You Cannot Practice Buddhism Without Thinking
It is difficult to practice Buddhism properly without first clearing away misunderstandings about it. What I discuss here therefore belongs to the basics of Buddhism: why Buddhism speaks of wisdom rather than truth, why negative particles such as “no,” “not,” and “non-” appear everywhere, and what the expression “neither perception nor non-perception” points to. I will use the familiar fable of the ant and the grasshopper, then continue into questions about preparing for success and about vipassanā.
Buddhism must be realized and applied in ordinary life. Only when it is actually applied to life can we call it practice, and the person who lives that way is a Buddha. A Buddha is not someone who reaches a special state in a single stroke. We must first break the image of Buddhahood as a mysterious state in which all discrimination disappears and nothing can cause disturbance. Buddhahood is an attitude toward life, and that attitude must appear in our words and actions.
When Buddhism is learned incorrectly, people pursue “becoming a Buddha” without knowing what they are pursuing. They imagine a separate state of complete awakening that turns a person into something unlike ordinary human beings. Buddha then becomes a sublime and mystical being, while no one tries to live like a Buddha. At the same time, people loudly claiming to be awakened produce one absurdity after another. We arrive at the strange world in which no one dares become a Buddha, yet self-proclaimed awakened people abound.
Breaking the image of Buddha changes the question. Instead of asking, “What state must I attain?” we ask, “What am I applying to my life today?” My speech and conduct must change; I must notice the illusions I hold; and I must be able to converse with others and accept criticism. This is what I mean by a real Buddhist and by an attitude worthy of a Buddha.
To practice a Buddhism that does not chase illusions but actually applies to life, you must think, reflect, observe, and raise questions for yourself.
Do not simply believe what I say either. Think about what may be wrong with it and criticize it. Buddhism must be able to address politics, religion, society, culture, customs, and personal problems throughout life. If it merely repeats stock phrases and tells people to live without thinking, it is not Buddhism.
When Compressed Words Lose Their Original Direction
Buddhism and philosophy contain many aphoristic expressions. Long and complicated explanations are compressed into short sayings and terms. “Knowledge is power” is not a sentence found verbatim in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum; it is a further compression of his discussion of knowledge and method. When people no longer know what was compressed into the phrase, they interpret it however they please.
The same is true of “neither perception nor non-perception.” The expression points in a direction, but once its original meaning is lost, it becomes deified and turned into bizarre conclusions. A common explanation, including what one finds in Google’s AI overview, describes the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception as the fourth level of the formless realm, the highest meditative attainment, and a subtle transcendent mental state in which thought can be said to be neither present nor absent. I regard this as a fatal misunderstanding created by later people who did not understand Buddhism.
Here, “perception” includes the shapes and images that arise in the mind as well as thoughts and concepts. “Neither perception nor non-perception” does not describe a peculiar state in which perception remains in an extremely subtle form. Once the compressed expression is treated as the name of a state, people begin claiming to have reached a mysterious condition in which thought can be called neither present nor absent. I criticize this as talk that can make people mentally ill, because it ignores the direction of the words and manufactures a state to pursue.
An AI overview can gather commonly repeated explanations, but it cannot guarantee an answer. It may instead show how people commonly misunderstand this expression. The fact that an authoritative-sounding explanation circulates widely is entirely different from a judgment that it is Buddhist. Whether the source is a scripture, a teacher, or AI, we must ask again whether its statement accords with dependent arising, observation, and lived experience.
The formless realm is not a meditative state but the result of questioning, observation, and reflection. What is needed after the four meditations of the form realm is not a deeper stupor but a deeper understanding.
Meditative absorption ends with the four meditations of the form realm. Calming thought can help someone whose mind rushes to conclusions and becomes swept away by its own ideas. But meditation alone cannot produce awakening, while many people have awakened without any special meditative attainment. What matters in Buddhism is questioning, doubt, observation, and reflection. The fact that the Korean name for the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception contains the character for “concentration” does not justify turning it into a strange mental condition.
The Ant, the Grasshopper, and “This Moment”
In the fable, the ant works to prepare for winter while the grasshopper plays and enjoys the day, only to suffer when winter arrives. The story normally ends by declaring the future-oriented ant correct. But we first need to ask why Buddhism says, “Live this moment.” Why this moment? Why say that a single meeting is a single opportunity?
