The First Question of the AI Age: Did We Ever Think Critically?
On March 23, 2026, I opened the Monday question livestream. While waiting for viewers, I introduced a post from a participant named “Prediction Machine” in the Barobul Buddhism open chat. It warned that accepting AI answers without examination can harden thought in one direction.
My book Artificial Intelligence and Delusion describes humans as creatures of conjecture. Intelligence is deeply tied to predicting the next scene and filling gaps from available information. AI conjectures and humans conjecture; confident wording does not turn an answer into fact.
Yet we should not blame AI for the entire problem. I asked whether AI created humanity’s failure to criticize. Long before AI, people believed superstition, fake news, prophecy, and personal guesses as fact. AI may simply be a new object for an old habit of blind belief.
AI did not invent human credulity; an old habit of belief encountered a new authority.
Authority Shifted from Experts, News, and Religion to AI
People have uncritically trusted experts, professors, scientists, and politicians. They accepted claims because they appeared on public news, in a famous book, or in the words of teachers and parents. Sentences in Buddhist and Christian scriptures were received the same way.
A society formed this way is unlikely to treat AI differently. As AI grows more accurate and hallucinations decrease, its authority grows. Fewer errors can make the remaining errors easier to mistake for fact, after which untested answers are copied and repeated like a parrot.
AI education therefore cannot stop at prompting technique. We need the habit of asking for grounds, alternatives, and counterexamples. The same test must apply not only to AI but to every human authority.
Question not only AI but experts, news, scripture, parents, and my own thought by the same standard.
Why Writing Differs from Speaking
When a viewer praised the large archive of posts, I spoke about writing. In a livestream, thought may be insufficiently organized, words may repeat, examples may be imperfect, and the precise term may not arrive quickly.
Writing permits pause, rereading, and revision. Scattered thoughts connect as sentences form, and claims and examples can be reordered. This is why producing a book demands substantial work regardless of whether its thesis is true.
But writing does not automatically become truth. A polished sentence can make a false idea more persuasive. We must distinguish the craftsmanship of prose from the factual quality of its claim and read even excellent books critically.
Organized writing clarifies thought, but clarity of prose is not proof of truth.
Books and Public Broadcasters Also Sell Superstition
Many published books are filled with personal assertions lacking verification. Public and famous broadcasters also attach the label documentary to superstition or transmit false news. An authoritative format does not guarantee rational content.
I recalled seeing even EBS content tracing alleged past-life memories. When supernatural claims appear under the banner of educational broadcasting, viewers may mistake them for verified knowledge. Book, broadcast, and documentary become forms of authority.
This shows how difficult scientific, skeptical, and Buddhist thinking is. Superstition is not confined to ignorant individuals; it enters institutions of knowledge and education. Critical thought is therefore a daily civic duty, not a hobby.
The signboard of public or educational broadcasting cannot transform superstition into fact.
Criticism Must Face External Claims and My Own Concepts
Doubting AI and broadcasting is not enough. A critic of outside authority may still cling to inner concepts as absolutes. I must examine what I treat as right and obvious and where those thoughts came from.
Buddhist liberation means recognizing the beam before my own eyes and leaving delusion. Scripture, religion, scientists, and AI become my own thoughts after entering me, so external criticism and self-criticism cannot be separated.
This is why Barobul Buddhism discusses religion, science, philosophy, and politics together. Different objects meet the same question: Is it really so, can it be observed, and under what conditions did this claim arise? My speech must face that question too.
Critical thinking is not a technique for attacking others but a liberating practice that removes internalized authority.
The Jogye Conflict Began with Cultural-Property Fees
When told my criticism of the Jogye Order had grown harsher, I said it had been strong from early in the channel. During the presidential contest between Yoon Suk Yeol and Lee Jae-myung, lawmaker Jeong Cheong-rae criticized blocking mountain paths and charging cultural-property fees.
Even hikers not visiting a temple had to pay because the route passed temple land or entrances. Temples did not build the entire road and monks did not own the whole mountain. To citizens, blocking the path under a cultural-property pretext could look like a gangster toll road.
The Order responded with a national monks’ rally and political pressure rather than receiving criticism. I saw this as a religious institution using collective power to protect its financial interest and affect an election.
Protecting cultural property does not create a right to block a citizen’s road and collect money.
