Opening a Live Conversation with Questions
On the evening of April 10, 2026, I turned on the broadcast a little early, as usual. While people joined, I greeted someone I would meet the next day and asked a first-time chatter which video had brought him here. This was meant to be a conversation rather than a fixed lecture. I joked that if viewers did not ask questions, I would ask them first, but that line also expressed the attitude running through the entire broadcast.
Recently I had criticized people who spread superstition under the name of Buddhism, and on Wednesday I had discussed economic and social issues while watching Trump and the Israel-Iran war. The subjects differ, but the test is the same: instead of believing something because an authority said it, ask whether it is really so. A small livestream is a place where we can exchange those questions directly.
If you do not ask questions, I will ask them.
The Freedom to Believe and the Responsibility of Spreading Claims
I cannot chase down and stop every individual who believes a superstition. But appearing on twenty-first-century YouTube, packaging it as Buddhism, clothing it in scriptural authority, and spreading it widely deserves criticism. Rather than attacking every other religion, I have focused on people who use the Buddhist signboard while making claims that contradict Buddhist wisdom.
Most religious spaces do not welcome critical thought and questions. “It is simply so; believe it” is more convenient. Within the Buddhist world, people who watch my videos and even enter a live chat are probably rare. I thank them, but I also insist that we should not decorate ourselves as special people. We must look objectively at our own thinking as well.
Privately believing something and spreading it in Buddhism’s name are different matters.
The Intimacy of a Small Audience
With hundreds or thousands of viewers, it would be difficult to ask one newcomer calmly where he came from. A small room can have a close conversation. One viewer had been shocked by my video saying there is no rebirth; another had been practicing hard to escape rebirth when he encountered it. Shock often means that a previous assumption has begun to move.
I asked which video they first saw, what contradicted their beliefs, and why they subscribed and came to the livestream. Instead of mechanically requesting likes and subscriptions, I wanted to know what question had actually moved a person. To a night driver using the program like radio, I said safety mattered more than chatting. The mere presence of a listener gives strength to a speaker.
A small gathering has a form of conversation available only to it.
Night Driving and the Company of Radio
When a viewer said he would only listen while driving at night, I remembered my years as a used-car dealer. My home was far from the lot, the evening roads were congested, and the drive home often took nearly an hour. Although I had barely listened to radio before, I listened frequently for two or three years during that period.
An hour with someone’s voice and stories felt much better than driving in silence. I realized that this livestream, too, could serve as radio for someone. It is all right not to watch the screen or type a question. Drive safely at night, and let the words meet you slowly inside your ordinary life.
People who drive for long hours eventually seek a human voice.
Three YouTube Channels and a Changed Request
Before this Buddhist channel, I ran two other YouTube channels. I had spent my working life as a web programmer and developer and had also done design, but after several business failures I needed immediate income and became a used-car dealer. With no personal network, selling cars was difficult, so I moved from blogging to YouTube. My first channel had the comical name “The Man Who Will Become the Used-Car King.”
After back pain ended that work, I operated an IT channel called “Yoon Deok-man, Life Part Two” for about two years. Both channels reached roughly seven thousand subscribers, and then I regularly asked for likes and notification settings. I almost never do that on this Buddhist channel. Increasing the number matters less now than discovering what a person doubts and how a person revises a belief.
I once shouted for notification settings; now one honest question matters more.
An Affinity That Began in My Father’s Bookshelf
My father formed the background of my first encounter with Buddhism. As a young man in Busan, he participated in Won Buddhist youth activities and remained close to Buddhism throughout his life, treated by people around him as an elder or teacher. Our home contained a Korean Tripitaka, the Lotus Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, philosophy, books by Rajneesh and Krishnamurti, and Christian and Confucian texts.
That did not make me deeply Buddhist as a child. When I was in middle school, adults around my father taught me how to sit in meditation with my tongue against the palate, but they could not explain what I was doing or why. If neither the instructor nor the practitioner understands the purpose, merely sitting is a waste of time. My insistence that questions and understanding precede form also grew from that experience.
Sitting without knowing what you are doing does not produce wisdom.
A Sentence Read in the Middle of Suffering
In my second year of university, I was alone in a painful bend of life. Reading a Buddhist text from our home, I encountered the insight that I suffered because I demanded that the world not be as it was. For the first time, I saw objectively my attachment to a world that had to follow my expectations.
