(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So I'm gonna start by reading you a little bit from my book and it's partly because I want to let you know about this one of the reasons I come. But it's also because I think this hopefully will set the scene for what I'm gonna be talking about in the talk in general. Title of which is a Buddha's vision and I believe this is the first talk in a series that you're having in this class on the Buddha's vision and my vision. So I'll be talking about the Buddha of history go to my Buddha, but also I hope relating that back to one's own practice. History is all very well, but what does that mean? What does it mean now? It's morning. The sun is hot, but not yet overwhelming. A man named Bahia scours the streets of Shravasti. His gaunt frame is covered by a rough tunic that's stitched together from pieces of tree bark and he's weary after walking night and day from India's west coast. He draws little attention from the townspeople who recognize him as a holy man, part of the tide of spiritual seekers that washes constantly through the city. Shravasti is the capital of the kingdom of Kosala and a major metropolis of the culture that thrives in the central Ganges Valley. We have no detailed descriptions of its streets to fill out the scene, but the city's ruins have been partially unearthed and revealed it was a large town guarded by huge ramparts at the junction of three important trade routes. Slightly later text evokes the profusion of such a city. Furnished with solid foundations and with many gateways and walls, behold the drinking shops and taverns, the slaughterhouses and cook shops, the harlots and wantons, the garland weavers, the washermen, the astrologers, the cloth merchants, the gold workers and the jewelers. So with such clues, we may imagine the scene that confronted by here, the wattle and door houses with domed roofs of tiles or thatch, the sturdier brick built civic buildings and homes of the wealthy, the main streets clogged with mules, oxen, chariots and pedestrians, the elephants lumbering impassively along the roadway, laden with produce, the alleys spidering out from the main thoroughfare, thick with smells and resounding with the cries of food sellers. As Bahia jostles through the press, he catches sight of a singular figure and knows instantly is the man that he seeks. He's in the middle years of his life and the Bahia suitor, the account of this meeting in the ancient British scriptures describes him as pleasing, lovely to see with calm senses and tranquil mind possessing perfect poise and calm. He stands silently at a doorway, his eyes downcast as the woman of the house places a little food in his bowl. Like other townspeople, he wears lengths of cloth draped around his midriff and across his shoulder to make a robe. But their mud yellow fabric is much coarser than the embroidered muslin used by the rich or even the plain cotton of the poor. There's a patchwork sewn together from scraps gathered on rubbish heaps or from charred remnants of the shrouds that covered corpses in cremation grounds. These robes along with a bowl made from dry palm leaves that he holds before him a needle, a thread, a girdle, a razor and a water strainer are the sum of his possessions. Most people call him Gautama, Gautama, the name of the clan into which he was born in Shakya, coastal as northeastern province. But his disciples address him by a host of titles, especially Bhakavat, meaning blessed lord, to target her, the one who is like that, and Buddha, he awakened. The encounter is intense and dramatic, Bahia throws himself at Gautama's feet and cries, "Please teach me, teach me the truth that will be for my lasting benefit." Gautama spoke to no one when he was collecting food, so he tells Bahia, "Come to me later and I will answer your questions." But Bahia insists he cannot wait. It is hard to know how long you or I will live. At the third time of asking, Gautama turns to Facebook here and speaks a few spare words. Bahia, you should train yourself thus. In the scene will be merely what is seen. In the herd will be merely what is heard. In the sensed will be merely what is sensed. In the cognized will be merely what is cognized. In this way should you train yourself. Then Bahia, you are not in that. When you are not in that, then you will be neither here nor beyond nor between the two. Just this is the end of suffering. A sudden moment of communion cocoons the men beyond time or place, and something happens to Bahia. Exactly what is hard to say, but its effect is shattering. It's bound up with a meaning of Gautama's words, but that meaning is mixed with a sense that Gautama himself embodies them completely and has inwardly expanded into the open spaces they disclose. A shift occurs deep in Bahia's consciousness, a silent opening, and then the moment's over. Street rises return, Bahia walks away, and Gautama returns quietly to his arms round. So that's the start of the book that I've written. Go through a book that I can teach you to be a waking one. I wanted to read that at the beginning because it does a number of things. First of all, it evokes the Buddha in the way that I'm talking about him. So all of that comes from ancient texts, or