We Must First Question the Goal of Seeing One’s Nature and Becoming a Buddha
This chapter addresses the core of my criticism of Dharma teacher Kim Tae-wan, but the problem is not limited to one person. Too many people turn “seeing one’s nature and becoming a Buddha,” original face, Buddha-nature, true self, no-mind, and non-discrimination into a special state and call it awakening. They believe in something that cannot be seen, known, or reached through discrimination, then claim that recognizing or experiencing it makes one a Buddha. Yoon Hong-sik’s talk of the true self and the original face discussed by Kim Tae-wan and his followers point in the same direction despite their different names.
The problem is not the desire to awaken. It is the confusion of a brief experience of no-mind with awakening when one does not even know what is to be awakened to. If we run without understanding what Buddhism does or what a Buddha is, great effort only carries us in the opposite direction. We may even arrive there, believe that we have become Buddhas, and drag others along. That is why the issue must be stated clearly.
To decide whether seeing one’s nature and becoming a Buddha is Buddhist, we must first answer the fundamental questions: “Why do we practice Buddhism, and what is a Buddha?”
One may define a Buddha as someone who has gained the higher knowledges, escaped rebirth, completely eliminated greed, hatred, and delusion, or attained perfect equanimity and an immovable mind. All these definitions, however, turn Buddha into a completed state. I define it from another direction: a Buddha is someone capable of wise thought who also helps others think wisely.
A Buddha Is Someone Who Makes Wise Judgments
We practice Buddhism to gain wisdom. Here, wisdom is not abstract omniscience but the capacity for judgment that actually helps one’s life. Every person has different traits, surroundings, social conditions, historical moments, and problems. A soldier in Ukraine, a child and parents under bombardment in Iran, the president of the United States, and residents of South and North Korea live under different conditions. The same advice cannot be mechanically applied to all of them.
Life demands judgment at every moment. We must examine what we pursue, why we suffer, what we desire, and whether that desire accords with the way reality works. If I wish for the sun to rise in the west and suffer every morning because it rises in the east, the problem is not the world but my expectation built against it. I must know whether what I pursue is an illusion and whether the cause of suffering lies in my thought or in external conditions before I can respond appropriately.
Buddhism is not a book containing the answer to every situation. It is a tool that teaches each person how to make a wiser judgment under their own conditions.
No scripture can contain a case identical to that of a university student preparing for examinations while caring for a sick mother. There are billions of people, all differing in time, place, and individual qualities. Some problems can be taken to experts, but I cannot delegate to someone else the questions of what I pursue and how I live. Buddhism does not make that decision for me; it helps me become capable of making it.
This wisdom is not the exclusive property of Buddhism. Because the world is dependently arisen, Buddhist wisdom has influenced and been influenced by other traditions, spreading in similar forms. Different terms can point in the same direction and carry the same content. Insisting that truth exists only in Buddhism is another attachment. Buddhism nevertheless contains tools especially useful for observing and breaking our illusions.
A Buddha Does Not Hand Down Answers but Helps Us See for Ourselves
Consider the story of the woman who came to the Buddha carrying her dead infant. She begged him to restore the child, believing that a great person should be able to do so. The Buddha did not immediately explain that death was inevitable. He asked her to visit the houses of the village and find one in which no one had ever died. If she found such a household, he said, he would revive her child.
The woman went from house to house. In every family, a grandfather, mother, husband, wife, child, or relative had died. There was no household untouched by loss. When she returned, the Buddha told her that her child was the same. What matters is not the moment when the Buddha pronounced an answer about death. The woman was given the time and process to meet others and directly observe the universality of death.
The Buddha’s teaching is not the injection of a conclusion. It is the process of guiding another person to question, observe, reflect, and reach their own judgment.
The story of the person asking the Buddha to pray so that his dead mother would avoid hell has the same structure. The Buddha had him throw a heavy rock into a river, then told him to pray for the rock to float. Whether he prayed single-mindedly for one hour or two, the rock remained submerged by its own weight. Just as prayer could not lift the rock, it could not alter the destination of his dead mother.
