A Buddhist Exercise That Began as a Multiple-Choice Question
As soon as the broadcast began, I said that there had been a minor technical problem, then introduced the question for the March 14, 2025 program. Yeonbyeonjungsubu had submitted it on the YouTube channel in advance. Which view of meat-eating is desirable, the viewer asked, while adding that of course there might be no correct answer. I said I would treat it not merely as a decision about whether to eat meat, but as a representative exercise in whether you can reason, observe, criticize, and judge through dependent origination in a Buddhist way.
It looks simple on the surface. It seems that all one has to do is choose between eating and not eating. I warned at the outset, however, that it was not so simple. I would pose a series of questions, and together we would see whether you could examine a real problem to the end without disposing of it with a sentence in a book or an answer supplied by someone else.
Before the official program began, I looked for an earlier video titled May We Kill Mosquitoes? I had remembered the title incorrectly, so it did not appear in the search results. I typed “May we catch mosquitoes?” and waited, wondering when it would show up, but still could not find it. Only after changing the channel name and search terms did I discover it as the second result. The little commotion exposed my own mistake in remembering the title.
Beneath that video, I had written a deliberately provocative line roughly meaning, “Kill every one you see. Then what about the precept against killing?” If Buddhism teaches non-killing, may one kill a mosquito? This seemingly trivial decision shows whether we can think through dependent origination and exercise criticism, and whether we can think for ourselves beyond what books and authorities say. The question about meat belongs to the same class.
I then read the four choices supplied by the questioner: one must eat meat; one may eat meat; one may refrain from eating meat; and one must not eat meat. I said that none of the four even seemed close to a complete answer. Problems in life and society do not end when we select one item on a four- or six-option test. A Buddhist life also lives an “answer without an answer.” That may be difficult, but it is precisely why this question becomes a valuable exercise applicable to one’s whole life.
Temple Food, Non-Killing, and the Mendicant Bhikkhu
When the official broadcast began at 8:05, Heowonkkot said that they had lived as a vegetarian for a long time and, for the moment, chose option two: it is acceptable to eat meat. I did not immediately confirm that vote as the answer. Instead, I asked why meat and Buddhism are so often discussed together. When people visit a temple, they rarely see meat side dishes. They see bibimbap and temple meals centered on vegetables. They then infer that monastics do not eat meat. My own mother had thought so as well.
At this point I spoke very categorically. Korean monastics eat meat, I said, and they have no blanket internal rule prohibiting it. In my account, the appearance of a temple that does not serve meat and the actual diet of a monastic should not be treated as identical. Why, then, is that appearance maintained? Because people connect meat-eating with the first of the five precepts, the prohibition on taking life. Since obtaining meat involves the death of an animal, the question becomes one of killing.
I next turned to an account from the time of Gautama Siddhartha. I first qualified it: whether this is what historically happened is a separate question, and for now we can consider the representative story as it is commonly presented. A bhikkhu is a person who begs for food. I put it bluntly and repeated myself: “He is a beggar. A beggar. A Buddhist monastic is a beggar.” A wandering mendicant does not work and order the meal he wants. He receives leftover food or whatever is offered and does not discriminate among it.
Can such a person refuse by saying, “This contains meat, so I cannot eat it”? The answer I gave was that bhikkhus ate meat and that the Buddha ate meat. I therefore said that the command “Do not eat meat” is not, by itself, Buddhism. That is my historical and doctrinal judgment in the video. At the same time, I explained that abstention from meat became linked to non-killing and that, as Buddhism passed through China, Chinese cultural judgments that discouraged meat also influenced East Asian Buddhism.
I did not raise history to create a new command that says, “The Buddha ate meat, so we should too.” Establishing what the Buddha ate does not automatically decide my present choice. From here I moved to the deeper question: what exactly is the thing we call meat?
Where Is the Boundary of the Word Meat?
Meat-eating is ordinarily understood as eating the flesh of an animal. Then what is meat? Can someone who resolves not to eat it divide clearly between what is and is not meat? I have said many times that language is constructed from convenient and approximate distinctions.
