Am I Seeing the World as It Is?
This conversation began with two apparently different questions. One asked whether human beings, whose lives are finite, should cultivate a wider field of view, reduce conceptual thinking, and exercise freer reason. The other asked for the Buddha’s teaching to be summarized in about ten Korean characters. Yet both questions pointed toward the same issue: when I say that I see the world, what am I actually seeing, and where do the judgments I call correct come from?
We continually learn what we should do as citizens, students, workers, parents, children, and spouses. I too lived for a long time under the ideas that I had to support my family, earn money, and care for my parents. The point is not to reject every obligation. It is to ask, before holding any obligation as nature itself, how my thoughts and values were formed through a particular body, period, relationship, and education. Even a decision that feels entirely free contains countless conditions.
The Fantasy of Turning a Buddha Into a Transcendent Being
I call myself an arhat, but I still have things I want to do and things I feel I ought to do. When I am hungry I eat; I feel heat and cold; when I am sleepy I sleep. I have sexual desire. The image that becoming a Buddha completely eliminates desire and sexuality, grants all knowledge, and removes the effects of nature is closer to a human fantasy.
A Buddha is born under conditions, awakens through conditions, and eventually dies. No Buddha can become an eternal being. The historical Buddha did not know black holes, DNA, evolution, atoms, the Big Bang, artificial intelligence, television, the internet, mobile phones, or nuclear weapons. Awakening is not encyclopedic omniscience. Even if two people are both awakened, there is no reason their personalities, knowledge, worldviews, speech, and concrete decisions must be identical.
I have also described a Buddha as “a person going through a fifth adolescence.” An elementary-school student does not acquire university knowledge simply by knowing that he is an elementary-school student. But knowing where one stands can prevent one from insisting that one knows what one does not. Awakening is less like knowing everything beyond the well than recognizing that I am a frog inside it.
Can the Heart of Buddhism Be Said in Ten Characters?
There is no perfect sentence that fixes the Buddha’s teaching in ten characters. If I had to indicate a direction, I might say, “There is no such thing; do not be deluded.” The Diamond Sutra’s line that all conditioned appearances are illusory, and the Heart Sutra’s reference to inverted dreamlike thought, can be read as invitations to examine the images and inversions we grasp. Do not believe concepts blindly; observe the conditions that produced them.
This does not mean eliminating every concept and thinking nothing. Without concepts we could neither speak nor decide. But when we freeze one concept into a substance and use it to judge ourselves and the world, we can break it apart and assemble it again. It is an attitude of seeing an image as both image and not-image. Freedom from being swept away by wishes, and the gradual release of fear when the mind is unobstructed, lie in the same direction.
Must Everyone Become a Buddha?
I do not know whether everyone must become a Buddha and observe the world coldly. People live through dreams, images, and meanings, and a dream can move a life forward. Yet when someone is trapped in severe guilt, despair, or fear because an image is believed to be absolute truth, seeing that it may be a delusion can be an enormous help.
While mentioning the case of a politician who ended his life after past wrongdoing became public, I emphasized that I could not know his inner life and could only speculate. If the collapse of the honor and moral image that defined him felt like the end of his whole life, then making that image absolute may have pushed him further into despair. Awakening is not cold-blooded elimination of emotion. It creates a pause in which one can ask whether the image pulling one toward death is truly absolute.
Politics Revealed My Own Well
Because I have lived in poverty, I am sensitive to scenes in which capital crushes people. I ask whether the use of large capital to build a megastore and destroy a traditional market ceases to be violence merely because the law permits it. Yet this sensitivity was also formed at the place where I have lived. I have not lived the life of the wealthy and cannot claim to know their minds and experiences completely.
The 2025 presidential election made me feel this limit more sharply. After the martial-law crisis, I expected that few people would choose candidate Kim Moon-soo, yet close to forty percent of voters supported him. At first I asked how that could happen, but soon turned the question back on myself: “I am the same.” I had mistaken an image produced through my information, media, and experience for the reality of the whole country.