I then spent about four years in the Buddhist student association at Pusan National University. I did not remain tied to a particular temple or organization, but Buddhism stayed at the center of my mind. After my father died in 2020, I had what I call an awakening, stopped my IT channel, and began this one. It was not a beginning meant to advertise a mystical experience; it was a beginning that asked again what I had mistaken.
I suffered not because the world differed from my wishes, but because I insisted that it must not differ.
Asking About Won Buddhism and Mainstream Buddhism
Asked about the difference between Won Buddhism and mainstream Buddhism, I answered within the limits of what I know. Won Buddhism’s founding story says its founder awakened independently and later found the same teaching in the Diamond Sutra. On the broadcast I harshly called that element “half cult-like,” yet its actual study places Buddhist texts and the Diamond Sutra near the center, so continued practice reaches many points shared with Buddhism.
Won Buddhism has people who perform religious roles in each district, though not in the same form as traditional monastics, and they function while living ordinary social lives. I am not a deep practitioner of Won Buddhism; my connection is mainly that my father spent time there in his youth. Thus I focused less on exaggerating labels and more on how much the actual study and practice overlap.
What people study and question matters more than the signboard.
Rajneesh and the Trap of Samadhi
A viewer said that although Osho Rajneesh had serious public problems, his talks on the Dhammapada and other books had once felt startlingly fresh. I too read Rajneesh, Krishnamurti, and many religious and philosophical books when I was young. Looking back, however, I often read without knowing how to read. A person can consume many books and still become a parrot repeating another person’s words if no questions are asked.
On the broadcast I called Rajneesh a representative fraud. My central criticism concerns the mysticism and self-staging embedded in the books, more than personal scandal. I especially reject presenting meditative absorption and samadhi as awakening itself. Samadhi can be a state of concentration, but wisdom does not emerge automatically from it. Buddhism must be the wisdom that notices delusion and sees causes and relationships, not a technique for sustaining an extraordinary state.
Remaining in samadhi is not Buddhism. Buddhism is wisdom.
Asking Again What “Arhat” Means
Asked what an arhat is, I first considered traditional meanings: one worthy of offerings, or one who has attained an awakening equal to Shakyamuni’s. Yet if we assume that a meaning written in later scriptures must have been identical in the Buddha’s lifetime, reading scripture becomes a way of stopping thought.
I openly call myself a “self-proclaimed arhat,” certified by no one. Here the name is not a supernatural license. It is a public responsibility for saying, “I know what the core of Buddhism is,” and “I have opened my eyes.” No master descended from a mountain to appoint me, and no one verified mystical powers. My claim must therefore remain fully open to questioning.
I am a self-proclaimed, not an other-certified, arhat, and I bear responsibility for the name.
Awakening Is Dependent-Origination Thinking
What must one realize to be called an arhat? My answer is dependent-origination thinking. One must embody the view that nothing arises alone but through conditions and relationships, and repeatedly notice one’s own delusions and foolish actions: “I was caught in another absurd assumption,” or “This habit carried me away again.”
Liberation is not a single event completed forever. It is a way of living that notices, steps free, and notices again after falling back in. Therefore the essential work is the same before and after becoming a Buddha: observe, ask about causes, and objectify oneself within relationships. Awakening does not end the work; it makes the same work more honest and continuous.
A Buddha is someone who keeps noticing and keeps becoming free.
A Schoolchild Who Knows He Is a Schoolchild
I describe awakening as “an elementary student who knows he is an elementary student” or “a frog in a well that has noticed it is in a well.” Real wisdom does not paint the face gold and pretend to be extraordinary. It recognizes that I am not grand, that my view is narrow, and that my world is conditioned.
By contrast, a person who speaks authoritatively about claims that collapse under one more question, or decorates himself with past-life visions and supernatural power, is far from awakening. A calm voice and an absence of visible anger do not guarantee truth. The craft of appearing solemn can be the opposite of the wisdom that breaks one’s own delusion.
When I know I am a frog in a well, I can finally see the wall of the well.
The Historical Transformation of “Bodhisattva”
Asked whether “Buddha-bodhisattva” and “bodhisattva” mean the same thing, I first noted that the bodhisattva concept itself changed over history. In bodhisattva, sattva can refer to a sentient or living being. Earlier usage centered on a being moving toward wisdom and awakening.
