People Who Come from Different Planets
At the beginning of the broadcast, a young viewer said that a search about rebirth had led him to this channel. I was glad that a young person had become interested in Buddhism. Rebirth can comfort people, but it can also work in a deeply harmful way. A wealthy and powerful person can explain present privilege as a reward for good deeds in a previous life. A person in hardship can be taught to blame present suffering on a former life. Rebirth then becomes a device for justifying inequality.
A person who experiences life as a blessing may want to be born and live again, while someone for whom the present life is unbearable may want no next life at all. This difference shows how the same word, rebirth, carries different feelings and meanings for different people. Chapter 3 of The Little Prince shows precisely the misalignment that occurs when different experiences and worldviews meet.
The Mismatch over the Airplane, Rope, and Stake
The pilot says it took a long time to discover where the little prince came from. The prince constantly questions the pilot but rarely answers the pilot’s questions. Seeing an airplane for the first time, he asks what it is. The pilot proudly explains that he can fly, but the little prince laughs when he hears that the pilot fell from the sky and imagines that the pilot also came from another planet. To the pilot, the crash is a matter of life and death. To the prince, the words belong to an entirely different story.
The pilot also offers to draw a rope and stake for tying up the sheep. To someone who raises sheep on Earth, the proposal is obvious: an untethered sheep may wander away and become lost. The little prince laughs. His planet is so small that even if the sheep walks straight ahead, it cannot go far. The pilot unconsciously assumes that the prince’s planet must be as expansive as his own world, while the prince cannot understand why the pilot is proposing such useless objects.
The two exchange the same words without seeing the same world. The pilot’s rope is common sense within his experience and a strange idea on the little prince’s planet. This brief scene compresses the guesses, misunderstandings, illusions, and difficulties of communication that fill everyday life.
We Listen and Judge Through Our Own Images
What Buddhism calls an image is the form arising in the mind, a framework of impressions and judgment. Countless standards live within us: like and dislike, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, law and common sense. Most were formed by the experiences we have had and the information we have received. This is why people develop different feelings and judgments about the same person and event.
One person looks at a politician and says that he committed crimes and must be imprisoned; another says he did nothing wrong. Judgments of Yoon Suk Yeol, Lee Jae-myung, and Kim Moon-soo diverge not because each object is many people but because each observer brings different information, experience, and political position. Communication between men and women can be difficult, but even two men or two women rarely have perfectly matching minds. I cannot simply become the other person’s position. Understanding requires asking whether it may be so, checking what the other meant, and making adjustments together.
Suppose I tell someone to bring wood. Does the person hear that as gathering fuel, cutting a tree into logs with an axe, or collecting small branches that catch fire easily? The answer depends on shared experience. People who have worked together for a long time can understand much through a short phrase. Others imagine different tasks from the same sentence. Language is not a transparent pipe that carries the contents of my mind without alteration.
The Myth of Transmitting the Dharma Without Words
From this point, I criticized the story of the Buddha’s flower sermon and the lineage claimed by Seon Buddhism. We are told that the Buddha held up a flower and smiled, that only Mahakasyapa understood, and that the Dharma was thereby transmitted. Authority is then constructed through a single line of transmission from Indian patriarchs to Bodhidharma, Chinese patriarchs, and eventually a figure in today’s Jogye Order. I regard this as a blatant falsehood.
If a complex understanding could be transmitted completely through one smile, why would the Buddha have needed to speak so much for so long? We should also think critically about claims that the first five monks all became complete arhats after hearing the first teaching, or that groups of 500 and 1,250 people were arhats. Awakening is not receiving a memorized answer the moment one hears words. It means applying an understanding to one’s life and changing mistaken judgments and habits over a long period.
I also referred to the monk Hyangbong’s claim that an awakened person must answer immediately in a Seon exchange. What is communicated merely because one instantly answers “comfortable” when asked what it feels like to take one more step from the top of a hundred-foot pole? If one does not ask what problem the questioner means and cannot know what the other understood, a reflexive reply is not awakening. Striking a staff three times or blinking and assuming that the other understood is not communication. It is two people standing on different planets and speaking only to themselves.
Education That Rewards Fast Memorization and Study That Thinks Slowly
We receive enormous volumes of information from news, politicians, professors, religious figures, books, and videos. We rarely take time to consider what a statement means, why it is made, and what effects it produces. Modern education rewards the student who quickly memorizes the answer and marks it on an exam, rather than the student who stays with one question for days until it becomes clear. The training to skip what one does not know and rapidly solve what one remembers replaces deep inquiry.