This is not a story telling us to believe in forty-nine-day rites or the efficacy of prayer. It tells us not to believe something merely because it has been transmitted by tradition and practiced by others, but to question what prayer, life, and death are. Memorizing the answer “prayer does not work” merely creates another doctrine. Wisdom lies in observing whether the rock actually rises and reflecting on how that result relates to prayer for the dead.
We Must Distinguish Wisdom from Nonsense Even Within Scripture
Both stories appear in Buddhist scripture, but scripture also contains material that promotes deification and superstition rather than wisdom. We cannot know which sayings came from the historical Buddha. His actual voice was not preserved, and much of what was transmitted may have been made by later generations. A passage cannot be declared the Buddha’s teaching simply because it is in a scripture.
The criteria are whether it directly helps life, whether it offers methods of questioning, observation, and reflection for addressing suffering and doubt, and whether it allows another person to judge for themselves. Someone who claims to be a Buddha should not boast of an experience knowable only to themselves. They should help another person understand a problem and make a better decision.
A teaching that transmits no wisdom and remains unintelligible after ten years, or claims that one must know something that cannot be known or discriminated in order to become a Buddha, is not Buddhism.
Even after listening for one hour or ten minutes, a person should be able to break at least one illusion and gain one thing that helps life. A Buddha is not an authority monopolizing wisdom. A Buddha teaches a person how to gain wisdom so that they can live their own life wisely and then guide others toward wisdom.
How Non-Self, Emptiness, Nonduality, and Non-Discrimination Become States
When people hear non-self, they try to enter a state of non-self. When they hear the term “image of a self,” they try to create a condition completely devoid of an image of “I.” When they hear emptiness, they conclude that everything is futile and the world is an illusion, or they try to become literally empty. When they hear nonduality, they decide that all division and discrimination are wrong and pursue a state in which nothing is distinguished.
They have heard that such a state exists, believe what they heard, and eventually claim to have experienced it. Then they say that human beings possess an originally pure original face or Buddha-nature and that seeing it brings Buddhahood. Merely recognizing or experiencing it supposedly makes one a Buddha. Yet they cannot explain what those words mean, why the concepts arose, or what wisdom comes from the state.
A brief experience of no-mind or non-discrimination does not make someone a Buddha. Calling a state that produces no wisdom “awakening” merely attaches the wrong label to an experience.
Concentration can quiet thought for a time and make the mind comfortable. That is a real benefit of meditation. It can give someone overwhelmed by distress an experience of stopping and resting. But in the moment when thought and discrimination cease, no wise answer emerges. To speak to another person, one must again think and distinguish their circumstances, level of understanding, and problem.
Original Face and Buddha-Nature Are Other Names for Ātman
The moment we claim that there is something originally pure—original face, Buddha-nature, true self, pure light, jīva, or soul—that cannot be seen, known, or observed, it is no different from ātman. Changing the name does not make a metaphysical substance Buddhist. “It cannot be known by discrimination but can suddenly be experienced” is a device that blocks verification and discussion.
Even if we suppose such a thing exists, why should seeing it make someone wise? How can a quiet mental experience judge politics, society, and personal suffering or help another person? Connecting an experience to remainderless nirvana, emptiness, or non-discriminating wisdom is the experiencer’s guess. They call their guess Buddhahood without examination, verification, debate, or self-criticism.
Claiming to become a Buddha by seeing an unobservable and unknowable original face is anti-Buddhist. Buddhism does not take what cannot be observed as a subject of discussion.
If we have not observed the full extent of the universe, we cannot declare it infinite. If we cannot observe an afterlife, we do not conclusively say that it exists or does not. This is the Buddhist refusal to answer. But when one says that true self and original face cannot be seen or known yet claims to have experienced them, one smuggles back the metaphysics Buddhism declined to discuss.
Wisdom Comes Not from Meditation but from Discrimination and Reflection
Wisdom does not emerge from spacing out. Many people in Korean Buddhism and southern Buddhism insist that meditation produces wisdom, but meditation merely allows the flow of thought to rest temporarily. Wisdom arises in the process of raising a question, observing the object, and reflecting on what was observed.