A Temple the Poor Buddha Could Not Enter
Śākyamuni is described as living without property and surviving on alms, while modern temples raise a financial barrier. I asked whether a poor awakened person like Gautama Siddhārtha could enter a Jogye temple today without an admission fee.
If people claiming to follow the Buddha exclude a person living like him because he lacks money, the contradiction is direct. An order owning land, heritage, buildings, and wealth invokes non-possession while collecting fees from ordinary people.
Robes, shaved heads, buildings, and cultural assets do not automatically create Buddhism. When an institution exercises property and authority in the Buddha’s name while departing from his life and message, its shell must be criticized.
If Śākyamuni returned but could not enter for lack of money, whom does that temple serve?
Why I Withdrew the Honorific “Seunim”
I once called even harmful monks seunim by habit. Yet the word itself functions as an honorific, so another respectful suffix is unnecessary. Saying “Jaseung seunim” grants elevation before asking whether he deserves respect.
A pastor may be called pastor respectfully or without an honorific. There is no need to elevate someone judged fraudulent. Religious office should not guarantee respect for a monk either.
I now reserve seunim for a relationship and conduct I respect, using monk or the rougher “jung” generally. My language has grown harsher because many clergy, in my judgment, fail even the basic character of a bhikkhu.
Automatic honorifics for religious office recognize authority before conduct has been evaluated.
Robes Do Not Make a Bhikkhu
I criticized many monks for keeping robes and shaved heads without serious practice or basic Buddhist understanding. If they pursue wealth and power more greedily than laypeople, the title bhikkhu does not fit. Form marks status but proves no depth.
Jaseung’s power, the patriarchal system around Jinje and Seongpa, money-driven elections, and mass rallies made the sangha look like a political organization rather than a community of awakening. Collective action protects institutional benefit while suffering in society receives silence.
Even with Dao Seunim present, I apologized for rough language but did not weaken the criticism. The purpose was not personal insult but exposure of conduct and structures hidden by robes.
Ask whether someone lives as a bhikkhu rather than assume that robes and a shaved head make one.
Israel’s War Is a Twenty-First-Century Religious War
Asked about Israel’s continued attacks, I called them a twenty-first-century religious war. European Catholic-Protestant wars, conflicts within Christian groups, and wars with Islam were not fought only for sacred belief; they were also massacres for power and advantage.
Today’s Israeli war likewise uses religious and ethnic identity for invasion and killing. Judaism or ethnic difference does not permit murder. Christians should ask how “love your enemy” in the Sermon on the Mount can coexist with missile attacks.
Judaism does not accept Jesus, yet American Christian fundamentalists and MAGA strongly support Israel. People seeking a Christian nation place territory and military alliance ahead of Jesus’ message, exposing a political-religious contradiction.
Religious language cannot make invasion for advantage and civilian massacre holy.
Skepticism Is a Scientist’s Duty
I read a quotation attributed to Thomas Huxley: skepticism is the scientist’s highest duty and blind faith an unforgivable sin. Scientists must continually search for counterexamples to their own theories and authorities.
A quotation from Richard Feynman followed: science rests on the belief that experts can be wrong. Expertise does not erase fallibility; greater influence requires stricter verification.
I criticized Professor Kim Seong-gu for spreading superstition while speaking in the language of science and reason. The aim was not to attack his personality but to examine failure to perform the scientist’s basic skeptical duty.
When scientists begin believing blindly, their titles merely make superstition more dangerous.
Causality Is Central Within Dependent Origination
Asked about causality and dependent origination, I said causality is included as a central element. The phrase “our meeting is also a karmic connection” means that the result of meeting grew from seeds, causes, and many conditions.
Where and when I was born, whom I met, how I encountered Buddhism, which video recommendation appeared, and whether any accident prevented the appointment all affected this encounter. One result cannot be reduced to one cause.
Planting a red bean matters, but seed alone makes no crop. Water, light, soil, labor, and weather act together. This temporal causality is one major axis of dependent origination.
Every present result has not one cause but a network of causes and conditions.
Temporal Causality and Conceptual Dependence
Dependent origination extends beyond earlier causes producing later results. Concepts arise through relations to other concepts. Darkness gains meaning through light, and light gains a boundary through darkness.
Birth and disappearance, clean and dirty, large and small, heavy and light presuppose one another. Neither term can be defined in full isolation; without comparison and difference its range disappears.
