A Time to Ask Together, Not a Broadcast That Hands Down Answers
This broadcast, too, began as a time for questions. People could ask about artificial intelligence or Buddhism, or bring in something said on another YouTube channel. If someone identified the exact video and timestamp where a certain claim was made, we could watch that passage together and discuss it. The category of the question was not what mattered. What mattered was whether one could bring out the doubt that currently held one’s attention and whether the viewers and I could think it through together.
I do not claim that I can answer every question. Nor do I say that I know everything. It is enough if one person’s question stimulates another person’s thought, becomes new information and a new condition for both of us, and creates a dependently arisen time in which we can reflect together. That is why I repeatedly asked people not to fear questioning. One may feel embarrassed that a question will be discussed in public, or worry about one’s dignity and social position. Yet there is nothing shameful about an unawakened person asking questions. I, too, encountered Buddhism and practiced for many years, but until only a few years ago I was still an ordinary person with ordinary limits, and even now I do not believe that I know everything.
The present moment, while the audience is still small, is actually a good time for dialogue. If the audience grows into the hundreds or thousands, it may become difficult to take one person’s comment and discuss it at length as we can now. A live stream has a delay between my speaking and a viewer hearing and replying, but I still asked everyone to participate actively in the chat. Questions sent before the broadcast can become material for the next conversation, and questions left in the comments after it ends can open the next session. I would have been very grateful to have had this kind of opportunity in the past. I had almost none. This time, therefore, is not a place to receive correct answers but a place to exchange questions and think together.
Two Questions Returned by the Analects
A viewer first asked about the phrase 未知生, 焉知死 in the Analects and then asked whether the Confucian sage and gentleman could be regarded as similar to the Buddhist arahant and Buddha. A proper treatment of this problem could take a month and still remain incomplete. I am not a Confucian scholar, nor do I know every corner of the Analects. So rather than pretend to know, I decided to focus on the passage presented in the broadcast and think it through together.
How Can One Serve Ghosts Before Being Able to Serve People?
子路問事鬼神. 子曰: 未能事人, 焉能事鬼. Zilu asked about serving ghosts and spirits. Confucius said, “Not yet being able to serve people, how could you serve ghosts?”
Zilu asked Confucius about serving ghosts and spirits. The character 事 can mean both ‘affair’ and ‘to serve.’ It is conventionally translated here as serving ghosts, but we cannot translate an ancient Chinese sentence with the same certainty we assume when reading contemporary speech. Even so, 未能事人 can be read as not yet being capable of serving people, and 焉能事鬼 as the counterquestion: how, then, could one serve ghosts? It asks how anyone can set out to serve invisible ghosts while failing to treat the people directly before one properly.
The power of this answer lies in its refusal to offer a lengthy explanation of whether ghosts exist. Instead of first declaring that they exist or do not exist and then teaching the proper rites, Confucius sends the questioner back to reality. He asks him to look first at how he treats parents and children, neighbors and colleagues, and the people he meets now. A person who does not know how to serve the living but pretends expertise regarding unknowable beings displays something closer to vanity than wisdom.
How Can One Know Death Without Knowing Life?
曰: 敢問死. 曰: 未知生, 焉知死. Zilu spoke again: “May I venture to ask about death?” Confucius replied, “Not yet knowing life, how could you know death?”
This time Zilu asked about death. Confucius did not unfold a map of the afterlife or describe the rewards and punishments awaiting the dead. 未知生, 焉知死 is the counterquestion: how can one know death when one does not yet properly know life? It stops the habit of setting aside the life one can observe, the living people around one, and the work immediately before one while making confident claims about a world after death that cannot be verified.
This passage reveals a pronounced Confucian tendency. It does not put ghosts, mysterious powers, or the world after death at the center, but looks first at earthly affairs and human relationships. In that sense, Confucianism is highly realistic and practical and distanced itself from earlier mysticism. It does not fit comfortably within the Western word religion, nor does it fully match the system of belief we tend to imagine when we hear the word ‘religion.’ This becomes clearer when we recall that the Confucian school was originally one jia among the Mohists, Logicians, Legalists, and many others. It was not from the start a single rigid institution and creed, but a current of thought and philosophy competing over how to live in the real world.