rather ancient texts, plus a kind of reconstruction of what the town was like based on other ancient texts, little images and fragments that you find in them, plus the archaeology that we have, and to put it together you have to imagine it. So I try to evoke that. But the texts themselves, or some of them, really do bring to life the Buddha as a person with a personality and appearance, and not someone who's entirely beyond any particulars, and in a real place in which he has to engage, and he has to engage the real people, has to communicate with them. And another reason why I chose that is I'll come back to it later on, is it expresses in this very negatory, very succinct form, go to this vision, the Buddha's vision, in the scene, only the scene. But what does it mean? What does it mean? So this is a Buddhist center. Many of us here are Buddhists. Some of you are here because you're interested in exploring Buddhism, and in its most succinct essence, I suppose we could say, that Buddhism is the teaching of the Buddha, and that teaching is the expression of whatever it is that he understood through his enlightenment. But what is that? What is this enlightenment? So therefore what is this vision? And what is it we're trying to do when we practice it? So I'm going to come back to that rather elusive expression of the Buddhist vision, and approach it step by step, but still looking at the same kind of very ancient texts. And we get a different kind of sense of the Buddha from these texts than we do from many of the legends that you may have heard about the Buddha. Over time, even coming along to the beginners' course at the Buddhist center, you probably hear certain stories about the Buddha, and there's nothing wrong with them, I tell them myself. But those stories mix a kind of legendary, supernatural, almost fairy tale kind of aspect with the story of a person going through a number of experiences. Actually, if we look at some of the at least of the early texts that describe the period of the Buddhist life before his enlightenment, we can trace how he developed his vision. Didn't all come to him in a moment of sudden revelation when he sat under the Bodhi tree and became enlightened. In order to have reached the point where he could make the breakthrough which he called enlightenment or awakening, he needed to have already transformed his mind. He needed to have transformed his consciousness sufficiently to be able to make the final breakthrough. And bit by bit, we can trace a story through these texts. How he discovered what he later called the Dharma, the truth, that he understood about the nature of reality in individual insights. So, I want to start now with a text translated as something like taking arms, the Pali term, Pali is an ancient ancient language in which we have these, called the Atadumda Sita. In the legends, we have the story of the four sides, but as in a kind of palace, secluded from any suffering, and then he sees an old person, a sick person at the corpse, and finally a holy man. So, that's the legendary version that we have, which doesn't actually appear in the earliest texts. What we do have is this, which I think evokes a world which the Buddha inhabited. Fear is born from arming oneself. Just see how people fight. I'll tell you about the dreadful fear that caused me to shake all over. You have a very strong personal voice here. Seeing creatures flopping around like fish in water too shallow. So hostile to one another. Seeing this, I became afraid. This world completely lacks essence. It trembles in all directions. I longed to find myself a place unscathed, but I could not see it. Seeing people locked in conflict, I became completely distraught. But then I discerned here a thorn, hard to see lodged deep in the heart. It's only when pierced by this thorn that one runs in all directions. So if that thorn is taken out, one does not run and settles down. So that's a powerful poem in my view. He reads a little bit like a Shakespearean soliloquy. The Buddha later in his life describing the very powerful emotions. Strong sense of disillusionment that he felt as a young man. Presumably an aristocrat in a rather politicized environment of the court where he was living in this country called Shakya. People flopping around like fish in water too shallow. It's not enough room, it's not enough water for them. And he became afraid. This world completely lacks essence. What is it that we spend our time fighting over, trying to grab hold of? What on earth is it that people spend their time doing? That's what he's saying. And then I discerned a thorn. Sometimes it's trying to go to this dart or arrow. There's something stuck in him. And he realizes it's only when pierced by that thorn that one runs in all directions. And if that thorn is taken out, one does not run and settles down. So later on he had us teaching the four noble truths. First of these truths is what we call dukkha. The sense that there's something awry, something amiss, something unsatisfactory, deeply unsatisfactory about the ordinary human condition. It's the thorn that's an image, the dukkha. And what's more, this dukkha, which we might, if we had as a political philosophy for example, we might analyze all of the