A Broadcast Built Around Questions, and the Principle Behind Membership
At the start of this broadcast I announced that the channel now had a membership program. I do not, however, intend to let members see information first or to make content available only to them. I do not want to turn Buddhism into merchandise for making money. Membership should simply be understood as support—as if someone were buying me one meal a month so that I can keep running Barobul and continue this Buddhist work. I joked that payment is more difficult than it ought to be and that online shopping or a single authentication step in Korea can turn one’s stomach a dozen times, but the principle was clear: I will not put a paywall between people and the content.
The center of the broadcast was likewise not a prepared answer delivered in one direction, but the questions of viewers and the conversation those questions create. One question submitted in advance became the starting point for the long discussion that followed. Staying with it led us through what a saint might mean, what counts as Buddhist, where rebirth, karma, and asceticism came from, and why present-day Buddhism seems unable to cultivate awakened people. I did not begin with a conclusion already fixed. I followed the question and allowed it to touch even the things I thought I knew.
Why Do People Like Jang Gi-ryeo Seem So Rare in Korean Buddhism?
The viewer pointed to the Busan physician Jang Gi-ryeo. Many stories portray him as a deeply humane man who put the treatment of poor and powerless patients before money and began with free medical care. The question was why, after nearly seventeen centuries of Buddhism in Korea, modern Korean Buddhism has produced so few visible people of that kind—people who are truly formed, people one might call wise teachers. If a tree can be judged by its fruit, the viewer asked whether the result before us reveals a structural defect in Buddhism itself or a problem particular to Korean Buddhism.
I first said that two cautions were needed. A person who appears to be a saint or wise teacher is not necessarily what the appearance suggests. I also do not much like the labels “saint” and “wise teacher.” The viewer did not mean a supernatural being, but a decent human being whose life came close to the teachings of the Buddha or Jesus. I understood that intention. Even so, the label itself had to be examined. The moment we call a person sacred, we easily stop examining what that person does and begin imagining that he possesses an essence different from ordinary human beings.
Is There Anything Sacred in Buddhism?
People call the Buddha’s relics sacred. When Kim Keon-hee became involved with the Buddhist community in an effort to recover relics and their reliquary from abroad, the argument was made that the relics were not merely cultural property but sacred religious objects. There was also controversy because the relics returned while the reliquary did not. My question comes before the political dispute: Did the Buddha instruct anyone to regard the bones or teeth left after cremating his body as sacred? Did the veneration of relics arise from his teaching, or from the Indian and Indo-European cultures of the time that already treated the remains of holy figures as precious?
Relics may have historical value as traces that Shakyamuni once lived, and they may be carefully preserved. Calling them sacred is a different matter. A dead body has merely returned to nature from which it came. If someone claims that a mysterious power inheres in the bones, that power must be identified and shown. Christian relics and the bodies of saints can be understood within the same cultural connections. People often half-deified remarkable figures after death; Guan Yu in China, old generals, and kings were all treated as gods. Culture spreads through human networks, but broad diffusion does not make a practice Buddhist.
The word sacred carries ideas of greatness, mysterious power, and divine essence. Once the Buddha is elevated in that way, awakening becomes a transcendent event beyond the reach of human beings. The Buddha must then have been unlike ordinary people from birth, equipped with the thirty-two marks, the eighty minor characteristics, and a hundred merits; myths are needed in which he emerges from his mother’s side and walks immediately. What he observed and how he escaped delusion recede from view, while stories suggesting that he was never really human grow larger. This is how the concept of sacredness turns into deification.
Human Beings Imagining Souls and an Afterlife
To understand the issue we must look at older imaginings shared by people in the Buddha’s time. Human beings are born and all die. They therefore asked whether death was the end and guessed that a beloved father or great hero had not vanished completely, but that some spirit remained somewhere. They gave many names—jiva, atman, soul, sattva, and puggala—to a mind imagined as eternally existing apart from the body. The names differed, but the central idea was similar: my mind exists independently of my body and, when the body dies, enters another body or travels to another realm.
Such imaginings were not confined to one region. In the preceding broadcast on Pythagoras I mentioned the human network connecting Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and India. Mathematics and philosophy were not the only things that traveled through that network. Mythic and religious ideas also moved—the soul rising to heaven and later descending into another body in an endless cycle. The point is not to declare that one side simply copied another, but to see cultures influencing one another as people feared death and imagined what lay beyond it.