How Much of a Source Can Chinese Characters and Translation Carry?
Yet while reading these two sentences, we must not forget the limits of translation. Even two people speaking contemporary Korean may not be certain what the other meant by a particular word. Ancient Chinese differs from modern Korean with its rich particles and endings, and the text did not have modern punctuation. The characters 未 and 焉 give the lines their negative and interrogative texture, but a handful of characters cannot preserve Confucius’s intonation and facial expression or the exact intention of Zilu’s question. We ultimately have to read through context and comparison, and even an experienced translator can be wrong.
As the single character 空 in Chinese Buddhist translations may be used both for simple nonexistence and for the absence of intrinsic nature, different meanings can overlap in one character. If we overlook that distinction when translating the Heart Sutra’s ‘form is emptiness; emptiness is form,’ the sentence becomes something altogether different. Whether a word functions as an adjective or noun, what relations it bears, and what the surrounding context says can easily be lost in translation. We should therefore neither fix 事 to one meaning without question nor imagine that we fully possess 未知生 焉知死 through one modern translation. We may read the sentence, but we must question the illusion that we know it completely.
Confucian Realism and Its Power to Push Back Superstition
Even after acknowledging those limits, Confucius’s replies have a clear direction. Do not talk about ghosts while knowing nothing about people, and do not pretend to know what comes after death while knowing nothing about life. This is a powerful brake on the impulse to despise reality and escape into a transcendent world. Instead of dressing up what cannot be observed in order to create authority, it asks how we will serve people now and how we will understand the life before us.
This side of Confucianism is a major strength. It draws attention away from ghosts and mysterious powers, souls and afterlives, immortality and magic, and back toward actual relationships and conduct. Of course, Confucianism later became religious, while Daoist schools developed into institutions closely joined to superstitions about immortality, elixirs, and magic. Buddhism, too, carried numerous Indian superstitions and stories of supernatural powers under the name of Buddhism when it entered China. Accounts of yogic practice producing the six higher powers and abilities like those of immortals became mixed with Chinese mystical traditions. A tradition may begin by asking about reality, yet its later institutions and beliefs do not necessarily preserve that direction.
An Interconnected Age in Which Thought and Philosophy Exploded
The Hundred Schools, Indian Śramaṇas, and Greek Sophists
To consider Confucius and the Buddha together, we must not isolate them as solitary geniuses. In China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the Confucians were joined by Mohists, Logicians, Legalists, and the many other Hundred Schools offering competing paths. In India at nearly the same time, there were countless śramaṇas and teachers. Materialism, skepticism, Jainism, established Brahmanical traditions, yoga, and many other practices were intertwined, and the Buddha, too, learned and debated within that environment. Ancient Greece had the Sophists, whom we commonly learned to dismiss simply as deceptive arguers. Yet the original sense of sophistes is closer to a wise person or seeker of wisdom—a thinker and philosopher. Socrates stood in that same arena of fierce debate.
I do not separate the flowering of thought in those three regions into unrelated, purely spontaneous events. It is not dependent-origination thinking to imagine that China, India, and Greece each suddenly invented philosophy in isolation. Between them stood enormous empires such as Persia, along with networks and trade routes through which people, goods, and languages moved. Just as agriculture, the wheel, bronze, and iron spread, thoughts and questions traveled with people. It is more natural to see the burst of diversity and the flourishing of thought around the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE as emerging within conditions of mutual influence.
This period is also one of the earliest boundaries for which substantial documentary traces remain. It does not mean that no one questioned or thought before then; rather, too few documents survive for us to see clearly. Even the Daodejing becomes shorter as we look at older versions, showing that characters changed and material was added over time. We must therefore ask whether it was the finished work of one Laozi, whose historical existence is itself uncertain, or a book in which ideas from different periods gathered under Laozi’s name. Texts, religions, and philosophies are not fixed substances. They are made through time and relationship.