To decide whether to feed a child something covered in soil and sand, we must discriminate. We judge it dirty using knowledge that playground sand may contain parasites and contaminants. If nothing is distinguished and no thought occurs, we cannot even decide whether the child may eat it. A person makes innumerable judgments in the course of a single day.
A Buddha is not a person without discrimination but one who continually discriminates and reflects in order to make wiser judgments.
To answer another person’s question, one must distinguish their circumstances, disposition, level of understanding, and cause of suffering. Telling someone holding a dead child “Do not discriminate” offers no help. Nor can it help the person worried about a mother in hell. One must understand the person’s belief, grief, and question, then find a way for them to see for themselves. The ideal of a non-discriminating state eliminates this very possibility of wisdom.
Compressed Words Require History and Context
Impermanence, non-self, greed-hatred-delusion, immovable mind, equanimity, emptiness, non-arising and non-ceasing, seeing all images as non-images, neither perception nor non-perception, nonduality, and non-discriminating wisdom are aphoristically compressed terms. Such expressions include mistranslations and at times the content of later misunderstanding. We must therefore examine not just the term but its historical and cultural setting, why it arose, what it opposed, and which direction it indicated.
Non-self is a translation of anātman. To understand why “not ātman” was said, we must know the ancient Indian background in which people pursued an eternal and independent ātman. Non-self is not a state in which “I do not exist,” nor a command never to distinguish oneself from another. It is the understanding that there is no eternal, unchanging true self.
When context is removed, a compressed expression loses its direction and becomes the name of a state. Without the historical background of non-self, people create a non-self state; without the concern behind non-discrimination, they pursue thoughtlessness.
The “images of self and person” likewise do not simply command us to erase the ideas of self and other. They concern the image of ātman and attachment to independent substance. The concept can certainly be used to break fixation on self and other as completely separate beings. But when someone claims to have no image of self and says, “I am the universe,” they have not eliminated discrimination; they have fallen into a new delusion.
Neither Impure nor Pure Breaks Attachment to Purity
Consider why the Heart Sutra says “neither impure nor pure.” Jainism understood karma as something that adheres to the soul like matter. Good karma lifts one upward and bad karma takes one downward. By stopping every desire and action—even fasting to death—one would supposedly enter complete purity without any karma attached and escape rebirth.
“Neither impure nor pure” addresses someone bound by this image of perfect purity. Purity and impurity are not absolute substances but concepts determined through relations and convenience. What is filthy to a human can be excellent food for flies and microorganisms. If we become obsessed with sterility and purity, we could not even kiss another person whose body contains bacteria.
“There is neither impurity nor purity” does not mean eating anything and living without discrimination. It asks whom the image of purity and chastity is making suffer.
If a woman who has had a sexual relationship feels defiled because of the idea of premarital purity, the problem is not a substance attached to her body but an implanted image of purity. Expelling others from land because God supposedly gave it to us, and fighting over the concept of “mine,” have the same structure. Leaving a concept does not mean erasing every concept; it means seeing what a concept binds us to and what it prevents us from seeing.
Conversely, one must not use “neither impure nor pure” to say that nothing is dirty and feed a child something covered in filth. Breaking a convention against a father and son smoking together does not mean ignoring courtesy before everyone. If we break one image only to become bound by its opposite, we fall into the second trap of neither perception nor non-perception.
Become Free Again from the Image of Non-Discrimination
No one can live a single day without discrimination. We distinguish the toilet from the street, food from waste, and judge right from wrong and danger from safety. We must also discriminate when discussing politics, war, and massacre. Using non-discrimination to forbid political discussion removes Buddhist wisdom from reality.
We are told to be free of an image because we are bound by that image. But if we hear that images are not absolute and then become attached to “no image,” we create another image. Hence the structure of neither perception nor non-perception: do not absolutize images, but do not turn the state of having eliminated every image and distinction into a new absolute goal.
The state of non-discrimination is itself a delusion. How can someone tightly bound by the image that eliminating discrimination makes a Buddha help another person wisely?
Invoking an experience that cannot be explained or verified ends conversation. “You do not understand because you have not seen your nature” and “It cannot be put into words; you must suddenly experience it” protect a claim from criticism. This is also why no wise word about politics, society, or life emerges and why the concrete problems of others cannot be addressed.
