image. They may imagine that seeing one’s nature instantly makes one a Buddha, that one must answer every question at once and excel at Seon exchanges, or that a Buddha remains in oneness while awake and asleep 365 days a year without sadness, anger, or disturbance.
We must ask whether we arrived at that definition of Buddha through observation and reflection or merely heard it from scripture, teachers, and YouTube. Information carried by language formed an image and opinion of Buddha in the mind, and we may chase that representation as the real Buddha. A person seeking buddhahood that way may, with 99.9 percent probability, be following an absurd fantasy rather than the path to becoming a Buddha. Sitting and dozing for long hours does not become relevant merely because it is strenuous. Running hard toward a misunderstood goal only takes us farther in the wrong direction.
We may combine the ability to answer instantly, oneness while awake and asleep, unbroken absorption 365 days a year, and a state untouched by sadness or anger, then imagine these items to be conditions of buddhahood. But we must first ask whether they were derived by observing an actual Buddha. If we define a Buddha as “one who is liberated,” we must define liberation again; if we say “one who entered nirvana,” nirvana itself requires explanation. Replacing one unclear word with another and mistaking the result for knowledge is the idol of the marketplace.
To understand words spoken 2,600 years ago in the twenty-first century, we must seriously examine the gaps of time, language, and translation. If we assume a learned translation is simply correct, we make errors such as reading the form in “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” as the modern Korean word for color. Memorizing a sentence does not reveal its meaning unless we study what concept the word carried in its original context.
The Desire, Form, and Formless Realms—and Jinje’s Color Interpretation
I directly criticize former Jogye Order Patriarch Jinje. He explained the desire realm as a world filled with greed, the form realm as a world made of colors or light, and the formless realm as a world without light. This resulted from seeing the Chinese character translated as form and thinking only of color. The color among sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects must be distinguished from the form used to translate rupa in “form is emptiness” and name-and-form. I criticize in harsh terms the fact that someone who had not studied even this basic Buddhist vocabulary occupied the patriarch’s seat while claiming awakening and lineage.
My criticism is harsh not because of one minor translation mistake. The desire, form, and formless realms belong to Buddhism’s core worldview, and reading form merely as color distorts the entire practical connection among the three. When a patriarch speaks that mistake with institutional authority, many people copy it without question. It shows how an idol of language joined to religious authority can let one familiar meaning of a character deform a whole Buddhist teaching.
The desire, form, and formless realms are not merely a cosmic map. They present a Buddhist worldview and method of practice. At their center stand naming and concepts. The Pali term is nama. Nama resembles the English name, and roots and meanings connect because Indian and European languages belong to the Indo-European family. Naming is not merely attaching a sound; it assigns meaning and a concept.
Nama-Rupa and Name-and-Form: Rupa Means Form and Matter, Not Merely Color
Buddhism sees the world as nama and rupa, nama-rupa. The Chinese tradition translated this as name-and-form. The character for name renders nama well. The problem arose when rupa was rendered with a character now commonly understood as color, and modern Korean readers reduced it to hue. The basic meaning of rupa is form. From visible shapes and colors, it extends to things that can be touched and to matter. Even air, though difficult to see, is material and belongs to rupa in this broad sense.
In the Heart Sutra’s five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness—the form said to be empty is not merely color but matter. Yet we should not then reduce the form realm to a world simply composed of matter. We must examine what concept and stage of practice the word indicates in context. Without understanding nama-rupa, we cannot grasp Buddhism’s basic worldview, and reading one translated character through a familiar modern meaning generates endless mistakes.
Observing the Named World and Stopping Judgment
Nama means that humans name rupa and assign meaning to it. Stones, cats, and trees do not create those names; people divide, discriminate, and insert concepts. We therefore live in a humanly named world seen through human lenses. I assign meaning—this is good, important, beautiful, and necessary—and then chase it. When a wish comes true I rejoice, and when it fails I suffer. This fluctuating world is the desire realm.
As soon as nama attaches to rupa, a simple form becomes “what I must possess,” “what I must avoid,” “what is beautiful,” or “what is bad.” A name carries not only classification but value and desire. Desire in the desire realm is therefore not a force originally lodged in the thing. It grows as a person assigns meaning and chases that meaning as fact. Name-and-form displays both the structure of human experience and the structure through which suffering is made.
Through Buddhist study, I begin to observe that meanings I considered important are made of illusions and misconceptions. I see that standards such as good, delicious, beautiful, virtuous, and necessary arose from society, experience, and conclusions in my mind. First, I temporarily stop judging immediately by those standards. This is the practice of stopping and observing. When judgment stops, suffering and agitation caused by failing to do what I think I must do, or doing what I do not want, also pause. I explain this as the connection to the four absorptions of the form realm.
The standards in the mind, however, have not disappeared. Next I reflect on what they are and why they arose. I ask why I call a beautiful person desirable and why grasping one thought obstructs practice. I describe this as practice of the formless realm. The three realms are not a list of mystical places reached after death. They map how humans name and value, become agitated by those values, stop judgment, and then reflect on the standards themselves.
The calming of agitation when judgment stops is not the end; it creates conditions for the next observation. Standards of good and bad, right and wrong, remain in the mind. In practice of the formless realm, I ask what shape those standards have, where I learned them, and why I hold them. Rather than merely repeating stillness or pursuing a mystical absorption, I reflect on the names and concepts that moved me and expose the structure of delusion.
Questioning language and concepts is therefore not peripheral to Buddhism. Seeing how the named world arose and how its names produce my desires and suffering is central to the Buddhist worldview and path of practice. This is precisely why the idol of the marketplace matters.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.