Conceptual dependence keeps language from becoming absolute. Human distinctions help describe reality but are not reality itself. Knowing that concepts depend on relations loosens attachment to words.
Dependent origination explains not only events but how concepts arise by relying on one another.
Where Does a Tree Begin and End?
Saying “the tree does not exist” sounds like denial of the visible object. The point is not to deny material phenomena but to deny an independent essence in the human category tree.
If a dictionary defines a tree as a plant with woody tissue, woody tissue must then be defined. We compare tree with grass, stone, animal, and person. What is not tree helps construct the category tree.
Classification changes with knowledge. Whales once may have been treated as great fish, but changed criteria removed them from fish. Concepts change through comparison and learning rather than remaining fixed substances.
The phenomenon is present, but the boundary called “tree” is made relationally by humans.
No Concept Can Be Defined Alone
Fish, person, god, and self also cannot arise alone. Meaning depends on what is not fish, how humans resemble and differ from animals, and how god is distinguished from humanity and nature.
Even a god said to create everything depends conceptually on contrast with non-god. A being without any relation or comparison could not be defined in human language. Independent, unchanging self-nature already fails at the conceptual level.
Following dependent origination leads to lack of self-nature and non-self. I do not exist independently of body, family, language, memory, and society. These are not separate doctrines but views of the same observation.
Delusion begins when an independently existing essence is assigned to a concept that cannot be defined alone.
Impermanence Also Follows from Dependent Origination
Life is impermanent because the world exchanges influence. Body responds to food, air, illness, aging, relationship, and environment. Social, technological, and political change alters work and thought. Relational beings cannot remain identical.
Impermanence is not a sentimental claim that everything vanishes meaninglessly. It is the consequence that phenomena change when conditions change. This also grounds action: changing causes and relations can change results.
Dependent origination, non-self, lack of self-nature, and impermanence form one cluster. Memorizing them separately turns Buddhism into an abstract list instead of understanding the structure.
Impermanence is not nihilism; it is the dependent conclusion that changing relations change self and world.
Before Asking the Race of Śākyamuni and Jesus, Ask Whether We Know Their Lives
Asked to classify the race of Śākyamuni and Jesus, I said I did not know. More fundamentally, we cannot be certain that Gautama Siddhārtha and Jesus of Nazareth existed exactly as familiar religious portraits describe them.
Believers may accept miraculous birth, descent from heaven, virgin conception, and resurrection as facts. Historical and textual study shows biographies expanding over time, with later believers filling details through imagination and devotion.
Even if historical persons existed, not every scriptural biography becomes history. When stories absent early grow richer later, layers of transmission and creation must be distinguished.
Religious biographies expanded over time; every added story cannot be treated as history.
The Religious Core Matters More Than Historical Existence
Even if Śākyamuni or Jesus were composite or fictional figures, every value in Buddhism and Christianity would not disappear. What matters is identifying teachings that help life and lead people toward wisdom.
After miracles, mythology, past lives, and heavens are removed, love, peace, and wisdom examining delusion can remain. A teaching can be evaluated through observation, experience, and social effects without divine authorship.
The core of religion is not deifying a founder but liberating humans from superstition and delusion. Ask what can be practiced today instead of making historicity the survival test for a religion.
More important than whether Śākyamuni and Jesus existed is what in their legacy leads us toward love and wisdom.
The 400,000-Won Fraud of Reading Past Lives
A person allegedly charged 400,000 won for a thirty-minute past-life reading and appeared repeatedly on Buddhist television. I called this nearly explicit fraud and harshly criticized the broadcaster.
Past-life vision cannot be universally verified or disproved. Selling the ability exploits anxiety and belief. A Buddhist station presenting it without criticism becomes an advertising channel for superstition.
A scientist disguised in rational language requires detailed criticism, but an expensive past-life reading is so overt that I wondered whether a long refutation was necessary. The media standard itself has collapsed.
If Buddhist television promotes a person selling past lives, it joins the superstition industry.
The Channel’s First Goal: Become a Lamp Illuminating Darkness
Asked about the channel’s direction, I unpacked three goals in its description. The first is to become a lamp illuminating darkness: helping keep both my life and others’ lives from being darkened by superstition, fraud, and delusion.
This appears in videos introducing critical Buddhist, scientific, and philosophical thought. Criticizing scripture, religion, AI, politics, and scientists is one effort to illuminate the same structure of darkness.
