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[Bell tolls]
2,500 years ago
nestled in a fertile valley along the border between India and Nepal,
a child was born who was to become the Buddha
The stories say that before his birth,
his mother, the queen of s small India kindom,
had a dream
A beautiful white elephant offered the queen a lotus flower
And then entered the side of her body
When sages were asked to interpret the dream
They predicted the queen would give birth to a son
Destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man
One day, they said, he would either conquer the world
or become an enlightened being, the Buddha
People like stories. It is one of the ways we learn.
The story of the Buddha's life is an archetypal journey,
But it is a means to an end. It is not an end.
Within 10 months, as a tree lowered a branch to support her
A baby boy was born, emerging from her side
7 days later, the queen died
The world is filled with pain and sorrow
The Buddha would one day teach
But I have found a serenity, he told his followers,
that you can find, too.
Everybody understands suffering.
It is something that we all share with everybody else.
It's at once utterly intimate and utterly shared.
So Buddha says,
That's a place to begin. That's where we begin
No matter what your circumstances,
You will end up losing everything you love.
You will end up aging, you will end up ill,
And the problem is that we need to figure out
How to make that all be all right .
What he actually said was that life is blissful.
There's joy everywhere, only we're closed off to it.
His teachings were actually about opening up
the joyful or blissful nature of reality,
But the bliss and the joy is in the transitoriness
do you see this glass? I love this glass.
It holds the water admirably, When I tap it, it has a lovely ring.
When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully.
But when the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks
Or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground
I say , of course,
But when I know that the glass is already broken,
Every minute with it is precious
The Buddha can shine out from the eyes of anybody
Inside the buffeting of an ordinary human life, at any moment.
What the Buddha found, we can find
[Chanting in native language]
In southern Nepal, at the foot of the Himalayas,
Is one of world's holiest places, Lumbini
Where, according to the sacred tales, the Buddha was born
Today Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world
Make their way here to be in the presence of the sage
Whose life story is inseparable from centuries of anecdotes and legends
There are countless stories of the Buddha
Each tradition, each culture, each time period has their own stories
We have lots of visual narratives and artwork
From all over Buddhist Asia
But the first written material, actually...
The first biography, say, of the Buddha ,really, we don't see that before about 500 years after his death.
For the first few centuries, Buddhist narrative was oral.
Historically, it is based on something certainly that happened
There must have been someone who corresponded with Gautama Buddha
But we don't know
We don't know how much of it is pure fairy tale
And how much of it is historic fact
But it doesn't matter
It touches something that we all basically know
The relevance of it is in the message of the story
The promise of the story
Like any good story, it has a lot to teach.
So the story of his life then is a beautiful way of telling the teaching
He who sees me sees the teaching, the Buddha said
And he who sees the teaching sees me
Born some 500 years before the birth of Jesus
The Buddha would grow to manhood in a town vanished long ago
For nearly 3 decades, he would see nothing of the world beyond
Siddhartha Part 1
The tales say he was the son of a king
Raised in a palace with every imaginable luxury
He was called Siddhartha Gantama , a prince among a clan of warriors
When I was a child,he said
I was delicately brought up,most delicately.
A white sunshade was held over me day and night to
Protect me from cold, heat, dust, dirt, and dew
My father gave me 3 lotus ponds: one where red lotuses bloomed One where white lotuses bloomed, one where blue lotuses bloomed
The father wants him to be a king
Wants him to conquer the world and to be the emperor of India
Which at that time was 16 different kingdoms
And it was predicted that he would be able to conquer
Wherever he wanted if he remained an a king
So the father was creating this artificial environment to coddle him
His father wanted to prevent him from ever noticing that anything might be wrong with the world
Because he hoped that he would stay in the life they knew and loved
And not go off,as was predicted at his birth,and possibly
Become a spiritual teacher tather than a king
Shielded from pain and suffering ,Siddhatha indulged in a life of pure pleasure
Every whim satisfied,every desire fulfilled
I wore the most costly garments,ate the finest foods.
I was surrounded by beautiful women
[Thunder]
During the rainy season,I stayed in my palace
Where I was entertained by musicians and dancing girls.
I never even thought of leaving
When he was 16,his father,drawing him tighter into palace life
Married him to his cousin
It wasn't long before they fell in love
He was totally in love with her
There is a story that on their honeymoon, which was about 10 years long
At one time, they rolled off the roof that they were making love on while in union,
And they fell down but landed in a bed of lotuses and lilies and didn't notice they had fallen
And so ,the stories say,he indulged himself for 29 years
Until the shimmering bubble of pleasure burst.
His father does everything he can to never let him leave,
Never let him see the suffering that life is
But one day,he goes outside, and he's traveling through the kingdom
And he has the first of 4 encounters
He sees an old man, and he asks his attendant, and the attendant says,
Oh, that's change, one doesn't always stay young and perfect
Then on the next tour outside, he sees a sick man
And doesn't quite understand what it is
He asks his attendant, and the attendant says, Oh, that happens to all of us.
Everybody gets sick,and don't think, You are a prince,you will not get sick,
You are a prince,you will not get sick,
Your father will get sick,your mom will get sick.Everybody will become sick.
Then he sees that it isn't just this sick person,in fact,it's universal
And something is stimulated inside of him.
So he keeps getting the chariot driver to take him out
And he sees, you know, horror after horror.
And on his third trip outside, he-he meets a corpse
And he recognizes impermanence and suffering and death
As the real state of things, the world that he had been protected from, shielded from, Kept from seeing
And he was shocked
You know, he was shocked and he realized
I will also become old.
I will also become ill.
I will also die
How do I deal with these things?
These are universal questions in any human being's life--
What it's like to be in a body inside of time and our fate
And how do we navigate that?
