Those Who Collapse First in the Face of Disaster
This broadcast began with a moment of silence for the victims of torrential rain before turning to The Little Prince. Too much rain had fallen in a short time, and lives had been lost. Our regular gathering in Busan was also postponed because more heavy rain was forecast. Natural and social disasters may appear to strike everyone alike, but the damage they inflict and the conditions for recovery are never equal. A person with resources can recover from a certain amount of loss. For someone whose entire basis of living disappears, a single disaster can shake the whole of life.
I recalled the 1997 financial crisis and the credit-card crisis that followed. Vast funds were committed to large corporations in the name of saving the country, while people who lost their jobs and had to survive from day to day were left to endure by borrowing on credit cards. Some later found work and recovered, but many were driven deeper into despair by high interest. Korea’s suicide rate surged during that period and, despite the language of economic greatness, remained among the highest in the OECD for years.
The pattern returned during COVID-19. When people could not gather and consumption froze, small business owners and poor people took the greatest blow. Rather than protecting them adequately or providing low-interest public funds, the state again left them to financial institutions. Those in distress accumulated debt while financial companies made enormous profits. A state that demands duties from its people must also accept responsibility when they fall into crisis. A country that has already become a major economy should examine distribution and the conditions of recovery instead of speaking only of endless growth.
I speak from the place in which I have lived. A person who has lived under different conditions may see it differently. Yet if we study Buddhism, we must look not only at private peace of mind but also at who is injured most in every disaster and who has the least chance to recover. Compassion is not a word for ignoring structural suffering.
Why Was the Astronomer Who Found B612 Not Believed?
In Chapter 4 of The Little Prince, the pilot concludes that the prince’s home was asteroid B612, barely larger than a house. A Turkish astronomer observed it in 1909 and announced his discovery at an international astronomy conference. No one believed him because he wore traditional Turkish clothes. Later, after a Turkish dictator imposed European dress, the astronomer presented the same discovery again in 1920 in an elegant European suit. Only then did people believe him.
The content of the presentation and the evidence for the discovery were unchanged. Only the clothes were different, yet clothing altered the credibility of the words. Saint-Exupéry writes that grown-ups are like that. When they hear about a new friend, they do not ask what the friend’s voice sounds like, what games the friend enjoys, or whether the friend collects butterflies. They ask the friend’s age, number of siblings, weight, and the father’s salary. They cannot imagine a house described with pink bricks, geraniums at the windows, and pigeons on the roof, but they exclaim over a house when told that it costs one hundred thousand francs.
Grown-ups nod only when given the number B612, rather than the facts that the little prince laughed and wanted a sheep. The pilot accommodates them by naming the asteroid’s number, but he grieves that he too may be becoming an adult interested only in numbers. He picks up colored pencils and crayons for the first time since he was six so as not to forget the friend who left, yet he cannot see the sheep inside the box. His inability to draw the prince exactly is not merely a lack of technique. It contains the fear that he too may have become a deeply conditioned grown-up.
People Believe the Image Before the Content
Rather than trying to cover every issue in this chapter, I focused on the astronomer’s clothing. His words were ignored in traditional Turkish clothes and accepted in a European suit. We must first admit that we actually work this way. Why do news presenters appear in neat clothes, carefully arranged hair, and serious voices? The appearance constructs an image of professionalism, neutrality, and trustworthiness. If a presenter with dirt on the face, disordered hair, and ragged clothes read exactly the same news, would we trust it in exactly the same way?
Clothes are not the only material of first impressions. Speech, voice, skin color, gender, occupation, education, hairstyle, and facial expression all enter our judgment. A professor is expected to look like a professor, a nurse like a nurse, and a politician constantly performs the image of the politician that he or she wants us to see. A swindler never tries to look like a swindler. The swindler works hard to appear authoritative, gifted with special power, and capable of moving everything. That is why I mentioned figures such as Cheon Gong, Myeong Tae-gyun, and Geonjin Beopsa. They manipulate image because how they appear to others matters more than what they are.
Entertainers, politicians, and religious authorities also live through image. The appearance of knowledge and virtue often exerts more power than what they know and how they live. When we hear the name of a prestigious university or a religious title, we lean toward belief before examining the evidence. Cars, clothes, apartments, and schools sell brands as images. Advertising repeats all day because advertisers know how vulnerable people are to images.
Beauty and Normality Are Also Formed Through Experience
Traditional Turkish clothes did not look ridiculous because ridiculousness resided in the cloth. They looked ridiculous because Europeans were unfamiliar with them. Hanbok can also appear strange to someone for whom it is unfamiliar, and it can appear distinctive and beautiful after the image of Korean culture changes. People receive different feelings from the same object because their accumulated experiences and memories differ.