A lamp does not mean I own perfect truth. Because I too can be mistaken, it means continuing to ask and observe while mutually illuminating with others. A conversational network must brighten, not a single authority.
Becoming a lamp means illuminating one another’s delusions, not monopolizing truth.
The Second Goal: Help Individuals Who Suffer
The second goal is to help people live with less suffering and more happiness. This is why the livestream receives personal stories and attempts the role of counselor. Recognizing delusion can help when suffering grows from false belief or private standards.
But mindset cannot solve every pain. If loneliness comes from social isolation and poverty from unequal structure, telling a person merely to think differently does not remove the cause. Remove an arrow before correcting the victim’s mind.
Personal liberation and social improvement must be seen together. Counseling examines mind; participation changes conditions producing pain. Buddhism choosing only one sees half a life.
Release personal delusion through counsel, and remove society’s arrow by changing society.
The Third Goal: Build a Society of Love and Mutual Help
The third goal is to build a society where people love and help one another. Human beings live inside networks of family, economy, politics, and international relations. Korean disorder affects me, and foreign wars and American elections affect us.
Dependent origination can be explained as temporal, spatial, and conceptual networks. Everything, including myself, arises and changes within them. Buddhism cannot be reduced to a technique for private calm.
Discussing politics, economics, AI, and war is not leaving Buddhism. It is social practice observing the dependent conditions of life and proposing better futures.
If I arise dependently with society, practice ignoring social suffering also ignores my own conditions.
A Buddha Never Stops Observation and Criticism
I gathered the three goals under practice. A buddha continually observes thought, speech, conduct, emotion, body, and society, asks which causes and relations produced them, and searches for counterexamples.
The work before and after buddhahood is not fundamentally different. One does not become completed authority and stop observing; one acknowledges future delusion and keeps correcting.
Religion, scripture, counseling, society, and technology mingle on the channel because they are different objects of the same practice. Individual, neighbor, and society cannot be removed from the network.
A buddha is not someone who finished every answer but someone who never stops observing and correcting self and society.
Is the Jogye Order Walking Toward Natural Extinction?
I examined demographics behind reform. By my recollection, over eighty percent of monks were at least in their fifties, while annual new ordinations had fallen below fifty or one hundred. Younger generations have nearly disappeared.
If this continues, most will be over sixty in ten years and over seventy in twenty. Without new entrants, this becomes natural extinction rather than ordinary aging. Buddhist populations and this channel’s audience are also heavily older.
This is not contempt for age. Yet breaking hardened worldview and power becomes harder with age, and a hierarchy without younger reformers loses momentum.
A sangha without new people stands on a timetable of natural extinction even before reform begins.
A Structure That Removes the Status of Reformers
At first I urged reform-minded monks to organize and speak loudly. But I argued that the Order has expelled critics, removed monastic status, and imposed disadvantages. When speech threatens one’s livelihood, silence strengthens structurally.
Figures such as Myeongjin and the Yadanbeopseok channel have advocated reform, but they are few. Most fear retaliation, while lay Buddhists pay little attention to internal suppression. External criticism lacks leverage without organized internal force.
After years of observation I became pessimistic about reform. This does not end criticism; it recognizes how firmly demographic, political, and economic structures constrain change.
In an organization that expels reformers, silence is not only cowardice but a survival pattern produced by structure.
The Practical Limits of Retiree Ordination
The Order reportedly accepts retirees aged roughly fifty-one to sixty-five with long work experience, then requires novice life and years of training before full ordination. It is an attempt to replace declining young entrants.
I still did not recommend becoming a Jogye monk. Hierarchy, authority, mysterious Zen exchanges, power, and property problems are stacked so deeply that a sincere individual may find practice obstructed.
A retiree with social experience also lacks easy power to change the whole institution. New entrants sit low in hierarchy; entering a rotten structure without reform authority can simply exhaust them.
Good intentions behind retirement ordination can become obstacles when the institution entered is structurally corrupt.
From Individual Participation Toward Collective Action
Social participation cannot remain speech. I described joining protests over a Bulguksa monk and standing against violence in which Bongeunsa monks beat and trampled an employee.
Individual action has limits. I am considering whether people sharing Barobul Buddhism’s direction can gather and act in something like an organization, moving from online criticism toward offline practice.