Questions Enter a World Sustained by ‘That Is Simply How It Has Always Been’
The earlier world was often maintained by saying that things had always been that way. Ghosts, heaven and hell, souls and vital spirits had always existed; rites had always had to be conducted in a certain way; the blood of chiefs and kings had always been different; and those below had always had to obey. But as different schools met and debate grew active, people finally began to ask: Is that really so? Why must it be so? On what do your gods, morality, and order rest?
The debates among China’s schools, the contests among India’s śramaṇas, and the conversations of the Greek Sophists did not merely produce more candidate answers. They made it possible to question what had been handed down as truth. The Buddha, too, learned within that wind and that network of language and experience. He did not manufacture awakening alone and without conditions. He opened his path under the influence of earlier teachers, competing schools, the movement of states and peoples, and countless conversations. This is what it means to see a person through dependent origination.
Before Answers, We Must See the Question
At this point I asked the viewers: Which matters more, the answer or the question? Confucius’s words are formally answers, yet they sound like questions handed back to the questioner. Asked how to serve ghosts, he asks whether one knows how to serve people. Asked about death, he asks whether one knows life. What matters is that Confucius did not add a new doctrine about the afterlife. He made Zilu look again at the concepts he had taken for granted: ghosts, service, and death.
Human beings live through the language and images, conventions and rules they hear and learn from childhood. In Buddhist terms, dharmas and images accumulate and become one’s world. Among them are answers about how a ruler, parent, child, man, or woman must behave. We can ask whether the Confucian language of the sage and gentleman carries the traces of a male-centered society. The discrimination preserved between bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs in India can be questioned in the same way. Greece was no exception. More important than worshiping the answers offered by ancient people is continuing the moment when they began to question the conventions inherited from their own past.
When religion hardens, a teaching born from questions is converted back into commands about what must be done. Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity are all vulnerable to that danger. The original sages were people who broke the conventions of their own age by questioning them, yet later religions use their names as authority to stop questions. Living reflection then disappears, leaving only an answer sheet.
What Does the Sermon on the Mount Put on Trial?
Do not judge others. By the measure with which you judge, you too will be judged. The sun and rain of heaven do not choose between the good and the evil, the righteous and the unrighteous, before shining and falling.
I read the Sermon on the Mount in the same direction. The command not to judge questions the very standard by which one says, ‘That person is evil, so I will judge him.’ The claim that sun and rain do not choose people according to good and evil can be read to mean that nature contains none of the moral divisions human beings construct. Unlike the God of the Old Testament, who burns disobedient people and cities, the Jesus of this passage speaks of a God closer to a god of nature and makes us reconsider our hasty judgments.
Yet religious people today discard that question and devote themselves to condemning others. They read that homosexuality is bad in a Christian text and never ask whether it is actually bad; instead, they use their standard to remove a speck from someone else’s eye. Jesus told them first to remove the enormous beam from their own eye, but they become people with closed eyes shouting at those whose eyes are open that they are blind. They never examine their own belief and superstition, yet set out to correct everyone else.
I cited the political agitation of Segero Church in Busan and Jeon Kwang-hoon as examples. People hear shouted claims about China and fraudulent elections, put on tinted glasses, and believe them without checking whether they are true. There is no questioning, verification, or connection to a broader network of information. The attitude that says, ‘A pastor said it, so I must follow’ remains superstitious even when it bears the name of religion. A teaching that began in questions becomes an answer sheet for political hatred.
Whom Did the Kalama Sutta Tell Us to Believe?
“Every śramaṇa who comes to this village says that his teaching is right. Whose words are right, and whom should we believe and follow?”
The Kalama Sutta also begins with a question. Various śramaṇas come to a village, each declaring that his own teaching is true and the others are wrong. Confused, the Kalamas ask the Buddha whose words are right and whom they should believe and follow. Whether this event happened exactly as told or was composed later is not the central issue here. What matters is that a Buddhist text places this question at the beginning of its teaching.