To tell someone to “bring firewood,” we need a shared concept that roughly distinguishes trees from grass. We must agree that this and that are trees while something else is grass before communication can work. The more finely we distinguish, saying, “That is grass,” “Bring the trunk,” or “Pick up branches,” the more precise our instructions become. Yet drawing a convenient division does not mean that an independent substance called a tree exists somewhere in the world. If we pursue the perfect line separating tree from grass, the boundary begins to waver.
The same applies to meat. The existence of a word in language does not establish a fixed intrinsic nature corresponding to it. I connected this with the Heart Sutra’s “no arising and no ceasing, no impurity and no purity, no increase and no decrease.” What exactly does it mean to be born? When form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness are distinguished, can consciousness alone be extracted from all conditions and displayed as “this is consciousness”? A verbal distinction does not prove that a corresponding independent entity exists.
Pork and beef are easily called meat. When asked whether fish is meat, most people would say yes. What, then, about the plankton eaten by fish? Where is the perfect separation between animal plankton and plant plankton? Microorganisms are present in food and in our mouths, and we take them in throughout the processes of breathing and eating. If microorganisms are also life, is absolute abstention from meat even possible?
These questions do not begin with a predetermined conclusion that vegetarianism is therefore useless. The point is to see that animal and plant, life and nonlife, meat and non-meat are useful distinctions in daily life but not absolute boundaries. Once we mistake the boundaries of names for the boundaries of reality, our subsequent judgments harden as well.
Concentration Cannot Supply the Ethical Answer for Us
Some people read the precept against taking life in a book, memorize the statement “One must not kill,” and then answer categorically that a mosquito must never be caught. I said that some even claim killing a mosquito prevents entry into concentration. I attacked that attitude harshly: such people do not know what concentration is or what Buddhism is, yet imagine they practice Buddhism while trapped in binary thought.
You have not even grasped the foundations of Buddhism, so what Buddhist practice are you talking about? If you refuse to use your head and merely do something because a book says so, does that make it practice? However hard you travel in the wrong direction, it remains the wrong road.
For me, trying to practice Buddhism without reasoning is not Buddhism. If one practices concentration for a long time and reaches profound states, do answers to real problems like this emerge automatically? When Dawuseu previously asked, “Does concentration produce insight that sees reality as it is?” I answered no. Concentration may reduce one’s immediate emotional reactivity and make it possible to look with a cooler mind. But calmness itself is not such insight, and deep concentration cannot decide the tangled conditions of meat-eating and killing on our behalf.
That is why I said, “Buddhist meditation cannot save the world.” It was not a sentence discarding all meditation as worthless. It criticized meditation severed from critical thought as incapable of resolving real problems or delivering awakening. Concentration may matter, but it cannot replace thinking and questioning.
The Buddha, Scripture, and an Arhat Are Not Answer Keys
The issue of authority followed. If I give an answer during this broadcast, may you use my words as your standard? If you find a sentence saying that the Buddha permitted meat, should you follow it? Is Buddhism a matter of obeying statements that the Buddha said not to kill, not to lie, and to eat what one is given? Because people think this way, they become preoccupied with which document contains the Buddha’s authentic words. They reason that if a collection is genuinely his own teaching, they can believe and follow it.
I argued, however, that the Buddha never demanded belief and obedience to his words. What should you do if I announce, “I am the Buddha of twenty-first-century Korea, so believe and obey me”? Without hesitation, you should turn off the broadcast, leave, and cancel every subscription. The moment you take my words just as they are and follow them, it becomes superstition rather than Buddhism.
If you seek awakening, you must think through my words for yourself. They are one piece of information exchanged through relationships and conditions, no more than a question and an opportunity capable of shaking an illusion in your mind. If I operate like an “Arhat AI bot,” outputting answers for you to copy, the relationship is not Buddhist. What matters is not who spoke but whether what was said is actually so.
To illustrate this principle, I opened the Kalama Sutta. I did not tell anyone to memorize the entire text indiscriminately. On the contrary, I said strongly that later material contradicting its central teaching was anti-Buddhist and should be discarded. Even a scripture should not be made into a single infallible authority; contradictions within it must be examined.