forces in the world out there that are causing all of the problems. But the Buddha has a different view, or in fact the young Gautama has a different view. He sees that it's something about himself and it's something about all of the other people around him, but is causing to be agitated, uneasy, illities, running around as what he says. So the second noble truth is that the cause of dukkha is craving Kṛṣṇa. So in other words, the reason that we find our own lives less and perfect and the world around us is less and perfect is something to do with ourselves, something to do with the mind. So he says, if that thorn is taken out, one does not run and settle down. Well, that's the third noble truth and the fourth as well I suppose. Third noble truth is that the cessation of cravings, if you change your mind in some way, you change your mental state, you change your consciousness, then this dukkha is going to change as well. And the path is fourth proof. Now he doesn't have the path at this stage. This is the young Gautama who is feeling that there's something deeply wrong with the kind of existence he's living. He has to do something about it, but at this stage he doesn't know what. So he goes forth, he leaves home, and again there's a very elaborate legend around that. But in the early text we have quite a simple description of it. When still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life, and that's interesting because the later account says he was 29, but here we have someone in the first stage of life. While my parents, unwilling, were crying with tears streaming down their face, so not stealing out of the palace late at night, but after a long period of arguing with his father and his stepmother, and they're begging him not to do it, tears streaming down their faces, nonetheless, I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the ochre robe, and went forth from the home life into homelessness. So he's off, he's on the spiritual quest. Now, you may or may not know the various details in the story of what came next. Very briefly, I won't dwell on this next bit very much. He goes and he studies with two teachers, and they both teach him different forms of meditation practice. One of them takes him to a very elevated level of consciousness called the sphere of nothingness, and the next one takes him to another even more highly elevated sphere of consciousness called the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception. I could be of a theory about this, and I'm not going to unpack the whole theory, or he now, because it's a little bit complicated. But essentially, I think that what he's experiencing with these teachers is what we can read about in text called the Upanishads, which are kind of the origin of a lot of Hindu teaching and philosophy we still have today. In the Upanishads, this ancient Indian approach to spirituality, what it's all about is borrowing away, getting through all the levels of your being, unraveling the process of creation, till you get back to something fundamental, something essential, something eternal, the sphere of the heart of each human being, which they called Atma, and the revelatory realization when you get to these stages of this particular path is that Atma is Brightma, the soul is God. So, if that is what the young Go to My experience, he would have engaged with these meditation practices and done so within a very strong framework of belief and theology, really, so that he wasn't having just a plain experience, he was having a religious experience within a particular religious tradition. So, that's the next thing that the Buddha did, Go to the did, and then, according to the traditional story, he practiced self-mortification. What we do know about the religious traditions of the Buddha's culture at his time is that the most prominent things in the culture that he inhabited were traditions of Jainism, which still exists, and other traditions that he, because, and so on, which don't. And what these traditions all seem to have emphasized is punishing the flesh. Again, there's an idea about releasing the spirit by punishing the flesh, but the flesh is bad. So, you torture yourself, literally. The aim is to achieve some kind of eternal happiness, but the way to do that is by having pain now. And in the scriptures, we have dialogues between the Buddha and the Jains about what is the way to happiness. But they believe, and the Buddha seems to have taken this up, the practice of really making this up suffer, with heat, with lying on proverbial beds of nails and so on. Then we have, in these texts, a really important, really interesting little episode. This is the Buddha's memory of what happened when he was a young boy of maybe eight or nine. Sitting in the cool shade of a rose apple tree, while my Shaqian father was engaged in work, I spent time having attained the joy and happiness of the first absorption. He remembers at this point where he's totally emaciated, he's on the point of death. He remembers an experience of what's called the first absorption. He's sitting under a rose apple tree and he enters spontaneously into this expansive, meditative state. I mean, you can experience this if you apply yourself to meditation yourself, so