On This Shore and the Far Shore, Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception, and the Middle Way

The Question Left After Four Critiques

I begin the Arahant’s live broadcast by greeting Dao Sunim and the viewers already present. Recently I watched the monk Beopsang’s YouTube videos and criticized them over four broadcasts. I examined why particular statements made no sense, but the larger problem was that the direction being pursued was un-Buddhist from the outset. My criticism is that the understanding of the state he claims to have attained, or mistakenly believes he has attained, rests on a delusion.

Some may not understand what I mean by un-Buddhist. How can the awakening long explained by people practicing Buddhism be un-Buddhist? Today I want to explain the grounds of that criticism: why I question the goals described in Seon, in early Buddhism called Theravada, in Yogacara consciousness-only, and by people such as Kim Tae-wan and Beopsang. If I reject their claims, what Buddhism am I describing?

If you reject their claims, what do you want to say?

People say they have seen their nature, seen the true self, gained an insight, confirmed something, or had an experience. Even non-self is drawn into this vocabulary. Those who have had such experiences or received some help from these broadcasts may dislike what I say. Yet some feel they have accomplished something only to turn around and find little has changed, with questions still unresolved. Today I also want to examine why an apparent experience may leave one feeling that nothing has been resolved.

Three Subjects That Need Plain Explanation

Today’s subjects are leaving both this shore and the far shore, neither perception nor non-perception, and why I avoid the term Middle Way. Translations telling us to leave both shores or discard both this world and the other world make it hard to know what is meant. Rather than merely explain neither perception nor non-perception as a term in the nine successive meditative attainments, I want to consider it in a context connected with leaving both shores.

While greeting arrivals, I mention a comment left on the previous broadcast that I did not understand well. Perhaps my linguistic ability is weak or my capacity insufficient. I should acknowledge what I do not understand. Whether criticizing me or explaining your own understanding, please use plainer language. I know writing plainly is difficult. But piling conceptual expressions on top of one another makes it hard for us to know what each person means.

To keep the broadcast from running too long, I outline its scope in writing as I explain. I have not prepared a finished script, but making the scope visible helps me manage the time. I will first identify why I dislike the term Middle Way, explain ora-param, and then return to the issue.

What Does the Pointing Finger Called the Middle Way Indicate?

Across some four hundred Buddhist broadcasts, I have not given one explaining the Middle Way. Many people discussing Buddhism in Korea say, “Buddhism is the Middle Way.” The monk Seongcheol is a leading example. The Korean term uses the characters for middle and way. But compressing something into this one term invites misunderstanding. The expression philosophy of emptiness poses a similar problem. A short, familiar expression does not necessarily have a clear meaning.

The term Middle Way is far too easy to misunderstand.

I also think the term itself fails to represent the direction Buddhism points toward. We may point with a finger when we cannot explain something directly in words. But if the finger itself is easily misunderstood, how will listeners know where to look? That is why I avoid the expression. Only when someone asks what the Middle Way means does a long explanation begin. It is better to explain concretely from the beginning what delusion needs abandoning and what needs observing.

Ora-Param and Paramita: The Lower and What Lies Beyond

Ora-param is translated as this shore and the far shore, these two banks, or this world and the other world. It combines ora and param. You may have heard the sentence telling us to leave both behind as a snake sheds its skin. But memorizing a translation about two shores makes it difficult to understand what ora and param respectively indicate.

To explain param, consider the Heart Sutra’s title, Mahaprajnaparamita Hridaya, and the six paramitas. You may have heard of the paramitas of giving, patience, diligence, and wisdom. These are six methods presented in Mahayana Buddhism as tools for becoming a Buddha. If a Buddha is understood as a being who has transcended something, these become answers to “How shall we become Buddhas?” Crossing over through wisdom or transcending through wisdom belongs to this explanation.

By ora I mean what is lower or worldly. Param is what lies beyond, crossing over, or the transcended. When what has crossed over is elevated, the meaning can expand to what is supreme. Desires for perfection or the highest state thus attach themselves to param. The important point is that I do not understand Buddhism’s direction as arriving at either side. What I call its motto is leaving both behind.

Leave both ora and param behind.

Yet, as this compressed expression was transmitted, people lost sight of what ora and param mean. Without understanding it, they spent long periods pursuing what contradicts the motto. To see why leaving both shores is central to Buddhism, we must unpack how those two pursuits appear in actual life.