The Kalama Sutta and the Limits of Induction
The first grounds I identified in the Kalama Sutta were repeated hearing, inherited tradition, rumor, and inclusion in scripture or a collected text. Does hearing from childhood that Buddhism prohibits killing make the statement a fact? Does something become true because one’s father and grandfather said it? Is it right because everyone gossips about it or calls it good today? Must it be believed because it appears in a written book or an orally recited collection? My answer in every case was no.
Traditional sayings must face the same test. Suppose we have long heard, “Do not tie your shoes under a pear tree,” or “Do not lend money to friends and relatives.” We cannot obey automatically without examining what result the maxim has under particular conditions. “Do not merely believe and follow” does not mean “do nothing.” It means ask whether the claim is really so and reason about it critically.
Next came inference and induction. If every swan I have observed is white, it is easy to conclude that all swans are white. Yet the moment a single black swan is found, that universal proposition collapses. However plausible a conclusion based on repeated observation and experience may be, I cannot see every place and time in the universe. The fact that the sun rose until yesterday is not an absolute guarantee that it must rise tomorrow.
Induction is not useless. We have no choice but to live by drawing approximate conclusions from limited observation. The problem begins when we believe an inference to be reality itself, an eternal and unchanging truth. Experience and custom surrounding meat-eating are provisional judgments in the same sense.
What Axioms, Meditative Experiences, and Authority Cannot Guarantee
Deductive thought also fails when its opening axiom is wrong. Imagine that people establish the principles that heaven is perfect and eternal, and that perfect things move in circles. The apparent constancy of the stars and the seeming rotation of the sky may appear to support the principle. But we must ask whether the stars moved or Earth rotated, and if Earth travels around the sun in an ellipse rather than a perfect circle, the opening axiom was wrong.
The deduction “All humans die; Socrates is human; therefore Socrates dies” looks formally solid. But how is the first premise, “All humans die,” guaranteed as absolute truth? When an axiom is false, a conclusion calculated impeccably from it is false as well. I said that philosophy, religion, and science, including Aristotle and Plato, have often insisted that conclusions made from axioms were true only for them later to prove wrong.
An image arising during meditation offers no guarantee either. Suppose I see a light in meditation and feel it is Avalokitesvara, think I saw a former life in a dream, or nearly die and feel I saw an afterlife. The fact that I experienced the image differs from the claim that the image is an external fact. Vividness inside my mind is not a sufficient reason to believe and follow it.
Carefully reasoned views and modern common sense are no different. Something does not become eternal truth merely because many people have considered it for a long time and call it scientifically correct. Nor does the status of an impressive authority—a professor, a chief patriarch of the Jogye Order, a great master, a Seon teacher, or a patriarch—automatically guarantee the truth of a statement. Questions remain even if the speaker is Seongcheol, Bodhidharma, Gautama Siddhartha, one of the teachers Gautama met before awakening, or me.
When Yeonbyeonjungsubu commented that the spirit of “kill the Buddha and kill the patriarch” is Buddhist, I agreed. In this context, the expression does not tell anyone to harm a person. It tells us to sever the condition in which attachment to a name and authority prevents thought. That is why neither the absence of meat in temple bibimbap nor a famous monastic’s one-line statement can settle the meat question.
Precepts Are Conditional Agreements That Make Life Possible
Returning to meat, I asked what proportion of humanity would die if eating fish were prohibited. Even if we say we will eat plants, plants are also life, and animal and plant are convenient names. Calling whatever moves an animal and whatever does not move a plant does not create an absolute and immovable line between them.
This does not mean throwing away the five precepts. A community cannot form if people stab one another and lie whenever they open their mouths. A group therefore makes agreements not to harm life carelessly, not to lie, and to cultivate compassion. When people drink so excessively that they lose the capacity to think, retain only emotion, and can neither learn nor practice, the group may also agree to limit alcohol.
What matters is reasoning deeply about the practical purpose and range of a precept within one’s life. If we make the sentence “Do not kill” into an absolute law while never asking whether complete non-killing is possible in reality, we miss its meaning. Even in relation to mosquitoes, an attitude that kills every visible creature without restraint differs from one that considers actual harm and conditions while trying, as far as possible, not to injure life.
