This weeks FBA Podcast, “The Significance of the Buddha’s Enlightenment” is a talk by Sona given at Manchester Buddhist Centre on Buddha Day, 9th May 2009.
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The Significance of the Buddha’s Enlightenment
(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Well, thank you very much for introducing me and it's very lovely being here, if you will. It's always a difficult talking here because you can't always see everyone, but I think I can see most people now. Yeah, as Papadarshini said, I was in India. Actually, I was in India earlier in the year. I haven't just come back from India. I was in India in February and March. And that was my first trip to India. And it was everything people told me it would be. And it was both wonderful and horrible. (audience laughing) I loved it and I hated it. But I want to go back. So I guess there's more love than hate. Just out of interest, how many of you here have been to India? Okay, so it's a good third of you. Now, how many of you have been to Bhudgaya? Okay, this reasonable number of people have been to Bhudgaya's, okay? So when I came back from India, well, for those of you who haven't been to India, India is quite an experience. It's very different to England. And actually, I was a little bit disappointed when I arrived because apart from the taxi drive from the airport to the hotel, which was like dodgems, if you know what they are, sort of, everyone told me it was like that. So I wasn't surprised, but I sort of quite enjoyed it, really. You know, the cows in the middle of the road and not just in the middle of the road, but in the middle of the motorway. You know, on the aisle, the carriageways, not munching at the flowers or rubbish as they do. And I feel a bit disappointed because the hotel I was staying, it was very quiet to me. I said, "Indias, you never get peace and quiet." So at first, I thought it was in the wrong country. But by the time I got to put guy up, I realized that India had found me at last, or I had found India. And my whole view of England has been altered as a consequence. I mean, I find things like rubbish in the street, sort of now in England quite unremarkable. I don't get upset because in India, this just rubbish everywhere. And being here in the Buddhist center, which sometimes can feel a bit noisy, is it's like this is the most quietest place you probably could find in India. And by comparison, this is absolutely nothing. So it changes your whole perspective on things. The traffic's just completely chaos. People are hooting all the time, dodging in and out of each other. There's a little space you get into it. You don't say, "After you." No, I didn't get away. Get in there. And it always seems to be quite friendly. I don't think it's any punch-ups or anything. And apparently, most people in India have had an accident once in their life, which isn't surprising because these people live in the cities. So yeah, I went to India. And I didn't just go to India. I went to Delhi, spent a few days in Delhi, went to Taj Mahal, did a bit of a reason. But my main reason for going to India was to participate in a gathering of the order. It was the International Convention, Order Convention. Unfortunately, there weren't that many Westerners there. But there were about 500 Indians and about 150 Westerners. It was a good collection of people. Fellow-- sister, no. Fellow and lady. [LAUGHTER] What's the fellow-- Fellow could do for both men and women. What would it mean? And I spent nearly two and a half weeks in good Gaia. And I just loved it. It was just a wonderful place to be. It was wonderful because that is the place where the Buddha gained enlightenment. And it was very significant for us to have our order gathering in that place. And it was truly amazing having-- I know some of you here were there with me-- having 500 order members sitting so close to the spot that the Buddha sat over 2 and 1/2 thousand years ago when he gained enlightenment. And it was doing that for five or six days with all these people and then sitting there more or less every day for nearly three weeks, usually we have a couple of friends just sitting close by the tree or in the shade of another tree just sitting there meditating in the mornings. So yeah, Buddha Gaia is an interesting place. Two and a half thousand years ago, you sort of imagine it to be quite different from today. When you go to the place where the Buddha gained enlightenment, you see this big tree, which I understand is about the third generation of trees since the Buddha's time, so it's-- anyway, I'm trying to work my grandson a bit out, but say it's the third generation. It's an old tree. Looks like it's seen better days. But all around this tree, there are other trees because it's sort of is in a bit of a grove. But there's just a massive great temple that rises up just in front of the spot where the Buddha gained enlightenment. And all around that, there are stoopers or Tibetan Jordan's and other little shrines and other little temples all around the tree. It's just a big park full of places to go and sit and meditate. So there you have this nice grove, little temple, well, big temple, pretty big, rises massively up into the air. And it's in a very small town in India. In fact, it's not even really a town. It's just sort of more than a village, but somewhere between. And so you would imagine you could sit there nice and quiet for soaking up the atmosphere and just feeling, wow, this is where the Buddha gained enlightenment. Now, it would be like that if you were deaf, because it would be very quiet then. But if you have relatively normal hearing, there's a sort of cacophony of sounds going on all around you. First of all, you have the traffic just outside. So you get constant honking of horns and shouts. And then the vendors are trying to sell people things. Tourists are going to see the temple. But once you get into the temple, the real noise starts, because you have everyone chanting the refuges and precepts. So you get the sin of these going [SINGING] But they don't just do it like that. They do it on a loud speaker. So it's like [SINGING] And then you get the Koreans, or others, going, [SINGING] And they're all doing good honing and staring. Except for the Tibetans who seem to go [SINGING] And they all throw themselves down. And they're getting up and diving down again one after the other. It's so inspiring just watching. They do it hours after. And sometimes they get up in a little chat, and then they carry on. And if you turn up with no cushions, they'll give you some cushions. They're very friendly. It's a wonderful sort of atmosphere of being in this space. So I thought this is going to be challenging to be able to meditate in this spot. So the first day, I sat down there, and I think it was about 6.30 in the morning, thinking that it would be quite relatively quiet. Actually, it was more noisy about it. I think he quieted down about 8, and then it became noisy again. But I managed to discover, actually, even on the first day, I managed to have sort of become quite absorbed in meditation, and seemed to forget about the sounds. And in subsequent days, I discovered that if I listened to the sound of the birds, all the other sounds seemed to just fall away. It wasn't as though they weren't there. But they somehow receded in the background. It's a bit like when your mind focuses on one thing, like your finger. You can have a sense of everyone sitting there behind you looking at you. But you don't have to pay too much attention to them. So you know, you know, they're