An Open Conversation Without a Predetermined Lecture Topic
On May 15, 2026, shortly before Buddha’s Birthday, the speaker opened a livestream without a prepared lecture topic. He invited viewers to bring ordinary questions, recent thoughts about their own lives, and concerns about Buddhism or society. The evening began as a space for conversation rather than a one-way sermon.
He hoped the space could become more than a place where one person answered everyone else. Those familiar with Barobul’s direction could practice the attitude of fellow practitioners and “twenty-first-century Buddhas”: speaking frankly about their condition, discussing social problems, and helping one another revise mistaken views.
He also explained why personal suffering, social questions, and problems inside Buddhism were not sharply separated. A large community can make intimate concerns difficult to voice, while a small channel can hold all three together. The mixture may feel disorderly, but at this stage it is also the community’s strength.
The form of the broadcast already embodied its eventual argument. This was not a completed authority handing down final answers, but a conversation in which questions and objections reveal the walls of each participant’s well. Methods may change as the community grows, yet honest dialogue is where the present work begins.
A Buddhist Community Must Speak About Society and Politics
Many people dislike political discussion on a Buddhist channel, but the speaker argued that a Buddhist community must address the world in which people actually live. If it ignores power, violence, coups, and public responsibility in the name of cultivating inner peace, it can hardly be called living Buddhism.
His harsh criticism of Yoon Suk Yeol, Kim Keon Hee, and political actors who avoided responsibility followed from that position. Political speech should not be expelled from Buddhism. Even when people disagree, they should debate instead of retreating into private certainties.
He described revising a thumbnail that initially said, “When my mind is peaceful, the world is peaceful.” His mind might be calm while the world remained at war. Because the line leaned too far toward inwardness, he replaced it with, “To know only one thing is to know nothing.”
Personal calm does not stop bombs or erase the pain of victims. Caring for the mind and attending to the world need not be opposites, but neither can stand in for the whole. This small thumbnail correction anticipated the later argument that reality is not an illusion produced by one person’s mind.
My mind may be peaceful while the world is not. To know only one thing is to know nothing.
We Must Talk Because We Are All Frogs in Wells
Why must people debate and converse? His answer was simple: “Because all of us are frogs in wells.” Each person sees the world from a well made by bodily limits, language, culture, memory, and experience. No one can inspect everything outside that well alone.
We therefore need to live in networks that expose us to other voices. We exchange information, compare views, and point out one another’s errors. Repeating only our own conclusions leaves us dreaming inside a closed world; dialogue supplies conditions and counterexamples that our own well concealed.
To live like a Buddha does not mean becoming an omniscient transcendent being. It begins by knowing that one is a frog in a well. Only after acknowledging that limit can one listen, avoid solitary certainty, and enter relationships in which people awaken and guide one another.
Viewer questions and objections were therefore not side material. They were instruments of practice. The speaker could be wrong as readily as anyone else. Conversation was not a means of establishing his authority but of opening windows in the walls of everyone’s well.
A Buddha-like attitude begins not with believing that one knows everything, but with knowing that one is a frog in a well and talking with others.
A Silent Jogye Leadership and a Community That Has Died
The speaker had recently criticized Seongpa, the Supreme Patriarch of the Jogye Order, yet almost no one responded. Followers at least appeared when he criticized other teachers, but an attack on the highest office produced no sense of impact. He read that silence not as lofty authority but as a sign that the community had long been dead.
What is such a title for, he asked, if its holder performs dignity while saying nothing about social crises? Every Buddha’s Birthday, institutional leaders issue messages detached from actual suffering. He said those statements left him with little beyond the judgment that they were pathetic.
The language was deliberately abrasive, but the central question was not personal insult. It was whether authority performs public responsibility and whether an organization speaking in Buddhism’s name communicates with the lives of ordinary people. He repeated that the Jogye Order was dead because nobody answered, argued, or tried to change it.
The small Barobul community tries to join social, political, Buddhist, and personal questions precisely to create the opposite of that silence. Buddhism that refuses to speak about real power and pain becomes little more than a decoration for temporary comfort.
Remembering His Father Without Performing Ancestral Rites
Asked whether he performed memorial rites for his late father, he said his family no longer kept a prescribed date or ritual form. They had once observed rites for several generations, but at the request of the children and family they stopped the holiday and death-anniversary ceremonies.
Stopping the rite did not mean forgetting his father. Alcohol dependence and its wounds, a lifetime of Buddhist conversations, his father’s unresolved misunderstanding of “form is emptiness and emptiness is form,” and relationships with his father’s students all shaped the speaker’s life in both painful and valuable ways.
