Beginning with the Question of Whether Effort Is Genetic
The conversation began with a question: “People say that even effort is genetic. What do you think?” I first said that I could not reduce the matter to one side. Conditions inherited from parents and ancestors certainly affect a person’s life. At the same time, environment, experience, learning, and reward also change how much effort a person makes. I cannot confidently say which side has the greater influence. My honest answer was, “I do not really know.” I only thought that what is innate and what is learned later probably work together.
I used my own experience as an example. Until the sixth grade of elementary school, I hardly studied outside class. I went to school, but I mostly played afterward. Around the time I entered middle school, however, I envied classmates who went to the front, received certificates, and were applauded. I told my mother that I wanted to receive one too. She said that in middle school I could earn a certificate by studying well. I was completely won over by that answer, and in my first year of middle school I began going to Haeundae Library after class to work through problem books.
At the time, students received awards if their test averages passed certain thresholds. Receiving my first award and hearing the applause felt wonderful. A little effort raised my scores; higher scores brought an award; the award made me want to work harder. I personally experienced a virtuous cycle in which small and larger rewards generated motivation and sustained effort. This could not be explained by my will alone. It was produced together with a situation in which effort actually brought achievement and reward.
Effort may be influenced by innate disposition, but experiences in which effort is rewarded and renewed motivation follows can also make someone into a person who keeps trying.
A book titled I Can Do It, which I found at the library, also had a major effect on me. It told the reader to embody the conviction that anything could be done. For more than ten years afterward, whenever I encountered a task, I repeated in my head, “I can do it.” A kind of ultra-positive attitude became installed in me. It helped me confront difficult things before being easily discouraged. Later in life, however, I also learned that I cannot do everything. I am not unconditionally recommending that book. Its message had strengths, but it also contained the problem of something close to autosuggestion. I raised the example to show that learned attitudes and structures of reward, not genes alone, affect effort.
Scientific-Sounding Terms Are Not Evidence
A viewer then asked about Master Jeokgwang of the International Scientific Meditation Center and whether his relaxation practice was the Buddha’s method. During the broadcast, I searched for what he taught. Terms such as telomere length, cell division, oxygen, consciousness, and the Buddha’s thirty-two marks were attached to one another. Even a few scenes were absurd enough to leave me gasping. Using many scientific terms does not make a claim scientific. Adding the word “meditation” does not automatically make a practice Buddhist.
Two of the oldest ways to deceive people are threat and promised benefit. One threatens that the world will end, that a person will go to hell, or that something dreadful will happen. The other promises that a practice will improve health, produce special powers, heal others, or even overcome death. The two can also be combined. When scientific words unfamiliar to most people are added, the claim begins to sound plausible.
Stringing together a few scientific terms does not produce a scientific explanation. What matters is whether anyone can observe the claim and verify it repeatedly.
I bluntly called the man a fraud. Someone may ask how I could say that without watching everything he had made. But when someone mixes telomeres, oxygen, cells, and the thirty-two marks, claims effects from practice, and offers no way to test the connection, the claim already takes the classic form of a fraud. He spoke of both science and meditation, but appeared to understand neither. My criticism was not of unfamiliar vocabulary itself. It was of the method of using impressive words to promise unverified benefits and mysterious transformations as certainties.
Belief in the Buddha’s Thirty-Two Marks Would Make Buddhahood Impossible for Us
The conversation moved to the Buddha’s thirty-two marks. What happens if one claims that the Buddha possessed special physical traits and that practice lengthens the arms and ears, broadens the soles, and transforms even the head and forehead? If one truly needs such a body to be a Buddha, none of us can become one. The explanation that practice later produces those features is another unsupported invention. Where in Buddhism has it been shown and verified that practice transforms the body in that way?
Moreover, Buddhism teaches us not to be bound by appearances. If a mysterious outward appearance proves that someone is a Buddha, the claim directly contradicts the foundation of Buddhism. If such changes can be scientifically demonstrated, one must first compare the body before and after practice and make the transformation visible to anyone. If Master Jeokgwang himself looks ordinary and does not possess the thirty-two marks, how can he scientifically prove a transformation he has not embodied? Failing to show it himself while telling others that practice will produce it is not proof.
The moment the Buddha is explained through a mysterious bodily appearance, Buddhism is overturned from wisdom that frees us from appearances into superstition that worships them.
I jokingly asked whether long arms make someone a Buddha and broad feet make someone rich. If bodily form can be changed, why not simply fly with supernatural power? If the thirty-two marks are evidence of successful practice, should the six supernatural powers not also be shown? People present outward forms and mysterious phenomena as proof because they do not know what a Buddha is.