It really is a tale of the transformation
From a certain naive,innocent relationship to your own life
To wanting to know the full story,wanting to know the full truth
And then the fourth trip outside,he sees a spiritual seeker,
Someone who has decided to live a life completely other than his life
in order to escape from impermanence£¬suffering, and death
So he has this sort of traumatic encounter
with the pain and suffering of life.
We try to protect our children
We don't want to let our children see all the pain that's in the world
But at a very early age,at a time before he could remember anything,
At a time before there was conceptual thought,
He already suffered the worst kind of loss that one could suffer.
Suddenly and mysteriously,
His mother died when he was a week old
So something tragic happened, you know right at the beginning
That might be what it takes to become a Buddha is that
You have to suffer on such a primitive level
29 years old, profoundly troubled
Siddhartha was determined to comprehend the nature of suffering
He resolved to leave the palace
His wife had just given birth to a baby boy
Siddhartha called him Rahula, fetter
He names his son fetter
He names his son ball and chain
This is the fetter
that will keep me tethered to this life
This is what will keep me imprisoned
Late one summer evening Siddhartha went into his wife's room
A lamp of scented oil lit up
His wife lay sleeping on bed strewn with flowers
Cradling their newborn son in her arms
He gazed from the threshold, deep in thought
If I take my wife's hand from my son's head
and pick him up and hold him in my arms,
It will be painful for me to leave
He turned away and climbed down to the palace courtyard
His beloved horse Kanthaka was waiting
As he rode toward the city's northern wall,he leapt high into the air
Mara,the tempter god of desire,was waiting
You are destined, Mara told him,to rule a great empire
Go back,and worldly power will be yours
Siddhartha refused
He left grief and probably absolute puzzlement and dismay in the hearts of his wife
In the infant son who was innocent and yet was suddenly fatherless
And , of course, his own father
But there is no knowledge won without sacrifice
And this is one of the hard truths of human existence:
In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything
Siddhartha was alone in the world for the first time
On the bank of a nearby river, he drew his sword
Although my father and stepmother were grieving
With tears on their faces, he said,
I cut off my hair,I put on the yellow robes, and went forth from home into homelessness
I had been wounded by the enjoyment of the world
And I had come out longing to obtain peace.
Siddhartha wandered south toward the holy Ganges river
Once a great prince, now he became a beggar,
Surviving on the charity of strangers
He slept on the cold ground in the dark forests of banyan,teak,and sal that covered The northeastern plain,frightening places
where wild animals roamed and dangerous spirits were said to live
He is going out to see what there is
He's a seeker
He doesn't have a teaching yet, he doesn't have an understanding yet
He doesn't have an insight yet
He doesn't have a solution yet, but he recognizes the problem
Siddhartha could not expect help from the religion of the time
The ancient Vedic religion, steeped in ceremony and ritual
Some of its rituals still live on in ceremonies
Conducted by Hindu priests, who chant Vedic formulas more than 2,500 years old
[Man speaking foreign language]
For centuries, the Vedic rituals had commanded respect for the gods and inspired conviction.
But by Siddhartha's time
The rituals no longer spoke to the spiritual needs of many Indians,
Leaving a spiritual vacuum and a sense of foreboding
The gods become less important than the rituals themselves
It's a period of great unrest
It was a period of social upheaval, social change
Cities were growing, generating new wealth and spiritual hunger
As one ancient voice cried out in despair
The oceans have dried up, mountains have crumbled;
The pole star is shaken, the earth founders, the gods perish
I'm like a frog in a dry well
A lot of people aren't satisfied with the religion that they grew up in
And when Prince Siddhartha decides to give up his life
He's doing something that lots of other people were doing.
Siddhartha joined thousands of searchers like himself
Renunciants, men and even a few women who had renounced the world,
embracing poverty and celibacy ,living on the edge,
Just as spiritual seekers still do in India today
Now ,at this time in India, there are lots of renunciants out there.
It's a flourishing renunciant tradition
There are many different people who have given everything up
And practice austerities and meditate
In order to escape from the cycle of death and rebirth
The notion of reincarnation is something that's part of Indian culture,Part of Indian civilization
Part of Indian religion,that was there long before the Buddha,
And it was the¡ªin a sense
The problem that the Buddha faced
Suffering didn't begin at birth and finish with death
Suffering was endless
Unless it was possible to find a way out
Become enlightened, become a Buddha
In his time,there was a sense of death not being final
But of death leading inexorably to rebirth
And of beings, suffering beings,
Bound to the wheel of death and rebirth
It's said that Siddhartha had lived many lives before this one
As countless animals...
Innumerable human beings...
And even gods
Across 4 incalculable ages,the sacred texts say
And many eons,
experiencing life in all its different forms
Siddhartha's previous lives, many eons
Sometimes as a human being,sometimes as an animal
But then gradually using his practice,
Becoming more higher and higher and deeper, deeper
The idea is, from life to life,
To progress more and more towards the enlightenment and become wiser and wiser
Some beings will stubbornly insist on their ignorance and their egotism
And they will charge ahead, grabbing and eating what they can in front of themselves
And being dissatisfied but thinking that the next bite will do it.
And they will die and be reborn and die and be reborn infinite times
It could take them, you know, a billion lifetimes if they are very stubborn,you know.
And becoming a Buddha, becoming enlightened,
is the only way of getting out of the continual cycle
Of death and rebirth
Now, rebirth here isn't the popular notion that
You know,in my past life,I was Cleopatra floating down the Nile
or Napoleon
It's as if every life is going through junior high school again
Over and over and over
With the authority of the priests worn thin
And wisdom seekers like Siddhartha roaming the countryside,
Holy men emerged teaching their own spiritual disciplines
Siddhartha apprenticed himself to one of them
A celebrated guru who taught that
true knowledge could never come from ritual practice alone
It was necessary to look within.
