What Kind of Theater Am I Living In?
I begin this discussion with a question: “What kind of theater might I be living in?” You may wonder whether I am really saying that we live in a theater. I am. We live not in one theater but where countless theaters overlap. By theater, I mean a stage and script arranged by someone—a human-made story and worldview. The problem begins when we no longer know that the story is a story. If we take a constructed stage for the world itself, we wander inside it. A world we have seen, heard, and repeatedly learned from birth feels so natural that it is difficult even to imagine that it was made.
Buddhism is a religion of release. When we speak of liberation, we must first ask: released from where and from what? If I do not even know what binds me now, I cannot get free. We live in a theater without knowing it is a theater, absorbed in a manufactured story. This is why a tiny grain of doubt—“Perhaps I too live inside some theater”—matters. That doubt cracks a hardened frame and opens the possibility of breaking through the shell. If this discussion causes you to question your own world even once, the video has already served a purpose.
Two Theaters Meet: Vikings and Christians
Let us go back into the past. When Vikings invaded Europe, they had a religious and cultural worldview grounded in Norse mythology. Today we see Thor, Odin, and Loki as characters brought to life in Marvel movies. To the Vikings of that time, however, they were not movie material. Norse mythology was their religion, their belief, and their way of understanding the world.
In that world, a warrior had to die fighting bravely on the battlefield for a Valkyrie to carry his soul into a heavenly realm. To die in battle without cowardice was the path to the eternal world. They learned this story in childhood, grew up inside it, and acted according to it when they went out to raid and wage war. From birth to death, they did not question it.
As they invaded different parts of Europe, they met Christians. Christians lived within a worldview in which people who believed in God and Jesus and lived virtuously went to heaven, while those who did not believe or did evil went to hell. The two worlds collided through war and plunder, captivity and rule. To Viking eyes, Christian belief may have looked like foolish superstition; to Christian eyes, Viking gods may have looked like savage superstition. When people first encounter an unfamiliar world, each side easily mocks the other. Some Vikings later converted to Christianity under the influence of local society.
The important question is this: Were the worldviews they believed true? Were they facts? We now use Norse mythology freely in films and novels because it has largely shed its religious force. Yet for Vikings around the seventh and eighth centuries, mocking it could have provoked a deadly conflict. Christians may say their own belief is the exception. They may say that Thor, Odin, and Loki are fictional, but God and the angels, Michael and Lucifer, the devil and Yahweh truly exist. What I want to say, however, is clear: they are all stories made by human beings.
Conditioned Things: A World Made by Humans
I call laws made by human beings conditioned things, or yuwibeop. They are laws constructed and fabricated under conditions. Cats, worms, fish, and monkeys do not construct systems like these. Complex human imaginings and concepts become words and sentences; those elements become entangled and form a system and a worldview. Once the system grows sufficiently elaborate, people may feel it to be a world that exists in its own right.
We are vulnerable to repetition and learning. Just as ringing a bell whenever food appears can eventually make saliva flow at the sound alone, a worldview heard repeatedly from childhood seeps into the body. A chance to recognize that one’s own theater may be a theater arrives when it collides with another world. When we encounter beliefs, institutions, and lives utterly unlike the familiar, we can finally ask, “Could what I have believed also be a manufactured story?”
The theater of belief is also at work as Israel bombs Hamas and wages war in 2024. People believe that a god gave this land to the Jews and say, “This is our land, so other peoples and other religions must leave.” But that is not an objective fact bestowed by a god. It is a story made by human beings. Christians and Jews may dislike hearing this, but in the twenty-first century we must be able to view that belief objectively too.
Ancient Indian Caste and the Buddha’s Escape
Now let us go to ancient India about 2,600 years ago. Brahmins claimed to be the purest, most sacred, and most noble priestly class. Below them stood Kshatriyas, commoners, and the enslaved Shudra class. The child of a slave became a slave, the child of a noble became a noble, and the child of a priest became a priest. At birth, each person was assigned a place: “You are a slave,” “You are a commoner,” “You belong to the warrior and royal class,” or “I am a sacred priest.”
To people immersed in that society, this was self-evident. A lower-ranking person could lose his life merely for colliding with someone above him. Yet this order was a constructed theater. Because they could not imagine their world as something made, they explained rank through stories about classes emerging from the head or feet of the creator god Brahma. They taught that each class had to fulfill its assigned role according to dharma and that a society in which no one left that role was good and proper. The slave had to do a slave’s work, the warrior had to wage war, and the priest had to perform a priest’s work. That was the script.
Even the shramana movement was not entirely free of the social conditions of the time. Giving food to a person engaged in noble spiritual practice was considered a virtuous act that would bring a return. Yet if a commoner or slave abandoned assigned work and declared an intention to become a shramana, the existing order would hardly have accepted it. Gautama Siddhartha himself belonged to the royal Kshatriya class. The Ganges region was somewhat more open than the Indus region, and as iron civilization spread, royal and commoner power grew while caste hierarchy began to loosen. The shramana current itself was part of that change.
