(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 hello, it's nice to see so many people. It's nice to see some familiar faces, some old friends as well. I did live in Birmingham for several years and made good friends here. It's very good to see some of you again and also to see new faces. I'm aware that in this talk, there are a number of different contexts within which I'm speaking. So some of you may just be here because it's the Thursday night regular class at the Birmingham Buddhist Center and you're maybe a little bit surprised why you're not meditating at the moment and hoping that the talk will be nice and brief. And some of you may have come along especially and some of you may even have read the book that I've written already. Some of you may be here at the class for the first time and some of you I know, Bante, have been pouring over this material for many years and I just want to greet you, myself, Bante and say I'm very pleased that you're able to come along tonight and that one of the things that I was aware of in writing my book on the Buddha was that for all that I was trying to work things out in my own mind and trying to make sense the material for myself without reference to anyone else's ideas particularly, I continually became aware that the approach that I had was fundamentally learned from yourself and from your writings. And the most important part of that is the value of seeing the Buddha as someone historical but without, as it were, reducing him to just a wise man who lived in India two and a half thousand years ago. So seeing the Buddha as historical but also enlightened and as a Buddhist I do think that the Buddha was enlightened. I don't exactly know what that means but I think it means something very special. I'm not going to talk about that directly tonight and I'm also not going to talk in a way about the methodology that I adopted and why I've taken this particular approach to the Buddha. There are other books on the Buddha most of them retell the legends of the Buddha. We have depictions of the Buddha in this sort of timeless aspect sitting on the lotus sometimes depicted in a clear blue sky and there are other Buddha figures that represent that. I'm not going to be talking about the Buddha in that respect and I'm also not going to go very much into why I'm not going to talk about him. I want to talk about the Buddha in terms of one particular aspect of what I have been exploring what I've been coming to understand about who he was and what he did. And that's the Buddha in relation to his society. Another context for this talk is that this is one of a series of talks that I'm giving. I'm going to different Buddhist centers and I decided I wouldn't simply give the same talk several times. I'm giving different talks, exploring different aspects of the Buddha and his profile and they'll be a series and the series will be available on free Buddhist audio. Three years ago in the course of researching my book on the Buddha, I traveled to India for the first time to the pilgrimage sites in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It's an area that's scattered around the Ganges River in northeastern India. Some of you will have been to those sites, I know, and some of you may have heard of them and of course some of you may not. There's for example, Bodhgaya, which is the most famous site of all, where the Buddha gained enlightenment. Now, when the Buddha described the place where he gained enlightenment, he said, well, it was a grove by a flowing river and there was a village for aunt nearby. We know that the river was called Naranjara and the village was called Uruvela or Uruvelva. And now there's a thriving, beautiful temple and many Buddhist from many countries. There's very little relationship to what the Buddha would have seen when he sat down in that place. The only connection really is the Bodhi tree. He was said to have sat under a tree of the same genus, the same variety. There are other places you can go to. One of the most evocative is Vulture's Peak. You climb a long winding trail up above a plateau and you go through craggy rocks to a vantage point, which looks out across the valley. The valley is enclosed by a number of peaks, five peaks traditionally. And in the Buddha's day, many holy men, holy men of his variety in particular, the kind of holy man he was at that stage was called Ashramana or a renouncer. Many holy men lived in the hills and caves above the valley. And you really get a feeling for what it was like to be in that environment. The texts tell us that the air was thick with the ghosts of the departed. And the spiritually attuned, people like the Buddha's disciple, Mogulana, could actually see them. Well, I can't vouch for that, which doesn't prove anything. But the atmosphere is certainly very strong and it's quite eerie. So one can imagine what it might have been like to be someone like the Buddha in that natural environment, which hasn't changed very much, presumably. But the foot of the mountains, at the foot of Vulture's Peak, is the former site of the city of Rajgriha, which was the capital of the kingdom of Magadha, which was one of the two major kingdoms of the area where the Buddha lived. The civilization that was flourishing around the Ganges, that part of the Ganges in his day. It's a capital city and texts in the later part of the Buddha's life say there were 70,000 households there. And yet one sees nothing. One sees a plateau covered in shrubs. It's not even like going to somewhere like Pompeii, which is of course very vivid. It hasn't been excavated. Who knows what lies underneath the shrubs? They've done what they call vertical excavation, which means they take a section and they dig down just to see what's there. But there's never been what's called horizontal excavation where they clear away everything and you get to excavate the whole city. And that's a rather good image for the problems one has in trying to reconstruct the society of the