Revisiting ancient questions through today’s observations
This is Arahant Live. It is Monday, September 21, 2026, and a new week has begun. Let me first greet Venerable Dao, who has joined us. Last Wednesday, we discussed Dao’s question: why is Buddhism a religion of questions? On Friday, we followed that question further and examined what people were asking in ancient India when Buddhism emerged. Today, I want to reconsider those questions through twenty-first-century examples.
Without a question, awakening cannot come. If you have realized something, there must have been something you wondered about beforehand. Last time, we therefore examined the questions underlying Buddhism in India around 2,500 years ago, broadly around 600–400 BCE. We looked at the Upanishads and the different answers classified, from a Hindu perspective, as astika and nastika.
The astika side respects the Vedas and affirms atman: an essential self that continues after death, unlike our present bodily selves, an unchanging true self. This leads to answers involving an immortal soul, rebirth, an afterlife, and gods. Those affirming such things called those denying them nastika and treated them as heretics. The latter refused to recognize authority merely because something was written in the Vedas and called nonsense nonsense. Buddhism is a representative branch.
The Buddhism I discuss does not affirm gods or a permanent self. Dependent origination is its basis. We are dependently arisen beings, and because everything arises dependently, nothing can remain permanent. Impermanence and non-self follow from this. How could an eternally immortal self exist separately when we arise through conditions? Such questions and answers formed the background to Buddhism’s birth.
Follow a process of thought rather than believe my answer
An ancient answer does not mean modern questions are finished. People still believe in religions and wonder about souls, gods, rebirth, and the afterlife. Whether Buddhism, Christianity, philosophy, or science has answered, an answer remains an answer. Some continue believing what they want to believe, while others ask whether it is actually true.
Today, I will revisit humanity’s longstanding questions about existence and try to develop an answer by observing and thinking about the world of 2026. What am I? How does this world work? Do I continue existing after death? We can now observe things that people in the past could not. If I call myself a twenty-first-century arahant, should I not speak in twenty-first-century terms?
Of course, this is my own way of thinking. Not everyone can think exactly as I do, and I do not know whether my answer is the correct one. I am inviting you to follow a process of questioning, observation, and thought to consider what understanding a dependently arisen world might mean. I am not asking you to make my words another belief.
Examining human self-importance from two directions
I brought news pointing in two directions. People live thinking human beings are extraordinary. That was probably also true in ancient India. After killing a cockroach, do you wonder whether it has an afterlife? Do you ask whether a gnat has another life? Does a dandelion seed have a next life? Yet when it comes to humans, we imagine that death might not be the end.
Underlying this is the assumption that I, or humanity, am special. Letting go of that assumption creates a basis for reconsidering existence. We could discuss many aspects of humanity, beginning with the body, but intellect and emotion may be what we regard as most characteristically human. Are intellectual abilities and feelings really unique to humans, making us extraordinary?
I will examine intellect through AI deciphering historical codes, and emotion through attachment in chimpanzees and bonobos. What is intelligence? Does it belong only to humans? Are we, too, merely dependently arisen beings assembled from countless material components? As the illusion that only humans are unique falls away, so does conceit.
The old question: do I still exist after death?
First, let us revisit the questions from Friday. The Upanishads were ancient Indian philosophy and religion, and as an inquiry into the world of their time, difficult to separate from science. Their questions were not exclusively theirs. People worldwide have asked them for longer than we can identify.
Answers circulated in ancient India under the name of the Vedas. How did the universe arise? What am I, and what happens after death? There were teachings about praising gods, offering sacrifices, and what one should do. From one angle, the Upanishads reinterpret the Vedas; from another, they open the possibility of stepping back from Vedic thinking to offer an answer. Buddhism and shramana philosophies, including Ajivika and skeptical currents, offered anti-Vedic answers, while astika positions formed a basis for Hinduism. Their basic questions were shared.
The Katha Upanishad asks about those who have departed this world. Some say a person continues to exist after death; others say not. The speaker seeks wisdom to resolve this uncertainty. Is there an afterlife, rebirth, a heavenly realm, hell, or heaven? These questions recur today. I am not fixing the text at one exact point 2,500 years ago. We are examining questions around that period, including the observation that this text belongs after 400 BCE.
Another passage asks whether Brahman really is the origin of the world, where we came from, through whom we live, and where we go at the end. One side answers that gods, souls, and atman exist. This world is an illusion in which we live temporarily before exchanging bodies, while the real you, the true self, exists separately. The other answers that no such thing exists: mind and body are merely the result of dependently arising combinations and dispersals. In that respect, you are not fundamentally different from the dog beside you.
As someone discussing Buddhism, I will answer in the latter direction. My answer is that we are dependently arisen beings and there is no such thing as an afterlife. To follow the thinking toward that answer, let us first consider intellect.