We postpone what we need to say to the person before us and put off what we want to do until some future day. We assume we will still be here tomorrow. Impermanence means that I do not exist forever and do not know when I will die or change. There is no guarantee that the person beside me during this year’s cherry blossoms will still be beside me next year. I too once viewed the blossoms with my family, only to see them the following year without my father.
There is a definite concern behind the emphasis on this moment. People behave as though they will live forever and imagine that they will be happy once a desire is fulfilled someday. They think today can be endured, the present may be miserable, and life can begin after success. But a life is the gathering of its moments. One cannot fill ten or twenty years before success with suffering and call only the final result happiness.
Understanding impermanence deeply does not mean becoming gloomy while talking about death. It means treating the person met today as someone one may never meet again, not postponing what must be said, and not making oneself worthless merely because something remains unachieved. Even if the goal is never reached, one should be able to live each present day on the way toward it as something precious.
“Live this moment” is not a declaration that only the present exists. It means that you should not mortgage your whole life today for a future that may never arrive.
People make today miserable for the sake of success ten years from now. They postpone what they want and need to say and give up present contentment. Parents send children from academy to academy, leaving them no time to play, because of what they want the children to become at twenty. Yet no one knows whether the child will reach twenty or whether the parent will still be there. A child has the right to live at one, ten, and twenty. If happiness is allowed only after a future goal is achieved, every day along the way becomes a day of not yet having succeeded.
Buddhism therefore tells us not to live like the ant. I will call this “non-ant.” But does negating the ant make the grasshopper correct? Since tomorrow may not arrive, should we play all night, neglect tomorrow’s examination, and refuse to grow food because winter may not come? It is true that we may die tomorrow, but it is equally true that we may still be alive. Declaring that there is only today is another image to which the mind clings.
From Non-Ant to Non-Grasshopper
Do not live like the ant, mortgaging everything to the future. But do not live like the grasshopper either, as though there were no future. Live today while preparing for the possibility of tomorrow, and prepare for tomorrow without turning today into a wreck. The problem is who can prescribe the ratio. There is no formula saying that thirty percent ant and seventy percent grasshopper is the answer.
People want a quick and easy answer. When a daughter wants to marry someone, they consult fortune tellers and compatibility charts because they want somebody to tell them what to do. But fortune telling guarantees nothing, and Buddhism does not tell us that a choice will certainly succeed. No one knows every condition in the world, and no one can unconditionally control results that arise dependently.
If either the ant or the grasshopper were a universal answer, Buddhism could provide one simple instruction. But conditions differ from person to person, and even one person’s life changes from moment to moment. Some people need more rest today; others must prepare today. No choice guarantees success. Buddhism can therefore offer not a truth that applies identically to every case but wisdom that reads conditions and revises judgment.
The arrival of AI may change the value of study and skill as they existed in the past. It does not follow that reading, critical thought, and cultivated judgment become meaningless. The conclusion that one need only enjoy today is equally premature. The capacity to prepare for the future and the capacity to live the present are not enemies that must eliminate each other. The problem is fixation on one side until the other disappears from view.
When a viewer wrote that “only the present exists,” I told him not to talk such nonsense. If only the present existed, how did someone who learned of the broadcast in the past enter it today? Turning “this moment” into an absolute ontological proposition transforms a teaching meant to make us examine life into another image that denies reality.
Buddhism is not a religion that makes the decision for you. It is a process of seeing what binds you in a situation without a fixed answer and learning to make a wiser judgment under your own conditions.
This is the structure of neither perception nor non-perception. “Non-perception” means not being bound by an image. But if we break one image and immediately seize the opposing image of “no image,” we are once again bound by non-perception. Not turning the grasshopper into the answer after negating the ant—moving from non-ant to non-grasshopper—is one easy illustration of this structure.
Negation Does Not Tell Us to Create an Opposite Substance
Buddhism uses so many negations because people become bound as soon as something is named. Say that discrimination is a problem, and they invent a state of total non-discrimination. Say “neither impure nor pure” to loosen attachment to impurity and purity, and they create a new doctrine that nothing in the world is dirty or clean. Say Buddha-nature, and they imagine a substantial Buddha-nature; say true self, and they seek a true self; say remainderless nirvana, and they imagine an actual mystical condition.