What Are You Practicing If You Do Not Even Know What Qi Is?
The viewer next asked about qi practice and the “small” and “great heavenly circuits.” I reversed the question: “What is qi?” If the answer is breathing practice, we must ask what breathing has to do with qi and why it should be called qi. Observing and regulating inhalation and exhalation is possible. But it becomes a different matter when one names it the flow of an unidentified qi and then claims that this qi improves health, heals others, or grants mysterious powers.
If one cannot clearly explain what qi actually is, and if no meaningful difference between practitioners and non-practitioners can be repeatedly verified, what exactly is being practiced? If qi practice had been scientifically proven to heal people and grant special abilities, most of the world would already be learning it. Once something is verified, it comes into the open. Such claims have remained unverified for so long because their proponents cannot demonstrate them.
Claiming to practice something whose identity cannot be established, while promising effects that cannot be verified, is not wisdom but an accumulation of imagination and falsehood.
The same applies to terms such as soul, subtle body, true self, chakra, energy, and dantian. Once a word exists, people assume that the mysterious entity it names must also exist. Yet a considerable portion of human concepts begins in imagination. I do not deny the possibility that something remains undiscovered. But I reject the assertion that practices promoted in Korea under the names of qi, danhak, chakras, and energy have been scientifically verified. “It may exist” and “this exists now and produces these effects” are entirely different claims.
In my second year of university, I myself learned from a practitioner who claimed to inherit an Indian yoga lineage. He came to me saying he would become my teacher, and I actually tried his instruction. In the end, however, he asserted as real things he did not understand himself and covered one falsehood with another falsehood and more imagination. Having gone through that experience, I know how much imagination and exaggeration gather around the word qi.
Scientific Proof Must Be Universally Observable
When someone lifts weights, the muscles undergo stress and change through damage and recovery. Changes in strength and muscle can be observed repeatedly. This is at least close to scientific confirmation. By contrast, if someone says qi practice allows healing and produces mysterious powers, but no one can confirm those effects under the same conditions, the claim cannot be called proof.
I proposed a very simple test. Among those who claim mysterious powers, has anyone floated even one millimeter in a way everyone can see? People who present themselves as an only-begotten son or daughter, Jesus, Buddha, or a special practitioner usually speak only about things that cannot be observed. Instead of making vague claims that an illness improved, ask them to rise one meter before our eyes. None can do it. They always flee to realms that cannot be checked because that is where the fraud can continue.
Before believing a claim that cannot be universally observed, ask why it always escapes to a place where it cannot be checked.
The Same Problem Applies to the True Self, Soul, Supernatural Powers, and Cessation
I applied the same standard to Yun Hong-sik’s claims. He is certain that purgatory exists, but he has neither seen it nor returned from it. He says the true self or soul leaves the body at death, yet the true self and soul are imagined concepts, not observed facts. Liking stories of bodhisattvas and supernatural powers in the Avatamsaka Sutra does not make such powers factual. If one speaks with certainty that one knows while offering no verifiable basis, one has fallen ill with the desire to become a guru.
I also called it nonsense to present the complete disappearance of feeling and thought in the attainment of cessation as a mysterious achievement. If sensation, thought, and recognition truly disappeared altogether, how would the person awaken again? With no feeling, perception, or thought, there could be no occasion to awaken and no recognition that awakening had occurred. The moment someone reports the experience of “everything disappearing,” something was already felt and remembered. A mysterious realm has been created in words by someone who does not understand concentration.
The moment one becomes certain of an unobservable world and packages unverified experience as the highest practice, Buddhism becomes another form of mysticism.
The Moment It Becomes Prophecy, It Becomes Fraud Rather Than Buddhism
In the latter part of the conversation, the prophecies attributed to the monk Tanheo became the subject. I said that anyone claiming to prophesy the future of a nation or the world through fortune calculation, the I Ching, or the four pillars is committing fraud. We may predict possibilities from observed conditions. But a prophecy that presents Korea’s condition decades later as something that must happen is different. The premise that the movement of the universe can be calculated through the sixty sexagenary signs or yin-yang and the five phases is itself unsupported imagination.
One viewer responded that he had often attended Tanheo’s lectures but had never directly heard him prophesy, and that later followers might have embellished the story. During the broadcast I searched the material again. Claims attributed to Tanheo included predictions of the Korean War, military coups, the Vietnam War, Park Geun-hye’s election, the sinking of Japan, the division of China, and Korea’s future. I was not evaluating Tanheo’s entire character or every other lecture associated with him. If later people attached words he never said, responsibility must be distinguished. But there was no reason to change my judgment that the supposedly certain prophecies presented under his name were fraudulent as prophecies.