If we turn the Buddha’s answer into ‘This time, believe only the Buddha,’ we destroy the power of the Kalama Sutta. Together with dependent origination, the most important Buddhist attitude is not to believe and follow anything merely because of authority. Believing what one does not know is superstition. Yet we cannot easily escape by saying that belief is fine if we know, because the knowledge we think we possess may itself be an illusion. Books and scriptures, teachers and professors, monks and YouTubers—and my own words as well—must all be questioned.
This questioning is not aimed only outward. Why was I offended today? Why do I want that object? Why did desire lead me to speak in that way? Where did I learn the good and evil, right and wrong, that I now take for granted? Do I truly know them? If one is to change from an existing habit, a doubt must arise first. Merely memorizing answers does not let one question one’s thinking or observe oneself.
Socratic Maieutics and the Awakening One Gives Birth to Oneself
“I neither know nor think that I know.”
Socrates’s statement contains deep reflection on what it means to know. He was tried and killed on charges of denying the gods, corrupting the young, and confusing morality. Yet many Sophists in Greece were already debating gods and morality. Socrates protested that he was not the only one saying such things, so why was he alone made a criminal? What matters is not that he manufactured another doctrine and implanted it in people. It is that he repeatedly asked questions until the other person could see the contradictions and gaps in his own thinking.
That is why his method is called maieutics, the art of the midwife. One might ask what sort of child a person who is not pregnant is supposed to deliver, but the thing born here is one’s own thought. Passing through the pain of questions, one sees the problem oneself, breaks the rigid frame oneself, and emerges from it. No one hands over an answer on one’s behalf; reflection is born from within. Questioning is not a technique for forcibly inserting awakening but a way to help a doubt already stirring within someone come to birth.
This also explains why questions spread so widely around the sixth through fourth centuries BCE. Once a serious question arises, it is difficult to hide. Even if power suppresses speech and the established order presses down, the question ‘Is that really so?’ passes to others. In a place where people know how to question, someone who insists without grounds that only he is right cannot easily survive debate. Skeptics and Sophists, the refutations of the śramaṇas, Confucius’s counterquestions, and the Buddha’s teaching all display that power.
What Did Gyeongheo See for the First Time Before Death?
I used the story of the Seon master Gyeongheo to show the moment when a question enters one’s life from the realm of knowledge. Many people in Korean Seon Buddhism and the Jogye Order today claim to carry Gyeongheo’s lineage, but I do not simply believe those genealogical claims. Nor am I trying to pass judgment on whether he was truly awakened. What matters here is not the legend about which hwadu he held or which sentence caused enlightenment, but where his question arose.
Gyeongheo is said to have memorized the Diamond Sutra fluently from a young age and lectured on it to others. He would have skillfully explained that one must let go of appearances, reciting, ‘All conditioned appearances are illusory; if one sees that all appearances are not appearances, one sees the Tathagata.’ Then one day, while traveling into a city to meet his teacher, he encountered an epidemic and saw people lying dead. This was not death in a book. It was death directly before him, accompanied by a fear that froze his body.
In that moment, scriptural knowledge did not automatically make him wise. Seeing his own inability to take another step, an inward question finally arose: What had I actually known? He had explained the Diamond Sutra to others, but now saw that he knew nothing about his own mind and fear, life and death. He stopped on the road to his teacher, turned back, and shut himself in a small room.
The decisive matter is not the particular hwadu he is said to have taken up afterward. It is that death in the real world gave rise to questions deep in his chest: What is this? Why do I react this way? What are life and death? What should I do? Hearing ‘everything is made by mind’ or ‘non-discriminating wisdom’ a hundred or a thousand times cannot replace that question. Practice begins when words once directed at others are turned inward and one starts observing one’s own response. I understand Buddhism as the process in which one’s own question breaks one’s own frame and comes out through it.