You may stay here with me ,the guru told him
A wise person can soon dwell in his teacher's knowledge
And experience it directly for himself
Siddhartha set himself to learn the rigorous practices the guru prescribed
The teachers of the time
Are already teaching forms of yoga and meditation,
Teaching that the self-reflective capacity of the mind can be put to use
to tame the mind,to tame the passions
That was already established in India.
And there were probably so many schools of yoga and meditation in those days
Just as there are now
Although yoga appears to focus on controlling the body
It is,in fact,an ancient spiritual discipline
A form meditation,
harnessing the energies of the body to tame the mind
Some yogis learn to sit without moving for hours,
Breathing more and more slowly
Until they seem to be barely breathing at all
All kinds of trance states are possible through meditation
If you hold the mind,
If you concentrate the mind on a single object
You know,be it a word or a candle flame or a sound,
It's possible to transport the mind into all kinds of interesting places
The person who was to become the Buddha
was very good at all of those practices,he was a super student, Doing these practices
Taking them to their limit
And no matter what he did in these practices,
He was still stuck in the pain that he set out with
He ascends to these very rarified states of consciousness
But it's not permanent
And it does not bring penetrating truth into the nature of reality
So these become a temporary escape from the problem of existence
But they don't solve the problem
Siddhartha apprenticed himself to another popular guru
But the results were the same
The thought occurred to me ,he said later
This practice does not lead to direct knowledge
To deeper awareness
Disenchanted,he left this master,too
Siddhartha continued to drift south
Still searching for the answer to his questions:
Why do human beings suffer? Is there any escape?
He's trying and trying and searching and searching,
And he already experienced extreme luxuries
So now he tries extreme deprivation
Among the renunciants, asceticism was a common spiritual practice:
Punishing the body as a way to attain serenity and wisdom
Siddhartha fell in with 5 other ascetics
And soon was outdoing them in mortifying the flesh
Subjecting his body to extremes of hardship and pain
The body represents a fundamental problem
Old age brings a decrepitude to the body
Sickness brings pain and suffering to the body
And death is ultimately the cessation of the functioning of the body
So there was a sense that if you could punish the body sufficiently
You could escape its influence
You could transcend some of the limitations
That the body seemed to impose
The ascetic pursues the truth by taking the requirements of survival
down to the absolute minimum possible:
Barely enough food to stay alive,
No protection from the elements, no heat,
Sit in the cold, sit in the rain
Meditate fiercely for all the hours of awakening
The step of renunciation, of shedding everything
of dying, the feeling that one is dying to one's life
As it was
is essential to being reborn as someone who sees
Ascetics can still be seen in India
Firm in the belief that by subduing the flesh
They can gain spiritual power
Emaciated,exhausted,Siddhartha punished himself
For 6 years, trying to put an end to the cravings that beset him
He tortures himself,trying to destroy anything
within himself that he sees as bad
The spiritual traditions of that time said you can be liberated
If you eliminate everything that's human
You know, everything that's coarse and vulgar,
Every bit of anger, every bit of desire
If you ¨Cyou know, if you
If you wipe that out with force of will
Then you can go into some kind of transcendental state
And the Buddha tried all that
And he became, you know, the most anorectic of the anorectic ascetics
He was eating one grain of rice per day, he was drinking his own urine
He was standing on one foot, he was sleeping on nails
He did it all to the utmost
My body slowly became extremely emaciated, Siddhartha said
My limbs became like the jointed segments of vine or bamboo stems
My spine stood out like a string of beads
My ribs jutted out like the jutting rafters of an old abandoned building
In my eye sockets, like the gleam
of water deep in a well
My scalp shriveled and withered like a green,
bitter gourd shriveled and withered in the heat and wind
What he was trying to do was pushing his body to the most extreme that he could
But then he realized that from that, he cannot gain what he wants
Trying to torture the body, the body becomes too much
The whole attention is given to the body,nothing else
He surrendered himself completely to
the hard training that he was given
And what he discovered, having tried this completely for many years,
was that he had not answered his question
It hadn't worked
He was on the verge of death, dying, unawakened
When he remembered something
He remembered a day when he was young and sat by the river with his father
And the perfection of the world as it was simply gave itself to him
Years before, when Siddhartha was a small boy
His father, the king, had taken him to a spring planting festival
While he watched the ceremonial dancing£¬he looked down at the grass
He thought about the insects and their eggs...
Destroyed as the field was planted
He was overwhelmed with sadness
One great taproot of Buddhism is compassion
Which is the deep affection that we feel for everything
Because we're all in it together..
Be it other human beings,other animals,the planet
As a whole, the creatures of this planet,
the trees and rivers of this planet
Everything is connected.
It was a beautiful day. his mind drifted
As if by instinct, he crossed his legs in the yoga pose of meditation
And the natural world paid him homage.
As the sun moved through the sky,the shadows shifted,
But the shadow of the rose apple tree where he sat remained still
He felt a sense of pure joy
The joy that he found is in the world that is already broken
It's in this transitory world that we're all a part of
And the fabric of this world...
Despite the fact that it can seem so horrible,
The underlying fabric of this world actually is that joy that he recovered
That was his great insight
So I better eat something
And then at that moment,a village maiden mysteriously appears carrying a bowl of rice porridge
And she said to him, Here, eat.
That moment of generosity and release
when he accepted the rice was a decision towards life
It was what in the Christian tradition might be called grace
that you cannot do it completely on your own
And in Christianity,the grace comes from the divine
In the story of the Buddha,
The grace comes from the ordinary,kind heart of a girl
who sees somebody starving and says,eat.
