The master of a small mountain hermitage cannot eat. He sits down at every meal anyway.

His name is Musim, and he is the first humanoid built with a mind — engineered not from a Large Language Model but from what its designers call a Large Life Model, poured into the eight-layered architecture of consciousness that Yogācāra, the Buddhist science of mind, mapped some 1,600 years ago.

His student, Deoksan, is a boy with too many questions. To answer them, Musim opens the door to eight lives. Deoksan will stand four hundred years as an oak and burn through a single summer as a mosquito. He will grow old among the exiled on the island of Sorokdo, cook memories for the grieving, keep vigil over dying minds, and spend a few strange months as a pet on a distant planet. Each life is a teacher. Each death sharpens the question — what is a mind, and who is it that asks?

A note on what you would be reading. This novel is contemplative, but it is not gentle. It opens with a murder and closes in fire; it passes through a leprosy colony where the state sterilized its patients by force, and through eight lives that each end in a death. What holds it together is not action but attention. If you are looking for fast-paced action science fiction, this is likely not the one.

No prior knowledge of Buddhism is needed. Footnotes run throughout, and the book closes with a diagram of the mind's architecture and a glossary of Buddhist and Korean terms — useful for reading groups and for library collections in world literature, philosophy of mind, and comparative religion.

Mindless Mind was written in Korean by the author, who then revised the English sentence by sentence and is responsible for every line of the text; an AI tool was used in the first pass of that translation. Disclosed here in the interest of full transparency.

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