His father died on December 26, 2020, so Christmas and the end of each year naturally bring him back to mind. Buddha’s Birthday also evokes him because for decades students and friends visited the family home on that day, while the speaker himself stayed busy with university Buddhist activities.
He found more meaning in remembrance than in formal ritual. At times the family takes his mother to the Nakdong River where his father’s ashes were scattered. His son, brother, and wife go together, gaze quietly at the water, remember him, and return home. That is a more honest memorial for them than a fixed ceremony.
Ritual is a form, but remembering the dead and gathering as a family can still carry real meaning.
Outdated Temple Forms, Twenty-First-Century Buddhism, and Donations
Asked whether he ever visited temples, he said he had rarely done so for years. Visiting for a calm atmosphere was not inherently wrong, but he felt that monastic conventions and delusions had turned many temples into places distant from Buddhism. Historical and cultural value could remain while the present institution still required change.
He asked why twenty-first-century specialists in Buddhist study, counseling, and public service must be marked by celibacy, abstinence, shaved heads, and an inherited social status. People may devote themselves professionally to such work, but their role need not be bound to an ancient ascetic identity.
When a viewer objected to donation boxes beneath Buddha images, he defended donations as an old and necessary tradition. Someone who speaks independently of capital and political power still needs food and material support. Ancient alms and modern contributions both provide the conditions for sustained independent work.
The problem is not receiving money but what one does after receiving it. Support is appropriate when the recipient studies, helps others, and speaks honestly. The problem is taking money while selling fortune-telling, forty-nine-day rites, and religious nonsense.
Is There a Contradiction Between No Free Will and Creating One’s Life?
The main inquiry began with a viewer’s comparison. Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj were said to deny free will and describe everything as karma, while Conversations with God and Ramtha taught that thought, speech, and action create life through free will. How should this apparent contradiction be understood?
Rather than announce an answer, the speaker first asked for the viewer’s own conclusion. One side denies a wholly independent will; the other recognizes the subject who presently speaks, acts, and chooses. After hearing that both seemed partly right, he began separating levels that Buddhist discussions often collapse.
If complete free will means an impulse arising entirely by itself without any condition, it is difficult to defend. Human decisions are affected by the body, brain, upbringing, education, culture, society, memory, and desire. Yet none of that means the person presently judging and acting has disappeared.
The contradiction arises when “there is no independent, immutable will” is turned into “therefore I never choose and bear no responsibility.” Seeing dependent conditions and recognizing an acting subject in the phenomenal world are not mutually exclusive claims. They are two sides that must be held together.
No-Self Does Not Mean That the Present Thinking and Acting Person Is Absent
No-self does not mean that “I do not exist.” What it denies is an entity untouched by other things, existing independently, and continuing unchanged before birth and after death: a true self, soul, or atman. Renaming it God or the observer does not change the assumption.
Dependent-origination analysis reveals no self-existing, eternally unchanging thing. This is the direction of anatman. But the claim does not erase the human organism that feels hunger and sexual desire, judges situations, performs actions, and experiences consequences.
People continue to perceive around “I” within the limits of the brain and body. Meditation may temporarily soften the feeling of self, but it does not erase embodied conditions or learned memory. The speaker’s blunt claim that he had never seen anyone discard ego attacked the religious ideal that humans should turn themselves into gods.
Buddhism does not delete the person. It helps the person notice that what is called “I” is a phenomenon shaped by innumerable conditions. One investigates where preferences, moral judgments, desires, and decisions came from and begins to view even oneself more objectively.
No-self does not mean that the individual is absent. It means there is no independent, immutable, eternally continuing true self.
Even Without Absolute Freedom, the Choosing Person and Responsibility Remain
The speaker called it complete nonsense to infer that actions and thoughts have no meaning because absolute freedom is absent. Whether to take drugs or study, broadcast or remain silent, seek work or stay unemployed, care for parents or neglect them—people live through countless actual decisions.
Those choices are influenced by genes, education, and social conditions, but influence does not erase the organism making the choice. “You exist,” he repeated. Buddhism does not deny individuals; it denies the mistake of treating the individual as an isolated essence.
A fixed essence called “an egoistic person” may dissolve under analysis, while egoistic conduct and its victims remain real in ordinary life. If a philosophical account of essencelessness erases practical difference and responsibility, it becomes what he called dog-shit philosophy, disconnected from lived consequences.
Conditions and responsibility can therefore be understood at the same time. One recognizes personal choice while examining the wider network that produced it. The free-will question cannot be resolved responsibly with the single word “exists” or “does not exist.”