I prefer social participation to social purification, which can imply cleansing others from above. Direction should emerge through participants’ questions and proposals rather than one leader’s fixed answer.
When video criticism becomes real participation, questions become conditions that move society.
Jaseung’s Power and Violence Against a Whistleblower
A broadcast reportedly showed monks dragging, assaulting, and threatening a monk who exposed gambling linked to Jaseung. If clergy attack an internal whistleblower, the offenders should be punished and the organization held responsible.
I criticized reports that attackers were not properly punished and instead received desirable posts. When loyalty to corruption is rewarded and criticism expelled, the institution protects corruption as a system.
Jaseung served long as administrative leader and later exercised kingmaker-like power while displaying political connections. A huge flower-filled welcome after an India pilgrimage contradicted the humility expected of a monk.
If the whistleblower is beaten and the attackers promoted, corruption is protected institutionally rather than committed accidentally.
Jaseung’s Death and the Opacity of Power
I said the circumstances of Jaseung’s death had not been clearly established. Reports of intelligence personnel involvement raised the question of why an intelligence agency rather than ordinary police would handle a death.
I did not present unverified rumor as fact. Even claims doubting the death could not be known from hearsay. The key is that cases involving strong religious and political power require transparent investigation.
His death cannot be isolated from the sangha that enabled his power, political relationships, and organizational protection of violence and gambling. The network producing power matters more than speculative secrets.
Do not fill an unclear death with conjecture; ask why a powerful person’s case could remain opaque.
Is Dependent Origination Itself Dependently Originated?
When asked whether dependent origination is itself dependently originated, I initially admitted that my thought had not reached that point. Rather than invent a quick answer, I examined how the concept arose.
Dependent origination did not descend from empty space as absolute truth. People observed causes, results, and relational arising, then expressed those observations in language.
The doctrine therefore depends on human senses, language, history, and capacity for observation. World and sentence are not identical; future observation can refine the account.
Dependent origination is not a sentence fallen from heaven but a dependent result of observing and conceptualizing the world.
Vipassana Means Stepping Back to Observe
I located vipassana in observation. Step back to examine body, feeling, mind, and phenomena and see what actually happens. Body-feeling-mind-dhamma is not merely a list to memorize.
Observation approaches the conclusion that phenomena arise through causes and relations. Asking what conditions produced this, what it connects to, and whether it is true is vipassana and critical thought.
Dependent reasoning does not come from believing a scriptural sentence. It grows through repeatedly checking body, emotion, society, and nature against explanation. This is where practice and scientific attitude meet.
Vipassana is not mystical experience but training to observe self and world from one step away.
Rebirth Is the Delusion That Humans Alone Are Special
Asked whether something might continue after death, I called rebirth a representative delusion. Would cockroaches, canaries, ants, bacteria, gut microbes, and plants all reincarnate?
Humans are one species among many, and life is one form of material phenomenon. Belief in a separate traveling soul treats humanity as cosmically exceptional.
Fear of death is understandable but emotion does not make fact. We must distinguish the desire for an independent self to continue from what can actually be observed.
If cockroaches and bacteria do not reincarnate, question the premise that humans alone must continue.
Self and Consciousness Are Results of the Bodily Network
Viewed dependently, I am a result of relationship and matter. Body is a network of cells, organs, nerves, food, air, and environment; consciousness is not a mystical object separate from bodily activity.
Consciousness also feeds back into body. Thought changes action, hormones, and habit while bodily condition changes thought and emotion. Mutual influence does not establish independence of mind from body.
No immortal consciousness continuing after bodily dissolution has been observed. The experience of self is real, but interpreting it as an independent, permanent substance is delusion.
Consciousness is a phenomenon of bodily and natural networks, not a separate thing traveling beyond the body.
Liberation of Self, Neighbor, and Society
At the end I reopened the channel’s principles to viewers: become a lamp, help people live happily, and build a society filled with love and peace.
In Buddhist language, the question is how to contribute to liberation of self, neighbor, and society. Outside religious vocabulary, it asks how individuals and communities can live more rationally, wisely, and happily.
The operator alone does not decide the answer. Anyone can offer questions and ideas through comments, community posts, and livestream chat. Participation creates new conditions that shape the channel and society.
Do not merely believe; ask, and together create conditions for the liberation of self, neighbor, and society.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.