My Criterion Is Whether We See Through Dependent Arising

Whether in Seon, Theravada, or among yogis, the common problem I criticize is treating the Buddha as a transcendent being. People seek a true self, claim to be originally awakened, speak of rebirth and heavenly realms, and uphold a state beyond life and death. I see these elements mixed together in influential explanations of Buddhism in Korea.

I explain Yogacara consciousness-only in terms of yoga and the claim that only consciousness exists: the world is illusion, but consciousness—understood as I—exists. I criticize that explanation as another name for the yogi’s position wearing a Buddhist disguise, even though labeled Buddhism. I regard Theravada as not greatly different insofar as it establishes a transcendent Buddha. Today’s criticism addresses such pursuits of a godlike Buddha.

See the world through dependent arising.

What, then, am I trying to say through this criticism? My answer is to see oneself and the world through dependent arising. I consider it contrary to dependent arising to become caught in liberation from birth and death or complete nondiscrimination and demand an unmoved response whether one dies or not. My criticism of Beopsang, Kim Tae-wan, and various Seon explanations is that questioning has stopped and they have stumbled over such goals.

I Do Not Treat the Sutta Nipata as One Infallible Book

I introduce the Sutta Nipata as a good place to encounter ora-param. The volume in my hand is translated by the monk Beopjeong. It contains five chapters, the first called the Chapter of the Snake; its opening discourse is the Discourse on the Snake. The Rhinoceros Discourse is also in that chapter, including familiar words about going alone like the rhinoceros’s horn, like a lion unstartled by sound and wind uncaught in a net.

Sutta can be explained as discourse and nipata as collection. We should not see it as a coherent book written from beginning to end by one person on a single subject. It collects individual discourses passed down through memorized verse. That does not mean it is free from fabrication. I regard the Sutta Nipata too as containing later intervention and fabrication.

The distinction I make is between verse and prose. Since what is memorized and transmitted is verse, I focus on chapters one, four, and five, while treating the prose of chapters two and three as composed later, when people could write extended narratives. Verse is no guarantee against fabrication. Nevertheless, to look for traces of older discourses in this book, I recommend concentrating on chapters one, four, and five. I view chapter four’s eight-verse discourses and chapter five’s discourses concerning the far shore in that context.

The Meaning Lost Behind the Two Translated Shores

I briefly check the publication year in Beopjeong’s volume, though I think the translation itself was done earlier. My concern is that it translates a Japanese version into Korean: Pali becomes Japanese and then Korean. I criticize the Japanese translation itself as a mess and argue that retranslating it carried many errors over. There are now at least six or seven Korean versions by different translators.

Showing the book to the camera, I read its opening passage. It describes a practitioner who calms rising anger as medicine controls snake venom spreading through the body, leaving this world and the other world as a snake sheds old skin. What appears here as this world and the other world, corresponding to the Chinese-character terms for this shore and the far shore, is ora-param. I am not saying Japanese translators invented those characters from nothing. They drew on expressions already present in Chinese-character scriptures and the Tripitaka Koreana.

Leave both this shore and the far shore, as a snake sheds its skin.

Yet “leave both shores” prompts the response, “What does that mean?” The same is true of this world and the other world. The meaning has been symbolically compressed into words that later generations fail to understand. I call this Buddhism’s motto. Failing to understand it can lead someone studying Buddhism to establish the opposite goal. I will therefore borrow the familiar life story of the Buddha to explain the two pursuits.

A Hypothetical Scenario for Explanation, Not a Historical Certainty

What follows is a hypothetical scenario. I take the position that we cannot know whether a person called Shakyamuni actually existed or how much of the familiar biography is factual. Today I borrow that story to explain this shore and the far shore. Its individual scenes should not therefore be taken as history I have verified.

We hear of a prince living in a palace and then leaving home. There are embellishments such as childhood stories about birds, but let us begin simply with someone living in the worldly sphere. There are beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, high and low rank, desires, greed, and conflict. People are born, age, become ill, and die. Having many desirable things does not make them eternal.

Seeing this, the questions begin: what am I, where do I come from and go, what happens after death, can I avoid dying? Is there something not impermanent, something eternal and unchanging? We can frame the story as leaving home to seek the eternal after finding no satisfaction in worldly things.

What am I, and where do I come from and go?