Questioning the Concepts Tree and Fish Does Not Erase the Phenomenal World
When asked to define a tree or fish essentially, boundaries soon become unstable. Where precisely does a tree, fish, or person begin and end? Language draws names and borders across continuous processes, and those concepts should not be mistaken for eternal independent substances.
Yet when someone says, “Bring firewood,” we do not return with grass or mushrooms. Distinctions among trees, plants, and fungi function in ordinary life. Buddhism does not abolish them; it uses them while asking whether the concepts possess permanent essence.
Birth and death work similarly. We speak about them in practical reality, but careful inquiry makes the exact beginnings and endings less simple. We can use “my will” and “I” while questioning whether either refers to something isolated from all influence.
Hearing someone else’s deep argument reduced to “free will does not exist” and then concluding that anything is permissible is superficial study. Buddhism joins recognition of phenomena with sustained inquiry into the limits of the concepts used to describe them.
Dependent Origination Still Allows Responsibility for Yoon Suk Yeol
If dependent origination is used to erase personal responsibility, there would be no basis for criticizing Yoon Suk Yeol or Kim Keon Hee. Calling them products of genes, education, desire, and social structures could become an excuse against punishment. The speaker rejected that as rhetoric that abandons reality.
Conduct must still be criticized and responsibility imposed. At the same time, society should ask how a person who rose to prosecutor general became fascistic and willing to sacrifice everything for private interest, and why prosecutors, corporations, capital, crime, and politics formed such alliances.
The influence of figures such as Cheon Gong and the attraction of fortune-telling, geomancy, and claims of supernatural insight cannot be reduced to one strange individual. A society cultivated the relationships in which those beliefs became powerful. Blaming only the individual preserves the structure; blaming only the structure erases choice and injury.
The speaker said that after cursing Kim Keon Hee he turns around and asks why this dependent phenomenon arose. Moving between individual wrongdoing and social conditions is the two-sided method. People act and answer as individuals while arising within dense relational networks.
Dependent origination does not eliminate personal responsibility. It asks us to criticize the individual and also examine the social conditions that produced that individual.
The Idealism of Discarding Ego and the Error of Eliminating Discernment
Buddhist language easily slides into the ideals “discard ego,” “eliminate discrimination,” and “stop thinking.” The beautiful instruction to offer the other cheek or give one’s inner garment as well must still be tested against the question of whether human beings can live that way at every moment.
Speaking of non-possession and emptiness does not require surrendering everything whenever another person demands it. An impossible ideal of perfection encourages performance and self-deception. The speaker’s claim that he had never seen anyone abandon ego attacked that pretense directly.
Freedom from conceptual attachment concerns fantasies such as eternal afterlives, supernatural powers, prophecy, and true selves treated as facts. One small wrong step turns this into the belief that wisdom has no concepts, moral judgments, or thought at all.
Buddhism can go somewhere entirely different with even half a wrong step. Knowing the limits of concepts is not losing the ability to use them. Releasing attachment to discrimination is not becoming unable to tell excrement from fermented paste.
Seeing Feminism, Antifeminism, and Political Correctness From Both Sides
Asked about feminism, antifeminism, political correctness, and their oppositions, the speaker called the conflict a very natural phenomenon. Women were oppressed for long periods under male-centered systems, and the public language of liberation and equality is historically recent. Feminism therefore arose for understandable reasons.
Yet when liberation becomes absolute hostility toward men or treats refusal of marriage and childbirth as a universal standard, antifeminist reaction emerges. If that reaction becomes misogyny, another opposition follows. Resistance to one oppression can generate a new form of contempt and coercion.
He also attacked a state that imposes military duty on men but refuses responsibility for their later employment and lives. Duties are assigned in an authoritarian way while welfare is denounced as communism, and wealthy or powerful families escape the burdens imposed on others.
Equality and justice are worth pursuing, but excessive political correctness that tries to straighten everyone according to one moral template is also objectionable. Criticism and countercriticism can be healthy. What matters is seeing both the conditions that produced a movement and the new harms its slogans can create.
What Awakening Gives: A Mayfly Life and the Problem of Value
Asked what awakening gives, the speaker first turned to the length of life. A life lived under the assumption that a soul continues after death differs from one understood as a single, mayfly-brief interval in cosmic time. Each premise changes how the present is spent.
Recognizing a short, one-time life makes a person reconsider the values for which they torment themselves every day. How precious is each hour, and what is consuming one’s limited time? This is not acquiring mystical truth but viewing oneself and one’s life more objectively.