There's something beautiful
Whenever I remember that story,it makes me so happy
Because I see the heart of Buddha as the person he was
Like the Siddhartha
This dish was the dish he used to be fed by his stepmother,rice pudding
He was missing that so much
And then he remembered maybe further and further
And he remembered about his wife,about his son
And the deepest emotions that he had suppressed,
They overpower,they came up.they were still there
And he had a feeling of missing
He had a feeling of seeing his son
and a feeling of being near his loved ones
They were so powerful
Oh,this must have soaked his whole entire being
He was actually an utter failure
He had been clinging to the path of asceticism
And when he took the food,
what followed was a return of his original question
Life is painful,Life involves change
This is still a problem,the problem didn't disappear
It wasn't long before,the ascetics who had been Siddhartha's companions
found him eating and turned away in disgust
Siddhartha loves luxury,they said
He has forsaken his spiritual practice,He has become extravagant
But the man who will become the Buddha realizes that
extreme deprivation isn't the way to go
We can live as normal human beings,we can eat and drink
And,in fact,we kind of need to eat and drink and be normal human beings in order to break through
In order to attain the kind of realization that he was looking for
Siddhartha had put his faith in two gurus
They hadn't helped him
He had punished his mind and body. That had almost killed him
Now he knew what he must do
To find the answer to his questions,
he would look within and trust himself
Bodh Gaya is a small town in northeastern India
Throngs of pilgrims have come here from all over the world
For more than 16 centuries
For Buddhists,there are hundreds of holy places
But none more sacred than this one
Bodh Gaya is the sacred point from which the Buddhist faith radiates
Some pilgrims travel great distances,
reciting prayers and prostrating themselves every step of the way
It is their Mecca and Jerusalem
Their holy of holies is not the imposing temple beside them
But a simple fig tree, ficus religiosa
The Bodhi tree
The tree, it is said, is descended from the Buddha's time
Every pilgrim knows the story of how Siddhartha,
After accepting the rice milk from the young girl
Put aside the rags he was wearing, bathed himself in a nearby river
and strengthened ,sat down in the shade of the Bodhi tree
And began to meditate
It was springtime, the moon was full
Before the sun would rise,
Siddhartha's long search would be over
He sat down under a Bodhi tree,
in the shelter of the natural world
In all of its beauty and fullness
And he said,I will not move from this place until I have solved my problem
Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up
Together with all the flesh and blood of my body,he said
I welcome it
But I will not move from this spot
until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom
All at once, Mara, lord of desire, rose to challenge him
With an army of demons, he attacked
Siddhartha did not move
and their weapons turned into flowers
Mara is the ruler of this realm of desire
This world that we all live in
And what he's afraid Siddhartha is going to do
When he attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha ..is conquer that world
That is, he's going to do away with desire
He's going to ..he's going to wreck the whole game
Mara did not give up
He sent his three daughters to seduce him
Siddhartha remained still
When he faces Mara, he faces himself and his own destructive capacity
But he's not the warrior trying to do battle with those qualities
He's discovered his own capacity for equanimity
He has become like, you know, the top of the great Himalayan Mountains, you know
The weather is passing over him, storms are raging around him
And he sits like the top of the mountain..
Impassive not in a trance state, you know, totally aware of everything
So he frustrates Mara
Siddhartha resisted every temptation Mara could devise
The lord of desire had one final test
He demanded to know who would testify that
Siddhartha was worthy of attaining ultimate wisdom
And his demon army rose up to support him
Siddhartha said nothing
He reached down and touched the ground
And the earth shuddered
Mara's demons fled
The Buddha reaches down and with his finger touches the earth
He says, the earth is my witness
He said,Mara,you are not the earth
The earth is right here, beneath my finger
And the earth is what we're talking about..
Accepting the earth, not owning the earth
Not possessing the earth, but the earth just as it is
Abused and exploited and despised and rejected
And plowed and mined and shat on and everything else
You know, It's still the earth, and it's
It is it's we owe everything to it
Siddhartha meditated throughout the night...
And all his former lives passed before him
He remembers all his previous lives, infinite numbers of previous lives
Female and male and every other race
and every other being in the vast ocean of life-forms
And he remembered that all viscerally, so that means his awareness expanded to be
-so that all the moments of the past were completely present to him
He gains the power to see the process of birth death, and rebirth-
-that all creatures go through
He's given this sort of cosmic vision
of the workings of the entire universe
As the morning star appeared, he roared like a lion
My mind, he said, is at peace
The heavens shook, and the Bodhi tree rained down flowers
He had become, the awakened one, the Buddha
Something new opens up for him
Which he calls Nirvana or which he calls awakening
He said, at this moment, all beings and I awaken together
So it was not just him, it was all the universe
He touched the earth
As earth is my witness, seeing this morning star
All things and I awaken together
It's not like entering a new state. it's uncovering or surrendering to the reality
that has always been there
He realized he'd always been in Nirvana
That Nirvana was always the case
Your reality itself is Nirvana
It's the unreality, it's your ignorance that
-makes you think you're this self-centered separate
being trying to fight off an overwhelming universe and failing
You are that universe
You're already enlightened
He's saying the capacity for enlightenment¡ªthat
your awakeness already exists within you
Nirvana is this moment seen directly
There is nowhere else than here
The only gate is now
The only doorway is your own body and mind
There's nowhere to go, There's nothing else to be
There's no destination
It's not something to aim for in the afterlife
It's simply the quality of this moment
Just this,just this,this room where we are
Pay attention to that, pay attention to who's there
Pay attention to what is known there
Pay attention to what everyone is thinking
And feeling, what you're doing there
Pay attention, pay attention
For weeks, the Buddha remained near the Bodhi tree, peaceful and serene
He was tempted to retire into a profound solitude
Instead of trying to teach others what it had taken him 6 long years to discover for himself
He wants to stay there, he's very happy
He doesn't want to go out
He says to himself, no one is going to understand this
You know, people are going to think I'm crazy,they're going to think I'm nuts.