Leaving Worldly Life Does Not End the Pursuing Mind

A renunciant ascetic lives on what others give. I connect bhikkhu with the English word beggar and describe them as sharing an origin. The bhikkhu behind the terms monk and nun can be explained as someone who begs for food. Suppose one has moved into that mendicant life. The important question is less the fact of leaving home than the purpose for which one left.

Call the life of chasing beauty and wealth, stabbing and killing, eating and being eaten, and fighting within desire ora: the lower sphere caught in worldly wants. What, then, does the renunciant seek? Param: what lies beyond, perfection, the unchanging, a truth not subject to impermanence, complete purity and awakening. The labels can change endlessly, but the desire is to leave human limitations and become something complete.

Letting go of worldly things does not mean pursuing itself has ended. The destination has merely changed. Missing this leads to the mistake that every renunciant practice follows Buddhism’s direction. This is precisely the distinction I am making: leaving ora to pursue param differs from leaving both ora and param behind.

Asceticism and the Desire for Complete Purity

Consider the story of six years of ascetic practice and the emaciated ascetic statue. Was that a method the Buddha invented alone? We should see it as something other practitioners also did. Why undertake it? To become complete, perfect, wholly pure, and immortal in soul: asceticism aimed at obtaining what is not impermanent.

To explain this, I introduce Jain practice. In the Jain world as I describe it, there are jiva and ajiva. Jiva is something like a soul; ajiva comprises what is not that, including matter, time, and space. I also explain that the term rendered as a life-being in the Diamond Sutra’s notions of self, person, sentient being, and life-being is jiva. It posits a being that does not disappear at death but receives another body and continues living.

In that explanation, karma produced by action adheres to jiva. I explain kr in karma as a root meaning to act. Karma is described as something between jiva and ajiva rather than either one, with bad karma dragging one downward like a weight and good karma raising one upward. This accounts for being born in worse places or better ones such as heaven. But both still involve a life that keeps changing.

What, then, would be the route to a flawless being moved by nothing? The goal becomes producing no karma whatsoever, neither good nor bad. If even eating counts as karma, one seeks to end bodily activity too. I explain the Jain practice of fasting to death as this pursuit of complete purity.

What Changes in the Story of Accepting Milk Porridge?

Gotama Siddhartha’s fasting can also be considered in connection with this pursuit rather than as starvation without a reason. Of course, this too is my inference: a hypothetical explanation that he believed even bodily desires and actions had to be rejected to become a perfect, immortal being. The goal of abandoning an impermanent world to obtain an enduring world or flawless existence resembles explanations involving the dharmakaya Buddha.

In the familiar biography, he abandons asceticism one day—in effect, he gives up starving. His fellow practitioners are said to leave and are called the five monks. A passing woman offers milk porridge to the starving, collapsed ascetic, and he accepts it. We do not know whether he had been washing, whether rice gruel was added to the milk, or whether the story is factual. My concern is how to read the direction of pursuit within it.

Do not seek to transcend. Do not seek to become perfect.

The Buddhist turn I describe is leaving ora and param alike. It is not merely abandoning worldly desire to obtain immortality. It also reconsiders the pursuit of perfection, transcendence, complete truth, and purity. A life desperately attached to changing and disappearing things such as wealth and beauty, and a life imagining something unchanging on the opposite side, can both rest on delusion.

Making the Buddha a God Makes Being Human Unacceptable

Yet the Buddha is increasingly elevated into a complete and perfect being in later accounts. This is not only a Mahayana problem. I point to stories in the Pali Nikayas too: heavenly beings bowing, Mara being subdued, Indra appearing, and the earth splitting beneath someone who wronged the Buddha. Added to these are touching the sun, wielding six supernormal powers, seeing past lives, and producing two cartloads of relics after death.

The same applies to stories of walking seven steps immediately after birth or descending from Tusita heaven into his mother’s womb. I criticize these as deification resembling science fiction or fairy tales. The Buddha lived and died as a human, but is made into a flawless mythical being. He then becomes someone who must not resemble a human or show human responses.

The Buddha lived as a human and died as a human.

This deification changes the subsequent goal of practice. People think they too must become such beings. If Buddhism was asking us to see the delusions in the two pursuits, this reestablishes param as the highest goal. The image of a Buddha who attained perfection generates another desire for perfection.

How Do You Know That Awakening Is the Highest?

I like the Heart Sutra and regard much of its overall context as valuable. That does not mean I accept every expression in it. Unsurpassed perfect awakening is an example. If it means the highest awakening with nothing above it, a perfect and certain awakening, I criticize it as nonsense. It too describes acquiring the supreme—param.