there. But doing that allowed me to imaginatively take that leap back in history, back in time, two and a half centuries ago, to when the Buddha was alone in that whole area. I was just wandering around more or less alone, because he didn't meet someone during that time. And I would go there and sit there and then gradually just tune in to the fact that this is where the Buddha gained enlightenment. And having been a Buddha Buddhist for-- that was a mistake. [LAUGHTER] Having been a Buddhist, a follower of the Buddha for the last 30-something years, yeah, it's very significant for me to be at the place where the Buddha gained enlightenment. And I found when I was sitting there, something happened just being in that place, just tuning in, just being around so many people. I had such a very, very strong expression of faith and confidence in the Buddha's teaching. And when I came back to England after that experience, I just felt when I'd like to share something of that experience with you. But you know, I don't just want to tell you about my holiday in India and what India's like. So I thought I'd be able to talk about the Buddha's enlightenment, because in a way, it sort of takes us back to that spot. And it's good to remember that for a Buddhist, that is the holiest place in the universe. Not just in the world, but it's in the universe. That is where the Buddha, for the first time in any history that we know of, gained a state that no one else has ever gained. It's not just like people have done it all the time, and it's just happened to be someone happened to do it in 1/2,000. It's the first time. I mean, in some Buddhist traditions, there is a history of other Buddhas that almost exist outside of time. And we seem to be in a family of Buddhas. But the timescals are so large that they seem to go into sort of mythical proportions. So when you are in a place, and you think you're in the world, it's difficult to think of the universe extending for alums of no countless numbers of calpars of miles into different directions. Calpars is an imaginably large number. And it's difficult to just think of a universe in that way in time. But at least in this world in our history, this is the first time something of an enormous magnitude happened, so it's become the holiest place in the world. And it's so wonderful today, because it's actually owned by, or at least it's used by Buddhists. It wasn't that long ago when the Hindus, Brahmins, would you have to pay them to get them to say the refugees and precepts for you. In fact, a friend of mine, shortly after I was ordained in the '70s in India, he went to put a guy here. He wasn't allowed to go and say the refugees and precepts. He had to get Hindu Brahmins to say them for him. But nowadays, it really is owned by Buddhists and full Buddhists. So if you get the chance and you want to go to India, I think you want to go to this holiest place in the universe, then I'd really recommend you go. I wouldn't recommend you go in March, because in March, it's starting to get very hot. And it got very hot by the time I left. It was getting to that heat where you just want to lie in your bed under a fan all day. And then in the evening, get up and wander around. That sort of heat. But January is a good time to go. And apparently, in the autumn, it's a very good time. So I got there by going to flying from Manchester to Dubai, Dubai to Delhi, and then from Delhi, I caught a train, which is in the whole experience in itself, a 12-hour train journey overnight to Gaia, which is another experience in itself, because you walk out and you think you've walked into a war zone with bodies everywhere. They're just sleeping, actually, at four o'clock in the morning. And then being taken to a house of some followers of Dr. Embedkar, who described themselves as communists, don't think they really were communists. They were more like Marxists, but they were incredible people who were doing things that I sort of didn't think I'd ever meet people like that, who actually sort of would take over the land and build a village and fight off anyone who said they owned it. And they put-- well, I actually watched a photograph of the guys sitting in the room with being shot by the police, where the police got very frightened. And they were trying to keep this demonstration of about 50 people at bay, so they started shooting. And it's just meeting some very, very interesting characters there. And then going from there around Gaia, for a little bit, to Bud Gaia, which actually was relatively civilized in a Western sense to Gaia. And there you meet quite a lot of tourists and people from all over the world. The Buddha's journey was a bit different. The Buddha was born on the foothills of the Himalayas, probably on the Nepalese border. And he wandered all around the north of India and eventually found his way down into the plains. So if you could imagine India is that India's enormous. When you look at the map, it's sort of actually much longer than it is wide. And it goes right from the south from the equator, more or less, right up into Tibet. And I was startled when I opened up a map of India, actually, how large it is. But he moved down from the foothills, probably through a lot of jungle. And Indian jungle isn't quite like I imagined it to be. It's not full of sort of damp, a tropic or sort of sense. It's like shrubs. But it would have been quite wild and full of dangerous animals and things. And he walked from village to village, probably along following the rivers, which were the main roots of communication in those days. And he eventually came to this spot and he chose to sit down in this spot where he gained enlightenment. His journey there started some time before when he realized he had to leave his comfortable life. And he had to go off and seek for this state. I don't suppose he quite knew what he was seeking for. But he knew he had to go off searching for a state that he could release, where he was released from the bonds of being a sort of conditioned human being. It's said that he saw three sites, four sites, three sites being old age, someone who was diseased, and a dead body. And these still were the sites you often can see in India where I didn't see any dead bodies apart from animals, I think, that you can see them in India. And it just made him aware of what life is like. And then the fourth site was a wanderer, a holy man, who was striving for some higher state of perfection. And he followed in the footpaths of this holy man, not literally the footpaths of this person, but he followed the tradition of giving up all the household life, or his clothes, find clothes. And he went off and wandered in the forest, found a couple of meditation teachers, experienced high states of consciousness, decided that wasn't going to help him particularly. And then he became a skeptic, and started starving himself, thinking, well, actually, if he didn't eat anything, and hardly drank anything, and just lived in the conditions, whether the heat or cold, this would be a way of releasing him from the sensuous desires of worldly experience, and he would be free. And it said his physical condition was such that if he placed his finger on his belly, he could feel his spine. Now Buddhism is full of poetic imagery and metaphors. And we don't know even if he actually saw three sites. But all these things-- and when you read the Buddhist texts, you have to remember, you can't overtake everything completely literally, but they all have a poetic meaning. So you try to open yourself to what they mean. So the Buddha must have been