Once rebirth is accepted as fact, another question follows: if endless cycling is suffering, how can one escape it? This is where the desire for transcendence grows. One wants not to be born again as an ordinary human being but to raise the rank of the soul and become divine. If worldly life is low, one imagines a higher realm beyond it. People did not directly observe that realm. They inherited words and concepts from earlier generations and began practicing toward what those words promised.
Jain Jiva, Karma, and Asceticism
Jainism distinguishes jiva from ajiva. Jiva is soul, while ajiva consists of non-soul, material elements. On this dualism that treats body and mind as separate substances, it explains that karma produced by action adheres to the soul. Good deeds make the soul lighter; bad deeds make it heavier and cause it to fall into hell or into lower forms such as animals and microorganisms. If karma clings to the soul and drives rebirth, then preventing new karma becomes the center of practice.
Rules and renunciation therefore become absolute in Jainism. One avoids killing, lying, stealing, sexual desire, and ownership. I explained that several items resemble the five Buddhist precepts, with non-possession in Jainism standing where abstention from intoxicants appears in Buddhism. Similarities are unsurprising within a shared shramana culture. Under the Jain rules, however, lies a substantial notion of karma: action literally soils and weighs down the soul.
Pushed to its conclusion, this logic makes bodily desire contemptible and even eating an act that creates karma. At the end one attempts to remove all karma from the soul and rise into a divine state by abandoning food and desire and starving to death. I used the image of a Jain practitioner growing skeletal through fasting while approaching death. This is not merely a restrained life. Behind it is a structure of transcendence in which the independent mind becomes complete by shedding the body.
The Buddha Also Pursued Param—and Then Abandoned That Path
The Buddha, after leaving home, also began within the questions and methods of his age. He learned the attainments of the sphere of nothingness and of neither-perception-nor-non-perception from teachers, yet did not feel that he fully knew. He wanted to solve birth, aging, sickness, and death completely and gain perfect knowledge of what he was, where he came from, and where he was going. In other words, he sought knowledge beyond human limitation, something divine. Finding the teachings of his teachers insufficient, he resolved to practice to the end on his own.
The method he chose closely resembled Jain austerity. He ate so little that his bones protruded and sat in concentration trying to defeat hunger, sexual desire, and every bodily urge. He assumed that if action rooted in desire ceased and no karma accumulated, transcendence would follow. The monks with him also regarded that path as genuine practice. When he abandoned austerity and accepted milk-rice, they left, saying that he had fallen away and given up the path.
What matters is that awakening came after this abandonment. The effort to reject worldly desire and become a transcendent being was itself bondage to inherited concepts. Wanting food is not the only desire. Wanting to become a god, to become an eternal mind beyond birth and death, and to know everything are also desires. The Buddha’s abandonment of austerity was not an escape into an easier life. It was the turn in which he saw that attachment to param—the beyond—was another husk.
The Snake Sutta: Discarding an Old Skin
When I ask what is Buddhist, I often return to the Sutta Nipata, a collection of early discourses. Of its five chapters I regard the fourth, the Atthakavagga, and the fifth, the chapter on the way to the far shore, as especially important. Today, however, I examined the first discourse in the opening Uragavagga, the Snake Sutta. It uses a snake shedding its skin to describe what a practitioner must leave behind. Rather than borrowing a conventional translation, I read it in words intended to retain the feeling of the original.
One who would put down surging anger, seeing that there is medicine for spreading snake venom, let the bhikkhu leave both the low and the beyond, as a snake discards this old, worn-out skin.
The verse speaks in terms of cause and effect. If anger rises and I am not simply to explode, there must be a medicine by which it can be put down. As snake venom has an antidote, anger has the medicine of seeing its cause. The verse points to my bondage to the low and the beyond. If I cling to the notions that I am right, the other is wrong, and the other must follow my standard, anger surges when that person refuses. When the clinging is left, the anger can also be put down.
The low here is ora, and what lies beyond is param. They can be translated as this shore and the far shore, this world and another world, but I want the contrast between the low and the transcendent to remain visible. The verse does not say only to leave a life bound to worldly pleasure. It says also to leave the life that despises the world while pursuing soul, afterlife, mysterious knowledge, and perfect purity. This is why “break free from both ora and param” is, for me, the alpha and omega of Buddhism.