Are the Confucian Sage and Gentleman the Same as the Buddhist Buddha and Arahant?
We can now return to the second of the initial questions. I have not studied the Confucian sage and gentleman deeply, so I will not define them dogmatically. From my brief examination, the sage is sometimes depicted as a person regarded as a sage from birth or as a perfected model difficult for ordinary people to imitate, while the gentleman is presented as an ideal character that a human being should cultivate. In that respect, they may resemble the Buddhist Buddha and arahant as images of ideal humanity.
Confucianism also has the strength of reflecting on one’s life and mind and trying to enact that reflection in ordinary life. In later periods, under strong Buddhist influence, it developed further questions and theories, and Joseon scholars thought deeply about what a ruler and gentleman should be and how cultivation should be practiced in actual life. Its combination of inward reflection with everyday practice can appear strongly Buddhist. We should neither isolate Confucianism’s bad side and denounce it nor inflate only its good side. Confucianism and Buddhism influenced each other within the same society, even as they sometimes fought fiercely.
Yet to my eyes, the emphasis differs. Confucianism tends to place greater weight on roles, morality, and proper conduct: how rulers, teachers, parents, children, men, and women should behave. Even when it asks what makes a gentleman, it can easily seek the answer within already given ideas of goodness, law, and the ideal person. The path of Buddha and arahant as I describe it places more weight on questioning those very goods, laws, roles, and ideals, and on seeing the frame that grasps them. The two are therefore not wholly unrelated, but it is also difficult to call them the same image.
When Confucianism hardens in the wrong way, it becomes a world of authoritarian elders declaring that this is how things have always had to be. Buddhism can harden in exactly the same way. If Buddha becomes an answer sheet about a perfected superhuman and an arahant becomes someone whose questions have ended, Buddhism ceases to be wisdom that sees reality and becomes another frame of authority. The difference does not lie in the label. It lies in whether one continues to question and break one’s frame, or uses the sage’s name to impose another frame.
A Religion That Stops Questions Becomes an Authoritarian ‘Old-Timer Religion’
Much of Buddhism today has become an authoritarian old-timer religion. It does not help people ask questions, but sells answers: ‘Believe and follow,’ ‘Pray this way and your wish will come true,’ and ‘The Buddha is mysterious and supreme.’ If people call on Amitabha, Avalokitesvara, Maitreya, or the mountain spirit in order to gain something, and that practice hardens without questioning and observation, it is not an inch different from another cult. A believer in Christian superstition, a believer in Buddhist superstition, and a follower of a cult leader differ only in their object; they are alike in believing what they do not know and refusing to question it.
Hearing the traditional rule that boys and girls should not sit together after age seven countless times does not make it an eternal truth. We must ask why such a rule arose, what it was meant to protect at that time, and whether it remains right today. The same applies to people who cling to non-answers such as ‘If you have no discrimination, you are awakened’ and then declare themselves enlightened. An awakening that never asks what was awakened, how one’s life changed, or how one responds to actual suffering is empty talk.
Monks, professors, and Buddhist YouTubers are not exempt. If anything, teaching people to believe and follow while blocking questions in the name of Buddhism is even more un-Buddhist. A genuine Buddhist time is one in which we question one another, question ourselves, and use those questions to see our own frames. Questions are not decoration. They are the most important path out of superstition.
After speaking for nearly an hour, I also wondered whether my voice had been so even that it sounded as though I were putting the viewers to sleep. I had not paused deliberately to give them room to think and had simply kept talking by myself; I laughed that speaking for an hour in something that was not quite a real conversation was impressive in its own way. That self-mockery, too, came from my wish for an actual exchange rather than a one-way lecture.
Questions Must Lead to Social Practice
The Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice and Buddhism’s Inadequate Voice
Near the end of the broadcast, a viewer said he was participating in a Mass and march organized by the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice in front of the Constitutional Court. I do not regard the Catholic Church as a whole as progressive. It is broadly quite conservative, and the Association for Justice is a minority rather than a majority representing all Catholics. Even so, I said that it has played an admirable role by stepping forward when the country faces a serious problem, asking questions, acting on those questions, and giving society a clear voice.