a very thin, starved human being. And with his ribs sticking out, and just a barely alive by the time he was sitting under the Bodhi tree. So he did this for quite a few years. And he said, no one ever practiced his territories as severely as he did. But in the end, he decided that these weren't helping him gaining enlightenment. But for some reason, he decides that he's going to give that up, and sit down, and just stay seated for a long time till he gains enlightenment. So someone offers him some rice pudding, which he eats, and makes him feel a bit better. And then he collects some grass from a grass cutter. And he takes it, and he sits down under the Bodhi tree in what's now become good guy. And he sits down facing east, apparently, various reasons. And he just sat there, probably in full lotus, like this. He wouldn't have looked like this at all. I mean, we always have images of the Buddha like this. But he would have been wearing filthy rags, probably. Maybe he washed them in the river, because there's a big river that runs by, although today, I think, I don't think it has any watering, because of irrigation. But he would have been really like a tramp, and long, sort of unkemptare, thin rags covering bits of his body. And he just sat there, probably, when he crossed his legs and mainly bones, just crossing and sitting there. And he decided not to move. He wasn't going to move until he gained the state of enlightenment. And he takes this vow, "Though my skin, my nerves, and my bones shall waste away in my life, while I'd go dry, I will not leave this seat until I have attained the highest wisdom called supreme enlightenment that leads to everlasting happiness." So he has this determination just to sit there and not move. And he starts doing the mindfulness, breathing. I don't know if he did it with accounting, but he just watched the breath coming in and going out, coming in and going out. And as you sit, watching your breath come in and going out. If you do it for a while and you let all the other thoughts or the things that bothering you fall away, I mean, the Buddha had a probably relatively unbusy life. He didn't have a mobile phone and communication systems and lots of people he had to keep in touch with. He was all alone and quite happy to be alone. Just sitting there with the birds into trees and they must keep those buzzing and be able to insects. He's sitting there watching his breath coming in, going out, coming in, going out. Gradually his mind becoming quieter and quieter. And then we have to also remember he sits there in the evening because it's, you know, hot in the day. It's not a great time to meditate. So it's sitting there in the evening. And just imagine it, right? There's this grove of trees, big trees, not sort of like chestnuts. They've sort of got leaf here. The branches are a bit spread out and things. And a bit of scrub around you. You don't quite know what's in the scrub. And it's in a little bit of a, you know, it's a grove and a little bit of a hollow where he sits. And he's just sitting there and it's nighttime. But it's the full moon. It's the eve of the full moon, which is why we have Wesak on the full moon of May. So it's this time in May when the Buddha was sitting in this grove and a big moon come up in the sky, sitting there meditating. Peace and quiet, lovely. What happened next? Well, as usually happens when we sit quietly and we're just beginning to drop into that deeper, quiet, calm, meditate meditation, we get disturbed. Might be a noise. Might be, there's a traffic going out. So we're shouting through the sudden bang or something. Or it might be that our mind becomes disturbed with thoughts. And what happened to the Buddha is it said that it suddenly became very, very dark, very dark. And then there was this big army approaching, a massive army of soldiers carrying all sorts of weapons coming towards him. And it's said that the figure that we call Mara, the evil one, sent his army to attack the Buddha, to put him off meditating. And the Buddha just sat there watching this great army of terrifying proportions coming to annihilate him. But he just sat there and sat there. And nothing happened to him. All the arrows and all the spears and all the weapons that were fired at him just turned to flowers. And so the Buddha just was able to defeat the army of Mara. So Mara, the evil one, coming as he is. And because the Buddha happened to be a man-- he could have been a woman, but he was a man-- and what did Mara do? He got his most beautiful daughters together. And he got them looking like very seductive young ladies thinking, this will distract the Buddha. Maybe you can put up with armies, but no way he's going to be able to put up with the most seductive females in the world. So he sings them. But then they just seem to transform into old hags, in their sort of really old ladies who don't want to be disrespectful to the elderly. But I think they were quite unpleasantly old and ugly. And it was a transformation that the Buddha saw. And of course, they were totally unattractive to him in that state. So Mara retires. He retreats. He realizes he cannot disturb the Buddha. And there's a number of things we could learn from this-- the imagery of this first experience-- is that, first of all, when we start making progress in our spiritual lives, when we start getting somewhere, whether it's in terms of calming our mind, becoming more mindful, becoming quieter, then it's as though we attract towards difficulties, things that, yes, it's as though no one's going to bother with us while we're not much use. But as soon as we become a little bit more-- made some progress on our spiritual life, is as though the forces that are going to block you and stop you, get in the way. And all sorts of either difficulties arise between people and oneself and others, people-- I mean, probably very few of us have enemies these days. I mean, I was at the gym today, and I thought, if I told some people going to the gym, that they were parking a disabled spot and they weren't disabled, they might have thumped me. And I thought I'd have had an enemy then. But I thought it was more appropriate just to remain calm and cowardly go upstairs and forget about it. But I suddenly realized, sitting in that gym, that very few people have enemies. You know, you don't actually find someone who's looking for you to sort of buff you over. There he is, and I'll do him over. But you know, you have a lot of people in your life who are difficult, and you probably call them the enemy. And if you do them at a bar for now, you're just a difficult person. But that's the sort of people we attract to us sometimes when we're making progress on the spiritual life. Or we get very distracted by other things. You know, there's other people. It was well known to me when I was younger, when I became a bit more confident and a little bit more relaxed and so on. But I attracted people to me who were very distracting. And it calls complications in my life a little bit. So it was great to get older and less attractive in that sort of way. But you know, you have to sit there and just sort of allow those things to fade away and just reflect on what happens over a period of time. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, that's-- it could be either. You don't-- in a way, I mean, the way we look at life is very psychological these days. But you know, the Buddhist look at the tradition of Buddhism looks at things as well. We don't know why things come up in our mind nowadays. We have all sorts of psychological reasons. It's something that happened in a pretty-- you know, earlier time in our life. But the Buddhist perspective, it could have happened in an earlier life. So you don't quite know which life, which earlier bit of which life something happened that's come up in you. But yeah, it's a useful way of seeing what happened to the Buddha and certainly what happens to you when you sit down to meditate and things come up. It's sometimes a good sign. It means you're making progress. You know, sometimes people get a bit despondent and think, oh, come get on with meditation. So much is coming up. But maybe you have to let things come up. And you have to sort of let them go in order to make some progress. It's as though you open yourself up to things that you haven't really opened yourself up to before. And this can be like you're being attacked. It can feel as though you're being attacked sometimes. Or you just get very distracted. Your mind doesn't want to stay calm. It's sort of a bit uncomfortable. Your ego's too threatened somehow. So you have all sorts of fantasies, which I'm taking off to other places. OK, so there's this great storm, Buddha, Mara retreats. And the Buddha becomes calm again. Everything goes quiet. And he goes into a deeper, deeper and deeper experience of meditation. Or a higher and higher level of experience of meditation. And it's said that he gradually begins to see not just this birth, this life that he's had, just looking back over his life. But it's as though he could look back over lifetimes of existence, one lifetime before another lifetime, before another lifetime, before another lifetime. And he goes on into a state of consciousness that surpasses all the states of consciousness that any human being has ever reached. It's as though his mind, if you like, like a warm air balloon, just rose up and rose up. And then the metaphor changes because it's not bound by gravity any longer. It just releases itself from the Earth's gravitational field and just moves out into space itself because it would seem like a cold, dark place, a vacuous place. But it floats off into a brightness, into a spatial experience that we can't really-- we can only sort of imagine just about with our minds, if we allow our minds to imagine that way. So the Buddha was rising upwards and upwards. And he began as though looking down on humankind, just seeing all the things that happen to people, the way the people are born, they go through their life, and they die. And it's as though whether you find rebirth or re-becoming an easy thing to believe in, this has seemed to be how the Buddha saw things. You could sit as a metaphor if you wanted, just like, what is the meaning? What's the point? You just get born. You go through life, and then you die. What's the point? And the Buddha sort of rises up, and he sees this whole thing going round. It could be just one person being born, just thinking now, thinking that all the millions of people, all the millions of babies, hundreds of thousands of babies, I don't know how many babies are being born right at this moment in the world. But they're babies, just taking their first breath. And there's an equal number of people breathing their last breath. All over the world, this is happening right at this minute, right now. And if you sort of rose up and you saw all that, you might think, what's the point, what's happening? But it says, oh, the Buddha could just leave that and just look at it and let it be. So gradually, his vision seemed to clear, and he seemed to see things more and more clearly. And he saw that human beings, at death, were like he said. It's like their being is laid out, as they're like a cloth, like the woven threads that make up a material, or unpicked, and just laid out, or the threads of the garment are just laid out on the ground. And you just look down to say, that's me. It's just that all the parts of us suddenly just disintegrate. And this is what is said to happen at the moment of death. Of course, consciousness, for some strange reason, seems to bring together a whole load of new parts very similar to the old parts. And you reconstruct another being, which you can't remember at the old being, but somehow it's like waking up and forgetting who you were, having Ebenezia. So probably a bit like that, Ebenezia, if you'd like to imagine it. But the Buddha saw something that was supremely important to us. He saw, and this is often said, and it's said in such a way that it all seems so obvious, he saw that nothing, absolutely nothing, exists as an entity without conditions, that all things come about because of conditions. There is nothing in this universe and the whole of world systems that exist outside of conditions. Everything comes into being because of conditions. Now this is a tremendous insight because when you think about it, you cannot have a created God. Because a created God would have come about, or wouldn't have come about, we'd just been there, as a condition. But the Buddha saw that nothing like that was possible, that what we perceive of as things, whether it's a created God, or even some idea that we have some sort of fixed nature that's there inside of as pure and unblemished, like a Buddha nature or something, doesn't exist. But nothing exists on its own as a fixed entity. He saw that everything just is in a constant flow of change. Changing itself is all the conditions that go to create it change. And when we say this and think about it, it all seems sort of, yeah, so what, let's go along with that. But when you start really contemplating it, it begins to unpick your whole view of yourself, because probably most of us have a pretty fixed view of ourselves. We think we are this and that and the other. And we know we change because our bodies change as we get older, and perhaps some of our views change as we get older. But in any present moment, as though we are a really solid thing, if your life's threatened, you feel a tremendous urge to defend yourself. And you can't just think, oh, well, there's death coming on, just on a change. It's as though we're wired to safeguard this thing that we call ourselves. And this is in Buddhism, what is called per-teacher Samakpala, or conditionality, is where things only arise independent upon conditions. And if you use that particular view, you can actually determine what is Buddhism, what is the Buddhist Dharma, and what is not. And sometimes even Buddhist fall into the trap of fixing a number of things, and start relating to them as though they really exist. So it's something that's very, very deep and difficult to understand, but one should constantly reflect on it, and see how you relate to things that you hold precious. And just see, well, they're only there because of all these conditions. Anyway, so the Buddha has this experience, and he goes on sitting through the night, and not only does he sit through the night, but he sits through the next day. Then he sits through the next night, and he sits through the next day, and he doesn't get up in between, so he doesn't get up and get a drink or go to the toilet. He just sits there for seven days. Now that is completely inhuman. And that would seem to suggest that the Buddha became something different. I mean, can you imagine anyone sitting for seven days without moving? Maybe, maybe if you, you know, you could perhaps think of it, but not like that. And it's as though the Buddha becomes something other than the human being. It's not that he becomes a god or anything like that. But it's, and it may not even be the case. It may be that it's just sort of poetic, um, um, fancy. And the Buddhist