Not Transcendence, but Dependent Arising and the Dismantling of Concepts
Buddhism is not a religion for surpassing humanity. The Buddha did not declare, “I know everything you do not know, and I have transcended the human condition.” Rather, he observed to the end his own search for soul, afterlife, and divine power, and discovered that these were conditioned constructions named and made by human beings. If someone says that a soul exists, we must be able to ask what it is and whether it can be produced apart from the conditions of body and the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.
By dependent arising I mean that everything comes to be in relationship and ceases in relationship: phenomena arise from conditions and cease with conditions. Mind is not a substance floating free of the body; it arises on the basis of the body. To claim that the body disappears while mind remains eternally independent is to posit something outside dependent arising. Yet what affects and is affected by other things cannot remain permanent. Even if we provisionally assumed something worth calling a soul, it could not be an eternal substance if it existed within conditions and relations.
Nama—name and concept—is not an absolute substance that contains reality exactly as it is. The antiquity of words such as soul, karma, heaven, hell, purity, and sacredness does not make their objects real. The Buddha’s turn was away from believing one named dharma after another and toward asking how those names were constructed. Buddhist practice is not the acquisition of a grander concept. It is the observation of whether I am being deceived by concepts I have already learned.
Ora: Leaving Everyday Standards and Anger
A life bound to ora is not merely a life chasing alcohol, money, and sex. It also includes treating as absolute the standards of like and dislike, right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice that I have accumulated through experience. I feel happy when desire is fulfilled and as if cast into hell when it is not. When another person refuses my word, anger rises to the point of wanting to judge or destroy him. That anger arises from certainty that I am one hundred percent right. To put anger down, I must first ask whether what I call right is really right.
I used the example of sexual violence. I was absolutely not saying that rape is insignificant or permissible. Social standards and law must be upheld to protect victims and stop violence. My point was that when ideas of chastity, purity, defilement, and cleanliness are imposed on a victim’s body, a second suffering can be added to the violence: “I have been defiled and can no longer live.” The body changes without cease; it is not an object whose essence becomes dirty or clean because someone passed over it. We must preserve standards that prevent violence while leaving absolute concepts of purity that imprison the victim again.
The same problem appears in obedience. If a ship is listing, must one remain seated to the end merely because the captain says to wait for rescue? If the statement “a soldier must obey a superior” is made absolute, the soldier must also obey an order to shoot residents or an order from martial-law command to drag out members of the National Assembly. An order, however, is a human agreement made for certain conditions, not an absolute truth. Only by stepping back from the concept can I decide whether this command should be followed or refused.
Param: Transcendent Concepts of Retribution, Beauty, and Purity
Leaving ora does not by itself reach Buddhism. If one leaves the world only to grasp karma, former lives, and purity, one is bound to param. On an online Buddhist forum someone looked at the handsome actor Cha Eun-woo and asked whether he must have saved a country in a former life to be born that way. I answer that a former life does not exist, and that even if one granted it for argument’s sake, good deeds in that life would not determine the face in this one. Handsome and ugly are already human concepts. Why would the universe read human aesthetic standards and dispense rewards accordingly?
The same applies to good and evil karma. The story that a cosmic system adopts human moral labels and assigns wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, good families and bad families is a projection of human imagination onto the universe. Wrongdoing can have consequences within real relationships and institutions. But the claim that an invisible substance called karma adheres to a soul and is later allocated as class and appearance in another life is a Jain notion, not a Buddhist explanation grounded in dependent arising and non-self.
The Visuddhimagga is treated in Theravada almost as a central manual of practice, but I question the very concept of a “path of purification.” A structure dividing pure from impure, light soul from heavy soul, good karma from evil karma, and demanding that evil karma be washed away resembles Jain dualism. The dream of becoming a perfectly clean human being may look noble, yet it can be the desire of param—the wish to cast off human impurity and become a transcendent being. What the Buddha asked us to leave includes not only worldly greed but attachment to purity itself.
When Dualism Is Left, Compassion Is No Longer a Superpower
If good and evil people are divided into fixed essences, an evil person must receive evil retribution. Where, then, can forgiveness arise, and how could compassion be extended to an enemy? When Jesus says to love one’s enemy and offer the other cheek, people treat it as the act of a saint impossible for ordinary humans. Yet once one leaves the dualism that turns enemy and ally, good person and evil person, into eternal essences, the act is no longer a divine superpower. It becomes a choice available to a human being who understands conditions.