A supporter of Kim Moon-soo may have worried about the country from within one well, while a supporter of Lee Jae-myung may also have judged from within another. This does not mean every choice is equally correct. Facts must be checked, and false information and agitation must be criticized. But before fixing people on the other side as evil or ignorant, I need to admit that I too judge from limited information and experience. Only then can dialogue begin.
Confessing That I Cannot Actually Stand in Another Person’s Place
I cannot become a person living through missiles falling in Israel or Iran. I cannot become Yoon Suk Yeol, Kim Moon-soo, Lee Jae-myung, or Kim Keon Hee and experience their memories and desires exactly. A rich person cannot easily claim full knowledge of poverty, and a poor person cannot claim full knowledge of the rich person’s mind. The same is true when a man says he completely understands a woman, or a woman a man. We may imagine and strive to empathize, but we cannot become the other person.
Admitting this limit is not abandoning dialogue. On the contrary, it lets us put down the attitude, “I already know everything about you,” and begin listening. When I, as a man, admit that I do not know a woman’s experience, I can finally ask what she has endured. When I accept that my interpretation may be wrong, there is room for the other person’s words to enter. Knowing that I am a frog in a well is the first step toward looking beyond its wall.
Reading “Bring Forth the Mind Without Dwelling” Literally
We also examined the Diamond Sutra’s phrase eungmu-soju isaeng-gisim, conventionally rendered as “bring forth the mind without dwelling anywhere.” If this is understood literally as producing a pure mind that depends on no condition, I do not think it is possible. For a dependently arising being, no thought or decision appears without grounds and relations. The very mind speaking these words arises through the body, memory, questioner and audience, language, and period.
Giving without attachment can be understood as a direction of practice: do not cling to the thought that “I gave” or to the merit of the gift. But treating a mind that dwells on no condition as an actual object becomes like searching for an imaginary giraffe. Even a Buddhist sentence should not be frozen into a concept and believed blindly. If scriptural authority is used to establish an impossible standard and then condemn oneself for failing to meet it, words meant to break an image have become a new image.
Seek Objective Facts Without Pretending to Be an Objective Human
Saying that our judgments are subjective is not a call to abandon fact-checking. We should not take politicians at their word. We should hear opposing claims, inspect evidence and context, and ask what frames shape the broadcasts we watch and articles we read, and whether falsehood has entered them. A textbook is produced by someone for a purpose, and a company’s “ideal candidate” is a standard designed to select the people the company wants. It is difficult to find an explanation completely free of purpose and relationship.
Even rational judgment begins from a perspective. Just as the name Yi Sun-sin evokes the image of a hero for Koreans, memories taught by history and the nation guide our emotions and conclusions. A Korean view of the Japanese military “comfort women” issue cannot be identical to the view of a Japanese person who was not taught enough or heard a different account. Facts and responsibility do not disappear for that reason. Recognizing how different conditions formed judgments lets us discuss more concretely what must be verified and how persuasion might work.
The Conclusion That Even an Arhat Is a Frog in a Well
I cannot say that I have acquired a wide field of view. I have merely begun to recognize that my view is subjective and narrow. People often vote not for a candidate as such but for a dream and image they have made of the candidate. They may treat their anger, fear, pride, and inferiority as truth itself. We live amid misinformation and sometimes do not even know that it is wrong.
This conversation is therefore less a finished answer than a confession. I have lived my whole life as a frog in a well, and I remain one. There is no contradiction in someone who calls himself an arhat or Buddha being inside a well. Buddhism is not a teaching for boasting that one possesses all knowledge. It is a path of asking which images produce my sorrow and joy, anger and thirst, fear, inferiority, and superiority.
When we ask questions, our politics, emotions, ignorance, and prejudice may become visible, and that can be embarrassing. Yet there is no useless question. Dharma friends should not stamp what appears as a fixed self. We can observe it from a step back as in vipassana, examine the conditions of the revealed mind, question and criticize one another, and refine each other through dialogue. Confessing that I am a frog in a well is not resignation. It is an invitation to inspect the walls of our wells together.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.