The Question: Have Greed, Anger, and Delusion Completely Disappeared?
This discussion began with a comment under my video criticizing Dharma teacher Kim Tae-wan. That criticism brought an experience I had not expected. I saw that more people in Korean Buddhism than I had assumed were seriously asking what becoming a Buddha and awakening mean. When I harshly criticized figures such as monk Go Gwang, Dr. Jeon Hyeon-su, monk Jinje, monk Mungwang, and Yoon Hong-sik, meaningful conversation with their followers was rare. Yet among people who had listened to Kim Tae-wan for years, some looked beyond my tone, considered the substance of the criticism, and seriously engaged my point that an experience by itself does not produce wisdom.
When criticizing someone, I try to distinguish criticism of a claim from an insult to the person. Of course, when I say, “That behavior is fascistic,” or “That claim is a fraud,” listeners may feel that I am attacking the person. In my earlier video, the profanity and force of my criticism sometimes prevented the argument from getting through. Someone who knowingly sells falsehood should be criticized plainly, but when the speaker is also trapped in an illusion, I should expose the structure of that illusion more precisely.
In that comment exchange, one practitioner said that he had undergone several experiences while studying under Kim Tae-wan. I never denied that such experiences occur. When people practice Buddhism for a long time and let go of habitual thoughts, they can have experiences unlike their ordinary condition. The problem begins when they call that experience awakening or Buddhahood and assume that wisdom comes from it. Another commenter asked the practitioner, “Have greed, anger, and delusion completely disappeared?” He answered that they had not. That question opened today’s discussion.
The question “Have greed, anger, and delusion completely disappeared?” sounds natural, but it already contains an ancient misunderstanding of what a Buddha is.
Their Extinction Is a Myth Hardened over Two Thousand Years
Anyone who has studied Buddhism has repeatedly heard that an arhat or Buddha is someone in whom the three poisons of greed, anger, and delusion have been completely extinguished. That is why people ask an apparently accomplished practitioner whether those three have vanished. I call this conventional belief a myth. Its traces were already present when the literature was being written down, so I regard it as a misunderstanding at least two thousand years old and perhaps older.
Greed, anger, and delusion have an earlier context. They must be read within the long sequence of the Atthakavagga, the Chapter of Eights in the Sutta Nipāta. The wisdom of those verses was compressed into the fourfold formula greed, anger, delusion, and conceit; later conceit was dropped and only the three poisons remained. The context disappeared in that compression. I cannot explain the entire Chapter of Eights in an hour or two. My point here is that we should not treat these forces as poisons to eradicate, but understand what they indicate and how they operate in our lives.
When a teaching is compressed into a term, its historical questions vanish. We no longer ask what kind of desire was called greed, which anger was being examined, what was considered foolish, or why the image of being highest was rejected. Greed then becomes a state without any desire, anger a state without any anger, and delusion a state without any ignorance. We begin to imagine a perfect being in whom everything human has disappeared and call that being a Buddha.
Greed, anger, and delusion are not poisons to annihilate. We must recover their context, understand them, and observe how they operate in life.
Religions Embellish and Deify Their Lineages
The first force that turned the Buddha into a perfect being was deification. Religions and schools embellish their predecessors when they want to advertise their lineage as supreme. To establish the legitimacy of Chinese Chan, Heze Shenhui elevated the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, and the lineage then had to extend back through Bodhidharma. Yet because there is no firm evidence that the historical Buddha appointed a successor, stories appeared in which the teaching was transmitted mind to mind to Mahākāśyapa.
The flower sermon and the three occasions of mind-to-mind transmission are representative myths. One story says that when the Buddha held up a flower, the assembly failed to understand but Mahākāśyapa smiled and received the Dharma without words. Another says that after the Buddha died, he extended his feet from the coffin for the late-arriving Mahākāśyapa. These stories legitimate a lineage. The fact that accounts first gave different numbers of Indian patriarchs before settling on twenty-eight reveals the same process. I see these narratives not as history but as later propaganda for orthodoxy.
Chan is not unique in doing this. Families embellish ancestors to claim noble descent, and religions elevate their founder above rival gods. In Mahāyāna scriptures, light pours from the Buddha’s forehead, flowers rain down, and gods descend. Even the name Avalokiteśvara includes īśvara, the idea of autonomous lordship that conflicts with dependent arising. Theravāda texts also deify the Buddha when Śakra comes to report events to him. Neither northern nor southern traditions are free of this tendency.