I therefore do not diminish Jang Gi-ryeo’s life. I regard him as a person of admirable character and religious practice. His actions remain admirable without calling him a saint. People act differently according to their experience and degree of understanding; there is no separate class born with a sacred essence. Indeed, when we elevate someone into sainthood, we can evade our own responsibility by declaring that ordinary people cannot live that way.
Nor should his life end as a private uplifting story. If medical practice today has been absorbed into capitalist industry, doctors become doctors to make money, and poor people cannot reach a hospital, then the structure itself must change. It is not enough to be moved by the story of one man giving free treatment. For his philosophy to be applied socially, it must lead toward conditions in which everyone can receive care. Conversely, a doctor living that way today might be dismissed as an eccentric and buried because he inconveniences surrounding interests. Before declaring that admirable people do not exist, we must ask whether our structure allows us to see them.
Two Faces of Korean Buddhism: Thugs of Ora and Practitioners of Param
I largely agree with the viewer’s sense that the results reveal a problem in Korean Buddhism. If Buddhist fundamentals were alive, later generations should have criticized Seongcheol when he presented such notions as continuous awareness in waking and sleeping as a measure of awakening. Instead, after his death the country was stirred by reports of relics, and glittering pieces were treated as proof of his practice and claims. I say that Korean Buddhism was ruined along with that falsehood, because instead of leaving concepts and mysticism it worshiped relics and marvels as signs of awakening.
On one side are people carrying the title monk while wholly absorbed in worldly desire. If they treat temples, land, and devotees as personal property, buy elections for abbot with money, gamble, drink, and pursue women, in what sense are they monks? Nothing remains but the robe and title; they are no different from laypeople submerged in ora. I do not cover them with polite language. They are closer to thugs than monks.
On the other side are sincere people who genuinely want to practice. The problem is that the model offered to them is also Seongcheol-style austerity. Sitting month after month until the buttocks burn, sleeping only one or two hours in pursuit of continuous awareness, and clinging to concentration as bodily self-punishment can look like great practice. In a place where most do not practice at all, effort alone appears extraordinary. But long sitting and little sleep do not prove awakening. The Buddha already left the very concept that treats austerity as the road to transcendence.
My own father stood at the far end of gnosticism. He believed that concentration could make his hand burning hot and that prayer could cause rain. Without deeply examining “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” or “everything is made by mind,” he moved toward a mysticism in which mind could create the world at will. I, too, lived within that culture. I therefore cannot laugh at gnostic people as though they were wholly other. Anyone practicing Buddhism without examining concepts to the end can slide toward a search for mysterious powers, a true self, and former lives.
The Jogye Order now appears split along those two directions. On one side are people of ora, absorbed in money, rank, and possession. On the other are people of param, pursuing supernormal powers, a true self, former lives, continuous meditative awareness, and mystical experiences. Seongpa sitting in the position of supreme patriarch and speaking of mysterious transmission also belongs to this structure. The latter may be more sincere and diligent than the former. Sincerity, however, does not turn a concept of transcendence into Buddhism. Without the foundation of leaving both ora and param, both directions remain within delusion.
Even an Experience of ‘Seeing’ Must Be Criticized
Jeon Hyeon-su may say that he saw a heavenly being; Christians report seeing Jesus, angels, or light in prayer; Buddhists say that they saw Avalokiteshvara or Maitreya. Such claims are common. I do not accept them as evidence of a mysterious realm. Yet I cannot reduce every claimant to a liar or mentally ill person. When human beings fail to examine what they feel they saw, they take an image produced by the mind for an external object.
Looking at clouds, a person familiar with dinosaurs sees a dinosaur, one familiar with lizards sees a lizard, and one accustomed to paintings of dragons sees a dragon. The shape entering the eye and the image arising in the mind are not the same. Without studying sensation and representation, shape and mental image, the certainty “I saw it” becomes proof of reality. Buddhist observation should not be the accumulation of experiences; it should observe how experience itself is produced.
Nor do I accept without criticism the Pali translations of Jeon Jae-seong and the monk Gakmuk merely because they are labeled early Buddhism. If translations deeply saturated with rebirth are identified with early Buddhism itself, Jain elements can be reinstalled as Buddhist foundations. I believe that few people across world Buddhism deeply understand the meaning of leaving ora and param. Without that foundation, one may read many scriptures and give many lectures only to rediscover in the texts what one already believed.