Even if someone speaks well on ten subjects, a single unverifiable prophecy presented as truth must be criticized precisely because it is prophecy.
Calling myself an arahant does not mean that I know everything. I use the term because I think deeply about what I do not know. Buddhist wisdom is not omniscience. If the Buddha were asked the size of the universe or the distant future, admitting ignorance or declining to answer would be far wiser than inventing a falsehood through imagination. If Tanheo could prophesy Korea’s future, the Buddha should have foretold the future of all humanity and even the fate of his own royal family. Thinking the matter through this way reveals how much the claim of prophecy arises from an inflated ego.
We think human beings are essentially different from insects and other animals. Yet all are living beings within conditions. Would you believe an insect that claimed to practice qi, heal others, acquire the thirty-two marks, and prophesy the future? Being human does not suddenly grant the power to calculate every condition in the universe. When an inflated ego mistakes its imagination for truth, claims of supernatural powers, prophecy, healing, and the thirty-two marks multiply without end.
The Honorific “Seunim” Should Not Be Attached Automatically Either
The issue also led to a discussion of titles. I usually say “monk” rather than automatically using the Korean honorific seunim. The suffix -nim is honorific. I may use it for someone I respect, but it is not an ordinary noun that must be applied to everyone merely because that person shaved his head and put on robes. The practice of monks elevating themselves with the term and applying it automatically to one another is also wrong.
There is no reason to attach an honorific even to someone who secretly keeps a partner, gambles, uses violence, lies, or claims awakening without being awakened. We do not call a criminal “Reverend” merely because he holds that office. The status of monk does not automatically guarantee respect. Use the honorific when a life and practice worthy of it have been shown. If someone violates the foundation of Buddhism by prophesying, I said I may even call him a fake monk rather than an honored one.
Honor should follow actual speech and conduct, not clothing and status.
The Philosophy of the I Ching Must Be Distinguished from Prophecy
One viewer argued that the I Ching is an ancient study of the future and that its mathematical system can calculate what is to come. I replied that this view had to change. The I Ching has philosophical aspects that use yin and yang, the trigrams, change, and cycles to make us think deeply about the world. We may learn that a full moon wanes again and that we should prepare for decline even at the height of success. I did not deny the value of observing some cycles in the world and reflecting on life through them.
But such philosophical thinking is entirely different from calculating the future as prophecy. A system that combines yin and yang, the trigrams, the five phases, and the sixty sexagenary signs to pronounce a person’s fate from a birth time or a nation’s future has not been verified. Expanding seasons and cycles observed in a small human environment to the entire universe does not make a complex world calculable. Philosophy can give us a perspective on life, but that perspective does not become a formula that predicts future events with one hundred percent certainty.
Drawing wisdom about change and cycles from the I Ching is separate from claiming to prophesy the future through it. When it crosses into the latter, philosophy becomes fraud.
The world is a complex system interwoven through dependent arising. Even whether rain will fall tomorrow in one neighborhood of Busan is expressed as a probability by supercomputers, not asserted with total certainty. An asteroid arriving from afar, changes in the sun, an epidemic, countless human choices, and accidental events cannot all be calculated by one mind using an old diagram. If someone cannot prophesy whether one individual will have an accident tomorrow or whether one living being will die, it makes no sense to claim knowledge of Korea thirty years later.
The Difference Between Prediction and Prophecy Is Whether Probability Is Acknowledged
Prediction begins by admitting that it may be wrong. If observed conditions suggest a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow, that statement admits both possibilities. Prophecy is different. It says the event must happen and claims one hundred percent certainty. That certainty is precisely the problem. If there is even a 0.1 percent gap, it is not one hundred percent.
Someone who sees the world through dependent arising cannot prophesy. Innumerable causes and conditions affect one another and keep changing. A prophet imagines the world as a small closed system and believes every variable can be calculated with a diagram inside his own head. That is not wisdom but immense arrogance. If someone studies Buddhism and still prophesies, he has not yet understood the foundation of dependent arising.
If one understands that the world arises dependently, what is possible is probabilistic prediction based on conditions, not prophecy that fixes the future with one hundred percent certainty.
It was good that viewers frankly stated their views that day. One carried an image of Tanheo, and another a belief about the I Ching. Because I used harsh words such as “fraud” and “nonsense,” collision was inevitable. Yet I never told anyone simply to believe and follow me. When our thoughts differ, we can study and debate exactly where they differ. We can ask what qi is, whether anyone can rise even one millimeter into the air, whether the I Ching can prophesy tomorrow’s weather or one person’s death, and what it means to say that the world arises dependently. The conclusion of the conversation was to question before believing and to press the question until it reaches a place of universal observation.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.