you don't need to look to ancient texts to know what the first geometry is. Once a fuses, fills, soaks and drenches one's very body with a happiness and joy that comes from seclusion. There's no part of the body that's untouched. So it's this experience that the mind has quietened down and this kind of joy arises. It's happiness, it's pleasure, it's joy, it's very still, very quiet, it's very concentrated. It's what we call the first dhyana. And the whole of the body seems to be filled with a sense of lightness, buoyancy and aliveness. And the Buddha says, I ask myself why I feared this happiness because he's turned away from my experience to punish the flesh. But he says it has nothing to do with sense pleasures or unwholesome qualities. Then I decided I would not fear it. So this is an insight, the Buddha glimpsed a dimension of consciousness which he later expanded as dhyana. This is the first dhyana and then there are four major dhyanas. After that it gets a bit more complicated. And it seems that this isn't what he'd experienced with his previous meditation teachers. And I think the reason is that this has nothing to do with theology. In a way it's nothing to do with religion. When he describes this experience, he describes it quite precisely. Once a fuses, fills, soaks, once buried, this is something you can actually experience. You don't have to believe anything to notice it. And all the descriptions of the dhyanas are like that or they're more poetic images. But they're not theological images, they're not about God or anything like that. And the Buddha says, "might this be the path to awakening?" and he knew with utter certainty that it was. So I think that the Buddha was discovering this open dimension of consciousness in which the mind could expand and grow and develop and be filled with these qualities of joy and increasing concentration. I actually think that people haven't been doing that before the Buddha, but we don't really know. And that is a very important part of the Buddha's teaching. The sense that there is more to the mind than we know about. That's part of his vision. And if we're Buddhists or exploring Buddhism, that's what we're coming into contact with. The sense that what we know about consciousness is one percent, ten percent of what it can possibly be. And what's more, the Buddha is trusting his mind. He's trusting that there's some kind of natural force within it. And if it goes with the grain, it goes with the flow, dare I say. It will move him towards wisdom and towards happiness. And this is experience. This is experience in quite a simple way, an innocent way almost, which is untouched by what the Buddha called views. The very strong religious views that were held by all the people around him. And he wanted to find a way to practice that wasn't informed by these views which fundamentally were born of a kind of insecurity, a desire to make sense of the world. Now he did have many teachings and he did develop what he called the right view. But he wanted very much distinguished teachings which were helping him to liberate the mind from those which fundamentally were born of some kind of insecurity. So that's the next stage. The Buddha, having this experience, this memory and thinking, that is the path to awakening. So he's on the path now. He doesn't have to be enlightened before he's found the path. He had a beautiful image of coming across an old forest path. Stumbling through the forest and suddenly you realize that beneath the undergrowth there's actually a pamma. And you start to discern where it leads through the trees, through the bracken, through the undergrowth, through the shrubs. Then the Buddha turns his mind upon itself. He's in the forest now. He's meditating on his own, meditating very deeply. And he realizes that he has to really confront himself. He's living in a world where the forest is the place of spirits, dangerous spirits and mysterious powers who are real for people in that world. And they come out. They live around certain trees, certain shrines, and they come out and they scare you. My God, they scare you. It's very clear that people in his culture, not just in his culture, are really terrified of these dark forces that are alive in the forest. And the Buddha's size, okay, that's where I'll go. I'll go to these shrines. And the thing is, it's okay to go to the shrines. You can make offerings there. That's all right. But you really shouldn't go at certain times in the month because that's when the spirits walk abroad. So he thinks, "Okay, that's when I'll go there. I'll do that then." On the face of the moon. And he just goes and he sits. And he says, "There, in the darkness, or the mooncast shadows, I would hear an animal approaching, or a peacock would break off a twig." He jumps out of his skin, you imagine it. Or the wind would rustle the fallen leaves. And I thought, "Is this it coming now? A fear and dread?" So he's turned his attention towards that which is most terrifying for him. The dark places of his mind, the dark places of his culture, the dark places of the forest. He's turned his mind towards it and he realized that the issue isn't so much about some kind of shamanic encounter with the spirits. The issue is his