The Essence of Awakening — 21st-Century Arahant, Episode 6

Practice Stops When We Think We Already Know the Answer

Why can someone study and practice Buddhism for years without making progress or awakening? The first obstacle is the conviction that the answer is already known and only needs to be believed and followed. Few Buddhists have never heard of dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self. Dependent arising means that things arise through relationships. What arises within relationships cannot remain permanently identical, and nothing can be isolated as an eternal self. These three expressions point to the same phenomenon.

Being able to recite those definitions, however, is entirely different from awakening. One may explain dependent arising while the fires of greed, anger, ignorance, and conceit continue to burn. Some mistake themselves for awakened people, while others perform awakening as frauds. If the goal is unclear, a practitioner can spend years digging the wrong well.

An awakened person should not be imagined as someone who instantly answers every koan or knows every truth in the universe. An obscure, poetic answer to a riddle does not demonstrate awakening. Such language can fail to communicate anything while allowing the speaker to appear special. The Buddha asked and explained things so that another person could understand. When awakening is equated with incomprehensible wordplay, Buddhism is replaced by mystical fantasy.

In awakening, a question matters more than a ready-made answer.

A Buddha Is Not Someone Who Has Finished Questioning

Human beings have no guarantee that they can know one hundred percent of any ultimate truth. This is why I describe an arahant as “an elementary-school child who knows that he is an elementary-school child,” or more gently, “a person who knows that he is human” and “an animal that knows it is an animal.” A human being must recognize the possibility of not knowing and being deluded. Questions do not disappear from an arahant’s inner life. They continue.

How can a war that kills people on the other side of the world be resolved? How can an aging mother living in poverty be helped to live happily? How can one communicate an insight so that another person can see a problem for themselves? Such questions require continuing observation of the world, one’s mind, and the other person’s situation. The ability to produce a one-line answer immediately is not the point. What matters is living with questions, considering many approaches, and continuing to learn.

A Buddha is not a person who has reached a final stage and knows everything. A Buddha is a person who continues to awaken. Because such a person knows clearly that knowledge is limited, questions continue and the world is observed more carefully. Awakening is therefore not the acquisition of fixed answers but a repeated movement between questioning and recognition.

Stream-Entry: When a Question Changes One’s Actual Life

Buddhism calls entry into the current of awakening the fruit of stream-entry. I describe it as the experience of recognizing that one’s own question and delusion caused suffering, followed by an actual change in life. When one sees what has been grasped and recognizes, “This is why I suffered; I was deluded,” life can change remarkably. A person who has seen one such pattern gains the possibility of resolving other problems in the same way.

My first experience came around my first year at university. I lived in despair and resentment because life did not go as I wished. After being told to reduce my sleep, I forced myself to remain awake and, with nothing else to do, picked up a Buddhist book from my father’s shelf. It began with suffering and explained that the world is one way while we suffer because we wish it were otherwise.

The explanation that we wish not to part from people we love but do part, and wish not to meet people we dislike but meet them again, struck me. I had changed elementary schools twice and repeatedly left friends behind. I did not want to part, but in reality I did. The world was not wrong for changing. The problem was my wish that a changing world should not change.

I applied the question to one episode of my life after another. As a child, I had wished not to grow up, but I was already aging. My family was poor, but I resented my home and father because I wished it were not poor. I resented having to work while other students socialized. Poverty was a reality, however, and wishing against it could not suddenly make the family rich. If I wanted wealth, I needed to look for ways to earn money. Instead of taking the action reality required, I had been resenting reality for differing from my wish.

I recalled past scenes and repeatedly asked, “Was reality like this while I wished it were otherwise?” Each time the question fit a scene, tears came. My life seemed to pass before me, and I saw how my own thoughts had added suffering. I call this my entry into the stream. For roughly six months to a year afterward, I lived with a peace that felt almost like the first meditative absorption continuing in ordinary life. Yet that single insight did not solve everything. We awaken only as deeply as our questions go.

Knowledge becomes a possibility of awakening when we apply it to our own life and ask, “Is this really so?”

Finding the Root of the Desire for Recognition at a Basketball Game

My second experience occurred around my third year at university during an interdepartmental basketball competition. I was not active in my department and lacked the skill to be selected. At first I cheered with everyone else. Then the thought arose that I also wanted to play and resented not being included. My mood became depressed, jealous, and disappointed.

On the bus home, I did not let that change of emotion pass unnoticed. Why had my mood changed? Why had jealousy appeared? I kept returning to the precise moment of change. Eventually I saw that I wanted to look impressive and receive praise. Because I felt I had instead been treated as insignificant, I suffered.

Following the question deeper brought back memories of exaggerating stories to friends: claiming to have done thirty-five push-ups after doing only twenty-five, making myself appear more impressive than I was. The root reached back to elementary school, when I had never received an award and envied classmates who were called to the front and applauded. After my mother told me that good grades could earn awards in middle school, I studied every day at a library. I still remembered the powerful pleasure of receiving my first award and applause.

I had wanted to appear outstanding and receive praise for many years. That desire had influenced my speech, study, actions, and relationships, but I had not clearly seen the pattern until I observed the small emotional change at the basketball game. Recognizing how long that thought had ruled me delivered a powerful shock and brought tears again. Awakening is not necessarily a distant mystical event. It is seeing clearly a pattern of mind that has governed one’s life.

A Memorized Answer Is Not Understanding a Pattern

Memorizing that one plus one equals two differs from understanding addition. Once the principle is understood, one can calculate unfamiliar sums. Likewise, reading the sentence “things arise through relationships” does not mean one has seen the world moving through dependent arising. One must see how conditions combine to produce emotions and actions in reality and be able to apply the pattern to other situations.

