What Have We Been Conditioned By?
We learn particular situations, learn from them, and become conditioned by them. Starting from that brief statement, I ask why companies advertise. They must install standards in our minds—“This is a good car, a good house, something stylish, something beautiful”—in order to sell us things. If I regard something as neither necessary nor good, the advertisement cannot move me. Advertising therefore deliberately indoctrinates and conditions me.
If a person has never learned to rank gold and silver by value, then when asked, “Would you take the gold axe or the silver axe?” that person does not even know which one is supposed to be better. The first response is, “What are those? What makes either one good?” The answer that gold is better is not naturally contained in the object. It comes from a standard engraved in my mind. Nor is advertising the only thing that conditions us. We accumulate countless standards through state education, social agreement, customs and law, and other external situations and experiences.
Buddhist liberation is the act of looking back at precisely those accumulated standards of experience. When I judge and desire by those standards, I suffer if I cannot obtain what I want. A person imprinted with the belief that a gold axe is good feels deprived when left with only a stone axe. Just as a sparrow cannot pass a mill, the mind automatically moves toward an object it has learned to call good. Conversely, obtaining it feels good and releases dopamine. Because I learned that meeting a girlfriend at Christmas, holding hands, and drinking coffee together are good, doing those things actually feels good. I ask us to question where that standard of goodness came from.
The Nine-to-One Judgment Surrounding Yoon Suk Yeol
Let us apply this problem of standards to the conflict surrounding Yoon Suk Yeol at the time. A person who did not support Yoon could see the roughly ten percent who did as foolish. Conversely, a supporter might call the people seeking to remove Yoon and calling him the ringleader of an insurrection pro-North forces and think, “Those people should be captured and beheaded, yet they will not even listen to Yoon.” This is not a statement I endorse. It is an example exposing the inner voice of authoritarianism when a person absolutizes his own standards.
I am not trying here to decide anew whether the ten percent or the ninety percent was right. I ask why people on each side came to think as they did. Each person judges according to what that person saw, heard, and learned. Someone raised in a society governed by the rule that boys and girls over seven should not sit together may have learned that separating them was right. Yet when time and place change, standards of right and wrong, ought and ought not, good and bad also change. To see a mind certain that “we need a military dictatorship to behead those who do not listen to me—why? Because I am justice, and my standard is right,” we must first examine the standard in that mind that has never once been questioned.
Rebirth and the Afterlife Are Learned Standards Too
Buddhist liberation means questioning the standards in my head. Does rebirth exist? Does an afterlife exist? Why did I come to think they do? If we go back a hundred thousand years, to a time without human beings when amoebas crawled or dinosaurs roamed, did rebirth, hell, and an afterlife exist then? I say that human imagination made them. Yet people believe because other people said so and because they themselves heard it, and they rarely question it.
How rigorously has a religious person questioned the afterlife seen in scripture, gods, prayer, faith, blessing, and mystery? One side points at believers in the Norse gods Odin and Thor and calls them superstitious while believing in Jehovah, angels, and Lucifer. People who believe in rebirth, Amitabha Buddha, the Pure Land, and souls see believers in heaven and hell, Jehovah, and angels as foolish, and the other side points back in exactly the same way. Each questions the other’s faith but not its own.
My question is simple. Where did your faith and standards come from? Under what conditions did your ideas of what is good or bad, what ought to be done, and what is right arise? The mere fact that the other side looks foolish does not turn my belief into truth.
Question the Names Capitalism, Communism, and Democracy
We must put the same question to politics and institutions. A person raised in a capitalist society may never think critically about capitalism’s many pathologies and what must be changed. Someone indoctrinated in a Communist Party society to believe communism is right may be unable to question how bad a communist dictatorship is. If so, we must reverse the claim that “they were indoctrinated by communist dictatorship” and ask at the same time whether I have been conditioned by the words democracy and capitalism.
Does attaching the name democratic society make reality democratic? It may in fact be rule by people with money and power. At the time, I argued that an overwhelming majority of the public wanted Yoon removed, yet eighty-some out of roughly one hundred lawmakers voted to reject impeachment. Were they following the views of the citizens who elected them or their own standards? We call this representative democracy, but is it truly democracy, or is it an aristocracy in which people with means are far more likely to become legislators? We must not take a word or concept as reality itself. We must look at what actually operates beneath the name.
The Foundational Standard: “I May Be Wrong”
Foolishness lies in believing, “I am right; this is absolute truth,” without ever raising a doubt. I say we must make our most foundational standard the recognition that my thoughts and standards came from outside, that they are judgments I inferred from experience, and that they may not be truth or reality. Without this, discussion cannot even begin.