fear. And this is another really important part of the Buddhist vision. An important part of his teaching is that if you want to transform yourself, you need to go into those dark places. And what do you do when you're there? You just sit. It says in this particular text, which is called "Fear and Dread." The fear and dread rises up through him and this is clearly an absolutely terrifying experience. He just decides, "When I'm sitting, I'm going to keep sitting. If I'm walking, I'm going to keep walking. If I'm standing, I'm going to keep standing. If I'm lying down, I'm going to keep lying down. In other words, I'm not going to be affected by it. I'm going to observe it mindfully. I'm going to turn myself towards it and I'm not going to be afraid. Or if I am afraid, there's actually fear that he's observing. I'm not going to turn away from the fear. And this practice of mindfulness. Right. Still in the forest. And he's made some kind of breakthrough with confronting himself. But there's more subtlety that you can bring out. It starts to really observe his mind. What is this mind that we have? How does it work? Why is it that we sometimes find ourselves in one state, sometimes in another state? He's meditating. He's concentrated. He has this mindfulness. So he turns his attention to the mind. He says, "The thought occurred to me. Why don't I keep dividing my thinking into two sorts? So I made thinking imbued with sensual desire, ill will and cruelty, Greet hatred and cruelty done. One thought and thought imbued renunciation, non ill will and harmlessness, another." So he's seeing that there are different aspects of his consciousness. And each of these trends in his thought has an effect on him. And he's starting to separate them out. This great distinction that he eventually made between those kind of trends in one's consciousness, which is skillful, on which one can engage with the skill of a craftsman or a potter or an irrigator and cultivate certain kinds of states of mind. And other kinds of states of mind actually lead to suffering, confusion, and distort one's awareness of reality. And he knows he could unskillful, like being a really bad potter or craftsman. The Buddha commenting on this experience later on says this, "Whatever a monk dwells on and keeps thinking about becomes the inclination of his awareness." So whatever a monk, whatever a person dwells upon and keeps thinking about becomes the inclination of his awareness. So the way you use your mind sets up shapes the kind of person that you become, shapes the way that your mind will work in future. Now, this is an insight into the mind. Have a mind makes itself, forms itself, remakes itself. The Buddha's mind, Gautan's mind, your mind and my mind. We aren't fixed, actually. We're continually responding to the things that happen to us. And in this way, we're reinforcing the kind of people that we are. We're remaking ourselves constantly. This is such a revelatory insight into the nature of the mind, which modern psychology is still struggling to keep up with, in my view. You may well know a heard of a text called the Dhamma Pada. It's a sort of selection of sayings of the Buddha. And a very first of these verses makes exactly this point. Experiences, it says, are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows, even as the cartwheel, follows the hoof of the orchestra and the cart. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs. So we make ourselves and we remake ourselves. We fashion ourselves. And this is, I think, the germ of what you may have heard of. And unfortunately, we often put it in rather abstract terms. I mean, the Buddha often put this teaching in abstract terms. Principle of conditionality, which put in abstract terms, rather crudely, is a way of saying, well, actions have consequences. There's cause and effect in the world. But the germ of the inside seems to me, is looking at the mind and seeing how the experience that we have of the world has come from the conditions we've established in the past. And what we do right now, the way we respond to our experience right now, whether skillfully or unskillfully, shapes the experience we'll have in the future. So in the first instance, it's an insight into the mind. Eventually, the Buddha sat down beneath this peephole tree, which we now call a boating tree. It's a kind of a fig tree, and there's ever a place that's now called Buddha Gaia in a clear grove near enough to a city called Uruvella. And the Buddha put these elements of what he'd already developed together. Deanna, he went very deeply into these mevesive states of consciousness. In the absence of views, he seems to have been able to just be perceiving, very clearly, like looking, he says, into a clear pool. So you can see all the fish swimming around, and the rocks, and the coral, and all the rest of it. There are no ripples, no distortion. That's to do with the concentration of his mind. It's freedom from unskillful mental states, but also to do with its freedom from views. Not believing or assuming anything about the mind, about his consciousness, about his being. He turns towards his fears, and this we have in the story of the Buddhist enlightenment in his encounter with Mara, the demon of