Over time, the bodhisattva changed from a seeker into a godlike figure: Manjushri, Kshitigarbha, and Avalokiteshvara became transcendent beings who remain in the world to aid living beings. Once Buddhahood was placed too high and final nirvana meant not returning, traditions needed divine helpers who postponed Buddhahood. A timeless dictionary definition misses this transformation.
A bodhisattva is not one fixed entity but a concept transformed by history.
Avalokiteshvara and India’s Local Religions
Indian religion was not one solid system cleanly separated from Buddhism, but a world where long-standing regional beliefs and deities overlapped. Devotion to Vishnu and Shiva varied by place, and these local traditions naturally entered Buddhism as it spread.
I explained Avalokiteshvara devotion within this movement. Familiar forms and names of local gods could be rearranged inside a new Buddhist cosmos and blended into Avalokiteshvara. Religions do not arise on empty ground. They transform by absorbing existing symbols, rituals, and human memories.
Avalokiteshvara did not fall separately from the sky; the figure formed within networks of local belief.
Shiva and Vishnu Inside the Great Compassion Dharani
For someone who knows the Great Compassion Dharani only as praise of Avalokiteshvara, its vocabulary can be shocking. Searching material during the broadcast, I explained that much of the dharani contains names and features associated with Shiva and Vishnu. Nilakantha, the blue throat, evokes Shiva after swallowing poison, while a name such as Hari can refer to Vishnu.
I also mentioned images such as black antelope skin on the left shoulder, associated with Shiva. My point was not to display etymological trivia. It was to see that a text chanted today as purely Buddhist is deeply infused with other Indian traditions. Instead of treating a mantra as mystical sound, ask who spoke its words and what they called within their culture.
Before chanting a formula, ask whose names the formula is calling.
How Religions Absorb Unfamiliar Gods
When Buddhism entered a new region, it did not erase every local deity. Indian scriptures bring Indra and asuras to hear the Buddha; Chinese stories place the Buddha above the Jade Emperor and many heavenly gods. Korean temples with mountain-spirit shrines preserve a similar trace of absorption.
A new religion places local gods beneath its own cosmos or interprets them as manifestations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Avalokiteshvara is a representative case. The appearance of gods in scripture is therefore not immediate evidence of historical fact or transcendent reality. It may be cultural evidence of the route by which a religion moved and mixed.
A procession of gods may map the route of religious travel rather than a supernatural world.
What the Shramanas Asked Away
We miss the center if we reduce shramana philosophy to a single heresy opposed to Brahmanical tradition. The shramanas asked questions: Where is God? Where is an afterlife? Do a soul and atman truly exist? Are supernatural powers and absolute good and evil real? Each question destabilized an inherited system.
If absolute morality and an eternal soul collapse, the machinery of rebirth also shakes. When this life ends, the substantial self imagined to continue forever ends with it. What remains is a self that arose temporarily through conditions. This was not invented by the Buddha alone beneath a tree. It grew in a network of questions exchanged among many shramanas and skeptics.
A Buddha cannot arise alone in a vacuum without questions.
Brahmins and Shramanas Were Not Completely Separate
The Upanishadic and shramana traditions were not unrelated worlds. They influenced one another under shared historical conditions, and many shramanas came from Brahmin backgrounds. Differences between the Indus and Ganges regions, cities, and exchange may have made some places more receptive to reforming questions.
The people able to record scriptures were also the tiny minority trained in writing and Sanskrit, often connected to priestly classes. A neat opposition of “Brahmins versus shramanas” therefore erases the movement of real people and knowledge. Even a text attacking opponents results from long argument and mutual influence.
Intellectual boundaries are never as clean as lines drawn on a map.
Who Wrote the Samaññaphala Sutta?
We should not accept without question passages that dismiss other shramanas as materialists, deniers of morality, and outsiders. “They say nothing exists, so they are wicked” may be the judgment of those who need existence to remain secure. The inability to tolerate emptiness and the insistence that something must exist recur even within Buddhism.