How can you know that your awakening is the highest awakening?

Suppose you attain an awakening. How do you know it is the highest? Even saying you are tall requires comparison with others. Claiming to be the tallest in the world would require comparison with everyone currently living on Earth. I use roughly eight billion people as the example. If you have never measured yourself against most people, how can you know you are tallest?

Awakening is harder still to compare. Even so, suppose you compared yourself with everyone and verified through some objective measure that your awakening was higher. Would you not need at least such a process before there could be grounds for calling it the highest? Did that actually happen? It did not. Yet personal certainty alone becomes a declaration of supremacy.

In the Buddhism I describe, a Buddha is not someone who acquired the highest thing. It is someone who looked back and recognized the folly of trying to obtain the highest, the folly of seeking an immortal soul. Much of Buddhist scripture instead claims that the Buddha attained the highest awakening. I see misunderstandings about the Buddha beginning here.

Rereading Impermanence and the Delusion in Greed, Hatred, and Delusion

Observing the world, I find it impermanent; I too am impermanent. Why? Because everything arises and disappears in relation and exists through dependent arising. From this comes the understanding that nothing independent and unchanging or eternally immutable can exist. What, then, was my transcendent pursuit of becoming complete, perfect, and wholly pure?

I connect the folly of this pursuit with delusion in greed, hatred, and delusion. People memorize these three poisons, but I regard that too as compressed language. I explain that chapter four of the Sutta Nipata contains sixteen discourses and call the second through fifth the eight-verse discourses. Recalling the Cave, Corrupt, Purity, and Param discourses, I explain their content as later compressed into greed, hatred, delusion, and conceit.

Do not seek something completely pure. That is foolish.

Seeing something pure does not make me pure; the search for something perfect, certain, and unchanging needs questioning. Both attachment to worldly things and the opposite search for perfection beyond them can rest on concepts and delusions. Reducing this to “Do not be foolish” loses what is being called foolish. The delusion I am addressing is precisely the folly of pursuing param.

Rejecting Supernormal Powers but Establishing an Unmoving Mind Can Repeat the Trap

One direction of deifying the Buddha involves the six supernormal powers: flying, touching the sun, seeing the other side of the Earth or a thousand leagues away, reading minds, and seeing past lives. When that feels too superstitious, people move in another direction: a perfectly unmoving mind that distinguishes nothing and is shaken by nothing. But this poses the same problem of demanding perfection from a human.

Can my body, mind, thoughts, and mental life remain constant? Do they not exchange influences with the world? If they interact even with a breath of air, a microorganism, a passing breeze, or a butterfly, they cannot remain constant. Impermanence includes the impossibility of remaining uniformly the same. Yet people make goals of single-mark samadhi, sameness in waking and sleeping, or sameness in movement and stillness, wanting always to remain alike. Yogis pursue these things too.

My body and mental life also exchange influences through dependent arising.

Imagine someone responding “All right” both to a cancer diagnosis and to being told it is not cancer. Ordinarily one might wonder what to do with so much left unfinished and what will happen to one’s children, spouse, or parents. I criticized Beopsang’s introduction of a woman named Katie in which such unruffled responses were presented as a sign of awakening. That is a demand for a person to leave their humanity behind.

Reconsidering Excessive Disturbance Is Different from Demanding No Disturbance

We can ask someone attached to inappropriate things and disturbed without understanding them to reconsider whether the pursuit is right. Think again, discuss, reflect, and examine yourself critically. Such a process is necessary because there is no perfect, complete truth and I may not know the right answer.

The Buddhist change I describe is this: one was immersed in ora, then pursued param, then recognized that seeking param was foolish too and turned toward seeing self and world through dependent arising. “I was mistaken. I pursued it because I thought such a thing existed.” It is not a declaration that transcendence has been achieved.

But the moment this is compressed into “neither this nor that, therefore the Middle Way,” innumerable misunderstandings arise again. Ora-param was not understood properly, and now another short term covers it. We need to explain why seeking sameness in waking and sleeping, complete purity, and perfect awakening is foolish. The task is not to create a new command to be shaken by nothing.

Demanding Nondiscrimination Is Itself Discrimination

People demand liberation from birth and death from humans, wanting no attachment or disturbance whether a blade is held to the neck or one lives or dies. They want the same unruffled response to cancer or its absence. This is fixation on one word, nondiscrimination. Instead of examining what a human such as I is, what animals are, and how the world works through dependent arising, they establish a delusion of what a Buddha looks like.

