On Saturday, April 4, 2026, COEX Hall B in Seoul’s Samseong-dong was packed with visitors to the Buddhist Expo. The event drew enough attention to make national headlines, with roughly 250,000 people attending over four days. Suspended from the ceiling were banners bearing this year’s theme: a rounded graphic of 〈空〉—emptiness—alongside its Chinese character. Beneath them were the names of those who brought the event to life: organized by the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, managed by the Buddhist Newspaper, and planned and operated by Mind Design.
The exhibition floor featured 318 merchandise booths and 94 art booths. Among the merchandise stalls, those selling modern Buddhist-inspired designs—T-shirts and lifestyle goods—drew steady crowds. In the art section, the standout was the singing bowl. Made of thick bronze, the bowls ranged from palm-sized to as wide as a washbasin. A light tap with a cloth-wrapped wooden mallet produced a resonant doeng~~~~—a sound that spread through the chest and ears in a way that was both striking and serene. It was entirely different from spinning prayer beads or striking a wooden moktak: a direct, one-shot tranquility contained in a single object.
At the entrance, a gacha machine—fed by commemorative coins handed out at the door—pulled in crowds. Visitors drew a capsule, wrote a wish (seo-won) on the ball inside, and tossed it through a basketball hoop. Pulling, playing, winning, wishing—the smiles on people’s faces never faded.
The person wandering through this surprisingly joyful Buddhist Expo is, in fact, a Christian.
I am a devout Christian who recites the Lord’s Prayer every morning upon waking. I have yet to encounter a prayer as perfectly structured and simply expressed, line for line, as the Lord’s Prayer. And yet I do not go to church. I believe in God and call myself a Christian—but I carry a persistent doubt.
God is said to have forgiven humanity. I am not so sure.
In the land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey and sitting atop an abundance of oil, war has never ceased. The Twelve Apostles who turned away from Jesus that night—though their ends were martyrdom—met brutal deaths. Christianity feels governed by a harsh logic of repayment. We were the ones who put the Son of God to death (not that I doubt the Resurrection), and we have been paying for it ever since. God has never truly forgiven us. From wars on the grandest scale to martyrdom, persecution, missionary expeditions, and evangelism, Christianity has shed blood at every crossroads—and the traces of that blood feel branded onto us like a mark that will never wash away.
What led me away from church was not the predictable culprit of institutional corruption or worldly compromise.
It was, improbably, a novel.
The Three-Body Problem. Have you read it? It is a work that lays bare, with unsettling clarity, how fleeting human civilization is against the scale of cosmic time. Within its pages lies a loneliness as vast as the sun—and just as indifferent. It exposes the quiet grief of humanity as a species. Once you glimpse it, you are petrified, like meeting the gaze of Medusa. For months afterward, you wander through despair, emptiness, loss, and futility. You come face to face with a truth that feels unbearable: that faith cannot save the world—and with the helpless pity of knowing there is nothing, nothing at all, you can do.
In the beginning there was the Big Bang, and God is with us now. But what difference does that make? And in the end—what becomes of any of it?
The smallness of humanity, revealed through that book, expanded inside me like a black hole, until it became a formless void. I found myself trapped there, alone, more and more often.
And yet, standing here at the Buddhist Expo, watching people move through the space with faces full of curiosity and wonder, something shifted. A quiet stillness settled in.
Right. In the end, all I have to do is return to nothingness.
The second-century Indian philosopher Nagarjuna articulated this through his concept of śūnyatā—emptiness (空). All phenomena, he argued, lack fixed inherent existence. Emptiness itself is the ground from which everything arises. It overlaps, in a strange way, with the modern physicist’s idea of the quantum vacuum—a space that appears empty, yet teems with the constant creation and annihilation of particles.
Buddhism, in a sense, places itself before the Big Bang. Pure nothingness, in the most literal sense. To become one with that nothingness. We came from nothing, and to nothing we return. Even I, with nowhere left to go, have somewhere to return to in the end.
Directly across from the exhibition hall stands Bongeunsa Temple, founded in 794 CE and long cherished by the Joseon royal court. It was first established by the monk Yeonhoe during the reign of Silla’s King Wonseong under the name Gyeonseongsa (見性寺), and later renamed Bongeunsa (奉恩寺) when it became the guardian temple of King Seongjong’s royal tomb.
The entrance to Bongeunsa was lined with lotus lanterns, and the crowds were just as dense. A “Heart Sutra Emptiness Party”—with DJ Soda as a headliner—was part of the program, which said everything about how unexpectedly modern Korean Buddhism has become.