AI deciphers a 370-year-old cryptogram
One recent story I found interesting concerned Claude Fable 5.1 solving an old cipher couplet. It is a poem written in numbers, a short encrypted message. During the broadcast, we looked at the original through Korean translation. I also greeted Myeongwangseong, who joined us then. I introduced Fable 5.1 as one of the strongest frontier AI systems competing with GPT-6 Astra.
The task was to solve a cryptogram that had remained unsolved for 370 years: a cipher couplet left by Thomas Urquhart in his book. How could two lines of 32 numbers each, 64 in total, be converted into letters? The short message, deliberately unreadable without its construction rule, had reportedly resisted decipherment for centuries.
It was raised as an unsolved problem in Notes and Queries in 1899 and appeared again in twentieth-century cryptographic literature. Historical cryptography researcher Klaus Schmeh included it in a list of unsolved encrypted messages. People tried frequency analysis, substitution, and other methods but apparently missed a decisive clue. Notice that it remained unsolved until the AI addressed it.
The person assigning the task said they did not intervene. Given the problem, the AI tried multiple approaches and reportedly found a solution after 44 minutes and 176,000 tokens. After the introduction saying it had completed the assignment within a day, I read the account of the actual reasoning time and process. The important point is that a person did not dictate every step of the solution; the AI searched for clues.
The key sought outside the book was inside it
The solution hinged on clues in the text itself. Immediately before the cryptogram were Urquhart’s 32 questions, and the author emphasized the number 32. The cryptogram also had two lines of 32 numbers. An accompanying poem said readers would discover their own heartfelt wishes and the author’s intention, while the questions ended with expressions involving wishes, desires, and hopes.
Earlier decipherment attempts seem to have assumed the key lay elsewhere. The AI instead connected the repeated number 32 and the language of wishes within the text. The book itself contained hints for decoding it. Applying the discovered rule produced a highly political prayer asking that King Charles II be protected and made supreme ruler of the land.
Afterward, the answer looks simple. But you must keep working until you find it. You must recognize clues left by the author, test possibilities, and determine whether the method works. A persistent person might also have solved it. In this case, AI eventually did. Consider how such persistence and exploration might appear in other fields too.
The intellectual process revealed by decipherment
Deciphering a code is a highly intellectual activity. We know stories of opposing sides making and breaking codes during the world wars. Discover the clues, keywords, and method, and you can read the message. Humans do this by identifying patterns and making guesses. Could it be this? Would this method work? Could it have been constructed that way? Repeated attempts eventually yield a solution.
Earlier computers calculated according to methods supplied by people. Now AI tries different approaches, discovers clues, and applies them to solve a problem. I describe this as reaching the level of human intellectual activity. Of course, I do not mean it is perfectly identical to humans. It is not. But we are seeing intellectual abilities once considered exclusively human in AI as well.
Myeongwangseong said this was frightening. In one sense it can be. But look from another direction. We have lived alongside many intelligent beings: dogs, horses, cattle, cats, monkeys, chimpanzees, dolphins, and whales. We regarded them as less intelligent than humans. Intelligence did not belong to humanity alone.
We can boast about how much more impressive humans are than other animals. Looking again, however, intelligence is a capacity found in multiple forms of life and now implemented in AI. Dogs, cats, monkeys, and crows have it. Intellect does not place humans in a unique category detached from the world.
If souls exist, where is the boundary?
People imagine themselves alone to be special on this planet. Or they place animal life above plants and nonliving things. Buddhist accounts of rebirth generally include animals but do not ordinarily describe becoming a plant. Then we are treating something animal as exceptional. I do not see the animal–plant distinction as such an absolute boundary either.
In the past, the range of observation was narrow. Today, we observe microorganisms invisible to the naked eye, not only bacteria but viruses. We learn about DNA, brain structure, how living beings develop, and genes. What, then, is life? My answer is matter combined and dispersed in particular configurations. Humans, too, are combinations of matter.
People imagined humans becoming dogs or heavenly beings. Even when imagining heavenly beings they had never seen, they struggled to exceed human imagination and gave them humanlike forms. Such imaginings assume humans are something distinct from plants and nonliving matter. From there comes the illusion that I cannot simply end at death.
A viewer noted that intelligent behavior in other animals has been treated as mere instinct. Yes, and we also ignore what we actually see. People living with dogs or cats know how intelligent they are, yet sometimes turn away and pretend otherwise. If humans have souls, must animals? If animals do, why not bacteria? What about viruses? Why not plants? How enormous is the difference between phytoplankton and zooplankton supposed to be?