Buddha saw the nature of the people
Envy and jealousy and the strong negative mental states
All the people in the world, they are like the fishes wriggling in the very shallow water
So, Buddha, he himself afraid to teach the people
The myth is that a god comes to the Buddha
Brahma comes on his knees and says, Please, we need you
Why don't you try talking about what you just understood?
Because the world needs the gods need it, and the men need it
You know, people need it
And then Buddha decided to give his teachings¡­
it's not an ordinary compassion Because of a great compassion,
When you feel the feelings of others,
you don't put it in the oven You feel the feeling of your hand,
I mean, you're not being compassionate to our hand
You just feel the pain, so you're not gonna put it there
So if you feel other's pain, you're going to do your best to help them alleviate it.
When somebody becomes enlightened, something blooms in his heart
It's like a flower blooms, and it cannot hold the fragrance
It has to naturally release
So it's like he naturally had to release his radiance
He has to share this joy that was in his heart
35 years old, the Buddha would devote the rest of his life to bringing his teachings the dharma, the fundamental laws of all things into the world
But as he had feared, it would not be easy
As he set off to share what he had learned, he met a wandering ascetic.
Who is your guru? The ascetic asked him
The Buddha said he had no guru, that he had attained enlightenment on his own
It may be so, the ascetic said and walked away
On his first attempt to teach, the Buddha had failed
Buddha meets someone who doesn't see anything special about him
Because the awakened Buddha doesn't look any different from anybody else
He is ordinary
Buddhism is not about being special
Buddhism is about being ordinary
And it is not about the continual exudation of bliss
It is about walking a normal human life
With normal human beings, doing normal human things
And this reminds you that you yourself might be a Buddha
At this moment, the person you're looking at might be one
It's an interesting practice
Just each person you see as you walk down the street Buddha? Buddha?
Buddha, Buddha, Buddha,
From Bodh Gaya, the Buddha walked west nearly 200 miles And crossed the Ganges River
He was still searching for a way to explain to others what he feared was unexplainable
The path to the enlightenment he himself had experienced
In a deer park in Sarnath, not far from the Ganges, He would try again
His 5 former companions were still practicing the austerities he himself had abandoned
From far off, they saw me coming and , on seeing me, made a pact with one another, the Buddha recalled
Friends , here comes Siddhartha, living luxuriously, straying from his ascetic practice
He doesn't deserve to be bowed down to
and disgusted with him for giving in after they'd all been These are his buddies, who were just disappointed trying to starve themselves into enlightenment
So they're a little distrustful at the beginning
They refer to him as an equal, and he then tells them,
No, that's not the term you should use when you refer to a Tathagata, a being who's gone beyond, and so he sets them straight
And they then become the first people to hear the content of what he realized under the Bodhi tree.
His first teaching would later be called
setting in motion the wheel of the dharma
because it brought the Buddha's message into the world for the first time
He did not propound a dogma
Instead, he spoke from his own experience out of his own heart
He had known the abandon of the sensualist and the rigors of the ascetic
Now he would disavow both of them
The Buddha said, I've discovered a new way, and it's not the path of asceticism,
And it's not the path of sensory indulgence, It's the middle way
What the Buddha was always doing was saying, Everything needs to be balanced.
So, you know, the middle way was always balancing between, you know, excesses on this side, excesses on the other side
[single note twangs Sitar strumming Soft sitar music]
Fair goes the dancing when the sitar is tuned
Tune us the sitar neither high nor low
And we will dance away the hearts of men
[Note twangs discordantly]
But the string too tight breaks and the music dies
The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies
There is a middle way
Tune us the sitar neither low nor high
And we will dance away the hearts of men
The path to enlightenment lay along the middle way,
The Buddha taught, and the ascetics listened
Now he would answer the question that 6 years before had provoked his spiritual journey
The question of suffering
Buddhists don't have a creation story. There is no creator deity
It's not really of interest. It's not an issue.
What's of interest is the problem of human suffering
And the solution to human suffering
Pretty much everything else, all right, is beside the point
The Buddha's analysis of suffering came in the form of what have come to be called the Four Noble Truths
There is no commandments or anything
The first Noble Truth is that there is suffering in this world
Generally, this suffering has been mistranslated
suffering is not entirely accurate to the word that the Buddha probably used
It means something closer to dissatisfaction
That, you know, we're never quite happy, and if we are, that's gone in an instant, anyhow .
And he says that this suffering, this unsatisfactoriness, doesn't arise by itself,It has causes.
Our own mind causes it
While the second Noble Truth asserts that suffering has a cause,
The third Noble Truth makes an astonishing claim
You really can be free of suffering by understanding the cause of suffering
But nobody tells you that, and so that was a huge announcement
The problem, Buddha taught, is desire,
How to live with the confused and entangling desires
People often misunderstand Buddhism, as saying
In order to wipe out suffering, you have to wipe out desire
If that was what the Buddha was saying,
then where does the desire for enlightenment fit in, you know?
