What Is Buddhadharma?
The third great vow promises to study the countless Dharma gates. But first ask what Dharma is. I define it as a tool for becoming a Buddha. It is a raft or skillful means, not an object of worship.
Any tool that accords with basic human ethics and actually helps a person cross delusion can be Dharma for that person.
We Do Not Need to Learn Every Teaching
The vow poetically says “all,” but practitioners need not collect every scripture. Once a suitable raft carries me across, I do not need every raft.
A single passage that pierces the heart and creates a real question may matter more than a scripture recited a thousand times without understanding.
Scriptures Were Taught to Particular People
Buddhist texts were composed and edited across many centuries. Ancient people did not know cells, microbes, or the structure of the cosmos and took gods, rebirth, caste, and their culture for granted.
A teaching answered a particular person within those conditions. Removing the audience and era and treating every sentence as timeless literal fact produces misunderstanding.
Should We Literally Believe Māra and the Birth Legends?
Stories describe Māra tempting the Buddha and the newborn Buddha walking seven steps after emerging from his mother’s side. Literalism turns these into supernatural biology.
Then ordinary people could never become Buddhas. We must read what the myth points toward rather than converting symbolism into history.
The Stopping in the Aṅgulimāla Story
Aṅgulimāla runs but cannot catch the walking Buddha, who says, “I have stopped; you have not.” The point is not magical speed. One person has stopped the rush of murder and craving while the other has not.
Reading this as proof of psychic power watches the finger and loses the moon. Buddhist myths need interpretation just as Korean foundation myths do.
Literalism Turns Buddhism into Superstition
Many teachers still insist on literal heavens, hells, rebirth realms, dragons, Māra, bodily marks, and supernatural powers. They declare disbelief to be non-Buddhist.
Such preaching does not lead modern people toward awakening. It turns Buddhism into superstition and shows that the teacher has not digested the Dharma.
A Mantra Has Power through Meaning
Teaching that an untranslated dhāraṇī fulfills wishes through sound alone is magic, not Dharma. Much of the Great Compassion Dhāraṇī praises ancient Indian deities.
The Heart Sutra mantra matters when understood as “Go, go, go beyond, go completely beyond, awaken together.” Language moves us through meaning, not mysterious syllables.
Did the Buddha Awaken by Holding a Hwadu?
Korean Buddhism calls Ganhwa Seon supreme, but did the Buddha awaken by holding a prescribed phrase? Did Śāriputra, Maudgalyāyana, Bodhidharma, or Huineng spend ten years on a teacher-assigned kōan?
Buddhism began through teachings fitted to people, alternative explanations, practical methods, and repeated checking—not one incomprehensible question imposed on everyone.
Seongcheol and the Supremacy of Ganhwa Seon
Seongcheol strongly shaped the Jogye culture of fierce retreat, continuous concentration, and complete penetration of kōans. I criticize him precisely because that authority still structures practice.
When teachers choose questions for disciples, discourage reading, and glorify long sitting, practitioners hold someone else’s problem. Endurance and injured bodies are mistaken for awakening.
Skepticism inside Buddhism
Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana came from Sañjaya’s community, associated with skepticism about subjective human knowledge. Encounters with such thought helped place epistemic humility within Buddhism.
The Eight-Verse Discourses warn against claiming one’s view, purity, or teaching as supreme. A teacher who declares one method best contradicts this early foundation.
Exchange beyond Early and Mahayana Labels
I am neither “Early Buddhist” nor “Mahayana Buddhist”; I simply practice Buddhism. Literal copying of southern texts is no better than isolation inside Korean Seon.
Vipassanā, yoga, Tibetan practice, psychology, and science should be compared and tested through exchange among traditions. A twenty-first-century Buddhism requires collective intelligence.
May We Kill Mosquitoes?
This question tests modern application of precepts. Literal non-killing says never, yet mosquitoes spread malaria, encephalitis, dengue, yellow fever, and Zika, causing severe harm.
When necessary, harmful mosquitoes may need to be killed. Nonviolence does not command abandonment of victims. Purpose, conditions, and modern medical knowledge must be considered together.
Create Dharma for the Twenty-First Century
Dharma is a tool for awakening, and tools must fit the era, place, language, culture, knowledge, and suffering of a person. Repeating dead superstition and untranslated characters harms Buddhism.
The Jogye Order should research across science, philosophy, society, and Buddhist traditions, then explain the heart of scripture in ordinary language. Studying countless Dharma gates means learning and creating countless tools that actually help countless people cross suffering.
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