The capacities to recognize patterns, perceive, judge, distinguish, and guess existed in animals and developed gradually. Humans possess them too, and we have now reached a stage of implementing them physically ourselves. Enormous effort goes into building and improving AI, but that does not contradict intelligence’s not being exclusively human. I call intellect an emergent, physical phenomenon.
German military radio messages read by GPT-6 Astra
Claude is not the only example. We also examined news of GPT-6 Astra deciphering German military radio messages from the First World War. While the earlier poem used numbers, this cipher uses six letters: ADFGVX. The same characters recur, but rules govern them, with a keyword used to transform the message.
A known list of cipher keys had already enabled hundreds of messages to be read. Yet more than a dozen, including one transmitted on November 27, 1918, reportedly remained unsolved. I showed the cryptogram on page 217 of the document and read how Astra was asked to solve it. The problem was to discover why it remained unreadable even with a keyword available.
I skipped the intricate details of the solution, but the decoded text said that the cruiser Canterbury had arrived at Sevastopol. How can we distinguish a plausible invented sentence from a real decipherment? Compare it with historical records. The account checked the arrival and events against records, including an Allied squadron following on November 26. It did not stop at proposing an answer but examined whether it matched actual circumstances.
In the next case, twenty elements of the encrypted text had been lost. Missing material prevented straightforward decipherment. The story described recovering another German radio message by inferring where the missing portion belonged and what it might contain. Some ciphers are simple and others complex; the point is that AI is analyzing material deliberately made difficult to read at this level.
Being different is not the same as lacking intelligence
Again, I am not saying humans and AI are identical. Humans cannot remember as much or readily handle physics, chemistry, cryptography, biology, and mathematics all at once. How difficult is it for you to get a perfect university entrance exam score? AI handles multiple fields together. There are specialized systems, but the Fable 5.1 and Astra examples I introduced are general-purpose systems addressing varied problems.
We are biological individuals; AI is software operating on computers and the internet. The underlying basis is different, so their intelligence cannot be exactly the same. But we must recognize their ability to reason, analyze patterns, identify things, and infer methods for solving problems. Difference from humans is no reason to deny intellectual activity itself.
I follow this toward the view that human intellect is a physical phenomenon rather than something exclusive and mysterious. It unsettles the assumption that such activity requires a soul unique to humans. What about emotion, then? Let us turn to animals.
A chimpanzee mother unable to release her dead infant
For emotion, I introduced an animal article from Hankyoreh. Not because I particularly favor that newspaper, but because I encountered a case relevant to human feelings while reading different outlets. It concerned chimpanzee mothers carrying dead infants for months—and the suggestion that they were not doing so merely because they did not know the infants had died.
Chimpanzees and bonobos resemble humans in many ways and have substantial intellectual abilities. They may continue dragging or carrying an infant after it dies. One observer might interpret this as failure to recognize death. Another might think the mother knows but cannot release the infant because of attachment. Scientists’ views likely differed too. This report pointed away from simple ignorance of death.
Mothers carry dead infants for periods ranging from hours to months. Analysis of cases from different locations reportedly suggested an extension of maternal attachment, varying with factors such as the bond during life. Can humans immediately let go emotionally when their child dies? The attachment is not unlike a human parent’s inability to release a dead child.
Not understanding, or understanding without being able to let go?
The research account read during the broadcast discussed observations from Tanzania, Uganda, Congo, and other African locations. Carrying duration varied and was closely related to cause of death, the infant’s age, and birth intervals. It described analyzing 483 cases to investigate why corpse-carrying occurs, why its duration varies, and how mothers understand infant death. The prior bond and temperature were also mentioned as relevant conditions.
These differences are difficult to consider through an explanation of mechanically carrying the infant simply because its death is unknown. I read them as mothers carrying longer depending on circumstances and struggling to release an older infant after a longer relationship. Emotion does not exist in isolation from relationships, time, and experience.
In several cases, mothers continued carrying infants that had already become mummified. Mummification means the body has dried out. Can we insist that a chimpanzee in that situation simply has no knowledge of death? Are chimpanzees stupid? As a viewer asked, can bonobos not distinguish life from death? These animals also eat other animals and live closely with life and death. Dogs and cats do too.
For me, the key is knowing yet being unable to let go, rather than merely not knowing. Recognizing that death has occurred and losing attachment are not the same thing. I did not read the rest of the article in full, but this gives us reason to reconsider emotion as a source of human pride.
Feelings are not humanity’s special possession
Observe dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, dogs, cats, familiar animals, and highly intelligent apes, and you see feelings. Humans do not alone possess emotions because we are extraordinary. Emotions arose through evolution, and we observe them in highly intelligent beings. Having feelings does not turn humans into something entirely separate from other animals.