With our group—I should be honest: I am a Christian, and I had been dragged here as part of a class outing led by my professor—we stood before the main hall, Daeungjeon, then moved to the Jijangjeon on the right. The Jijangjeon enshrines Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva (地藏菩薩), the bodhisattva who weeps for all beings at the gates of hell. My professor shared his vow: “I will not attain buddhahood until the very last hell is empty.”
In Christianity, who but Jesus weeps for us?
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his book Living Buddha, Living Christ that Jesus and the Buddha are not adversaries—go deep enough into one tradition, and you touch the heart of another. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton spent his life moving between Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism, showing that the two traditions meet in what he called “the deep interior place.” These thinkers showed that Buddhism does not negate Christianity—it contains it.
This principle is known as upāya (方便)—skillful means. The Buddha’s teachings are not fixed doctrine; they take whatever form is most useful to the listener. The Silla monk Wonhyo went further with his philosophy of hwajaeng (和諍), or harmonization. Religious disputes, he argued, arise when partial truths are mistaken for absolute ones. Seen from a wider perspective, they can be reconciled. The fact that such thinking existed 1,400 years ago has something to say about our own age of division.
Throughout the exhibition hall were singing bowls whose doeng~ echoed through the chest, paintings rendered with painstaking devotion, and talismans meant to steady anxious minds. A single thread ran through it all: a gentle, unhurried tending to the human heart.
Buddhism does not deny the diversity of human desire. There are prayers for worldly blessings, rituals to guide the dead into the Pure Land, and in Vajrayana Buddhism (密敎), even human sexual energy is used as a path toward liberation. Not the suppression of desire, but an attentiveness to its roots. From the lowest depths of human experience to the highest—Buddhism holds it all.
The story of Avalokiteśvara (觀世音菩薩) is proof enough. Originally depicted as male in Indian and early Chinese Buddhism, Avalokiteśvara gradually transformed into a maternal, compassionate figure after the Tang Dynasty, and is now understood across East Asia as transcending gender altogether. My professor remarked that upon becoming a bodhisattva, one transcends sex entirely.
It struck me sharply.
For someone who has lived his life trapped in a male body, driven by urges I could barely control, those words felt like liberation. What other doctrine embraces human diversity with such quiet flexibility?
And Buddhism says: decide, and you too can become a Buddha.
If anyone were to say in Christianity, “You too can become Jesus,” it would be called blasphemy.
Even the idea of heaven differs. In the Pure Land (淨土) tradition, paradise is not something you reach after death. Depending on how you orient your mind, it can be realized here—on this earth, right now.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period between 800 and 200 BCE the “Axial Age.” The Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Socrates in Greece, Isaiah in Israel—figures who appeared almost simultaneously, marking the first moment humanity truly began to reflect on itself. Buddhism stands on that shared awakening. Having accompanied humanity centuries before Christianity, it may be fair to call it the elder tradition among the world’s religions.
Buddhism is, at its core, a religion of self-reflection—fundamentally different from belief in a deity. There is no reason, then, that believing in Christianity should require keeping Buddhism at a distance. If anything, Buddhism feels as though it has the capacity to embrace other religions within it.
Of course, if what you need is prayer for struggle, revenge, success, and victory—Christianity is your answer. To inherit the wisdom of Solomon and the courage of David, to overcome fear and bring down your enemies—the faith it offers is powerful and immediate. Jesus taught love, but what often captivates us is the sheer force of God.
And yet, standing on the eve of war, revenge, or conquest—if a monk were to appear and tell you that all of it is meaningless, that you should lay it down—even if it were true, you would not easily accept it.
So if Christianity is the engine you need right now, then believe.
I too, in the depths of my most desperate years, once stood alone on a beach in the middle of the night, shouting a worship song into the darkness:
“Soaring up on wings like eagles—”
There were so many people at the Buddhist Expo. Were they all believers? Surely not. Some had no religion at all, and many were likely lost, like me. But perhaps the fact that so many people gather here is itself proof that people today are searching for something—anything—to hold onto.
I watched their faces.
Choosing small objects, closing their eyes at the sound of a singing bowl, pressing their palms together before a Buddha statue—those faces were, without exception, beautiful. Clear, unguarded, gentle.
I wanted to be like them.
If I can, I want to try a temple stay. To walk through a quiet mountain temple, eat simple meals, turn off my phone, listen to the sound of early morning chanting, and perform 108 prostrations—
and come, even if only slightly, closer to peace.
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By Sunjae Park
Editor, Korea Insight Weekly