Buddha's day. There are many of the details of dates, for example, which we're very hazy about. And even the texts that we have don't give descriptions really of what a city was like. And yet with a mix of archeology and little nuggets scattered around through the various texts, you can conjure something up. A city like Rajgriha is said to have had a population of something like 100,000, which would have made it as large as any city in the ancient world at the time. Of course, that's an estimate, but that's what we think. And there would have been two main roads going through it. One east west would go north south. Of course, we have the mountains rising up around it, making the natural fortress and fortifications on the top of those mountains. The houses of the wealthy, the merchants, the aristocrats would have been made of brick and stone and can see some of them. There might have been some big monuments, but many of the houses would have been made of wood, of wattle and door, essentially. And very closely crowded together, streets for the jewellers, streets for perfumaries, streets for spices, and we have one description, one of the sitters of a different city where the person who speak was called Mahanal, describes a ancient Indian traffic jam with elephants, with carts, with horses, and with pedestrians, all just all together. So we can imagine that society in these kind of broad terms. And we also have some knowledge of the social strata and the different castes and classes. And I'm not gonna try and pick all that apart for you today. You know, there's all that detail in the book. But I do want to investigate a little bit what the Buddha's role was from what he can tell in his society. This has become quite an important question for Buddhists, especially in Asia, because the forms that Buddhism evolved into over the centuries turned out to not be very well suited to the changing conditions of the 20th century. A phrase that I use in my book, which has caused a little controversy already, is describing the events that overwhelm Buddhism in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Siberia, Mongolia, and China, is the Buddhist Holocaust. Buddhist monks were often massacred, especially by communists, across all of those societies. And in other places, Buddhism has been challenged by forces such as colonialism initially, and then communism, but also capitalism, which has brought in a very different society in which the traditional forms don't have the old place. And finally, and this is the biggest year in places like Mongolia and South Korea, Christianity, where there is very powerful missionary work going on. It has been for many years. And Buddhists have asked the question, well, what is the relevance of our teaching to our society, to the modern society? Do we need to find new forms, new social forms? And a number of answers have come to this. Rather, Buddhists have looked back to the Buddha and tried to understand what his own social vision was. Did he have one? And there are a number of views. So just go through them very quickly. The first view I'll mention is engaged Buddhism. And there are, in many ways, very impressive figures from many Buddhist societies are trying to develop forms of Buddhism which really address the social needs of the people, not just monks, but address the social needs of the people that are in their societies. Buddhism should have a social dimension. Now, that's something I feel very supportive of myself. But the problem comes when people look back at the Buddha and they try to envisage him as an engaged Buddhist in the same way that they were. And the evidence just isn't there. The Buddha's main concern, so far as we can see, was to communicate his vision of reality to other people, to enable them to practice it if they were able to be whole-hearted, or to practice it on their own level if they weren't able to give everything up and come and join him in the jungle, or the monasteries, the monastic settlements outside the cities. So the Buddha's main social experiment is the development of the monastic community. The community continued to develop for many centuries after the Buddha's life. So we have to unravel a bit to find out what he was really doing in his own day. But he does seem to have created a very strong community that stayed together and stayed together after his death, established it on very strong principles, combining respect for elders, respect for those more experienced, in other words, a kind of hierarchical aspect, with an inclusive aspect and a very devolved aspect in terms of the way the Sangha itself functions. Sangha is, who word has many meanings, but includes the monastic community. It was an intentional community. So the Buddha wasn't an engaged Buddhist, like some of the modern engaged Buddhists. And the reason he wasn't is that role simply wasn't open to him in those terms. Another view of the Buddha, going to the other extreme really, is that his message was simply one of renunciation. So one of the stories about the Buddha, you encounter quite early, is how he stole away from his own family in the middle of the night, just casting one back foot glance at his wife and reaching out to touch his weak old son. But no, he left, he cut off his hair, he renounced whatever role it may have been that he had in his society. And he became a wandering holy man. So the romantic elements of that we don't find in the early sources. But it does seem that he left home to practice his spiritual life and eventually to find enlightenment. That's a very powerful image of renunciation. And clearly, the Buddha did do something like that and did encourage other people to devote themselves to practicing his teachings as fully as possible. But there was more to it than that. His teaching wasn't simply one of leaving home, leaving the world behind. For one thing, we have stories that there was a backlash against the Buddha and against his community, precisely for encouraging people to leave