The desire to preserve belief in the Buddha’s supremacy turns a human Buddha into a perfect transcendent being, and that deification then distorts the aim of practice.
An Arhat’s Nocturnal Emission and the Birth of a Perfect Transcendent Being
Differences in discipline were not the only reason Buddhist schools divided; they also disagreed about the arhat. A story about an arhat having a nocturnal emission provoked debate over whether a fully awakened person could still possess sexual desire. One side allowed that a bodily human being could undergo a physiological event, while the other insisted that an arhat must be entirely without sexuality. The image of Buddha and arhat had already been raised so high that this disagreement became a sectarian issue.
List the qualities of the deified Buddha and the figure becomes clear: an utterly immovable mind, no desire and not even sexuality, no anger or fluctuation of emotion, no ignorance, and complete knowledge of truth. This is not a wise human being but a deity. Carried further, it approaches a stone without sensation, desire, or feeling.
Human beings exist through dependent arising. Because causes and conditions affect us, we change and are impermanent. A mind untouched by anything directly contradicts dependent arising and impermanence. If a living person were unaffected by every condition, that person could not even be moved by another’s suffering. The image of the perfect Buddha is not a conclusion of Buddhist insight but a fantasy that ignores Buddhism’s most basic principles.
When a being without sexuality, emotion, or disturbance is called Buddha, Buddhism no longer speaks of human wisdom but manufactures a transcendent god.
Why Was Conceit the First Element to Disappear?
The several contexts of the Chapter of Eights were later compressed into greed, anger, delusion, and conceit. Conceit here means the thought that I am supreme, the image of the highest, and the pursuit of perfection. The Chapter of Eights tells us not to become trapped by superiority and not to pursue pāram, the perfect farther shore. Later Buddhism, however, wanted to proclaim that the Buddha had attained unsurpassed complete awakening, the highest awakening with nothing above it.
Could such a religion comfortably retain the teaching “Abandon the thought of being highest”? To proclaim that the Buddha is supreme, that our teaching is the best, and that it possesses truth above every other religion, conceit becomes inconvenient. I therefore speculate that conceit may have been dropped first as the fourfold formula became the three poisons. This is my inference from the direction of deification and the change in the formula, not an established documentary account of exactly why the word disappeared.
We must distinguish speculation from context we can identify. We cannot conclusively prove why conceit was dropped, but that does not change the fact that the formula was compressed from the contexts of the Chapter of Eights and that those contexts are needed to recover its meaning. When one merely memorizes the three poisons, one repeats a doctrine of extinction without knowing why conceit vanished or what each element originally challenged.
My claim that conceit may have disappeared because it was inconvenient for deification is a conjecture; the loss produced by memorizing three poisons without their context is not.
Compressed Non-Self Became a State to Be Attained
Non-self shows how a compressed term creates misunderstanding when its context disappears. People take non-self to be a condition attained by the Buddha and say, “I have not yet become non-self,” or “I still have an idea of myself.” They try to experience a state of non-self and erase every distinction between self and other. Non-self then ceases to be something understood and becomes a non-discriminating condition to acquire.
Non-self translates anātman. We must first understand ātman. Some ancient Indian traditions regarded the body and world as māyā, illusion, and posited behind them a true self that was eternal, unchanging, and survived death. Gautama Siddhārtha lived within a culture of wandering seekers who pursued such transcendent reality. Anātman is the turn that says there is no such ātman.
Non-self therefore is neither a state in which I disappear nor a mental condition unable to distinguish me from another. It is the understanding that there is no eternal self continuing independently after death, no substance outside dependent arising and impermanence. It also warns against casually positing an unobservable soul and postmortem rebirth. Once the historical background is erased and only two Chinese characters remain, non-self itself becomes a new transcendent desire.
Non-self is not a “state without me.” It is the understanding of anātman: there is no eternal, independent ātman.