scriptures are full of sort of supernatural happenings. And I remember when I studied this with Bansi, my teacher and sang a lecture, that, um, he said, well, they're all there in the, in the text. And some of us said, yeah, but it can't really be true. And he said, well, how do you know? So, you know, we all assume that everything has to be material. You know, we can have an explanation for everything. But, um, in the Buddhist text, sometimes we think I was just poetic license. But at the same time, we might actually reflect, well, maybe there are gods. Maybe there are ghosts. Maybe there are spirits. Maybe there are Buddhas and enlightened beings around us. And what we might co-angels, um, sort of floating around listening to the talk. And, uh, if you are able to see the world in this way, it's much richer place. I mean, it's a bit boring being in it, you know, stuff on the earth. Um, sort of in one dimension, you know, just everything's horizontal. And you've got time, of course, you know, another dimension. But imagine if you lived in a multi-dimensional universe, you know, where all the sort of space movies that you watched actually really happen. You know, where you can travel through space to parallel universes. And you can, and all the fantasy stories that you read, such as the dark material trilogy, where you move into a parallel universe by opening up a little spot and sort of climbing through it. And then you're suddenly, hey, this is different. And, um, just imagine what life would be like. It'd be so much richer, wouldn't it? You know, mobile phones would be so boring. Because, you know, there'd just be so much more to explore. And it would be much better than cyberspace, you know, where you can get lost. Because that's all just binary, just on and off switches. And this is, you know, like a wonderful way of looking at the universe. So that's the great thing about being a Buddhist. You've got the license suddenly to think like that. And, you know, if you're sort of a bit materialistic in your views, you can say, well, that's just being a poet in a way. But that's great. You know, that's fine. You can have that view. And, um, this is, anyway, how did I get onto that? So, Buddha was sitting there for seven days. So he spent the first week sitting there, just sitting there. Completely happy, supremely happy. He had an experience that was of a non-rational kind. He just sat there and experienced, um, his state of being. And then he had another week where he got up and he walked to the top of what's like a little rise, his little temple there now. And he sat looking at the Bodhi tree. And it was as though he was like the first, um, green piece, green piece, or a follower of green piece. He just sat there, looked at this tree and thought, wow, what a wonderful tree. There's a tree. I sat under that tree. And it perhaps he wasn't even thinking. He was just looking at the tree. Wow. And it stood or sat there for another seven days, just looking back at the place that he gained enlightenment. Now this is, I don't know what this sounds like to you, you know, me talking about this, but when you're actually a good guy and you think, oh, the Buddha was up there then for a week and you got there and you know, wow, it's a great view from up here. And you see the tree and you sort of imagine it without all the temples. And what a wonderful spot, you know, you have this amazing experience and you go to another spot and you just sit there sort of absorbing it more and more. Anyway, then he sat looking at this tree and in a way he was sort of worshiping the tree, worshiping the spot where he gained enlightenment. There was nothing else to worship. No other way of showing gratitude is natural for human beings. When something happens to us, it's so important, so meaningful, that we naturally want to express our gratitude to something or somehow. And this is what the Buddha did, he says though he expressed his gratitude to the tree for sheltering him for seven days and seven nights under that spot. Then he spends another week walking up and down and there's a little spot just close to where the Buddha sat in the grounds where you can, can't really walk up and down because there's like hundreds of people walking around and if you want to go in the opposite direction, you've got to sort of go like this to get through them or sort of moving them aside like parting the grass. But the Buddha would have just walked up and down a spot, maybe one and a half times the length of this room I would say sort of is marked out by a stone monument there now. And he just sort of walked up and down, walked up and down, just doing like a walking meditation, just again another week, just walking up and down. We don't know if it doesn't say sack down at all, just walked up and down for a whole week floating up and down, probably would have been quite light you know because you hadn't eaten walking up and down back. Then he sits down in another spot, not far from there, and he starts, I guess his mind is at this time trying to make sense in some way of what had happened to him. He had this experience which is incomprehensible to us, and he's trying to make sense of what happened to him. And it's said that he entered a dual chamber, a dual chamber of six colours I think, six colour jewels. And other texts say, so his body just emminated light, these six colours that make up the colours of the Buddhist flag, which I recently discovered was invented a hundred years ago. But when something really important happens to you, it's as though your body radiates light, or radiates something, because some people do seem to have it affect on you, you see, you sort of walk into room and you sort of go wow, that's an interesting person, but when you look at them you can't sort of think, well it's not that beautiful or anything like that, it's just something about them, it's just sort of really attractive. And it's as though this is what happened to the Buddha, that he sort of something was emanating from him, that was very, very attractive. So he sits in this sort of dual chamber that he created in his mind, or this experience such as like radiating light, as though things were somehow finding their place in his being, and he was able to sort of make a little bit more sense of what happened to him. He's in his fifth week now, he's just sitting under another tree, close by, and just experiencing being there. And then this Brahmin comes along, so he's not alone now, there's this Brahmin, and there's a bit of a Buddhist joke in the scriptures, because he's called something like a hunkar jatiha, and this word a hunkar it's like, and he was a very conceit of what the word means, a hunkar, he's like, tell me something new, and this Brahmin came along and he saw this man sitting there, and he approached him, and he said to the Buddha, he seemed to know his name, in what respect, over venerable go to him, does one become a Brahmin, and what conditions that make a Brahmin, tell me that then, and the Buddha just sort of sees him, and just says to him that the Brahmin is one who's discarded evil without conceit, so he sort of speaks back to him, is one who's not conceited, who's free from defilement, self-controlled, versed in knowledge, and has led the holy life rightly, it's only he who can call himself a Brahmin. Now this is quite important in India, because Brahmins are only born Brahmins in the Hindu system, you can't become a Brahmin, and some think people don't often realise when they are about Hinduism, everything's fixed in terms of your relationship right down a caste