doubt and death and that sort of thing. And he engages with the mind with this sort of self-passioning awareness and intelligence. His little quote, "What you do if you're at this stage?" So I think this is like to happen, thank you. He prepares a furnace, heats up a crucible. This is an analogy for the mind. He's up crucible and places gold in it with a pair of tongs. Then you blow on it, sprinkle water, examine it again and again. This is what a craftsman's doing. He's saying, "This is what you do in deep meditation with the mind." So the goal becomes flawless, free from drafts, plant, malleable, luminous. And then he can make from it whatever shape he wishes. So the mind in this state is plant, malleable and luminous. Guru analyzes his experience, that seems fairly clear. He tries to tease out different elements. He takes his insights to a greater death. Everything is conditioned. Therefore, everything is impermanned. And therefore, everything is instantaneous. He takes his right back to that first insight. When he was a young man, the world-like sessions. All of that shows up how the mind constricts itself, how the mind creates itself in ways that reinforce old patterns, old habits, and lead us to suffering. In this way, the Buddha somehow or other, all these things come together. And as if the Buddha is able to perceive not just his mental states in quite broad terms, you know, you or I might sit down to meditate and think, "Oh, I'm feeling a bit anxious today." That's a very broad kind of awareness. He's aware of momentary consciousness. Instance of his consciousness is aware of, according to the text, the deep structures of his consciousness. He sees the various forces, how they merge, how they come together. And then the revelation, then this understanding opens out into a kind of sense of the whole of his life and the whole of all life, how one thing leads to another. Things arise in depends upon conditions. And then somebody else happens to be enlightened. So the rest of the Buddha's life, he was absorbing that experience, first of all, and then communicating it. I would say a little bit about Buddha's vision and our vision. So I've talked about the number of elements of the Buddha's vision, which I think emerged even before he became enlightened. The first thing I would say, we talk about our vision. This is an element of caution, because we can think of my vision that can very easily be, you know, how I envisage my life. The story I've told myself about my life, who I really am deeply, how that's important. But we're talking about the Buddha's vision. Let's think about that image of vision. It's seeing something, seeing what's there. So the Buddha's vision claims, at least, to be a vision of the truth. And that's something to reflect on when we think about, well, what's my vision for my life? Not just what I want, not even just what feels right, but what is deeply true, whether I want it to be true or not. The Buddha's also saying that in order to see the truth, you need to train yourself. But one needs to take account of one's prejudices and assumptions and biases. You really take account of those things. And gradually, gently, learn to let go of them, so that one can see the truth with one's mind, and also one's heart. Because a compassionate attitude towards other people is the one that will enable us to see what they really like. Compassionate attitude towards oneself is the one that will enable us to see the truth of one's own life, the forces within oneself. And seeing the truth means somehow taking on board this core element of the Buddha's vision, that we create our own reality. We're doing it all the time, and we can guide it. And that's a skill. You know, there's a skill of learning to see reality more clearly, more truthfully. How do I do that? How do you and I create our own reality? And how can we change the way that we do that? And finally, in all of that, there's a possibility that if we can understand ourselves, there's a possibility of liberation. That's not straightforward. None of this is straightforward. Now, the Buddha gains enlightenment according to the texts, and then he reflects and he hesitates. He says, "The Dharma I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle to be experienced by the wise. And it's hard for us to grasp it. This generation, the light and attachment sets the Buddha, enjoys attachment, finds it hard to see this truth." He thinks by were to teach the Dharma and others would not understand me. And that would be tiresome for me and troublesome for me. I think there's an echo of that in the trouble that you and I have in trying to grasp the Buddha's vision in our own lives. And actually, later on, the stories we have about the Buddha bear this out. There's much misunderstanding of what he's trying to say. There's much resistance. People are actually opposing his message. He creates this community, which is quite incredible in terms of his time. But there are all sorts of problems within it. All sorts of communal problems, interpersonal problems, political problems, problems with kings, problems with problems. And as even a story, which I think we need to give some credence to. At the end of the Buddha's life, his entire race, his