I said that much of the diet of pastoral peoples came from the livestock they raised, and I invoked humanity’s life with pigs, cattle, horses, sheep, and chickens. I argued that people unable to farm during ice ages could not have survived without eating fish, shellfish, deer, reindeer, mammoths, and other animals. “Had humans not eaten meat, they would already have gone extinct. Without it, they would all have died,” I said. This was the historical judgment I offered in the video, and even that judgment enters the discussion as material for thought rather than authority.
I also questioned the moral ledger in which bad karma accumulates while good karma and merit accumulate on the other side. If one gives leftover food to the sangha—the bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, and fourfold Buddhist community—so that they can live, and someone says merit thereby accumulates, what literally accumulates? “What do you mean, it accumulates?” I asked. Buddhism, in my account, does not possess an independent substance serving as the absolute standard of right and wrong. Do not fall into the arrogance of thinking you know such a standard or possess perfect purity.
Does the Absence of an Absolute Rule Mean We May Kill at Will?
An obvious objection now arises. If good, evil, and precepts are not fixed, does that mean we may kill and harm any life we want? I explicitly rejected that conclusion. Within dependent origination and relationships, I can value another life as I value my own. If I do not want a knife in my back, I must enter an agreement that I will not casually put a knife in yours. That is how a society becomes possible.
We naturally protect family members and colleagues whom we see often and to whom we are attached. Animals also value the group with which they live and care for their young. Yet when society grows beyond twenty or thirty relatives and friends, agreements must expand so that we also refrain from abusing strangers, people across town, and people in another country. Law and norms arise because many people need to live together.
Such law is a necessary agreement under conditions, not absolute truth. We must keep adjusting how far it applies. The moment a contextual agreement hardens into an eternal substance, we reach absurd conclusions: “They say we cannot even kill a mosquito. They say we cannot eat meat. They say we must never kill anything.” Conversely, using the absence of intrinsic nature as an excuse to inflict harm at will is another illusion that ignores dependence and consequences.
An Answer Without an Answer and the Changing Conditions of Mosquitoes
Buddhism’s “answer without an answer” initially sounds difficult. It would be convenient if someone simply decided whether meat was right or wrong, mandatory or forbidden, and we only had to follow the conclusion. But Buddhism is not such a religion, I said. The core is not actually so complicated. We see that the presence of a word in language and concepts does not make its object an independent substance, and then we reason for ourselves.
I connected this with the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. People live without ever questioning the right and wrong, attraction and aversion, concepts and preferences deposited in their minds by what they have heard. Once we crack the shell of that illusion, the world looks different. We awaken from the dream that I will surely be alive tomorrow and the day after, and that the same self will continue after death, and begin to ask, “Is that really so? What am I?”
Questions follow one another. What is meat? What is life? What is an animal? Why should one abstain? If no fixed law exists, may I live however I please? Are law and society unnecessary? If meat is permitted, does that mean harming life is no problem? When should a rule be kept, and under what conditions should a different judgment be made?
Even if I wanted to give you the correct answer, I could not. I do not know either.
My earlier line “Kill the mosquitoes” was not an eternal command to kill indiscriminately. I said that mosquitoes currently cause hundreds of thousands of human deaths each year, and explained that this grave harm was the condition under which I told people to catch them. But if one day the harm caused by mosquitoes approached zero, why kill them? Under those conditions, a mosquito too could be treated as a living being. The example shows that judgment about the same act changes with situations and relationships.
If someone removes those conditions and clings to one sentence, they will denounce me: “You must not kill mosquitoes, yet this man is ruining Buddhism.” I mimicked that complaint and exclaimed that it drove me crazy. Once again I asked whether Buddhism was possible without ever thinking or exercising criticism.
Reopening the Thousand Hands Sutra, Its Dharani, and Repentance for the Ten Evils
Looking for a final example, I opened the Thousand Hands Sutra. I said that I did not particularly like it, then repeated that in fact I disliked it a great deal. Yet disliking the overall text is separate from treating every line in it as having the same value. Just as I said we should retain the central Kalama teaching and discard what contradicts it, the task here was to ask what, within the Thousand Hands Sutra, should be preserved and what should be criticized.
I said the text contains claims that following Avalokitesvara and chanting formulas fulfills every wish, removes karmic offenses, brings protection from various beings, and produces hundreds and thousands of samadhis in an instant. People then recite the Sinmyojanggu Daedharani like a spell without understanding the words. I asserted that this dharani praises and relies on Indian gods such as Vishnu and Shiva and invokes their attributes. Does Buddhism worship such gods? Why chant unknown words all night, merely repeating them over and over?