home. The story is that he was in Rajgriha itself, the king of Rajgriha having become a kind follower. And suddenly, there was a wave of conversions as people joining the monastic community. Rumors start and whisperings and are kind of feeling against the Buddha's community who, in that context, were called the sons of the Shakya or the Shakya Putras. The Shakya Putras are stealing our sons. They're stealing our husbands. Buddha told his monks to recite verses that went great heroes, truth-finders, lead by what is true dharma. Who could be jealous of these whys leading according to truth? So the Buddha asked them to stand up for themselves and soon enough it passed. That's the story we have in the scriptures. Another perspective we have in the scriptures is that initially the Buddha does seem to have given this very strong message of renunciation. But then gradually he had to accommodate himself to the fact that not everyone wanted to go forth and sometimes there were very strong feelings against that happening. One of the strongest of these statements is in the Vinaya. And it's something that his father says. When the Buddha goes back to the town where he was born, which was capital of us do, and then lo and behold, he gets his son, rahula, to join the monastic order. And his father, Sudodana, says, "When you went forth, it was very painful for me. And I felt the same when Nanda, that's the Buddha's brother, did so. But when it came to rahula, Sudodana's grandson, my pain was overwhelming. A father's love for his son cuts into the skin. It cuts into the hide, the flesh, the ligaments, the bones. It reaches the marrow and lives there. So very strong feelings were thrown up. And whether strong feelings were there or not, it seems from the scriptures that there were people who simply didn't want to renounce the world. And what's more, the shamaners, including the Buddha's own disciples, needed someone to feed them. They needed a laity. So they needed to have some kind of connection with the lay people. How would the Buddha communicate with them? There's a story, which I find really fascinating, seems to be set in the period immediately after the Buddha's delivered his first teaching. So he's in somewhere called Sarna. Initially, all the people who come to him become monks. But then, it seems that this is where this particular scripture belongs. Someone called Dhamma Dinar, not to be confused with the famous nun of the same name, a man called Dhamma Dinar, comes to him and asks him for a teaching. And the Buddha tells him to dwell on those discourses, which deal with voidness, with shinyata. It has those very deep things, which are about the ultimate nature of reality. And Dhamma Dinar is come along with a lot of his friends, from the nearby city. Says to him, "We're at home with our families, "with everything that goes along with that. "We don't understand what you're talking about. "Could you give us a teaching that we could understand "and practice, please?" And so the Buddha tells him to have faith in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sanga, and tells him that will be enough. So in this kind of story, we see the Buddha, I think, learning, trying to work out, how to communicate is very radical, very powerful message about living in a completely different way, according to a completely different set of values, to people who were actually living the same as they've always lived. So, yes, the Buddha's message of renunciation is by no means all the risks say about the Buddha. There are other views about the Buddha's relationship to his society. It's one view that we find in books by Treble Ling and more recently Stephen Bachelow, which see him as an urban figure. So not as someone who really belonged in the forest, a forest renunciant, but an urban or even a bane figure who spent all of his time in cities, who spent a lot of time with kings and aristocrats, and he tried to influence society by influencing, well, in a way that people at the top, but then had to navigate very carefully through this world of power and politics that sort of what Stephen Bachelow gives us. Now, there's probably something in that, I think. He certainly did cultivate connections with kings, particularly King Cole Passenade, who's king of another kingdom called Coesala, and patrons, rich patrons who could look after his community and give it a material base. And the most famous figure there is someone called an Atopindica. And the kings respected the Buddha, but they didn't follow him. Passenade is full of praise for the Buddha. He never really seems to ask the Buddha's advice on specifics. The only example we have where Passenade actually took the Buddha's advice was about dieting. Passenade had eaten an entire bucket full of curry and a bucket full of rice. And he was so bloated that he went to the Buddha one day, the next day, and complained to him. And the Buddha tells him to be mindful of his food. He gives him some verses, telling him to be mindful when he's eating, and Passenade is delighted, and tells his attendant to repeat these verses to him every time he comes to eat. And as a result, within a few months, the king grew slender and stroked his limbs with pleasure. So, Buddha offering, successfully offering, dietary advice to the king. But the king doesn't seem to have asked his direct advice about public policy or anything like that. And if he does, there's no record of it, or he didn't follow it. And I wonder sometimes if we focus on the Buddha in this sort of way, if there's a danger that we project our own concerns back onto the Buddha, we imagine the Buddha was like me with my issues, my concerns, my problems, my concerns about society, wearing robes two and a half thousand years ago. In fact, this is a big problem with writing about the Buddha at all, probably writing about any such figure, that you simply see in him a projection of what you want to see, the Buddha you've imagined, you then dress in historical garb. The caution