system, so many of our Buddhist brothers and sisters in India have left that whole system, because there's no way of moving, and they were right at the bottom, and so following Dr. Ambedko's photograph was shown there, they left that system, and the whole of Buddhism, so right from the beginning the Buddha started relating to everything in the world in a different way, he no longer saw Brahmin as something fixed, he gave a completely different definition, the Buddha then sits in the sixth week under another tree by a pond, and a storm arises, so from now on in India, and for another six weeks the Buddha would be sitting there, and then in six weeks time will be about the time that the rains will start coming, they may have come a bit earlier in that particular time of the Buddha, so the monsoon starts to come, and the storm arises, and it's said, and again we can, one could make all sorts of guesses and have interpretations of this, but it's said that there was a serpent king living in this pond who rose up out, and he wound himself like a cobra round seven times around the Buddha, and guarded him, and protected him from the cold and the rain, and he stayed like that for another week looking after the Buddha, so it's his own nature, in somewhere or another, rose up and protected the Buddha, so there's some special relationship that goes on between ourself as a spiritual being and nature, and you sometimes get this, those of you who've ever been on a long retreat, I had the opportunity of being at Gugeloka in Spain where we have ordination for men, 16 week retreats, and I remember when we've done ceremonies there, all sorts of very, very strange things happen, the weather suddenly changes, quite, I mean it happens so many times, it's a coincidence, you're doing a puja, you're doing a ritual, and then suddenly the weather dramatically changes, I mean it's not just like a little bit of mist comes in, you're sitting there, one day, brilliant sunlight, a few hours later, it's a complete whiter, you can't see a thing, you don't even know if there's anything existing any longer because you're just in complete mist, and that happens, you think yeah yeah but that's just coincidence, but it's happened so many times for coincidence to be not just coincidence, and to think actually there does seem to be an odd here, and quite sort of frightening in a way, when you start realising that the way old and you are interconnected in another way, or even if you begin to think that, you start thinking, oh you know when I do things, and think things, and practice things, it's actually having an effect on a much bigger scale than what I think, and you can't sort of really think well it's because your body language is say something to another person, and they get affected and another, because we're talking about the weather here, and that's how do you affect the weather, it's not really, but so maybe this is sort of what the scriptures are getting at, there's some sort of special relationship between the Buddha and nature, and that's why we should really treasure nature, you know it's not, I mean we have this whole big thing about climate change, don't we, and it's sort of sometimes put across as though it's you know we've got to protect the climate because of you know it's good to protect the climate, so we're going to benefit from protecting the climate, I mean none of us are going to benefit from protecting the climate because we'll be dead before the climate probably really changes, and although it's probably good to think we're not, you know we are going to get affected by the next ice age, in those of you who are young, when you get a bit older it's going to get really cold, and you're going to be living under about 20 metres of snow, and if you think like that you think okay I'm going to start using my car less, but actually if you had a different relationship with nature and start thinking well actually I'm somehow mysteriously connected with nature, and what I do and how I treat nature has a big effect, so it's like it doesn't matter whether you, well it may be it matters, it's your scientist and so on, but maybe it's more, it's certainly more it's easier for me to imagine, but if I use my car less nature will be pleased, it's not that there's a thing called nature because we already know that things only arise in dependent support conditions and so on, but so the whole relationship you have with the world and nature and things is somehow interconnected, it's almost like having the thought I use my car less, has already having an effect on nature, and having the thought I don't care, I'm going to drive my car because it's more comfortable, is having an effect on nature, having an effect on the world, so when you start thinking like this it starts placing an enormous responsibility on you and what you're doing because you can't rationalise things away, because you don't know, you don't know who to argue with, you don't know what to think really, but you just got this strange idea that there is this relationship between you and nature. The Buddha then sits for another week, in his seventh week, quite happily in this spot, and this is the Buddha's enlightenment, and this is what you did for seven weeks in the area around the Bodhi tree, he just sat there or he walked up and down and he was absorbing this experience, it's as though the experience of enlightenment doesn't just happen in a moment, it's as though you have a deepening like you do when you meditate, as your mind becomes quieter and calmer, and you just go into a deeper state of experience and or expansiveness or brightness, and if you imagine that process going on and on and on and on, no thoughts are arising, it's just as though you're in a some state of consciousness where you don't need to have thoughts, you're just sitting fully experiencing being totally present, you don't want to be anywhere else, you don't want to be in the future, you don't want to be in the past, you're just a hundred percent present in this moment, and your experience is in perfect bliss in that way. If you have that experience and it went on for long enough, you would probably come out of it, first of all your mind wouldn't function in its normal way, anyone who's had any deep experience of Deanna or our United States of Conscious notices, it's difficult to think afterwards, if you want to do a study group you do lots of meditation before it, you know people usually sit there going "oh" you say "what do you think of that?" This is so your mind is not operating in that, hang on a minute I've got an opinion about this and you come in with your opinion views and so on, so it's when you let go of all that, it can take time to get going again and it seems to have taken the Buddha about seven weeks really to get going. So just lastly, just like to ask the question "what is the Buddha?" Now what is someone who's had this experience? Well the great thing about Buddhism is you can't pin this down, this is an unnoble question, it's a bit like saying "well I know what I am, I know what you are, but I don't know what the Buddha is." But then you start thinking "I don't know what the Buddha is, maybe I don't quite know who you are, maybe I don't quite even know who I am." You know we'd base so much importance to our own experience as though we know ourselves, we know what's good for us, we know what's good for others and it's unquestionable because I know because I experience it, but that's just some sort of interpretation. Imagine if you can go through life just with this sense of "I don't know." All your views and