We also tend to read a book from beginning to end and then close it. Yet if we remain with the scene of the sheep and stake, the whole problem of communication is present within it. The marriage and family form that appears obvious to me may be very different in another society. Some regard monogamy as natural, some have brothers forming a family with one woman, and some raise children communally. We should not stop after learning that diverse customs exist. We must ask where the standard I regard as the answer came from.
Knowing many terms and books is not awakening. Even one scene or question must be applied to one’s own life. Thought begins when I ask why I am happy or sad, why I regard a choice as obvious, and why I run simply because everyone else is running. Through this lecture, I also examined my own habit of trying to deliver too much information too quickly. When ambition exceeds ability and time, words multiply while the important point fails to arrive. It is better to say less, think deeply about one thing, and exchange questions.
How Should We Understand Venerable Pomnyun’s “Cycle of Pleasure and Pain”?
After the lecture, the viewer asked about Venerable Pomnyun’s explanation of rebirth not as literal death and rebirth but as the repeated cycle of pleasure and pain. This interpretation rejects literal reincarnation and describes how people move between satisfaction and dissatisfaction according to whether desire is fulfilled. When a wish is fulfilled there is sukha; when it is not, there is dukkha. The mind moves between heaven and hell. This is more realistic than the claim that beings literally travel through the six realms, and in that sense it is not a bad interpretation.
A good interpretation, however, remains an interpretation. Because rebirth appears throughout Buddhist scriptures, the inherited concept has been sympathetically reinterpreted to fit impermanence and non-self. Venerable Pomnyun preserves scriptural rebirth by explaining it in modern terms. My position is more direct. I infer that rebirth was not part of the Buddha’s teaching and entered Buddhism after his death.
The reason is the Buddhist foundation of dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self. Everything arises through conditions and changes. No independent, unchanging self or soul can be established. What, then, leaves the body at death and travels into another life? It is difficult for a person who denies an unchanging substance, God, and soul to teach literal rebirth. We cannot establish exactly what the Buddha said, but comparison with the foundation of Buddhism leads me to think it highly likely that he did not teach rebirth. In a sentence, rebirth is not Buddhism to me.
Perfect Equanimity Is Also a Fantasy That Defies Dependent Origination
The cycle of pleasure and pain raises the meaning of liberation again. Is liberation a completely unmoving and equanimous mind, free from every movement between joy and suffering? I do not understand a Buddha as a being with perfect immovability. Such a state is impossible for a human being. The body is constantly affected by environment, food, sleep, and illness. If one has stomach pain, lacks sleep, or develops dementia and loses memory, how could the mind alone remain untouched by every condition?
Buddhism is a religion of wisdom that understands how self and world arise within relationships. We must deeply understand why we are shaken, why emotions change, and how body and mind influence one another. Claiming to possess an entirely unmoving mind shows a failure to understand dependent origination. Scriptures and traditions also contain falsehoods, fiction, and illusion. We must examine them critically rather than believe merely because of the name Buddhism or the authority of a famous monk or professor.
Buddhism, Materialism, and the Rejection of Independent Substance
Finally, the viewer asked whether Buddhism is a form of materialism identical to the position attributed to Ajita Kesakambali. Because his thought survives mainly through opponents rather than his own writings, it is difficult to know exactly what he taught. Accounts of another group can contain the purposes and distortions of the critic. We therefore cannot say that the two positions are entirely the same.
Still, some traditions of wandering philosophers viewed the world as the combination and separation of elements, a view close to materialism. I say that Buddhism also rests on a materialist basis insofar as it rejects an independent, unchanging God and soul and takes dependent origination as foundational. This does not mean denying mental phenomena. Feeling, thought, and suffering clearly occur, but they are not activities of a soul independent of body and environment. They arise as expressions within material conditions and relationships.
The world is neither a perfectly undivided one nor a collection of entirely unrelated twos. Everything affects everything else and temporarily appears in a certain form. If we freeze time and space, a thing looks fixed and separate, but in reality it is a part of continuously changing relationships. Impermanence and non-self follow from this understanding of dependent origination. Just as the little prince and the pilot misunderstood one another through experiences formed on different planets, we speak and judge from our own worlds. Buddhist study begins by seeing this fact and continuing to ask and converse without absolutizing our images.
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