entire people were wiped out by the King of Kosovo. A very gruesome story that the Shaqians were massacred. So our paths too are unlikely to be easy, because we've been asked to see through our own illusions, to enter our own forests and face our own demons, to see the patterns of our own mind and learn to work with them, to explore unknown dimensions of consciousness, to summon up persistence, patience, to do all of this. And yet, there's something very compassionate in the Buddha's vision as well. It's final response to this thought, "Well, maybe I won't teach. It's going to be too much bother." He's efficient. This is another way of talking about the Buddha's vision. "So out of compassion for beings," he says, "I surveyed the world with a vision of one awakened. As where there is a clump of blue lotuses, red lotuses or white lotuses, some of them do not rise out of the water that thrive while still immersed in it, some remain level with the surface of the water, and some rise out of the water and remain untouched." So we have this vision of lotuses at different stages of unfoldment. In other words, he sees that people aren't fixed and he's inviting us, I think, in this image. This image is inviting us to see our own life as imbued with the potential of a plant, perhaps in the form of a bud that's under the water, but with the capacity to grow, to unfold, to blossom into something much more. And that, it seems to me, is the heart of the Buddha's vision, that because we aren't fixed, we can change and our lives can be like, can feel like a process of a lotus going from a bud into flat. [applause] So that was a lot of me talking, and I'm interested and curious to know if you have any questions or thoughts or reflections. Yes, what's human? [inaudible] That's a good question. What was the most personal thing? I'd say two things, and I'm not quite sure if they get to the heart of it. One is, what I was talking about today, really. I think I have a clearer sense of what the Buddha's teaching is now, and how that affects me, and particularly this view of the mind, the mind as being skillful or unskilledful. I think that's a heart of the Buddhist teachings, and I think it's the same thing as his teaching and conditionality. And it's not anything new, but it's really reinforced my own sense that I am creating my whole experience, all the things that seem out there and to do with other people. Actually, what I am exploring, what I need to explore, is how I am participating in that process. So that's that, and I am completely convinced by that. So that has a bit of an effect on you're going for a future, even if that's simply an intellectual conviction. The other thing, I suppose, is I have come to feel a very strong connection with the Buddha. I mean, having been pouring over all this material for three years, he feels like a good friend of mine now, which might seem a bit balmy, but he does, so that. He feels like someone I know and doesn't mean I understand or comprehend. And it may be this feeling that I know the Buddha that I have imagined into existence. But I do feel, you know, meditate on the Buddha now, and I just sort of imagine sitting there next to him. And there he is, and there I am, and I know all the sort of things he says, because I've read all that stuff. And the other thing, you're going back to Bahia at the beginning, the sense that just being with the Buddha, someone who really embodies these teachings has quite an effect on you. And that you get in the story of the story. And the teaching that he's talking about there is in the scene, just the scene, in the her, just to someone who is utterly present with the simple things. Somehow makes him, gives him the kind of experience that's so different from the usual one. That's a good question. Anyone else curious to know what your thoughts are? I think you sit there. I just don't really enjoy listening to the talk. Thank you so much. Good, thanks. Yeah, you know, I mean, obviously as I've made quite a fine note, you've got strong interest in literature and drama. And I suppose I wonder, just from what you said in the talk, to what extent what you learned in that field about approaching tech has helped you to try and unravel mean behind some of those Buddhist things. And also, I suppose the thought follows on from that in my mind. I want to extend here, because we used to be used by scripture at one point. Yes. And we used their thoughts for the idea that these are religious things. But I wonder to what extent, actually, do you think they are literature? Okay, so two questions. What did I learn from literature that informed how I approached these texts? And to what extent are these texts literature? Well, I learned from literature. I didn't English degree. I used to write plays and that's the thing. What I learned, I would say, is that every literary text, reading a literary text properly, you need to enter it. You need to enter its world. Even, you know, a great poem, even if it's quite short, it's like entering someone's mind. It creates a way of seeing existence, creates its own terms for existence. And, you know, the language and the meanings and all of that go to make that up. And I think that's what one needs to do with the