Self, Person, Being, and Life Are Four Kinds of Enduring Self
The Diamond Sutra’s four images—self, person, sentient being, and life—suffered the same misunderstanding through compression and translation. They are commonly explained as the image of me, the image of another, the image of sentient beings, and the image of longevity. People then assume the sutra commands the elimination of every distinction between self and other. The Indic terms, however, all point to versions of a self that persists through death.
Kumārajīva’s “image of self” renders ātman; “person” renders pudgala; “sentient being” renders sattva; and “life” renders jīva. Xuanzang, perhaps recognizing that the Chinese terms for self and person would be read as me and another, transliterated the second as pudgala and rendered sattva as a being with sentience. The terms come from different settings—Brahmanical ātman, the pudgala of certain Buddhist schools, sattva as in bodhisattva, and the Jain jīva—but all concern an enduring self.
Jainism divides the soul, jīva, from the material realm, ajīva, and says that karma adheres to the jīva like matter and determines rebirth. Read against that background, the four images do not mean “Never use the idea of me.” They tell us not to hold images of an independent self that continues after death under names such as ātman, pudgala, sattva, or jīva. This points in the same direction as non-self, not toward non-discriminating consciousness.
The four images do not abolish the ordinary distinction between self and other. They challenge enduring selves constructed by several traditions.
The Root of Delusion Is the Transcendent Desire for Pāram
Once delusion is reduced to a single character meaning stupidity, it produces the strange command “Eliminate foolishness completely.” No one asks what was called foolish; delusion is treated like a poison that can be removed. In the Chapter of Eights, however, the root of delusion is pursuit of pāram—the desire to move beyond the worldly and become something perfect, eternal, and unchanging.
Ora indicates this side and ordinary worldly desires; pāram indicates the farther side, what lies beyond, and what is highest. Translations such as this shore and the other shore or this world and the next conceal the historical tension. A renunciant abandoned desires for money, status, and sex on this side, only to pursue escape from aging, illness, death, and rebirth, immortality, and absolute purity on the farther side. Worldly desire was exchanged for transcendent desire.
The Chapter of Eights tells us to become free from both ora and pāram. Do not drown in worldly desire, but do not pursue unobservable immortality, complete purity, or a godlike state of knowing everything. Understanding delusion does not mean obtaining perfect intelligence that can never be foolish. It means seeing where my desire for transcendence and perfection came from.
More important than “escaping delusion” is understanding what was called foolish: the transcendent desire for perfection and immortality called pāram.
What Was Gautama Siddhārtha’s Asceticism Seeking?
Tradition says Gautama Siddhārtha was dissatisfied with his teachers’ attainments of the sphere of nothingness and neither perception nor non-perception and entered extreme asceticism. He starved until only bones remained, suppressing hunger and bodily desire. Why would he go that far? He was not merely seeking a comfortable mind. The sequence makes sense if he was seeking transcendence beyond life and rebirth by stopping the body’s every demand and action.
Jain practice helps us understand this background. Jainism taught that both good and bad karma adhere to jīva. Good karma raises it to a higher world and bad karma pulls it lower, but both continue rebirth. Practitioners therefore sought to stop every action and finally even stopped eating, dying by fasting in order to reach complete purity to which no karma could adhere. They believed this liberated jīva from rebirth.
Siddhārtha abandoned the fast, and the five practitioners left because they thought he had fallen away. He ate Sujātā’s food and regained his strength. That change in direction matters. He saw that treating the body as an enemy in pursuit of absolute purity and deathlessness was not the answer. If we omit this and once again make the Buddha a transcendent being, later Buddhism merely repeats the road he abandoned.
Siddhārtha turned not only from worldly life but also from transcendent asceticism that denied the body in pursuit of pāram.
Later Buddhism Reestablished Pāramitā and Unsurpassed Awakening
Later Buddhism nevertheless restored pāram as its goal. Prajñāpāramitā and the six pāramitās came to indicate crossing beyond and transcendence. A Buddha was defined as one who had perfected the pāramitās and attained anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi, unsurpassed complete awakening. The Chapter of Eights had warned against the highest and the farther shore, but the direction was reversed.
This problem is not limited to Mahāyāna. Nikāya texts also contain many passages deifying the Buddha as one who completely passed beyond rebirth and the cycle of life and extinguished every defilement. In the Indian context, a being entirely free of rebirth was effectively a god. Buddhism denied gods in one breath and attached every divine quality to the Buddha in the next.