opinions won't be that important. You have to have views and opinions to be able to navigate yourself down the street because you need to get home, so you've got a view that you've got a home, so that's important. So you don't want to drop them all, but if you could hold everything much more likely and not think "I don't believe that." So I'll say to you "okay the Buddha is believing rebirth." No I don't believe that. What immediately happens is you harden and tighten, but just imagine if you allowed your mind to think "oh maybe, maybe, how do I know? How can I prove it? I can't go by my experience because I can't remember if I was born before. I don't want to happen when I die." So why would you have a view that was so fit, so absolutely certain when you've got no experience of it? You don't know what you're going to do when you die. It's just a sort of something you've constructed in your mind and you hold it as a view. Imagine if you could let go light and just live float through life thinking "yeah maybe, maybe, nothing happens when you die, maybe you're reborn." And maybe, this happens, maybe not. And you just sort of can be a little bit more equanimous to things. You can sit quietly. Your mind can quieten down much more easily. You don't have to get worked up about things. You don't have to get worked up about other people. You can just think "oh, you know, don't know what's happening. I don't understand other people. I hardly understand myself." And not surprising. I don't understand anyone else. So I don't know why they say the things they do to me. I do the things they do to me. Just one of those things. And life just becomes a lot easier. And you have a sort of mystery to everything. So like everything's magic suddenly. You suddenly see the trees moving. You wonder if you move them. And you have a different experience. Things aren't just sort of static in this boring way of living. I mean even being in India is rich. You know, everyone's just moving all the time. Life is full of vibrancy. And when you come back to England, I mean, someone told me once they came back to England after being in India for many years. And they said, "Is it a public holiday?" And they said, "No, no. It's just an ordinary day. You know, it's Monday actually. It really is so quiet. You know, it's hardly anyone around. You know, everyone's sort of quiet in India. It's just like going on all the time. And you know, so one could live imaginatively in this way. Just being a lot having a sense that everything is a bit mysterious. You don't really know. But you've got a sense of inquiry. You want to find out about things. And the way you find out about things is quietening your mind down. This is how the Buddha found out about things. He quietened his mind down. He did the mindfulness of breathing. Someone asked the Buddha, "Who is?" And he said, "Well, your reverence, you must be a god of the highest realm." And he says, "No, I'm not a god of the highest realm." And he said, "Well, you must be a god of the next highest realm." He says, "No, I'm not a god of the next highest." Okay, he must be a god of the terrestrial realm. He said, "No, I'm not a human being." So the Buddha is not categorizable by any of these definitions. He's in an undefinable state. We cannot place or fix the Buddha. We can't even save him accurately that he's an enlightened human being. Because he says in the scriptures, he's not even a human being. He's a Buddha. So now we have a whole new being, a Buddha, which we could become. So some thoughts to go away with. What would drive someone to become a Buddha? What would motivate anyone to practice meditation sitting still? Do things that majority of other people, certainly around us, don't do? Maybe as we begin to reflect that we're going to get old, probably going to get ill, like a cancer, might get some other illness, I'm going to die. And we think, "Well, I'm not really happy with that. I like a bit more understanding of what's going on." And maybe that would be a motivation. But maybe it's not enough because that's just sort of a rational thought you can have. Maybe if you actually fear getting old and fear getting ill and fear dying, you might motivate yourself to do something. But if you're a materialist, then you would just think, "Well, when you're dead, nothing happens." So if nothing happens when you're dead, why bother? And actually, logical conclusion I've come to being materialist is suicide. As soon as you suffer, die. Because that way you get rid of suffering. So end of suffering, isn't it? If you don't exist, you can't be suffering. So it's sort of, for me, materialism doesn't work. I can't think it's that easy. And as I find the whole Buddhist view, rather terrifying, you do something in his life, and it affects what you are in the future. Because what we are now is affected by what we've done in the past, because nothing's conditioned. We have conditioned ourselves. And what we're going to become in the future is conditioned by what we're going to be doing now. It's terrifying, isn't it? Yeah, I'm coming to that. I'm just looking at the negative point of view for the moment, because sometimes we need a whip before we get the carrot. But thank you for reminding me, just in case I... She's very good. She's spinning groups with me before. She's always got a very quick mind. She's one step ahead of me. And so, yeah, it can be a terrifying way of looking at it. But you're right, it could be. But, you know, actually, what would be good about that? Did you talk before about the train? Did I move the train back into it? Yeah, but suppose I was talking about just becoming from one lifetime to another lifetime, to another lifetime, to another lifetime, to another lifetime. What's positive about that? If it's not the 'I am here' and it's not the shot, then it's going to be if it's in the air. Right. If it's just like the other thing, it's just going through and then it's going to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, well, you could look at it from the traditional point of the Buddhist, and that is that gaining enlightenment takes many, many lifetimes. So you've got, you know, plenty of time. But the unfortunate thing about Buddhism, because everything's conditioned, is that what you do today is affecting what you become tomorrow. So if you do things that are sort of out of line with what might be natural, you will experience suffering in the future. If you do things that are in line with what you might label natural, you will experience things going well together. So as though nature and you are in some sort of relationship, the world and you are in some sort of relationship. And this is the Buddhist approach, is that human beings are somehow part of a process, or one's consciousness, is part of the process of being natural. And being natural is becoming more and more expansive. It's like a tree. The tree starts off as a acorn, let's say, a little seed. It's not a tree. It's just an acorn. It has the potential to become a tree, but it's not a tree. And it grows. It grows into a little seedling. And the seedling grows into a sapling. And the sapling grows into a small tree. And the small tree grows into a big tree. And the big tree gets bigger and bigger and bigger, until at some point it sort of stops being big and gradually starts disintegrating. But you imagine a state where the tree never stopped. It just went on and on growing. It's as though this is what a human mind can do. Our conscious mind doesn't have to stop. It can go on and on growing bigger and bigger. Sometimes it's as though we