The Buddha brought about a greater change. He admitted into the sangha not only nobles and Brahmins but also commoners, Shudras, and people called untouchables who had scarcely been treated as human beings. This way of thinking undermined the social order of the time. How was it possible? Because he understood caste as a conditioned law—a law made by human beings. Caste was not fact itself but a theater. One who escapes that frame can break the demands imposed by tradition and culture and tell a new story. This is where liberation meets the social world.
The Theater of Joseon Status and the Subjugation of Women
Joseon society also had yangban, commoners, and nobi. Families with money and power held nobi as property, bought and sold them, denied their freedom, and used them at will. This is not merely a remote past. The culture and tradition continued into the early twentieth century. More astonishingly, its traces remain in the twenty-first century.
When I meet elders at a drinking gathering, I still hear questions such as, “What is your surname? Which generation are you? Which Yun clan are you from? Ah, you are yangban.” Recently I told a senior that in the twenty-first century I would prefer not to hear talk of nobility or yangban because it makes me uncomfortable. I can partly understand his explanation that it is a light, traditional way to begin a conversation. I too heard constant questions about surnames and generations when I was young. Yet it is a relic of an age that discriminated by blood. Even progressive and admirable people seldom question words and customs familiar to them. Unless we see sacred blood and class as illusions devised for someone’s benefit, we remain buried in that theater.
The Confucian theater also made women appendages of men. A woman was told to follow her father at birth, her husband after marriage, and her son after her husband died. Her own freedom disappeared, and she became a person who had to follow someone throughout life. This was our reality until very recently, and it remains in sexual puritanism, discrimination against women, and the old-man obstinacy of men. People say something is right because “it has always been this way,” “it is tradition,” or “this is what I was taught.” They do not know that they live inside a constructed theater. Such worldviews are still present in today’s wars, conflicts, and oppression.
Bruno and the Index as a Map of Modernization
In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned by the Catholic Church for proposing an infinite universe and interpreting the Bible and doctrine differently. Merely speaking against the established worldview made him a threat. He was told to retract his claims; when he did not, he was executed, and his books later became prohibited works.
The Catholic Church placed books that might threaten its theater and worldview on the Index of Forbidden Books. Copernicus’s work on heliocentrism, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, also became a book that should not be read. Yet if you want to know how the Scientific Revolution and modernity arrived, you can look at the Catholic Index. It contains the path out of older Christian, Aristotelian, and Platonic modes of thought. In that sense, the Catholic Index was also a list of Western modernization.
Even Montaigne’s Essays appeared on the Index. Through the Renaissance, ancient classics received new attention, and after 1450 Gutenberg’s printing technology spread many books widely. At the center was Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Pyrrhonism contained a skepticism that asked, “Is that really so? Do you truly possess the correct answer and the truth?” In 1417, De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things—was rediscovered and widely read, and the materialism of Epicureanism returned as well.
Montaigne read and reflected on Pyrrhonism, Epicurus, and Stoic philosophy, and honestly wrote down his life and thoughts. This became the essay, a prototype of today’s personal prose. The word essay carries the sense of a test or trial. It was not writing that pretended to be solemn and impressive, but a thought experiment and experimental form of writing that exposed his own thoughts and anguish. Its central question was, “What do I know?” It echoes Socrates’s attitude: “I neither think that I know nor do I know.” Such doubt cracks the countless theaters we have believed to be truth. It asks whether gods and heaven, karma and angels, hell and rebirth and souls really exist.
An Education That Does Not Teach Doubt
Science too is a theater. Things Aristotle imagined in his head confined the West for centuries as if the world had always been that way. Escaping that framework and Christian religious thought was an important part of modernity. Korean society, however, did not undergo that process fully on its own. Until very recently it was Joseon, and Western institutions and ideas arrived abruptly without enough time to explore what had been criticized, why it was criticized, and how people escaped it.
This is why Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, older culture, and shamanic belief remain mixed together. In 2024, shamanic belief seems to have captured politics and to be eating away at the country, while even the president and his wife live inside that theater. We did not properly learn why modernity arrived, what allowed people to see old stories as stories, or how they liberated themselves from those frames.
Korean education does not teach critical doubt. It teaches students to memorize predetermined formulas and answers quickly, earn high scores, and become people who perform assigned work quickly. The ethics textbook I studied claimed that Socrates said, “Even a bad law is law, so obey it,” but he never said that. He was instead a person who asked what deserved obedience and whether it was truly right. Sophist also carried the sense of a wise person, yet the textbook taught sophists only as peddlers of fallacy. It turned those who questioned established law and asked whether a made law was right into bad sophists, then taught that law must always be obeyed and never questioned.