Instant Answers, Lineage, and the Authority of Transmission
I also question the attitude of the monk Hyangbong, who says that he can answer every Zen exchange instantly and that an answer must be immediate. Why must it be immediate? Does the quick answer awaken the other person at once, or does it display that I am awakened? The ability to repeat an old master’s phrase quickly is not deep observation. If one already believes the concept that an awakened person answers instantly, the performance merely conforms to the concept. This is why a person can say something right in one context and then produce a contradictory answer when pricked by a slightly different question.
Ask the monk Gakmuk whether the five aggregates are empty and he answers yes; ask whether rebirth exists and he also answers yes. He thus grasps self-dissolution and an enduring subject at the same time. When a scripture declares impermanence beside a story resembling a transmigrating soul, and the contradiction is not seen, there may be many memorized words but inquiry has not begun. I do not seek contradictions merely to attack a speaker. I say that we must prick one another. When I say that something seems right, the person beside me should ask, “Is it really right?” so that I can think again.
I also find little historical support for the story that an unbroken Dharma lineage carried the lamp of awakening from teacher to disciple. It is extremely rare for an awakened teacher to produce an awakened disciple. Awakening is ultimately something each person must do. If the majority who transmit Buddhism are unawakened, their words and concepts also accumulate in scripture and tradition. Far more unawakened writing than awakened writing can be added. Buddhism then becomes a vast mixture in which rebirth and soul stand beside passages on impermanence and non-self.
Buddhist study is therefore difficult. To put it provocatively, it can resemble searching for one percent truth among ninety-nine percent falsehood. Yet a path opens if we recognize contradiction as contradiction, hold the question deeply, and refuse to release it until it applies directly to life. An organization without criticism rots, a society without criticism rots, and a person without self-criticism imagines that he is right about everything. Criticism is not malice for the sake of destruction; it is a Buddhist condition for discovering delusion.
Religion Turned into Belief, and the Logic of Cults
Nor is this only a failure of Korean Buddhism. The Sermon on the Mount contains the profound instruction to love even an enemy, yet Christians who leave afterlife, judgment, and heaven and try to see nature as it is are exceedingly rare. Occasionally someone understands God not as a transcendent personal deity but in a pantheistic or naturalistic sense close to nature itself, but most believe in God, angels, and judgment after death. The presence of a fine sentence inside a tradition does not mean that the religion lives by it.
In twenty-first-century religion, people continually arise who sell such superstition. If established religion says, “Believe and you will go to heaven,” someone beside it can say, “I am Jesus, I am God, and if you believe me I will send you to heaven.” The many cults, including Shincheonji, grow from the same structure of belief found in established religion. Their degree of social harm can differ, but the foundation is the same: do not verify what you do not know; believe the authority.
Even on Buddhist forums people say, “If you do not believe that, why practice Buddhism?” But to believe can mean that I do not know, and it can be a declaration that I no longer want to think. Buddhism should be a path of direct observation, questioning, reasoning, and breaking the grip of names and concepts. The moment it becomes a religion of “just believe,” it approaches the foundation of cults. If I believe merely because the authority of the Buddha or the name of scripture has been attached, I am not practicing Buddhism; I am abandoning the question.
Do Not Believe Me; Prick One Another
Thus, even while using the title Arahan Live, I repeat: do not believe me. Do not assume that everything I say is right, do not follow me, and criticize me as well. How could a person who tells everyone to criticize one another easily run the fraud of “I am divine, so believe me”? The conclusion that Buddhism has neither belief nor sacred objects is not a decorative slogan against authority. It means that no one is exempt from questioning—the Buddha, scripture, monks, and myself included.
This does not mean that I know there have been no admirable people at all within Korean Buddhism. I may not know; my view may be narrow; I may have failed to see lives that remained hidden. A person like Jang Gi-ryeo could be buried and never widely known within today’s structure. Rather than declaring that none exist, we should ask why they are not visible and what structures fail to cultivate them or conceal them. Today’s answer is not a final verdict but material for continuing that question.
What is Buddhist is not hatred of the world and worship of transcendence. It is seeing how I am bound to both desires—ora and param, the low and the beyond, pleasure and purity, good and evil, human and divine. It is discarding a worn-out concept as a snake leaves an old skin. It is then continuing to question so that a new skin is not put on again as absolute truth. Each person must observe self and world and ask what it means to use discrimination without being bound even to that discrimination. That is the Buddhism I am speaking of.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.