Vipassanā Is Observation Followed by Reflection
Vipassanā observes reality as it is. It observes mind, body, and world. Observation means seeing an object in distinction from other things. To observe an ant, one must focus on the ant; to observe an emotion, one must distinguish the emotion, its cause, and the desire behind it.
Why observe? To understand how things operate. We need to know how the mind arises, why we suffer, and through what conditions the world moves. But observation is not the end. After observing, we must reflect: “Why did this happen?” Understanding does not arise without discrimination and thought.
Buddhism cannot advance a single step without thought and discrimination. Meditation can provide temporary rest, but it does not become wisdom unless observation and reflection follow.
Quiet can continue for a while after meditation, and stepping back to observe one’s thoughts can become familiar. This is a result of training and one form of metacognition. It is not the sudden transformation into an ineffable something. Human beings can acquire the habit of observing emotions without being immediately dragged by them. Calling that experience itself Buddhahood creates attachment to another experience.
An Unobservable Experience Is Not a Buddhist Conversation
Buddhism discusses what can be mutually understood. Something that cannot be seen, known, or discriminated but can supposedly be suddenly experienced cannot serve as a topic of discussion. The same applies to Buddha-nature, original face, and true self. Just as we say we do not know the size of the universe or the afterlife when they have not been observed, we must say we do not know an unobservable inner substance.
Language and reflection are among the distinctive strengths of human beings. Language cannot contain the whole of reality and can create illusions such as God, soul, and afterlife, but language and reflection also enable us to criticize and become free of those concepts. Buddhism arose and wandering thinkers questioned, debated, and recorded teachings because of language. Using “not relying on words” to eliminate thought and explanation reduces a human being below a stone.
Do not boast that something cannot be conveyed in words. A Buddha must be able to communicate methods of questioning, observation, and judgment in words another person can understand.
Interpreting “everything is mind-made” as meaning that the whole world is created by my mind is the same error. The world continues when I close my eyes and fail to perceive it; factories, science, and other lives continue after I die. Mind is the activity of my brain and body, not a substance that creates the universe.
Liberation and Leaving Concepts Do Not End Once and for All
Leaving concepts has a purpose. We investigate which illusion makes us suffer and what false thing we pursue, then become free of our attachment to that concept. The brain cannot be wiped clean at once so that every distinction and bond disappears. At each moment, a person must mindfully examine what pulls them, why they are angry or depressed, and what they desire.
The cause of suffering cannot be reduced to mind alone. My thought and concepts may be causes, but family, society, politics, and physical violence may also be causes. If someone cuts my arm with a knife, making the mind peaceful does not remove the source of pain. Nor are missiles solved by inner quiet. In a dependently arisen world, we must distinguish many causes and respond to each appropriately.
Liberation is not a single event of reaching a perfect state. It is the repeated process of observing and reflecting on the illusion that binds us at each moment and becoming free again.
Observing one’s mind can be awkward at first, like learning to ride a bicycle. With repetition, it becomes familiar to step back from emotions and thoughts and ask what one is bound by. It requires neither a special genius nor a sudden mystical experience. It requires understanding words and questions, some capacity for concentration, and continued practice.
A Buddha Is an Ongoing Process, Not the Owner of Completed Truth
A Buddha is neither someone who knows everything nor someone never disturbed by any condition. A Buddha develops the attitude of thinking wisely on the basis of understanding self, society, and nature, admits that judgments may be wrong, and continues conversation and debate. When criticized, such a person must be able to say, “You are right; my judgment was not wise,” and revise it.
A Buddha is not someone who has attained a certain state. A Buddha teaches how to gain wisdom and continues to practice that attitude personally.
When seeing one’s nature, becoming a Buddha, and an experience of no-mind are turned into ultimate awakening, this entire process disappears. Only the delusion remains that one ineffable experience completes a person and grants all wisdom. Such Buddhism does not produce even a speck of wisdom. Buddhism means cultivating wisdom, applying it to life’s problems, and helping others solve their own problems.
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