This is simply praising superstition. Why do you chant it?
I then turned to the repentance verse and repentance for the ten evils. They speak of all harmful karma made over past ages as arising from greed, anger, and ignorance and of repenting for what body, speech, and thought have done. The list includes killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, decorative speech, divisive speech, harsh speech, greed, anger, and ignorance. But if one merely memorizes that greed, anger, and ignorance are “bad things” and promises not to commit them again, one has not understood what greed, anger, and ignorance are.
I also questioned the repentance of acts done unknowingly. Are only acts I knowingly committed bad, or are unknown acts sins too? How can I repent for an act I do not even recognize? Reading a list differs from understanding how its concepts operate. When we never ask what the words mean, I said, Buddhism falls without end into a level devoid of an answer.
True Repentance and the Lack of Intrinsic Nature in Sin and Mind
I read the repentance lines in the Thousand Hands Sutra: “Sins accumulated over a hundred eons are swept away in a single thought, like dry grass consumed by fire until nothing remains.” I then read the verse saying that sin has no intrinsic nature but arises following mind; when mind ceases, sin too disappears; sin and mind are both empty; this is called true repentance. I interpreted it as a statement that sin has no separate intrinsic nature and that both sin and mind are empty.
I criticized a translation that says sin disappears, mind then vanishes, and the two thereby become empty. The meaning, I argued, is not that sin first existed as a substance and then vanished, while mind likewise existed and then disappeared. Neither sin nor mind ever had independent intrinsic nature. To see the absence of substance in both is true repentance.
If sin has literally accumulated like matter for a hundred eons and one thought makes that matter vanish, a strange conclusion follows. May I diligently build evil karma until the moment of death and then change my mind once just before dying, erasing the sin? If it had substance, should it not take a hundred eons to cleanse what took a hundred eons to accumulate? The contradiction itself becomes a clue that the verse points to the absence of intrinsic nature in both sin and mind.
The meat question now returns. What is mind? What is sin? What are good and evil, karma and merit, meat and animal and self? Do heaven and hell exist alone, unrelated to anything else? The “self” in intrinsic nature means existence by itself; the question is whether something truly exists independently and immutably, apart from all other conditions. What we conventionally call mind, consciousness, sin, karma, and self consists of approximate language and concepts, not fixed substances.
Does that mean neither sin nor self exists and we may therefore stab anyone? No. We conventionally keep etiquette, respect elders, and make social agreements. Saying that those agreements must not harden into substances applied absolutely in every situation is entirely different from saying we may ignore them and create harm. Emptiness is not a license for nihilism.
Wisdom Is the Power to Keep Questioning Within One’s Own Life
Finally, I explained why a supplied decision tree fails. Even if I construct an answer key saying, “Do this under these conditions and do that under those,” a slightly different situation leaves you unable to decide once again. Will you spend your life going to someone else for an answer every time, or will you become able to reason for yourself?
Wisdom does not necessarily require encyclopedic knowledge. Wisdom is persistent reasoning, doubt, and questioning. Take one real problem—whether to eat meat—and think deeply about the relationship I actually have with meat, the conditions surrounding it, and its consequences. Only then can I judge situation by situation, live by an answer I reach rather than one handed to me, and live my own life.
Near the end, I summarized how the broadcast had moved from meat to the Thousand Hands Sutra, critical thought, concepts and dharmas, intrinsic nature, and substance. Cheongpo thanked me for another good talk. I laughed that I had failed to exchange many questions and instead rambled alone for an hour. If you had been in front of me, I said, I would have interrupted and pressed you to answer, though you would probably dislike that too.
I thanked Kimchimu, Heowonkkot, Yeonbyeonjungsubu, and the other viewers who had joined. I hoped that questions they perhaps thought they already understood would operate as Buddhist wisdom in the reality of each day. A life that does not memorize someone else’s verdict on meat, but sees relations and conditions and keeps questioning and correcting itself—that, I said, is attaining Buddhahood and Buddhism. With that, I ended the broadcast.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.