that I had made that came clear and clearer to me in studying the Buddha and studying these scriptures is the need to envisage a very different world and a very different culture with a very different world view from our own. And if you do that, and you imagine yourself into the things that seem to be important to the people in these ancient texts, then the texts start to make sense. And then you can see how the Buddha is navigating through this world and how he's acting skillfully within it. The Buddha presented himself to society. There are some kind of grand scenes of his meetings with kings where they want to know what he's got to offer. And essentially he presents himself as a holy man who possesses some kind of power yet to be defined. And the question then is, what did people want from a holy man? And the question for the Buddha was, if he was going to adopt that role of holy man in the way that people envisaged, how could he do so to the greatest effect? There are lots of little incidents in these scriptures that evoke the way that people looked at holy men. There's one that I like, and it takes called the Angutranikana, a question called the Angutranikana. And the Buddha is walking in a country, a land called Mullah, where the Mullens, the kind of tribal people are living. And they're very rough, especially the youths. And there's a particular group of youths who like roaming the countryside. They're quick-tempered, rough, and greedy fellows. They like to rob messengers. They like to slap women and girls on the back. That's what the text says. When the Buddha comes along, they cast aside their bows, they call off their dogs, they salute the Buddha, and they stand before him with hands-up raised, revering him. So the Buddha comments that when a son shows respect to a parent, the parent fondly regards him with loving thoughts. And similarly, venerating a holy man prompts his compassion, benevolence, and brings his blessing. So in other words, in this society, holy man has a place, even for the most rough and uneducated people. They may not know anything about him. They don't meditate. They don't know anything about his teaching necessarily. But the holy man, especially one with great prestige, like some of his said to be enlightened, really represents something incredibly important, even for the roughest members of society. And this brings forth a response from the sage himself, the holy man himself. And what's more, those who act respectfully become lovely in their actions and worthy of praise. So it seems to me that the Buddha identified this natural connection, this natural respect that people had for holy men as something he could work on. That was a lever that he could use to open people's eyes up to what he had to say to them. And there were other people around doing this. There were Brahmins, the priests, and you get a sense of tremendous competition between the world of the Brahmins, who are offering one version of how holy men can help society, which is largely through conducting sacrifices, which will bring benefit to an individual or to an entire country. And also, through showing people what their true place in the world is, their place within the system that eventually became the caste system. If you do this, then you will be on the side of those forces in the universe, which will support and protect you. So there's a competition between the Brahmins and the world of the wandering ascetics, like Gautama, who the Shrama, so we have the Brahmanas and the Shrama-Nas. And then within the Shrama-Nas community themselves, there are all sorts of different groups and sects. And tremendous rivalries between them. One of the most vivid of the stories that we have concerns how Magalana, who is one of the Buddhist two chief disciples, died, he's said to have gone to heaven, made the visionary ascent to heaven. And in heaven, he saw that people were practicing the Buddha's teachings, were all around him. And people who practiced the Jain teachings were nowhere to be seen. Came back from his visionary journey into the heavens, and he told everyone this. And this called absolute uproar. The Jains were furious. The Jain leaders set a group of thugs onto Magalana, and he was beaten to death. This is a story in the commentaries. Now, the king, who'd become a follower of the Buddha himself, was so angry when this happened that he had the murderers buried up to their necks in a field, and then he had the field plowed over. Yik. It's a horrible story, actually. I swear if you tell me that. It's a horrible story. But it really brings out the fact that at least some time afterwards, it was believed that the rivalry between different groups of holy men was so intense, and why is it intense? Because, in this case, Magalana is making a claim which goes to the heart of the way that lay people relate to these holy men. If you're on the right side of them, if you have their blessing, if you're aligned with them, then your fate after death and the fate of your relatives will be assured. Otherwise, you're in big trouble. So that's how the lay people are thinking. I'm not saying this is how the Buddha is thinking. This seems to be how the lay people are thinking. This concern with what would happen after death and, at parallel concern, the threat that's coming from the spirit world, the gods, but particularly more vengeful spirits, some of the yaka spirits, and the arachisers, and the praters, ghosts, and I won't go through who all of these are. The spirit worlds are very powerful presence in the Buddha society, and religion in his society almost certainly revolved around placating these spirits. And unless you are doing that, you're in trouble. So there's very well-known verse from a text called the Dhammapada, which makes sense if you put it in this social, cultural context. Many people, out of fear, flee for refuge to sacred hills, woods, groves, trees, and shrines. That's where they're making their offerings to these kind of shrines. In