The Buddha's saying, be smart about your desires
With the fourth and final Noble Truth,
The Buddha laid out a series of instructions For his disciples to follow,
a way of leading the mind to enlightenment called the Noble Eightfold Path
The cultivation of moral discipline, mindfulness, and wisdom
They are, as I like to think of them,
a set of possible recipes
that you can try on your own life and see which one makes the best soup
The Buddha didn't speak for long, but when he was finished
The 5 skeptical ascetics had been won over
They became his first disciples
Word quickly spread of the sage teaching in the deer park at Sarnath
Hundreds came to hear him and became disciples, too
Many were wealthy merchants or their sons,
living just 5 miles away in a thriving trading center
On the Ganges, the holy city of Benares
[Bell clanging Men singing]
Today Benares is the most sacred city in all of India, as it has been for millennia
Even before the time of the Buddha, pilgrims came here to worship their gods and bathe in the holy river of heaven
You see people purifying themselves bathing in the Ganges
You see priests performing rituals
You see corpses because that's the best place to end one's life
and much of it of the type that does go back to the Buddha's time So you see going on there a great range of religious activity,
[singing in native language]
Many of today's sacred ceremonies on the Ganges echo the ancient practices of the Vedic priests, the Brahmans
In the Buddha's day, only the Brahmans could mediate between the gods and men
Only they could conduct the holy rituals that were said to preserve the universe itself
The Brahman priests stood at the pinnacle of a rigid social hierarchy, a sacred system of caste
Beneath them were the warriors
The caste to which the Buddha belonged
Below them were farmers
At the bottom were the servants, and, still lower, outcastes,
Those social groups are not merely social conventions,
You're supposed to stay in that group
And the survival of society depends upon your continuing to perform the function associated with that social status
Caste was irrelevant to the Buddha
So were priestly rituals to preserve the universe
His teachings focused on the universe within
The Buddha said you could be from any caste
What makes you noble is if you understand reality
If you're a wise person, then you're noble [Bird squawks]
In time, a devoted gathering of monks formed around the Buddha at Sarnath, near the Ganges
Broken stones and fallen pillars mark what remains of what grew to be a vibrant monastic community, the Sangha
It took the Buddha many, many years to find his way
But he didn't want it to be so hard for people
And so he established a community who could live together and help one another
In a ceremony evoking the beginning of the Buddha's own spiritual journey,
Fledgling monks of all ages say good-bye to their families and homes and join the Sangha [Chanting Children repeating chant]
I go to the refuge of the Buddha
I go to the refuge of the dharma, and I go to the refuge of the Sangha
The Sangha is an embodiment of Buddha's experience and wisdom
What happens if people practice this thing?
Are they truly happy or not? Are they joyful or not?
So I think Buddha wanted to also leave a perfect example of his teaching,
an alive teaching, a teaching that walks, a teaching that can talk,
A teaching that can laugh
So I would say Sangha is just like a living example of Buddha's teaching
The first Sangha was a radical institution
open to people of every caste and,
remarkable for the times in which the Buddha lived
To both men and women
The Buddha was part of a culture deeply suspicious of women
The attitude towards women at the time was very critical, and many things were impossible for them
So that was a very revolutionary thing to do that in that times of India
By ordaining women as nuns, the Buddha gave women the chance to escape the drudgery of daily life
Life was so hard for most women that entering the Sangha was a liberation,
as we know from their ecstatic, heartrending poems
So freed! So freed!
So thoroughly freed am I from my pestle,
My shameless husband, and his sunshade making my moldy old pot with its water snake smell
Aversion and passion I cut with a chop
Having come to the foot of a tree, I meditate, absorbed in the bliss
What bliss [Bell tolls]
Bliss, Nirvanna, the Buddha taught,
could be found in the fleeting moment through the practice of meditation
The Buddha showed his followers how to come to terms with their own roiling thoughts and desires by paying attention to them,
by becoming aware, becoming mindful
As an ancient poem counsels, Like an archer an arrow
The wise man steadies his trembling mind
A fickle and restless weapon
Many times, our mind is not peaceful enough
So we realize that perhaps we need to understand more about mind itself
and how to balance the emotions, how to balance our mind, and try to cultivate more happiness
The difficulties come from within
One experiences unexpected things from one's mind
The most dangerous skeptical doubts, doubts about one's self, doubts about the Buddha
Physical is¡­we can get¡­ from the food
and from the supplement of vitamins and ¡­
Yeah, and for the mind, this is the only way we have to ¡­only medicine
Meditation is not about getting rid of anger or getting rid of lust or getting rid of jealousy
Even while becoming a monk, often we experience angers it happens
And it often happens when people start teasing you, like, Shaven bald head person
OK£¬let's see, this anger arises. What is it? But it gives a good chance for us to realize that,
What most often happens in our ordinary life is that
Whenever we experience these emotions, we get stuck into it. It starts twisting us.
But Buddhism is going through inside it and getting out of it peacefully
And I think that gives us more joy
And that makes human life more full, more round
It's not like ¡­we are not living a partial truth, but it's like the whole of things together
It takes time to comprehend this
And then by practicing again and again the practitioner becomes very balanced, and one reaches a state of very strong equanimity
Equanimity towards the physical and mental objects
And this is the base camp for the summit ¡­enlightenment
After washing my feet, a disciple said,
I watch the water going down the drain
I am calm
I control my mind like a noble thoroughbred horse
Taking a lamp, I enter my cell
Thinking of sleep, I sit on my bed
I touch the wick. The lamp goes out: Nirvana
My mind is freed
The mind is as restless as a monkey, the Buddha taught
Who you are, what you think of as your self is constantly changing¡­
Like a river, endlessly flowing
One thing today, another tomorrow
The self comes, and the self goes.
There's water in a river, then there's water in a glass, and then the water is back in the air, and then it's back in the river.
The water's there, but what is it?
That's a way to think about the self in Buddhism
One moment you're angry. The next moment you're laughing. Who are you
A seed becomes a plant
Wisps of grass are spun into a rope
A trickling stream turns into a river
Simply notice how from one moment to another,
Your self is actually not as much the same as we think it is
What the Buddha realizes is that if we can get rid of this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the self based on egotism,
we won't cling to things, we won't screw up everything we do
Because we're thinking about it in the wrong way
Once you stop centering your feelings about your feelings on your self,
What naturally arises is simple compassion, compassion for your own suffering, compassion for the suffering of others.