A scripture filled with heavenly gods, supernatural powers, moral reward, and rejection of questioners may, from my perspective, be anti-wisdom despite its Buddhist title. The title does not certify truth. Ask who wrote it, inside what controversy, and why an opponent was labeled deviant. Critical reading does not discard scripture; it preserves wisdom within it.
Look beyond the Buddhist title and ask whether questions remain alive inside the text.
Seeing the Sophists and Socrates Again
The Greek sophists are commonly taught as mere quibblers, but I see that translation and image as tilted toward the victors. Sophists were people concerned with and teaching wisdom. Socrates was one of the questioning figures of the time, repeatedly asking until his counterpart encountered the limit of his own claim.
His trial had political contexts, but accusations that he did not honor the city’s gods and made the young atheistic also attached to him. He was not alone. Many sophists questioned gods and power, custom and morality. “Where is it? How do you know? Can you prove it?” threatened the inherited order.
Calling every sophist a quibbler can repeat the old hatred of those who ask questions.
The Explosion of Questions Before the Common Era
Within surviving sources, traces of questioning increase greatly across Eurasia between roughly the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. Greece, Persia, India, and China show movements doubting inherited myth and authority and asking anew about humans and the world. Questions may have existed earlier, but sparse records limit certainty.
We should not turn the era into a miracle in which a handful of geniuses awakened independently. A question produces another question, and debate changes an opponent’s language. The Buddha and Socrates were outcomes of many prior questions and contemporary conversations. Wisdom does not leap fully formed from one hero’s mind; it flowers through long exchange among people.
Before the wise individual came a society through which questions could travel.
My Objection to the “Axial Age” Explanation
Karl Jaspers’s “Axial Age” describes new thought arising at similar times in China, India, Persia, and Greece. I strongly objected to the claim that these developments occurred without direct cultural exchange. On the broadcast I went so far as to call that explanation “bullshit” and “a foolish thing to say.” In a world where silk, food, taxes, and armies moved, it is hard to believe that philosophy alone remained sealed within borders.
Treating similar questions as independent miracles hides the network. Words move with merchants, travelers, soldiers, tax collectors, refugees, and scholars. Our inability to identify every speaker who carried every sentence does not prove the absence of exchange. Once we unfold the maps and imperial roads, the opposite inference is more natural.
If goods and people moved, is it not strange to say that ideas did not?
The World Connected by the Persian Royal Road
Around the fifth century BCE, the Persian Empire extended from Egypt and Babylon toward the Indus region. Such a vast territory required roads to collect taxes and move armies. The Royal Road was not merely a route for a king’s travel; it was an imperial artery carrying horses, wagons, administration, and goods toward the centers of power.
Products were not the only things moving along it. Stories and religions, questions and rebuttals also flowed. The Mediterranean world in the west and northwestern India in the east belonged to one political-economic network, while exchange between China and India continued across mountains and grasslands. There is little reason to imagine wisdom alone appearing simultaneously in isolated compartments.
The Persian Royal Road carried taxes, but also words and thoughts.
Beyond the Fence of Wisdom Owned by Buddhism
The wisdom flowering in this network does not belong to Buddhism alone. Its traces appear in Socrates, the Buddha, and parts of later Christian literature. We need not claim that Buddhism transmitted everything. More broadly, human wisdom spread: the habit of asking before believing and observing before authority. Wisdom needs no Buddhist trademark.
In an age when only a tiny minority could read and write, scriptures were also literary works produced by educated people already influenced by several civilizations and debates. The New Testament teaching to remove the beam from one’s own eye before the speck from another’s meets Buddhist wisdom in its demand to see one’s delusion first. The names differ, but the task of self-objectification is shared.
Wisdom remains wisdom even without a Buddhist label.
Questions That Remove the Beam from My Eye
The beam in my eye is delusion, fantasy, and unsupported certainty. Removing it requires critical thought. I must first ask myself: “Is what I know correct? Is it really so? On what grounds do I say this?” A question that shakes the root of my own belief is harder than one used to judge someone else.
At the end, I returned to the opening conversation. We had traveled through Avalokiteshvara, dharani, shramanas, sophists, and the Persian Royal Road, but it was one road: the moment conversation and debate begin and a question enters belief. As a word without feet travels a thousand miles, wisdom flows with people. My conclusion is simple again: do not believe; ask.
Is what I know correct? Is it really so? Buddhism and wisdom begin there.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.