Buddhist text scriptures. We need to enter them, enter them, and see the world through their eyes. And I think that, you know, there are different aspects of that because it's partly history as well. One of the things I've been talking about some of the other talks I've been giving you other places. And these are all going to be a series which will be on the web. One of the things I've been talking about is entering a very different society. And actually making the Buddha more alien from us. Seeing him as somewhat from two and a half thousand years ago, who is engaged with a completely different culture, a completely different worldview. If you do that, then the text starts to make sense. And you can see how the Buddha is engaging with things that are real. So particularly things like the spirits, the spirit which I just touched on in that talk. If you imagine that Buddha is basically a modern person who is encountering all these people who believe in spirits, but he doesn't really, then you can't really make sense of how he responds. But if you see him as someone who's embedded in that world, for whom the spirits are real, in a culture where there are more important reality than political reality, or at least as important, then you can see how he's very skillfully navigating that world. He's given a role as a home man, for example, and he has to figure out how to be skillful within that role. He can't choose his role in society. So those may be something analogous that you enter into the world of the Buddha. We often don't want to do that. We often want to draw lessons, universal lessons out for the modern world. Because in the end we want to do that, but I think you miss a lot if you're not willing to see the otherness of the Buddha's teaching and the otherness of Asian culture in all different forms of movement. What's the second question? Yes, to what extent are they literary texts? Well, there are two aspects to that. Because literary texts implies something that's crafted. And one of the biggest questions about all of these texts is, are we listening to the word of the Buddha? Or are we listening to things that are the compositions of people in later centuries? I don't think there's a simple answer to that question. It clearly isn't a simple answer to that question. I think that it's useful to see how the longer texts are formed in literary ways. And you often see the meaning of something. Sometimes significance of things in those texts isn't exactly stated. The mirrors or echoes something that came before. You start to put them together in the way that you might, if you're reading a novel. Then you start to see what the meaning is. So it's not very clear without an example, but that's one sense. The other sense is, I believe the Buddha was a great poet. And this is another aspect of looking at the Buddha's words, but I take to be the Buddha's words. There's this cascade of imagery, sometimes very powerful. I mean, like the images of lotuses. And sometimes, as in the first texts that I read, which is the Atadamda Sita, you hear this voice. A very strong, direct voice talking across the centuries to you in very powerful imagery. And then other times, you feel like you're reading something that's written by a committee. So that's quite a subjective take on where I think the Buddha's voice is heard and where it isn't heard. I have sometimes wondered if I have that perception, or I feel confident in that perception, because actually that's what a literary critic does. Whereas a textual scholar who's pouring over the Pali grammar won't feel able to make that kind of judgment. So it's interesting to me that I've written the biography of the Buddha and all these scholars in their universities haven't. They're actually armed by the books that you can read in a way that you can read this book and feel the read about the Buddha. And that's because they are constrained by their scholarship to not want to go beyond that which you can prove, really. It's not academically respectable to do that, and there are no doubt good reasons for that. But as someone coming from a more literary point of view, I don't feel that constrained. I want to pay attention to the evidence, but I think essentially what I'm doing is an act of imagination. Imagination constrained by evidence is the phrase I came up with recently. But I would say that's a good description for history. Yes, because it's always an act of imagination. Although, yes, people don't always like to acknowledge that. But I think it is. It is, yes. It is. Imagination constrained by evidence. Yes. And I think that is a good way to think about how we can approach the Buddha. I was just telling you a bit of a dialogue with somebody who read my book as a practitioner in a hugging tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and saying that he really enjoyed my book, but he gets nowhere when he raises this sort of approach with his hugging teachers. Because they've got a different type of approach in the Buddha. And if you want to be critical of that approach, not that I do particularly, but the difference is what about the evidence? We can't ignore it. We can't ignore the evidence of history. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