What counts as dirty or clean changes with standpoint and conditions. Feces that look filthy to a person are a habitat for countless microorganisms. Understanding this does not mean feeding a child something dirty that fell on the ground. Nor does loosening attachment to the precept against killing mean creating a new absolute rule that one can never even kill a mosquito. Ask why the concept was made, what binds me, and whom I harm because of that attachment.
If “killing is bad” is held mechanically, one may create the conclusion that a mosquito can never be killed under any conditions. Conversely, one may invoke “neither impure nor pure” to claim that nothing is dirty or clean and that one may eat and live however one pleases. Both attitudes discard the context that produced the words and absolutize a term.
We must understand that words and concepts cannot contain the whole of reality. But we must not turn that insight into a new mysticism claiming that nothing can be conveyed in words or that thought must disappear so that the heart alone can awaken. Without thought, what could be observed and how could judgment occur? Buddhist negation demands not the suspension of thought but that thought be carried further and deeper.
Do not hear “non-discrimination” and try to eliminate thought. Observation and judgment both require discrimination. The problem is not discrimination itself but grasping our discrimination as an absolute substance.
The reason “nor non-perception” is added is that, after negating one image, people create another on the opposite side. With deep understanding, “non-perception” alone would be enough, because one could then ask, “Have I become trapped in the image of having no image?”
There Is No Mystical State of Cessation
I strongly criticize the conventional account that treats the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception and the attainment of cessation as meditative stages. If all feeling, emotion, sensation, and reflection disappeared without remainder, who could know that they had entered such a state? The moment someone says, “I entered a state without discrimination,” they are already using feeling, thought, and discrimination. They have merely given a grand name to an experience of becoming quieter than usual.
If every feeling, sensation, and consciousness disappeared, there would be no subject to remember the condition and no basis for judging that one had emerged from it. “I felt that I felt nothing” cannot stand as a sentence. What may actually have happened is an experience in which thought diminished and the mind became quieter than usual. The problem lies in interpreting that ordinary change as complete cessation and transcendence.
This interpretation is connected to the desire to become a divine being. People invent a perfect condition without emotion, sensation, or reflection and call it the highest state. Buddhism, however, makes us see human life arising and changing through conditions; it does not teach us to become something free of every condition. Once the formless realm is made into meditation and cessation is installed above it, the road of questioning and understanding becomes a hierarchy of transcendent states.
The very phrase “a meditative state in which everything disappears” is nonsense. It is not dependent arising. Claiming to have entered cessation contradicts the act of making the claim.
Therefore, the account that installs cessation as the ninth of nine successive attainments is bullshit. Writing bullshit in a scripture does not make it cease to be bullshit. Buddhism is neither perception nor non-perception, and this concerns understanding, not a meditative state. That understanding must apply to my life and speech and enable me to recognize what binds me. We must not turn “do not be excessively bound by sexual desire” into an ideal of completely eliminating sexual desire.
How the Image of Success Swallows Today
During the discussion, a viewer said that practice was difficult because the probability of being alive tomorrow was greater than that of dying, and tomorrow would most likely be another mechanical day. The core issue is not whether one prepares for the future. It is whether one is trapped in the image that one can be happy only after achieving something. You can rehearse for a performance. But if rehearsing now is nothing but anxiety and pain because the performance must succeed, the goal has swallowed the present.
Modern success cannot be possessed by everyone. In an examination with a ratio of one hundred applicants to one place, one passes and ninety-nine fail. Not everyone can be a star, a president, or a famous restaurant owner. Yet the one successful person says that effort produced everything, and that story hides the ninety-nine failures who pursued the same goal. Outcomes are determined not by individual effort alone but by countless relations and conditions.
The tearful testimony of a successful person sounds moving. He says he overcame hardship, worked, and finally succeeded. But the countless people who worked similarly and failed disappear from the story. When one person’s success is explained entirely by personal will, those who did not succeed become people of insufficient effort and lesser value. That is not a view of outcomes through dependent arising.
The same is true across the time of an individual life. If at twenty I fix an image of success at forty and live the next twenty years as “the person who has not yet succeeded,” half my life passes in lack. Even if I reach the goal at forty, the lost twenty years do not return. Moreover, success changes with conditions outside my control.
We should not become trapped in values assigned by society and regard ourselves as worthless. The belief that I must be useful, recognized, and proven before I have value makes today’s self wretched. For a person who may die tomorrow, how empty is the claim that social success determines human worth?