That itself is discrimination.

If you truly make no distinctions, why speak to anyone? Why tell someone to awaken or distinguish them as unawakened? If everyone is originally a Buddha and there is no difference, why give lectures? Demanding constancy and no response even to cancer already discriminates by choosing one condition as better than another. We need to see the contradiction of someone living through distinctions demanding that others make none.

That is why I call this goal un-Buddhist. It may look like departure from worldly desires, but it remains fixated on param. It establishes the nonhuman goal of complete nondiscrimination without asking whether that goal is right.

Why I Criticize Seongcheol’s Middle Way and Sameness in Waking and Sleeping Together

Seongcheol, who often spoke of the Middle Way, served as supreme patriarch of the Jogye Order and has many admirers. I am denounced whenever I criticize him. Nevertheless, I think he played a major role in damaging Korean Buddhism. He is said to have asked those claiming awakening or insight whether they remained the same asleep and awake. I challenge this bluntly: when sleeping, one should sleep—what is this demand to remain the same?

I connect this with the story of ten years without lying down. It amounts to demanding that humans leave human conditions behind. It makes me ask sarcastically why one should not simply fly through the sky and exercise supernormal powers instead. Someone speaking of sameness in waking and sleeping and what I call nonsense about sudden awakening with gradual or sudden cultivation declares Buddhism the Middle Way. I find this a deeply un-middle-way explanation.

If one uses the term Middle Way, at least one’s stated direction and conduct should agree. I dislike the term itself, but I also criticize the contradiction of invoking it while teaching goals I consider profoundly un-Buddhist. Being admired does not remove contradictions in an explanation.

Told Not to Be Caught in Perception, People Become Caught in Its Absence

No single word or sentence can express an entire direction, but easily misunderstood language is best avoided where possible. I connect this with Buddhism’s frequent use of negations: not, no, it is not so. Establishing a new concept and naming it with one word makes fixation on that concept likely again. Reporting the observation that things are not permanent differs from making another permanent state the answer.

When non-perception is invoked to say not to be overly caught in perceptions, people think Buddhism means having none at all. We must therefore also speak of not being caught in non-perception. Of course, neither perception nor non-perception in the nine successive attainments is terminology closer to neither cognizing nor not cognizing. Today I use it in the context of explaining attachment to concepts rather than only its meaning as a meditative stage.

Do not become attached to non-perception either.

Nonduality poses the same problem. Told that things are not two, people declare the whole world to be themselves and move toward the unity of Brahman and atman. The human brain can indeed move toward feeling that way. But the feeling does not make the explanation correct. In speaking of neither one nor two, the issue is not to be caught by a new conclusion of oneness simply because things are not two.

Seeing Material Change and Human Life Together

At a fundamental level, let us see humans as part of life and life as material change. Everything arises and disappears through dependent arising; its present form is the form of that moment. My thoughts belong to this too. Suppose this perspective lets us release much of our misplaced attachment to right and wrong or likes and dislikes. Is that the beginning and the end? Should we tell people to live through that perspective alone? No.

I still live as an organism and an individual human. I eat, defecate, have sex and children, love, hate, and quarrel. I am also a human drawn along by dopamine. We must see together both the fundamental understanding that we are not different from nonliving matter and the understanding that we nevertheless are humans with these conditions. The point is to reflect deeply without getting trapped on one side.

Told not to be caught in perceptions, people try to have none; told not to be excessively shaken, they try never to be shaken. Scriptures too abound in expressions about perfect equanimity or unsurpassed awakening. But assuming Shakyamuni existed, would he have been someone shaken by nothing? If that is what qualifies as a Buddha, I would say to put up a rock instead. Even a rock moves when the ground moves and breaks when struck with something harder.

Even Observation Requires Distinctions

How can someone live in the world without making any distinctions? Even choosing where to relieve oneself requires them. My blunt reference to excrement is meant to show that the most basic activities depend on discrimination. Distinguishing is the alpha and omega of human life. Separating light from dark and colors in visual information is discrimination. Distinctions already occur in feeling before one verbally thinks whether something is red or blue.

Buddhism is a religion of observation.

Even observation requires distinctions. We observe mind, body, and world to understand how they work. Knowing what I am, how I act, and how my mind moves is necessary for judging how to live. Some things do not follow my wishes; others can change when their workings are understood. Even a way to quit smoking requires observation and reflection. Where wisdom is needed, we should not proclaim that Buddhism means eliminating all discrimination.