feel as though we're in a prison. It's a bit all dark and dreary. I found this when I was about eight. I felt as I was in a prison. Everything was inexplicable. I couldn't understand how things could be as the way they are. They all seemed as though something was wrong somehow. And looking back on it, I can see the pattern of my life becoming a Buddhist was that I was looking for something I can only call the light. Because light brings light into darkness. And if you've got light, you can't have darkness. And it's sometimes like that when you're practicing meditation, you're practicing ethics. It's as though your light gets brighter. You become brighter. You become more expensive. You become more interesting both to yourself and to other people. And this is all part of nature. It's sort of natural. You could say it's natural to be a Buddhist. Completely unnatural to be another follower of any other religion. Because those people will have, won't believe, in preteacher summit. They won't see that things arise in dependence upon conditions. Because they will fix things like a soul or a god. I mean, if they've got very sort of indeterminate and flexible ways of looking at these things, then they are Buddhists. It's not really very much different. But it's not natural to be a Buddhist. And it's natural to be happy. And it's natural to be sad sometimes. And you can change how you're experiencing things by what you're doing now. It's not as though you're forever trapped with what happened to you in your early life. Of course, that's going to affect you. But you can change it. What you do right now, this very minute, will make effect things for the future. You're not a victim any longer. This is the great and wonderful message of the Buddha. None of us are victims. We are a victim in the sense of previous actions. We've got inspired, we came here, now you're a victim of listening to me going on for an hour. And you might be thinking, hey, I'd like to have a break now. But you could get up and go. That could be your property. But you might be enjoying it. But it's very important not to have this mentality of being trapped in your own sort of psychological states. You can do something about them. You can transform them. You can change them. And this is the great message of the Buddha. You can change them in a way that is so vast and incomprehensible. You can only describe it as mystical or magical. I'd say that if you weren't in touch with this sort of experience, it'd be very difficult to lead the life of a Buddhist. Because being a Buddhist is very, very demanding, very challenging. You've got to think about all the thoughts you're having. Well, first of all, you start thinking about all the things you're doing and all the things you're saying. And then you start thinking about, oh, that thought's not a very skillful thought. And it's very challenging because sometimes you think, oh, it's a lot of hard work. The whole time I happen to watch myself, what I'm doing. And what I'm saying, what I'm thinking. And you know, I just want to break. I just want to watch a movie. I just want to go down the pub to say, you know, get away from me or get a party. And that's all right. Because, you know, you have to make the transition a bit by bit. But Buddhists have a special faculty, and actually all human beings have a special faculty. Buddhists aren't that special. It's just that Buddhists have woken up to this faculty. And it's called faith or shred heart. It's where you can actually feel that being a human being is being part of a process of growing towards the light. And when you allow yourself to be moved in that way, so your body, your being, is responding to the universe in the right sort of way. When you're not doing that, it's as though you're at odds with things and people. And you notice that about there, when you act a bit unskilledfully, yeah, selfishly, you know, you take a bit of, well, as I said, a bit of software, you know, you haven't paid for. And yeah, you don't sleep very well that night because you think, yeah, I should have done that. You know, sort of, then you discover it was free, actually, after it seemed. Or you think, actually, I'm going to buy it, you know, make it all regularize it or something. You do some little thing, you know, like you sort of beat someone into a car parking space or something. I mean, Indians would do it. I think, yeah, I've got one over you on you there. That's great. I mean, you know, I wouldn't feel bad about it, but they're a pretty a moral bunch of people often. You know, and the English might say, after you, that might be a skillful means, it might just be because you don't want to be disliked, which actually, from the Buddhist point of view, would be possibly unskilled for, because it's all about you again. And anyway, where am I going with this? The main thing is to feel that you can be, I'm just going to close and I'll answer some questions. The main thing is that you can open yourself up to what's going on in the universe, in nature, in what's being natural. And in that way, you can be moved and you can be in touch with an inspiration that will help you to make the effort, at least some of the time, to do things that are really skillful. If you do that, you too could find yourself one day sitting under a Bodhi tree of some sort, making enormous progress, tuning in to whatever it is, because it's not an ear to you, but just tuning in to how things are, in a way that you've just never imagined before. And when we come together on a day like this, and we listen to a talk, hopefully, like I've just given, the purpose of it isn't really to be thinking that much about what I'm saying. It's the purpose of it is really to start feeling you're tuning in, in a non-rational way even to the Buddha's message. And we're going to have a poojour in a moment, which is a pretty non-rational thing to do. You know, we're going to worship something that doesn't exist. We're going to have gratitude to someone that we can't understand at all. We're not even sure of what it is. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, how would you write, how do you have a rational explanation back to people? I don't know how we do it when we come to Heaven. I think we give them some rational reason, and some of them, it's a bit like giving a baby a dummy to suck, you know, just keeps them quiet for a little while. But what the idea of a poojour is that you actually open yourself up to something that is really a bit inexplicable. Well, totally inexplicable. But when you've done it, and I know people that do poojours for the first time, they go, "Wow, that was amazing." And you say, "What do you like about it?" I don't know, but it's amazing. I mean, it needs a reason, but, you know, sometimes we do need reasons. But maybe that's what you can think of a Wesack celebration. It's a celebration of the Buddha, a way of opening yourself up to the Dharma, the Buddha, the Sangha, all those people that are trying to open themselves up, and in a way, just tuning in much more to the nature of things. And if you can do that, life might just be that much brighter and more interesting. And things might just happen. You might notice that things work out that much better for you. Because if things, if you're having effects on the world, the world is going to respond in some sort of way, do you? So, thank you for listening to me. I enjoy talking. I hope you enjoyed listening. And if you've got some questions, maybe the best thing to do is come talk to me afterwards. Yeah. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]