The second axis is value and concept. People pursue success, recognition, attractiveness, and social worth without understanding what they are pursuing. Communities sacrifice lives to values, justify war and massacre, enslave and oppress, and treat abstractions as more important than living beings.
Awakening is not obtaining one truth and suddenly knowing everything. It is noticing what one is, how one should live, what one calls right and valuable, and how those standards make oneself and others suffer. Without such inquiry, people spend lives chasing the wrong things through worthlessness, misery, emptiness, resentment, depression, and anger.
The World Is Not Exactly as It Appears, but That Does Not Make It an Illusion
When a viewer asked whether awakening changes appearances into illusion, the speaker immediately answered no. The claim that what I see is not the whole as it is and the claim that the visible world is unreal are entirely different. He regarded the latter as closer to Hindu thought than Buddhism.
Interpreted modestly, “everything is made by mind” can mean that standards and interpretations change how the same reality feels, and that people add much suffering through judgment. In that restricted sense it can support useful observation of mental activity.
One half-step further, however, it becomes the claim that all things are products of my mind. The sun, moon, factories, internet, and other people continue without my observation. Closing my eyes or dying does not cause the rest of the world to vanish.
His father’s death did not erase the son’s world, and the son’s survival did not continue the father’s field of awareness. Distinct organisms exist in relation. Reducing reality to my mental movie makes dialogue, history, responsibility, and the suffering of others unintelligible.
The world may not exist exactly as it appears to me, but that does not mean the world I encounter is an illusion.
Tools Extend the Limits of Perception Without Turning Reality Into Fantasy
Human beings see from inside bodily and sensory limits. We developed microscopes, telescopes, and instruments for many frequencies in order to observe the small, distant, ultraviolet, viral, and cosmic domains that naked senses cannot reach.
Those tools reveal realities that unaided perception missed. This does not mean we now see the whole, nor that what we previously failed to see did not exist. The expanding range of observation itself shows how partial human cognition remains.
Humility therefore requires saying that reality may exceed what appears to me. Turning that humility into “the world is a projection of my mind” returns to self-centered certainty. A philosophy meant to expose perceptual limitation paradoxically places personal consciousness at the center of the universe.
Someone who calls phenomena illusory still reads books, listens to broadcasts, and argues with others. If everyone in front of me is merely my projection, what could their words teach? The speaker repeatedly used this contradiction to urge viewers to wake from metaphysical dreaming and acknowledge shared reality.
Why He Directly Criticized a Viewer During the Livestream
The argument intensified when a viewer claimed that the Bible portrayed events inside the mind. The speaker described the Hebrew Bible instead as a mixture of history, myth, culture, and human affairs from the Middle East and Europe. Turning it entirely into private inner symbolism was an unsupported conclusion.
He treated “no-self” as a special state, “mind becomes reality,” and “one must awaken to mind” as related errors. No-self is not a state to attain, and making the vague word mind into a substance before speaking of awakening to it produces a sentence with little coherent meaning.
He had watched this viewer’s earlier comments and decided the issue was not one accidental phrase but a repeated direction. A person can perform knowledge briefly, but extended conversation reveals why they use certain words, the depth of their context, and whether their thinking changes.
His language escalated to “dog-shit philosophy” and “bullshit.” The point, however, was that an open conversation must allow unsupported conclusions to be challenged. Anyone who circulates a private conclusion as truth cannot claim exemption from criticism.
Do Not Turn a Dependent World Into Needlessly Difficult Language
When another viewer posed a complicated question about external objects, consciousness, networks, and dependent origination, the speaker admitted that the sentence was too difficult. Nested negations may sometimes be unavoidable, but abstract language often hides a simple point rather than deepening it.
“The world is dependently arisen, and so am I” is often enough. Nothing can be fixed as an isolated substance, yet people still distinguish through language and concepts. Knowing that those distinctions arise within human limits may be the appropriate stopping point.
After admitting that I see only part, I do not need to fill the unknown remainder with another vast metaphysics. Difficult wording does not guarantee depth. A sentence that neither listener nor speaker can explain merely builds another wall in the well.
The egg example served the same purpose. The concept egg is dependently formed and has no independent essence, but the egg in front of us does not disappear. Questioning the absolute meaning of free will likewise does not require abandoning ordinary language about action and constraint.
Buddhist Freedom and Liberation Mean Repeatedly Escaping Error
Asked what Buddhist freedom means, he answered that it is release from errors that make people pursue the wrong things and torment themselves for the wrong reasons. Buddhism begins by seeing how misunderstanding the world binds one’s life and then correcting it.