In my first experience, I saw the pattern in which wishing reality to be otherwise produced suffering. In the second, I saw how the desire to impress and receive praise had long guided speech and action. Memories of intense emotional moments remained, so I could apply the same question to those scenes and test the pattern.

Buddhism is an understanding of patterns in mind, thought, and the world. If knowing impermanence has no effect on one’s conduct, one does not yet know impermanence. If one can explain non-self but cannot address one’s own problem, nothing has been gained from the term. Life changes only when recognition penetrates deeply enough to be applied to an actual problem.

To awaken is to recognize a pattern with mind and life, then become able to apply it to real problems.

Archimedes and Eureka: Only a Question Turns an Event into an Answer

The famous story of Archimedes illustrates how questions make insight possible. Whether every detail is historically true is not important here. A ruler wanted to know whether a crown had been made entirely from the supplied gold without damaging it. Metals of equal weight can have different volumes, but the problem was how to measure the volume of an irregular crown.

Archimedes carried that question. One day he entered a bath and noticed the ordinary event of water overflowing. He recognized that an immersed object displaces water equal to its volume. By comparing the water displaced by the crown and by an equal weight of pure gold, one could determine whether another metal had been mixed in. Thus, according to the story, he cried, “Eureka—I found it.”

Countless people had entered baths and seen water overflow without discovering a principle of volume and density. They did not carry that question. Without an inner question, even an event capable of supplying the answer passes outside our concern. With an urgent question, an ordinary scene can become the condition that reveals a principle.

Pretended Knowledge and Arrogance Block Questions

If someone reads about rebirth, precepts, dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self and concludes, “I know all that,” questions cease. Why would a person ask about what they believe they already know? Unless one asks why anger arose, why depression appeared, why the fires of greed, anger, ignorance, and conceit burn, and why they can go out, neither an answer nor awakening can emerge.

Human civilization has also developed by discovering principles through questions. Buddhist awakening is no different. Even if the Buddha’s insight is handed down in sentences, it remains a memorized answer unless its principle is understood and applied to one’s own life. A long-time practitioner filled with arrogance, who speaks carelessly even about facts they do not know and claims that awakening requires an instant answer to everything, has moved away from questioning.

The closer one comes to Buddhahood, the more humility grows, because one’s ignorance becomes clearer. Questions must accumulate in the heart for discussion and further learning to remain possible. When one is intoxicated with pretending to know, genuine awakening cannot arrive.

Question Changes in My Mind, Not Merely Problems Belonging to Others

The talk recounts the experience of a monk who had learned many practices in Southeast Asia, including contemplation before an actual skeleton, yet said that none had struck him deeply. Back in Korea during a retreat, he saw the back of a fellow monk who had entered monastic life with him. Old thoughts and emotions about that person suddenly arose. At the instant he asked “Why?” he discovered the attitude he had carried, and something seemed to shatter.

Two common features appear. First, there must be a question, whether it has been carried for years or arises through observing a moment. It must be followed rather than discarded. Second, the question must concern oneself. We can empathize with a thorn in another person’s hand or throat, but we do not feel it as urgently as our own. Wars in Ukraine or between Israel and Hamas are horrific, yet those outside them do not feel exactly what people at the scene feel. This is part of the human condition.

What we can feel most clearly is a change in our own emotion and thought. If it is not observed, a condition for awakening passes. Conditions constantly arrive, but whether they become insight depends on whether we notice and question them.

Wonhyo’s Skull Water: Observation Joined with a Question

The famous story of Wonhyo and Uisang traveling toward China to meet Xuanzang shows the same structure. Thirsty at night in a dark cave, Wonhyo found water, drank it with pleasure, and returned to sleep. In the morning he saw that it had been stagnant water in a skull. The thought of filth made him vomit, until he remembered how delicious the same water had seemed the night before.

At that instant he saw that the water had not changed; a change in his own thought and mind had produced entirely different behavior. Scriptural statements about the importance of mind and the absence of fixed purity and impurity connected with his own experience and began to make sense. Uisang was in the same place but was not the one who drank and vomited, so the event could not strike him in the same way. Whether the story is historical cannot be known, but it clearly illustrates why questioning one’s own experience and emotional change matters.

Our minds and emotions display themselves 365 days a year. We are simply often not watching.

Anger, depression, resentment, pleasure, and every other shift reveal what is present within. Observation and questioning must work together if we are to see what we have mistaken and be released from it. Removing the thorn under one’s own fingernail is not a selfish rejection of the wider world. A person who can truly resolve the pattern of a personal problem gains the capacity to address thorns in the world as well.

The Question Lodged in My Heart Matters More Than a Koan Assigned by Someone Else

A story about the Zen master Gyeongheo tells of a young monk skilled in lecturing on scripture who passed through a city devastated by an epidemic. Although he had often taught non-attachment, he could say nothing before people actually dying. He turned back from his journey. The urgent question exposed within himself reportedly led him to practice until a verse finally helped him resolve it. We cannot know whether he truly awakened, but the important point is that the question was not an abstraction about other people’s deaths. It was his own problem revealed by reality.

I also criticize a story in which Seongcheol refused to hear another person’s koan and insisted that he would assign one. How can someone else’s question automatically become an urgent knot in my heart? If hearing “Who are you?” genuinely pierces a person, it may become that person’s question. But if an old koan chosen from a book is neither puzzling nor urgent, it is unsurprising that one cannot hold it no matter how hard one tries.

A hwadu must be the thorn in my own hand or throat. I must ask “Why?” about what shakes me today, what does not work, the moment my emotion changes, and the immediate problem I cannot resolve. Then the question becomes urgent, observation continues, and recognition can transform the rest of life. The essence of awakening is not possessing every answer. It is observing one’s life, following one’s own question to its end, and recognizing patterns of mind and world one by one.