Even the most abstract of the Buddha's teachings had a practical, ethical dimension.
Compassion, the Buddha taught, comes from understanding impermanence, transience, flow,
how one thing passes into another,
How everything and everyone is connected
When this is, that is.
From the arising of this comes the arising of that
When this isn't, that isn't.
From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.
This is always connected to that
Everything is connected to everything else.
You never live by yourself
You live always within a family, a society, or culture. You constantly interact with other people
So our happiness depends on their happiness as well
How can we be happy if we are the only one happy in¡ªon, you know,
Just an island of happiness within an ocean of misery
Of course, that's not possible
Compassion stirred the Buddha to send his monks out into the community
Sworn to chastity and poverty, they wandered the roads,
bringing the Buddha's teachings into the world
Go forth, monks, for the happiness of the many,
Out of compassion for the world
There are beings whose eyes have little dust on them
who will perish if they do not hear the teaching
But if they hear the teaching, they will gain liberation
The monks exist by begging
We think of begging as kind of a bad thing
Begging in this tradition is a good thing. It's a sign of spiritual purity
You're not allowed to beg tomorrow's lunch today¡­only today's lunch
Then you can't eat from noon until dawn the next day
Then you have to go out and get another lunch
And then in exchange for lunch, you give a lecture
Unless they say, We don't want to hear about it, then you don't. but that's the only thing¡­
but that forces you to interact with the lay community
And if you're not serving them, if you're not doing something useful for them,
they won't put anything in your bowl, and that will be the end of your community
The Buddha himself wandered across northeast India,
teaching and gathering new disciples everywhere he went
You didn't have to become a monk or nun to become a Buddhist
The Buddha's teachings were for everyone
Everything is burning
What is burning
The eyes are burning
Everything seen by the eyes is burning
The ears are burning
What is burning
Everything heard by the ears is burning
[Flute plays melody] The nose is burning
Smells are ablaze
The tongue is burning
Tastes are ablaze
The body is burning
The mind is burning
We're on fire. We many not know it, but we're on fire
And we have to put that fire out
We're burning with desire, all right? We're burning with craving
Everything¡­everything about us is out of control
The Buddha goes on to talk about the 3 poisons
Greed and anger and ignorance
And how the 3 poisons are what is making the fire
And the way out of doing this is not to deny the 3 poisons
but to recognize that if you turn them around, you come to their opposites
Instead of greed, you have generosity
Instead of anger, you have compassion
And instead of ignorance, you have wisdom
I can give my teachings in brief, the Buddha said
I can teach in detail
It is those who understand that are hard to find
There are stories of people coming to the Buddha and saying,
I am leaving your teaching
because you have not told me about whether there is a life
After death or whether there is another world
and the Buddha says, Did I ever say that I would give you the answer to these things?
No, lord, you didn't
Why do you think that I never said that I would give you the answer to these things?
Because these are not the things that you need to know
The thing that you need to know is how to deal with suffering,
because at this very moment, what made you ask that question was suffering
The Buddha was, above all, a pragmatist
He did not expect his followers to agree with everything he said
He encouraged them to debate and argue, to challenge him
Buddha said, my followers should not accept my teaching out of devotion but rather you own experiment
Even Buddha himself, in order to get final enlightenment, need hard work
So investigate based on reason through logical investigation
If something contradict in Buddha's own words
Then we have the right to reject that
As the Buddha gathered more and more followers, stories spread of his miracles, which mixed the marvelous with the mundane
One story tells how 500 pieces of firewood split at the Buddha's command
In another, a mad elephant charged wildly down a street
Forcing everyone to flee
Only the Buddha remained, quietly waiting
The elephant, overcome by the Buddha's radiant kindness, knelt before him,
and the Buddha patted his leathery trunk
Because miracle is something you cannot understand
So now I think that within this century,
We may find some new ideas or new facts
So far, we spent all our energy and time for research on matter,
not internal world
This skull, a small space, but lot of mysterious things still there
The great field of knowledge is as tiny, as the earth is in the universe
I mean, it's a tiny ,it's a speck
And the ¡­the universe is what we don't know
and it will always be that way
However much we find out, it will still be that way
Because the unknown is vastly
It's unspeakably greater than anything we will ever know
In one of the most storied miracles
The Buddha strode on a jeweled walkway suspended in midair while streams of water spouted and flames flashed from his body, shooting out to the very edge of the universe
And as the Buddha sat on a lotus flower giving his teachings, he replicated himself,
filling the sky with multitudes of Buddhas for all to see and wonder
Do we believe that literally?
Does it matter whether we believe it literally?
What many of those miraculous stories are
About is the sheer wonder of it all
The very fact that the whole of unknown time and space has led down to this¡­led to this very moment when we're sitting here talking¡­
when we are sitting here talking to each other is utterly miraculous
Sitting here in a room, having had a cup of coffee, Having taken it out of a beautiful blue and white porcelain mug,
What could be more miraculous than that?
Everyday life around us is already so implausible
And so glorious, that what need for further miracles?
And that's the teaching of the Buddha
That's the miraculous teaching of the Buddha
Violence, the Buddha taught, always leads to more violence
To the slayer comes a slayer
To the conqueror comes a conqueror
He who plunders is plundered in turn
War was endemic in the Buddha's age
Ravaging northeast India again and again
Although kings and their ministers sought his counsel,
the Buddha offered no grand political vision
He was powerless to stop the killing and the fighting
Even the men, women, and children of his former kingdom were massacred by a marauding king
Forced into pits and trampled by elephants
It was said that the Buddha received the news in silence
The Buddha failed, but we, as the Buddha, fail constantly, is our
and part of our suffering is our failure, our recognition of our failure
Buddhism doesn't argue with reality
There will always be both the potential for awakening in any moment and the potential for incredible damage at any moment,
and if we fool ourselves into thinking we're past that
We will do incredible damage
Change, the Buddha said, must come from within
The Buddha starts always with the mind and talks about the violence in the mind
and says that violence in the world is a result of violence in the mind
A tree lives on its roots
If you change the root, you change the tree
Culture lives in human beings
If you change the human heart, the culture will follow.