Liberation is not discovering that the world is a dream and exiting into a special state. It is the continuing process of escaping one’s errors and confirmation biases. Rather than owning final liberation after one experience, one returns and revises whenever a mistaken conclusion becomes visible.
If the world is an illusion, public responsibility also becomes illusory. There would be no reason to hold candles against Yoon, grieve the Itaewon disaster, object to war, or care about people killed by missiles. Treating the outside as mental imagery removes the basis for responding to others’ pain.
No one can carry every suffering in the world or live permanently grim. People can rest and laugh within their limits. Still, they should criticize what requires criticism and grieve what deserves grief. Living lightly is different from treating the world lightly.
Buddhist liberation is not believing that the world is unreal. It is continuously escaping one’s delusions and confirmation biases.
The Bhagavad Gita, Discernment, and Responsibility
A viewer recalled the Bhagavad Gita’s command to kill relatives without guilt because the sword merely passes through the material body. Would the same logic permit a nuclear weapon to kill humanity on the grounds that matter merely disperses?
For the speaker, this showed how an instruction to transcend discrimination can become dangerous. It can be used to tell people not to distinguish right from wrong, to obey orders without thought, and to preserve their assigned office and social rank.
When power appropriates divine will, duty, and non-discrimination, people surrender responsibility. A metaphysics in which souls cannot die can make killing and war appear weightless. He called this the “bullshit of all bullshit” without softening the broadcast’s force.
Here he located the difference between Hindu and Buddhist liberation. Release should not mean declaring the world unreal and returning to an eternal substance. It should mean correcting error while acknowledging relational reality, other people, and their suffering.
Sunnies and Deluded Sages: Chasing a Mystical Awakening
He discussed the host of Sunnies, who had admitted imagining awakening as supernatural power, mystical experience, or possession of a great truth. A comment saying, “You are chasing a delusion,” stayed with the host and prompted reconsideration of that pursuit.
Giving many people microphones to describe their experiences can appear open-minded, but without standards it accumulates sound insight and nonsense in the same place. Ordinary wisdom about observing mental activity slips half a step into claims about mystical eyes and transcendent stages.
He also criticized the unexamined presentation of Jeon Hyeon-su’s claim that concentration opens the eye of wisdom. Merely presenting everyone equally is insufficient. Without judgment about what can be observed and what is inflated fantasy, a channel becomes a network that amplifies error.
Calling Rajneesh a deluded sage expressed the same concern. Hindu transcendental vocabulary and certainty that one has obtained something special can seduce listeners. Unless the desire for awakening is itself questioned, a seeker trying to escape delusion may begin chasing a larger one.
Separating Wisdom From Delusion in the Mud of Religious Texts
Buddhist and Christian texts, Greek and śramaṇa philosophies, Chinese masters, and later books preserve precious human wisdom. Their reflections on self, inquiry, dialogue, concepts, and release from error deserve serious study.
Yet the same texts mix authors’ mistakes, myths, superstition, bad translation, political interests, and fantasy. Treating the whole muddy mixture as gold merely because it is scripture makes wisdom and nonsense impossible to distinguish.
He said even the short Heart Sutra mixes Avalokiteśvara, mantra, supreme enlightenment, translation problems, and misunderstandings around form and emptiness. His father and the speaker himself had wandered through that mixture because they lacked basic training in emptiness and critical self-examination.
The foundation is not impossibly difficult. Asking whether a claim is true, what a concept means, and which limits and counterexamples apply allows a person to develop independently. But a culture filled with souls, past lives, spiritual experiences, and mystical authority makes entry onto that direct path unusually hard.
Not Everyone Must Become a Buddha, but Someone Must Think Deeply
Not everyone has time to research artificial intelligence, philosophy, concepts, Buddhism, and every religious text. Demanding that people supporting families and earning a living all become Buddhas can itself become violence. Equal depth of scholarship is not a realistic moral obligation.
Still, someone must spend time thinking deeply, separating illusion from wisdom, and teaching methods by which others can make the distinction themselves. This is not one person’s monopoly on truth. It is the work of gathering, comparing, and clarifying insights already scattered across the world.
The world will not change because one speaker talks tirelessly, yet he did not demand that every viewer become a professional scholar. Each person can know the limits of their well, test what they hear, and pass a small light to others where possible.
The broadcast ended with the hope that individuals would gradually illuminate the world. It was not a command to become a perfected Buddha, but a practical request to correct one error at a time, remain in conversation, and brighten one’s immediate surroundings.
Not everyone must become a Buddha. Each person can nevertheless distinguish some delusion and illuminate a small part of the world.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.