What Is Different About a Buddha Who Is Not Perfect?

Buddhism should not end with merely saying neither this nor that. We must reconsider whether our pursuit is transcendent or excessively worldly, what it rests on, and what mistaken concepts hold us. Without self-critical thought, we remain caught somewhere.

Is a Buddha then a perfect person who is never caught in anything? That too demands perfection. Can a Buddha reset the brain or transcend the body? Being human, no. One may then ask what differs from an ordinary person. The difference in direction is knowing one is not perfect, not pursuing misguided perfection, not giving total certainty to one’s thoughts, and reconsidering, conversing, reflecting, and questioning.

It is about reconsidering, conversing, reflecting, and asking questions.

Only then can we exchange words with some wisdom. When self-reconsideration stops, we say anything to others without noticing the contradictions in our own speech. Explaining this direction is why I have spoken at such length today. Now I will hear viewers’ questions and thoughts. I dressed in layers because it was cold, but perhaps from speaking so much I now feel hot. I wait briefly for the chat.

Does Absorption Make Afflictive Thoughts Disappear?

Nono asks whether absorption makes afflictive thoughts disappear. During absorption, it is difficult to bring up thoughts other than its object. Before labeling this the disappearance of afflictions, look at the phenomenon itself. When absorbed in a game, do thoughts keep arising about being short, wanting romance, or needing money? Thoughts unrelated to the game do not readily appear.

The same applies when wholly focused on breathing. Deep in a game of Go, considering how one move will affect the other side, do a mother’s command to study, a spouse’s demand to earn money, a child’s request, and regrets about a failed business all keep arising at once? Those thoughts do not occur. Meditation uses this phenomenon. But the temporary absence of other thoughts must not immediately be converted into Buddhist awakening.

Another viewer says that a monk called Gou used the term Middle Way so often that it was distracting. I answer that I do not know why he used it. I nevertheless return to the common problem of attaching that term to explanations everywhere.

A Thoughtless State Is Not What I Call Non-Self

Nono asks again, “Is that not non-self?” I answer that absence of thought is not non-self. Expressions about losing oneself in absorption or reading make it easy to think that a self-forgetful state is Buddhist non-self. But Buddhism is not about arriving at such a state. Non-self requires conceptual understanding.

Absence of thought is not non-self.

My explanation is that nothing independent, unchanging, and permanent can exist, and I am no exception. It reconsiders the delusion of a permanent self like the jiva discussed earlier. If everything exists through dependent arising, I do too. One recognizes the delusion involved in seeking atman; in this sense, non-self is synonymous with anatman.

It is not strange that afflictive thoughts fail to arise during absorption. But people who meditate extensively or become absorbed in a hobby are not thereby all Buddhas. Confusion arises when thoughtlessness or nondiscrimination is treated as Buddhism. An experience of a state must be distinguished from the question of how one understands self and world.

Which Historical Sage Was Truly Awakened?

Pyeongbeom asks which of the world’s historical sages was truly awakened, requesting even one name. I have not met them, heard their voices directly, or observed their daily lives. We encounter in books what is attributed to people in the past, and I regard most such records as untrustworthy. I go so far as to criticize 99.9 percent of Buddhist scriptures as fabricated and say the same problem applies to the Buddha’s biography.

I regard Christian scripture similarly. How can we know Jesus’s existence and actual actions? We cannot directly verify what the Buddha, Laozi, or Socrates actually said either. Today video preserves what I say at particular times and how my thoughts change. We cannot compare ancient records in that way. Rather than certify who was awakened, we should examine the statements and claims themselves.

This is a very wise statement.

What we can say is that a statement is wise or a claim seems wise. For example, I cite words attributed to Socrates: “I neither know nor think that I know.” Ordinary people may claim knowledge without knowing that they do not know; this attitude does not think or claim to know what it does not know. It encourages deep reflection on knowledge itself.

Some declare awakening yet cannot even understand a criticism that their words contradict themselves. We must be able to ask whether we are pursuing param or speaking nonsense. Such questions matter more than obtaining the name of a sage.

The Question of Giving and a Mother Cat

A viewer asks whether one should practice giving. I first ask what giving means. I live in Busan; about twenty years ago my parents rented rooms in an old two-story house. The upstairs rooms were shabby and cold, with drafts blowing through, and my mother had a hard time. One day there I heard the faint sound of kittens.