Standards of beauty and ugliness also change with the period. The standards of the 1950s, the 1980s, the 2000s, and today are not identical. Mass media repeatedly displays particular faces and bodies and teaches us that they are beautiful. Before mass media, people could not see a photograph of a distant princess or courtesan. Paintings, rumors, and the customs of the time constructed the image of beauty. Much of what I now experience as beautiful is not an absolute standard completed at birth but the result of conditioning through experience.
The same applies to feelings about romance and marriage. A person repeatedly shown only romantic scenes and a person repeatedly shown violence, betrayal, and conflict will not feel the same way about relationships. We think we see the object as it is, but we see through images constructed from memory and experience. Unless I ask what formed my likes and dislikes, I mistake a conditioned judgment for reality itself.
Does Buddhism Make Us Pure Children Again?
An important question follows. Can Buddhism free us completely from being ruled by images? Can we return to the perfect purity of a child before conditioning? I do not think so. Human beings live through memory. If every memory disappeared, knowledge and recollection would not be all that vanished. We would not recognize parents, children, friends, or those we love. We would lose the material by which we know what is familiar or strange, who helped or harmed us, and what we favor or avoid.
We construct images through memory and live in the world through those images. The dream of returning to an entirely unconditioned state therefore resembles abandoning human life itself. We should not establish as the image of a Buddha an unmoving mind that remains untouched when a parent dies or a loved one leaves. If we imagine a Buddha as a transcendent being without sexuality or emotion and endowed with supernatural knowledge, no human being can ever become a Buddha. Buddhism is not a path for escaping humanity and becoming divine.
When we fail to discard fantasies about a Buddha, practice itself pursues fantasy. We imagine that awakening requires suppressing the senses, avoiding delicious food, and eliminating every desire. Scriptures and statues can easily portray the Buddha as a being who knew everything from the beginning and spoke with perfect completeness. That image blocks the real human possibility of awakening and self-correction. When I repeatedly say that we should become Buddhas, I am not joking. To do so, we must first let go of the transcendent image that makes Buddhahood impossible.
Freedom Is Not the Removal of Feeling but Understanding It
The impossibility of perfect purity does not mean that we should live swept away by feeling and judgment. This is the crucial point of Buddhism. The instant I see someone, I may feel attraction or dislike. I react to clothes, odors, manners of speech, and titles. Such lightning judgments may not disappear. Yet I can understand that I am feeling and judging in this way, and that the judgment arose from the conditions of my experience and memory.
Without that understanding, we force the standards we believe to be right upon others. The Turkish dictator declared European dress correct and threatened those who disobeyed with death. Fascism and dictatorship can begin when a conditioned standard is absolutized. The gaze of old travelers who recorded foreign cultures as bizarre worked similarly. If our own gender relations, clothing, and hairstyles become the standard of all reality, another world appears to be a country of monsters.
Compassion and tolerance begin by admitting that I may be a frog in a well. If I am certain that the other person is entirely evil and I alone am absolutely right, no room for understanding remains. When I see that my judgment arose within my own conditions, I can understand that another person sees and feels within different conditions and experiences. This does not conceal wrongdoing by calling it harmless. It means examining wrong without turning my judgment into absolute truth.
I speak of becoming free from both ora and para, from low worldly desire and lofty transcendent desire. Immersion in ordinary desire is not the only problem. The wish for perfect purity, an utterly unmoving mind, and transcendence beyond humanity is another desire. Buddhism is not a religion of abandoning reality and fleeing to another shore. It is a path of wisdom that asks us to observe what we pursue, why it feels good, and why we suffer when it is not attained.
A Life That Asks Where Judgment Came From
Human beings dream and prepare for the future. I am not telling people not to dream. I am saying that we should know it is a dream and that conditions may prevent its fulfillment. Success also arises through countless relationships and conditions. If we treat it entirely as the product of our own ability, we become unable to endure when conditions change and it collapses. If we pursue success, marriage, money, and honor simply because society tells us to do so, without asking what we actually want, we cannot understand why we remain dissatisfied even after reaching the goal.
What am I pursuing now? Why does this appear beautiful and that ugly? Why do I believe one person merely because of a title and dismiss another merely because of clothing? These questions become an understanding of myself and then an understanding of other people and society. We cannot erase conditioned memory, but we can see that we are conditioned. When we cease to absolutize feeling and judgment, attachment loosens a little and room opens to understand those who lived under different conditions. I believe that this is where the wisdom and compassion offered by Buddhism become possible.
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