For decades, the Buddha shared his teachings all across northeastern India
Let all beings be happy, he taught, weak or strong, great or small
Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child
Barefoot in his robes, he was still walking the road when he was 80,
but old age was upon him
His back hurt. His stomach was often in pain
I am old, worn out, he told a trusted disciple
Like a dilapidated cart held together with thin straps
The world is so sweet, he said,
that he could understand wanting to live for at least another century
But he was frail and exhausted
He became ill near Kushinagar
A remote village near the border of Nepal
When he was offered a meal which would prove deadly
The food was spoiled
He ate what was offered to him,
and it's said that he knew it was bad,
but he took it anyway because it was offered
and didn't want the person who offered it to feel bad,
Because it was his time
Today kushinagar is revered by pilgrims
As the place where the Buddha finally left the world
It was in Kushinagar where he grew weak and asked to be laid on his side in a quiet grove of sal trees
As he neared the end, his disciples began to weep, stricken with grief.
But the Buddha reassured them
All things change, he said
Whatever is born is subject to decay
He's saying this is a natural process
He tells his disciples, use this time, use the energy here, even this, for your own awakening.
So he used even his own death and their sadness as a time to remind them of what their real task was.
What he's actually doing is inviting those who are close to him into the experience
I don't think the Buddha's teaching in any way argues against grief or sadness or loss
The teachings, if they make any sense, have to make sense in ordinary circumstances, in ordinary lives
And in ordinary lives, we grieve when we lose.
We¡­when it hurts, we say, Ouch
Buddhism is trying to look at things the way they are,
The way it is, just as it is.
It hurts. this is life. This is our life
And our relation to life involves losing it, too
You don't get beyond these things
You don't get beyond them
It's all right to feel what human beings feel,
And we are not supposed to turn into rocks or trees when we practice Buddhism
Buddhist laugh, cry, dance, feel ecstasy, probably even feel despair.
It is how we know the world
It is how we live inside of our hearts and not dissociated from them
The Buddha had always been saying good bye
Now he prepared to leave the earth forever.
He would never be reborn, never die again.
It may be that after I am gone, the Buddha told his disciples
That some of you will think, now we have no teacher
But that is not how you should see it
Let the dharma and the discipline that I have taught you be your teacher
All individual things pass away.
Strive on, untiringly.
These were the Buddha's last words
The Buddha died peacefully
His head was pointed to the north, his face to the west
The stories tell how the earth shook, and the trees suddenly burst into bloom¡­
Their petals falling gently on his still body, Falling out of reverence
Divine coral flowers and divine sandalwood powders
Fell from above on the Buddha's body Out of reverence
His disciples were quite upset
What are we going to do without our teacher?
We will be lost without our teacher
But his instruction was so simple and so clear
I am not your light. I am not your authority
You've been with me a long time now. Be your own light
The Buddha saw death and life as inseparable
These are two sides of the same thing
Death is always with us
Death is part of the whole large unknown
And if we are unable to smile at the idea of the unknown,
we're in real trouble.
That's the realism that the Buddha was talking about,
Trying to come to terms with reality
When he was 29 and still Prince Siddhartha
The Buddha had left his wife, child , and family
to try and understand the nature of suffering
He had attained enlightenment, shared what he had learned
And left a path for others to follow
Now he was gone
But before he died, he had asked his followers
To remember him by making pilgrimage ¡­to the place of his death
To where he gave his first teachings
Where he achieved enlightenment
And where he was born
Those 4 places mark out a sacred biography
And in tracing that pilgrimage route
You are learning the story of that life
At places of pilgrimage, temples were built
Images were installed, and relics were enshrined
[Dalai lama]
Although the Buddha had predicted that his teachings, like everything eles,would in time disappear,
Buddhism flourished in India for 1500 years,
spread into Sri Lanka, central and southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan,
And in the 20th century, to Europe and the Americas,
Adapting different forms and shapes wherever it took root, attracting many millions of men and women
who practice the Buddha's teachings both within and outside the monastic community
But everywhere and in every age, the essence of the story remains the same
The Buddha said that we're turned this world into a painful place,
and this world does not have to be a painful place
This world can be a world inhabited by Buddhas
But it's up to each one of us to turn ourselves into a Buddha
That's really¡­that's the work
If the Buddha is not you,
finally, the Buddha is of no interest to you
The Buddha is
The Buddha is of such interest to you because you are the Buddha
I know that there are supposed to be preserved footprints of the Buddha which are kept in one of the sacred places in India or Nepal,
And, you know, you can stand in them,
and if you stand in them, maybe you realize, Ah, 10 toes. Me too
There is a story of a Brahman who one day found the Buddha under a tree, calmly meditating
The Buddha's mind was still
He radiated such power and strength that the Brahman was reminded of a tusker elephant
The Brahman asked him who he was
Imagine a lotus that had begun life underwater, the Buddha replied¡­
But grew and rose above the surface until it stood free.
So I, too, have transcended the world and attained the supreme enlightenment
Who are you then? The Brahman wondered
Remember me, the Buddha said, as the one who woke up
[cym2020]
Major funding for this program provided by:
The National Endowment for the Humanities
because democracy demands wisdom
THE ROBERT H.N.HO FAMILY FOUNDATION
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by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
dedicated to strengthening America's future through education...
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