Once we forget what delusion originally challenged, we begin pursuing the very perfect truth and absolute purity that were its object. The claim “I have completely eliminated delusion” can itself become the conceit that one knows everything. In attempting to make the Buddha the highest being, Buddhism lost the questions posed by both conceit and delusion.
When Buddhism established pāram and unsurpassed awakening as its final goal, wisdom that challenged transcendence was reversed into a doctrine worshiping a transcendent being.
The Root of Anger Is Examining My Certainty That I Am Right
If anger is reduced to an emotion that must always be eliminated, human feeling becomes an enemy. The context in the Chapter of Eights is more specific. People with good intentions and people with bad intentions both criticize others and become angry. Why? Both are certain that they are right. Anger rests on the thought that I know the complete truth.
Practice with anger therefore does not mean suppressing every rise of anger and becoming someone without feeling. I must ask what I believe is right, what supports that judgment, and which conditions and perspectives I may have missed. Skeptical thought is necessary: I must ask again whether what I know is absolute truth. If I am wrong, I must be able to revise my judgment.
Nor does this mean every anger is bad. There are times to be angry at war, massacre, violence, and injustice. If a thug attacks my family, watching without disturbance is not compassion. The mind may need to judge coolly while anger motivates action to stop violence and protect a victim. A fixed command never to do something under any condition is not Buddhism, which examines conditions.
Do not indiscriminately eradicate anger. Ask where certainty of being right came from, and at times become angry in order to stop injustice.
Perfect Equanimity Denies Both Dependent Arising and Compassion
The ideal of a perfectly immovable and equanimous mind has the same problem. A human being who arises and changes according to conditions cannot possess a mind affected by nothing. If such a condition were possible, it would resemble a dead stone. A person whose thought and feeling had completely stopped could neither feel another’s suffering nor move to help. Compassion arises when suffering moves the mind and we discriminate its causes.
I know from experience that deep concentration can make a person cold. When each thought is allowed to pass without grasping, emotional movement decreases and the mind becomes comfortable. This can be a useful rest for someone in distress, and it is not inherently bad. Yet loving-kindness, compassion, and the wisdom to solve a concrete problem do not automatically emerge from that condition.
Calling meditative quiet complete awakening exaggerates an experience. The human brain and body hear music, retrieve memories, and react to unexpected events. We cannot initialize memory and permanently delete every desire and emotion. Desire or anger can also arise in a Buddha. What matters is observing it carefully and judging again whether it is pointless greed or justified anger.
Practice is not becoming an unmoved stone. Wisdom observes why the mind moves and transforms that movement into compassionate action.
Practice Begins Only after We Release the Perfect Image of Buddha
Our minds carry an image of Buddha built from layers of scriptures and teachers: no desire, anger, sexuality, or distinction between self and other; knowledge of every truth; and permanent absorption in everyday samādhi. We have never seen the historical Buddha or heard his voice, yet we accept that image as fact and try to become that perfect state ourselves.
I did the same. When the mind became comfortable and I underwent unusual experiences, I wondered whether this was the Buddha’s condition. I kept trying to become a Buddha without knowing what a Buddha was. Yet perfection cannot exist in Buddhism. Perfect immovability and absolute non-discrimination are anti-Buddhist goals for a dependently arisen human being. Only when I doubt the image I held can questions begin.
Practice is not erasing greed, anger, and delusion until the head is empty. It is questioning, observing, and reflecting on how I and the world operate, what I mistake, and why I suffer. Nor does it end with introspection. We must also observe the conditions of family, society, politics, and nature. A practice that abandons observation and thought to repeat a state is another transcendent desire for pāram.
Releasing the image of Buddha opens the real questions of practice: What is a Buddha, why do I suffer, and how does the world operate?
Greed, Anger, and Delusion Are Objects of Inquiry, Not Eradication
This does not mean talk of greed, anger, and delusion is useless. It is valuable when it helps me examine desire, look back at why I am angry, and ask what I foolishly pursue. But if at the end I cling to the image that all three must disappear completely for me to be a Buddha, I betray that observation. The goal of total extinction creates another desire to deny and transcend myself.