Looking down into the alley, I saw a mother cat with two or three kittens, her head protruding from something like a pipe and the kittens nearby. When I met her eyes, she did not turn away. She kept looking straight at me until I looked away first. Recalling this, I ask: is the mother cat’s behavior giving to her kittens, or is it not?

Is the mother cat’s behavior giving to her babies, or is it not?

Words are difficult in this way. Before asking whether giving is obligatory, we should examine which actions we give that name to. We can say that we should share our lives and resources. Yet before the idea of giving something away comes the idea that it is mine. This leads us to reconsider what we regard as ours.

Are Air and Sunlight Mine?

Do we breathe while thinking the air is ours? Receiving sunlight, do we think the sun belongs to us and we will share it with others? Usually we think what is in our hands and recorded in our bank accounts is ours. But just as air and sunlight are not ours, we should ask whether the Earth’s resources fundamentally belong to us. The concept of mine needs reconsideration.

That does not mean I will erase human life by declaring, “Nothing is yours at all.” Earlier I said not to try to leave humanity behind. As a mother cat cares for her young, people love their children and form attachments. They like and love neighbors and sometimes betray them. Humans operate through both inherited tendencies and learning.

Even when someone regards something as theirs, choosing to share it with others is admirable. I do not call it bad. Reconsidering ownership and recognizing the value of actual sharing can go together. Holding both aspects allows us to understand giving within human life.

My Interpretation of Mendicant Culture and Scriptures Emphasizing Giving

To explain the context in which giving is emphasized, I return to Indian ascetic and Brahman culture. Buddhism arose within that culture. A bhikkhu begs for food and lives as a mendicant. In the ancient India I describe, not just anyone could live as a beggar. Slaves and commoners had to perform assigned labor, while providing food to ascetics or Brahmans was regarded as good.

I explain that in that culture people below a certain rank could not even offer food to Brahmans: food was not accepted from those regarded as belonging to impure classes. Giving or making offerings was not something everyone could freely do. In such a society, the idea that feeding priests or ascetics benefits oneself already existed, so I think there was less need to newly emphasize giving.

The situation changes when Buddhism enters places such as China or Korea that lacked that culture. I point to the presentation of scriptures emphasizing merit from giving to monks. Citing explanations in the Diamond Sutra about merit comparable to Mount Sumeru, I criticize their use to indoctrinate people that they must give. My interpretation is that an idea already taken for granted in ancient India came to be separately emphasized in other cultural settings.

The question of whether one should give cannot therefore be answered merely by citing scripture. We should examine the social conditions in which the expression was emphasized and what I now regard as mine, what I want to share, and with whom. There is no need to remain with old explanations telling people to give in order to gain better rewards through rebirth.

The Weight of Sharing Half an Apple

Not stealing concerns taking what belongs to another, while giving concerns sharing what belongs to oneself. Beneath both, we need to think deeply about whether it really belongs to you or me. But that question must not become language that ignores practical hardship.

Suppose hardship makes you debate whether your child can have half an apple or a whole one. To put more into the child’s mouth, you eat less or leave the child’s portion untouched. If, seeing a neighbor’s hardship, you then share despite wanting to give your child more, that giving can carry enormous weight. We must see how significant the action is within a human situation.

Understand the fundamental aspect and see it together with practical reality, losing sight of neither reality nor questioning.

Insisting here that nothing is yours and pushing someone to become a person who makes no distinctions makes a fool of them. Conversely, there is no need to leave the concept of mine wholly unquestioned. We need to see fundamental understanding and practical life together while continuing to question. Giving should not be turned into a simple obligation or a tool for transcendence.

The Final Question and Closing

Today’s lecture ran long. The questions afterward made it enjoyable, but next time I would like to finish the lecture within thirty or forty minutes where possible and take more questions. Finally, Pyeongbeom asks about Ching Hai of Vietnam, described as their former teacher. The viewer reports claims of having been Shakyamuni and Jesus and now being Maitreya and the returned Jesus, and asks whether I can criticize her.

I answer that I had briefly looked at her after someone mentioned her and strongly denounce Ching Hai as a fraud. I repeat that making such claims is no different from what I criticize in Yoon Hong-sik and places her among representative frauds. Here I do not undertake a separate extended examination; I close by stating my judgment in response to the request. I thank the viewers for listening and wish them a pleasant, restful weekend. May you become Buddhas.