Work for the future, but do not believe that happiness is possible only if the result is achieved. The present moment of preparation is already your life.
When my businesses kept failing in my late twenties and early thirties, I too wanted to buy lottery tickets. Whenever I desperately needed money, the temptation appeared. I examined that desire and repeatedly persuaded myself how foolish the expectation was. I have never bought a lottery ticket, not simply because I possessed strong willpower, but because I saw myself constructing an image that would suddenly solve everything in the midst of despair.
Vipassanā Means Observing Through Distinctions
Just as I was about to end the broadcast, someone asked what I thought of the claim that vipassanā causes the soul to disappear forever. First ask what is supposed to disappear: greed, hatred, and delusion; thought; or a soul? Vipassanā means observation. Observation has two important aspects. One is a metacognitive standpoint that steps back from immediately identifying thoughts, emotions, and moods as “me.” The other is discrimination, distinguishing the object being observed from other things.
To observe an ant, one must distinguish it from other insects. To observe an emotion, one must distinguish what emotion arose, what caused it, and what standards and desires lie underneath. Vipassanā is therefore not a state in which discrimination completely disappears. Nor does it refer only to formalized methods of attending to the soles of the feet or the breath. Its core is observing and understanding how mind, body, and world operate.
When Buddhism speaks of calming and observing, observation is especially important. We must see how the mind arises, what thought reacts to, under what conditions the body hurts, and through what relations the world operates. Observation leads us to realize, “The world works this way, while I was demanding its opposite,” and “I did not understand human beings, life, or even my own cognition.”
Discrimination is not the target of elimination here. Observation becomes impossible if we cannot distinguish an emotion from its cause, or a desire from the standard that produced it. Yet while observing, we can step back from the identification that says, “This emotion is me.” Vipassanā does not blur objects together. It distinguishes them more accurately without turning those distinctions into eternal substances.
Observing, reflecting, and questioning until one illusion after another is exposed—and becoming free of the bonds through which those illusions made us torment ourselves—is vipassanā and liberation.
What cannot be observed cannot be a subject of Buddhist discussion. To say that a soul disappears forever, one must first show what a soul is and how it is observed. A soul would have to exist before it could disappear. Imagining something nonexistent and then discussing its annihilation is not Buddhism but cultish nonsense.
Distinguish Meditative Quiet from Spiritual Illusion
Claims made by spiritual teachers such as Paramahansa Yogananda and by yogis who speak of souls, chakras, energies, and mystical attainments reveal the same problem. Concentrating on something can reduce mental wandering and make the mind quieter than usual. Meditation and absorption can have that effect, which is why I sometimes recommend Buddhist meditation. But quiet is simply quiet. Quiet itself is not awakening.
In a quiet state, people may feel that the body floats or that energy flows, and then append stories about a spiritual world and chakras. Meditation is only meditation, yet they create an illusion and pursue it. It is deeply regrettable that places immersed in ideas of Māra, karma, supernatural powers, and souls still speak this way in the twenty-first century.
When the mind becomes quiet in meditation, sensations normally unnoticed may stand out. The body may seem to float, energy may seem to flow, or one may feel contact with something special. The fact that a sensation occurred is different from the truth of the explanation attached to it. Human beings add stories after experiences. If a meditative experience is immediately treated as evidence of chakras, souls, or supernatural powers, one has failed to observe one’s own interpretation.
Calling a place “early Buddhism” does not make it Buddhist if, in the twenty-first century, it speaks as facts of Māra’s influence, the eternal annihilation of a soul, supernatural powers, and karmic mysticism. I call such claims nonsense and at times bullshit. I use harsh words because the issue is not a harmless difference of taste. These errors pull people away from observation and questioning and make them pursue what does not exist.
Wisdom does not arise without deep thought. Therefore, you cannot practice Buddhism without thinking.
Impermanence, non-self, dependent arising, critical thought, and observation of oneself and the world are all Buddhist basics. If those basics are studied deeply, one cannot claim to know the whole world, to have seen everything after leaving the well, or to have attained perfect non-discrimination and cessation. Do not accept something merely because it is written in a book or scripture or believed by everyone. Ask whether it is actually so. That is wisdom: making one’s own path through life without imagining that one possesses truth.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.