Today, I examined intellect and emotion through AI decipherment and chimpanzee and bonobo attachment. Even without this discussion, people living in the twenty-first century encounter animal documentaries, science news, and AI stories showing animals with intelligence and feelings and AI performing intellectual tasks. Why bring it up again?
We now have many eyes, observational instruments, and scientific methods. We can see much more than before and encounter more objective information. If we observe all this yet cling to human exceptionalism, our knowledge and beliefs about ourselves are disconnected. Connecting these examples with questions of existence is the purpose of today’s discussion.
Can mind be taken out of the body?
Buddhism says everything arises dependently. People in the past imagined that something called a soul or atman performed human mental and intellectual activities. Imagining it remaining after the body disappears produces afterlives, heavens, hells, and stories of carrying knowledge and memories into another life and remembering previous lives.
But the intellectual and emotional activities we can examine today are bodily based. My answer is that mind does not exist separately from the body but is a bodily and physical phenomenon. Mental activity, too, is a dependently arisen phenomenon resulting from causal relationships, combinations, and dispersals. Then what separate soul is there to carry memories of past lives and go to heaven or hell?
In my twenties, I too read Buddhist books and accounts that made me wonder whether past lives really existed. Books about people such as Edgar Cayce, describing purported real cases, intrigued me. I did not begin life untouched by such ideas. But in 2026, we need to observe carefully, ask questions, and think.
I say people should now recognize the nastika direction as correct concerning human existence. Modern science is deeply Buddhist in the sense that it keeps investigating a world arising through causes, combinations, and dispersals. It observes, thinks, questions, thinks again, and discovers. Buddhism is likewise a process. We do not stop simply because an answer was supplied in the past.
How do we live after releasing the eternal self?
The same questions continue. Is there an afterlife? What am I? How does the world work? Can I continue after death? Some say yes, others no; what is true? We need to look soberly at things as they are. I say humans are not fundamentally different in this respect from gnats, phytoplankton, viruses, or matter. Then what soul belongs uniquely to you?
A new question arises: how will we live? What should our values be? Without an eternal self, can we live however we please, or how should we live? What values have I pursued until now? Each person must ask these anew. An answer about existence does not automatically finish every question about life.
Based on what we can observe in the twenty-first century, I say we should now be able to state that there are no souls, no rebirth, no heaven or hell, and no gods. That is my answer. Humans are dependently arisen and therefore cannot remain permanent. The world is impermanent. Rather than wishing for permanence, we need to look directly at it as it is.
If my reasoning leaps, question that point too
Through these two directions of modern examples, I have explained my view that humans too are dependently arisen beings. If you have questions, objections, or impressions, leave them in the live chat or comment after the video becomes public, about twelve hours after the broadcast.
Especially if the move from real-world examples to an answer about existence seems incomplete, ask about it. Why jump there? Is an intermediate step missing? If you think my reasoning suddenly leaps, ask or offer your own view. For those asking out of real curiosity, I will explain calmly in another broadcast or a comment.
My answer is not necessarily the correct answer, and my way of thinking may not be perfectly logical. Rather than ending with my having given you an answer, I hope it stimulates fresh thought. A broadcast beginning with questioning must leave my words open to questions too.
Desired falsehoods and what helps us live today
Myeongwangseong commented, in effect, that Islam and Christianity would then be finished and “Boss Yoon would have to close shop too.” I asked who was meant and whether it referred to Yoon Hong-sik. I then strongly criticized Yoon Hong-sik, calling him a representative fraudster. The point I went on to make was that people are easily deceived when there are falsehoods they want to hear.
People want permanence, continuation after death, and this life not to be the end. Telling them something that matches those wishes creates favorable conditions for deception. Such wishes may continue to exist. But I say they must not be exploited to deceive people. I hope people remove such stories from religion and philosophy and gain what actually helps contemporary life.
One question running through three broadcasts
In roughly fifty minutes today, I discussed recent news, how I think from those reports, and my answer. Recently I have been trying to keep broadcasts around an hour. This is the third consecutive broadcast following Venerable Dao’s question about why Buddhism is a religion of questions. We moved from the necessity of questioning to ancient India’s questions, then to today’s examples and thinking. Watching them together may help clarify the progression.
Discussing existence in complicated philosophical language can make it difficult. Yet when we release the idea that humanity or I am extraordinary, it becomes surprisingly simple. Once we realize that our competition over greatness amounts to comparing acorns, much conceit falls away.
Thank you to Myeongwangseong for keeping the chat active. After I missed more than two weeks of broadcasting because of summer heat, fewer people joined the conversations, which was disappointing. Your participation has made this less lonely. Thank you to everyone who joined, commented, and showed interest today. Have a pleasant evening, and may you awaken.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.