This resembles an education that says, “You are a slave, so live as a slave. You are a commoner, so live as a commoner. Do not resist and do not question.” A bad law should be changed, yet this education prevents people from thinking for themselves and dreaming of social transformation. A student busy memorizing correct answers has no time to question the textbook itself. Modern education should enable people to read a book critically rather than merely copy it, to think “Is this really so?” and express their own views. Because such time is absent, many people are deprived of the chance to ask what theater they inhabit.
The Diamond Sutra, Conditioned Things, and Reform
Even a decent and kind person may be bound to a theater and wander in a dream. Yet criticize that belief and the person becomes angry: “Why do you attack my faith?” or “Why bring science into Buddhism?” Buddhism, however, is a religion of liberation, and a Buddha is one who has escaped. A wise person continually questions what binds him. He questions language and concepts, society and systems, and law, then recognizes, “I was trapped in another absurd delusion,” and gets free.
All conditioned things are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows; like dew and also like lightning. One should contemplate them in this way.
This verse from the Diamond Sutra says that every manufactured law is like a dream, illusion, bubble, and shadow, changing like dew and lightning, and should be seen accordingly. The world in which we say, “This must be done” or “This law must be obeyed” is also a conditioned thing made by human beings. It merely feels self-evident because it is familiar.
There is a reason people are denied the chance to question. Once they doubt, they try to change what is wrong. Those who benefit from an existing order want to preserve it because inequality favors them. Between a slave and a priest, who would urgently demand reform? The oppressed slave must change the order. The priest already occupies a good position and does not move. At least someone of Kshatriya rank may try to weaken Brahmin authority and break tradition. Yet that person may still wish to preserve commoners and slaves beneath him. A theater is sustained not only by belief but also by interests.
Is Only North Korea a Theater? What About Capitalism and Democracy?
A person who defects from North Korea has heard of a different society and recognized that the present society is troubled enough to justify an escape. If North Koreans never realize that their story is a manufactured theater and that they have been indoctrinated, they cannot leave. They may instead report anyone with a different thought.
We must then reverse the question. What theater do we in the Republic of Korea inhabit? We are accustomed to the theater called capitalism, and under the name of democracy we believe it to be just and excellent. Promises of law and separation of powers present an ideal picture, and we sometimes criticize reality when it falls short. But do law, judges, prosecutors, and attorneys apply justice equally in actual society? Is law itself not applied unequally?
Capitalism arranges the world in favor of those who possess money. Physical violence is punished by law, but we have no adequate defense against violence inflicted through money and competition. Capital can crush a company soaked in someone’s property, blood, and tears and reduce that person to poverty without sending the perpetrator to prison. One person may work to the bone while another earns far more by exploiting that labor. Once we see how the monetary and capitalist system relentlessly accelerates the rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer divide, we can view modern society critically as well.
Most people, however, do not question the society they inhabit or its laws. They consider what they have now natural and legitimate. But it is not natural. It is a promise and law produced under conditions and written by someone. A person who believes in God, heaven, an afterlife, good and bad karma, and rebirth, and a person steeped in capitalist society, both live inside a theater. Caste remains in India in the twenty-first century, and status inequality endured until late Joseon in Korea despite its adoption of Buddhism. These facts force us to ask whether a Buddhism that breaks theaters was ever properly transmitted. We must likewise ask whether modernity has truly arrived in modern society.
Break the Shell with the Awl of Doubt
A worldview produces behavior. A person who believes a Valkyrie will carry him away if he dies bravely in battle will try to fight and die that way. A person who believes that believers in God go to heaven while unbelievers go to hell will proselytize to others. One who has never criticized heaven and God, rebirth and the soul and karma, cannot imagine that his own faith may be a fabricated story.
Not only in twenty-first-century Korea but almost everywhere in the world, it is difficult to meet a person who lives outside every theater. I too live in a theater. Living in Busan in 2024, I am colored by social atmosphere and culture, the people I meet, television and YouTube, newspapers and the press, and books. Even so, I may fail to know what theater I inhabit. What matters is admitting that this can also be true of me.
When I hear a different voice and one seed of doubt is planted, a small crack can appear in the shell surrounding me. The force that widens the crack and breaks the frame is thought asking, “Is that true? Is it really so?” Without the spirit of doubt, liberation is impossible. I must ask why I think I have to live a certain way, why I judge something good or bad, and why a feeling offends me. Only the awl of doubt, thrust into the hard shell, can crack and finally break it.
Buddhism is a religion of release. A person bound in a cave, covered by countless things, and hardened fast is lost in delusion. I must examine what binds and surrounds me, why I have hardened, what I pursue within delusion, and how I live. To question earnestly whether my way of seeing the world and myself wanders in religious illusion, and to think critically: this is Buddhist wisdom and the Buddhist attitude toward life.
A Buddha is an awakened one, a wise one, one whose eyes are open. Such a person recognizes, “I was colored by it. I was bound. I was enclosed. I had hardened and fallen into delusion.” Therefore, I must study, reflect, and discover the fact that I live in a theater and learn what theater it is.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.