When greed arises, I examine what I regard as good, what I want, and why. When anger arises, I look at the standard of rightness I am holding and whether it fits actual conditions. To examine delusion, I ask whether I seek images of pāram such as complete purity, immortality, and omniscience. To examine conceit, I check the arrogance that my teaching and judgment are highest. None of this is deletion; it is the work of understanding.
Human beings rejoice, grieve, cry, laugh, become angry, and feel depressed. Being dragged endlessly by desire and anger creates problems, but the existence of emotion is not itself poison. When we stop trying to erase feeling and instead observe its conditions and consequences, room for choice appears. Greed, anger, and delusion then cease to be substances cut out of a person and become living material for wisdom.
The three poisons are not three substances to cut away. They become material for wisdom when we examine what we desire, why we are angry, and which perfection we believe in.
Even the Image of Non-Discrimination Must Be Discriminated in Reality
The discussion after the main talk returned to objections about non-discriminating practice. Saying that nothing is inherently dirty or pure may let us brush off a rice cake dropped on the floor and eat it. It can break an excessive fixation on purity. Yet saying nothing is dirty and feeding a child food covered in filth is not wisdom. We must distinguish what can be eaten from what is dangerous.
Buddhism tells us to release an image for a specific reason: because bondage to that concept drives us in a false direction. But if we become attached to non-image, to the claim that there are no images, we are bound to the opposite. Neither perception nor non-perception can therefore be read as refusing attachment even to non-perception. Do not absolutize images, but do not make the absence of discrimination into an absolute state either.
Without discrimination, how can we choose food, protect a child, or judge war and violence? A teacher who says, “Live without thought; do not listen elsewhere; follow only me,” while presenting himself as supremely awakened blocks conversation and verification. Surrendering one’s mind to authority may feel comfortable, but it does not cultivate the courage and wisdom of self-examination.
Releasing attachment to images is not a command to eliminate discrimination. We must absolutize neither image nor non-image and judge according to reality.
A Buddha Is a Process of Questioning, Observation, and Reflection
A Buddha is not someone who reached a perfect state. Buddha is a process. Before being called a Buddha, one questions, observes, and reflects; afterward, one continues questioning, observing, and reflecting. Someone who knows everything has no reason to ask, and someone in perfect non-discrimination cannot observe or judge. A living Buddha acknowledges the possibility of error and continues seeking better answers.
Buddhist practice is this process itself. We observe self, nature, and society; ask what we do not know and which illusion traps us; and make better judgments through dialogue with others. If another person’s criticism is correct, we must be able to say, “My judgment was wrong,” and revise it. The name Buddha does not grant ownership of completed truth. It points toward a way of living wisely.
We must therefore leave the two-thousand-year myth of extinguishing greed, anger, and delusion. We must not lose sight of what we pursue, what angers us, and what we believe to be perfect. Chasing a fantasy of Buddha while abandoning self-observation only wastes time. The living process of questioning, observing, reflecting, and correcting error is the Buddha’s path as I understand it.
A Buddha is not a perfect result but the process of questioning, observing, reflecting, and correcting error.
Artificial Intelligence and Illusion and the Forgotten Wisdom of Buddhism
Near the end of the broadcast, viewers asked me to write a book on Buddhism. I have begun a book with the working title The Forgotten Wisdom of Buddhism. I intend to organize material rarely heard elsewhere, including the Chapter of Eights, ora and pāram, and the earlier contexts of greed, anger, and delusion. I am still concerned that I may be writing it too densely, and I cannot say when it will be published.
A book available now is Artificial Intelligence and Illusion, which I wrote with Yoon Deok-jun. I think of it as something like my Diamond Sutra for modern readers. While explaining artificial intelligence, it examines human knowing and not knowing, learning and guessing, and the structure of illusion. If some technical terms in the opening chapter are difficult, readers may skip them without losing the book’s overall argument.
Artificial intelligence hallucination is not a defect wholly alien to human beings. Language models guessed plausible answers even when they did not know, and humans mark answers to unknown test questions and state judgments as facts. Both humans and AI guess, and guesses can be wrong. Buddhist wisdom begins again when we admit that we do not know, and question, observe, and compare before believing.
Do not believe; question. The forgotten wisdom of Buddhism begins again when we admit that both human and artificial intelligence guesses can be wrong.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.