There are also Buddhist organizations and monks who participated in Yadanbeopseok, along with other conscientious people in the Buddhist community. It would be wrong to say that they do not exist at all. Yet compared with the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice, Buddhism is severely lacking in visible speech and action that ordinary citizens can recognize when a major crisis occurs. It is regrettable and frustrating that Buddhism remains silent despite having ample resources with which to speak about reality.
I hope that Barobul Buddhism may someday have such a gathering as well. But I do not want an organization in which I stand at the center and command everyone to follow me. The people who gather around the channel should discuss and deliberate with one another, converse with me as well, and decide on a shared direction from which to speak on social issues. If we speak of questions while creating an organization that follows only a leader’s answers, we betray ourselves from the beginning.
If We Understand Dependent Origination, We Cannot Ignore Society and the State
Social participation is not something outside Buddhism. We live within conditions and relationships linking us to family, community, state, nature, and the world. When the country sways, the people aboard that ship sway as well; if the ship sinks, they fall into the water together. When a family goes wrong, it affects me, and the failures of society also change my life. We should not treat this through a divisive logic that separates individual and society, but see through dependent origination how far the extension of ‘I’ reaches.
We therefore cannot call the attempt to make only one’s own mind comfortable the whole of practice. We cannot live rightly while pretending not to see that the society to which we are connected is moving in the wrong direction. If one’s question is genuine, it moves toward the problems of the relational network in which one lives and continues into discussion, public speech, and action. Social participation is not political activity added onto Buddhism; it is one way of accepting dependent origination in reality.
Criticism of the National Monks’ Convention and the Jogye Order
I cited the National Monks’ Convention held shortly before a presidential election as an event through which I learned a great deal about the reality of Korean Buddhism. The convention had an enormous effect on society and the election. Monks, Buddhist organizations, and public figures who opposed its direction should therefore have stepped forward to question and criticize it clearly. Yet when I saw such an irrational event proceed openly without meaningful internal resistance, I felt that Korean Buddhism had become a ‘heaven of superstition’ bearing only the name Buddhism. Questions had disappeared from a tradition that should question.
I criticized the issue fiercely for a long time, but I have now let go of much of my expectation—so much so that one needs to see some hope of recovery even to find the energy to criticize. I often criticize the Jogye Order because it is large and visible, but I do not claim that the problem belongs to that order alone. Korea has many Buddhist orders and organizations, and the same problem arises wherever questions are blocked and authority demands obedience. I also said that if a monk listening to the broadcast belonged to the Jogye Order, my words might sound hurtful and I felt some regret about that. Yet regret cannot be a reason to soften the criticism. I am not attacking someone’s status; I am challenging conduct that abandons questioning and social responsibility in the name of Buddhism.
Questions Open the Door to Awakening
Zilu’s questions about ghosts and death matter more as questions than as occasions for answers. Do ghosts truly exist? What is death? What is life? Why do I become afraid, desire, and judge in a given situation? Can I hold these questions in my own heart without relying on words heard since childhood, lines from scripture, or the authority of sages and teachers? The moment I return a question once directed at others to myself and observe my own response, the question becomes practice rather than information.
The beginning of the flowering of thought and philosophy was the question ‘Is that really so?’ asked within a world that had simply believed what was handed down. Confucius’s counterquestions, the Kalama Sutta’s challenge, Socratic maieutics, and Gyeongheo’s inward questioning before death all point in the same direction. Do not believe; question. Do not claim to possess the answer; observe within life. And do not imprison the question within your own mind, but carry it into the reality of the family, society, and state to which you are connected.
Awakening is not a state in which questions have ended. It is a process of repeatedly seeing rigid frames through questions, correcting errors, and living differently in the real world. A door does not open unless someone knocks. A question is the key that opens the door of awakening, and Buddhism is the path that does not stop asking.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.