When I say, “Rebirth does not exist,” someone with no intention of discussing the belief itself immediately responds, “How can rebirth not exist?” The same happens if we ask Yoon to discuss the phrase pro-North left. As I said in the video, my claim is that almost nobody in South Korea wants a communist dictatorship or follows North Korea, that apart from spies there may not even be 0.1 percent, and that even a North Korean spy might prefer South Korea after living there for ten years. Yet if a person hardens a judgment gained from far-right YouTube or personal experience into truth, even this claim cannot be examined together. A judgment is only an inference, but that person has come to believe, “This is necessarily right; this must be done.”
When Certainty Becomes the Language of Anger and Coups
When people mistake their own conjecture for truth, they fly into a rage. Assuming that perhaps five percent still supported Yoon at the time, I said that if asked, they might angrily answer, “South Korea is full of pro-North Reds, so they should all have been crushed. Yoon should have carried out the coup better.” Again, this is a parody exposing an authoritarian logic among supporters, not my own position. The problem is that they have never looked back at their thinking.
I used Yoon’s insurrection, martial law, coup, and military dictatorship as examples, but the issue does not end there. Even someone who rejects organized religion may believe in ghosts, apparitions, shamans, or something mysterious. Religious people believe in souls, heaven and hell, the Pure Land and the afterlife, rebirth and gods. Where did those ideas come from? If they were learned because other people spoke and society conditioned us with its common sense, they too may not be absolute truth or reality.
A Liberated Person and a Buddha Are Ready for Discussion
Discussion and deliberation require us to set aside complete faith that “I am unconditionally right” about a subject. Yet many people are not ready to discuss. My definition of a liberated person and a buddha in this video is explicit. A liberated person is ready for discussion and deliberation, and a buddha is also ready to ask, “Is your thought really right? Is that truly so?” about his or her own thinking.
When people do not even know whether they know accurately yet are certain that “this is our land,” that certainty can lead to bombing. I use Israel and Hamas as an example, pointing to violence against actual people based on religious concepts about the Jewish god and land. I am not adding another outside story here. The core is that liberation requires me to look back at every concept I grasp, asking what experiences and standards I hold and what I am trapped in and bound by.
Gold Axes and Height, Bakeries and Christmas
Let us return to standards in everyday life. Who created the standard that the gold axe is better than the silver and stone axes? Was gold better from the beginning, or did I learn it because others said so? People call someone under 170 centimeters short and may demean someone of 150 centimeters as a dwarf, while calling someone over 192 centimeters a beanpole. Which height, then, is right? Who made the standard?
Our judgments arise automatically according to our conditioning. A person whose experience taught him to like delicious bread wants to enter when passing a bakery. When Christmas carols play, an image appears in which walking hand in hand with a girlfriend is naturally good, and a person with no girlfriend may judge, “What rotten luck.” But where did the thought that one needs a girlfriend for a good life come from? What are Christmas and year-end, and why are a girlfriend and delicious bread good? I must dig into the standards in my head and ask what I saw and learned that made me judge this way.
Did Education Teach Us to Question Ourselves?
People have little room to dig into their standards because nobody in South Korean society properly taught them to do it. Suppose Yoon studied in high school, went to Seoul National University, passed the bar examination, became a prosecutor, benefited from luck, positioned himself well, made some sound judgments, and became prosecutor general and president. Did he learn anywhere along that path to question his own thinking and critically look back at himself? Did school, his parents, or society teach him?
Buddhism is a religion of escape. To escape, we must first know what binds us. Most people are conditioned and bound somewhere without knowing it. Just as I can recognize that liking delicious bread is a standard born from experience, I must see that thinking a gold axe good and a stone axe bad, judging a certain height, face, or amount of muscle attractive, and calling something right or wrong may all be products of conditioning and my own conjecture.
Once I begin to see that these are not truth or knowledge and were not simply that way from the beginning, a path opens toward looking coolly at language and concepts, the question “What am I?”, and even life and death as they are. For a person who lives conditioned without knowing it to look again at the world and within, a question must come first.
Humility Begins With Questions
Why did Yoon make such a judgment? Why did roughly ten percent of the public support him? What were they thinking, and why did they come to think that way? And am I not like them? Genuine humility emerges only when I do not stop at identifying someone else’s error but turn the question back upon myself.
Real humility arises when I cannot say, “This is absolutely right.” When someone declares, “This must be done,” we can ask together, “What is that?” and only then discuss and live together.
Do Not Believe That Your Thought Is Right
Without this foundational standard, people become dictators, rage, wage wars, and conduct witch hunts. They burn people and kill them with guns and blades while saying, “This land is mine; God gave it to the Jews in scripture,” or, “Rebirth is written in Buddhist scripture, so it is a fact.” They live immersed in concepts and scriptures, believing them to be factual.
Do not believe that your thought is right. Do not think that you are right.
This is the path of liberation I have described today. Observe where your judgments came from, raise questions, and become ready for discussion. I hope you apply this teaching directly to your own life, and I wish you awakening.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.