reality, says the Buddha, this is not a safe refuge. In reality, this is not the best refuge. Fleeing to such a refuge, one is not released from all suffering. Instead, he says, you should go for refuge. In other words, find some kind of place of safety by committing yourself and making a connection with the Buddha, his teaching, and the community of his followers. So the Buddha is offering himself there as an alternative to the old religion. In some way, because of who he was, and because of what he taught, this would be as effective for people, in fact more effective for people, than all of the things that the old religion had done, all of the things that elayed their primordial fears, the fears of the forces of nature. And there are many, many stories in the Buddha's life which show him taming spirits, taming demons. And I think this starts really with the story of his encounter with Mara, which if you've known anything about the life of the Buddha, you'll have heard of. On the cusp of his enlightenment, this demon appears, and there are many ways in which the demon is spoken of, but in some ways he is simply a very, very powerful spirit. And it may well be that what we're having is an echo of the fact the Buddha sat down on the shrine of one of the central figures of the local cults, called Mara, and challenged him. But of course, this isn't just anthropology. Mara also represents death, he represents doubt, he represents the conditioned world, all of the things that limit us, and keep us trapped in old ways of being. So he's a kind of spirit, but a spirit who has these resonances in other ways. There are many stories like this. And I want to suggest that if we put ourselves back into that society, the most important thing that an engaged Buddhist could do was to offer some kind of protection against the spirit world. So the Buddhist simply had to respond to that. The other thing that we have is demands that the Buddha tells people what's happened to their friends and relatives after death. This is one of the special powers that Buddha has said to have had, the ability to know the rebirths, the future rebirths of people who've died. And at the end of his life, it's evident that the Buddha has become, the Buddha seems to, very often in the scriptures, be happy to respond to these questions about where is this nun gone, where is my grandmother gone, after death. But after a while, he really does seem to get fed up with it. People keep coming to him. And he says, "Arnander, it is not strange "that human beings should die, "but at each time it happens, "you should come to the Targetter, that's me, "and ask about them in this manner. "Indeed, it would be troublesome to you." And then he offers what he calls the mirror of the dharma, where he says, "Look, if you practice skillfully "in your life, and you've made spiritual progress, "then you'll have a good rebirth. "If you haven't, then you won't. "That is the mirror of the dharma." So in other words, he's saying, "You don't need me to tell you this. "Just, you know, if you want to know what your future fate is, "just look in the mirror, or look in the dharma, "the mirror of the dharma." So it has tried touching, because it shows the Buddha's patience running out. If one can speak of the Buddha's patience... No, one can't speak of the Buddha's patience running out. Well, he says he doesn't want to do it anymore. He's very old at that point. But up to that point in his life, that is precisely what he's done. So in other words, the Buddha accepts the role that's given to him, but he does it skillfully. The demons attained, they're made to, in some way, pay respects to the Buddha. So the spiritual world that these people inhabit is oriented to whatever values the Buddha is representing. And the idea of rebirth is connected with how you act in this life. And so he's able to bring in the idea of ethics. So this is the Buddha accepting the role that's given to him, and then working with it, changing it. So what of the Buddha's own vision? I think we get a little bit of a glimpse of that in a text called the Sigalavada Sutra, where he encounters a young man called Sigalar, who is doing what you will actually see quite often in India, even today. First thing in the morning, he's praying. He's praying to the four directions. The four directions, north-south east-west, are very important within the mythic structure that you encounter in the early Indian way of thinking. And in each of the four directions is the home of one of the four great kings, these mythic beings who kind of govern the universe in a certain way. Sigalar is propitiating them. He's establishing a connection with them. And the Buddha sees him doing that, and he talks to him, and he says, there's a different way in which you can understand these four directions. He says that the east should be seen as one's mother and father, the south as one's teachers, the west as one's wife and children, the north as one's friends and companions, direction below, a servant's and workers, the direction above, as ascetics and bronze, that's six directions. Did it wrong? Sorry, there are six directions, Sigalar the Sutra. So in other words, what he's saying is, look, what is this reality, this universe that we inhabit? You understand in mythic terms. For the Buddha, the world, reality, was what you actually experience. Anything beyond that, especially in these mythic terms, is really a matter of speculation. So create meaning, find significance in the things that are actually there in your life, and use the mythic structure of the six directions to give that meaning. So the east is your mother and father. Respect, pay respects to your mother and father. Pay respects to your teachers, your wife and children, your friends and companions, your servants and workers, ascetics and bronze. The Sutra elaborates that. It comes up with a vision of society as a network of connections and a network of these affirmative responses, of respectful responses, to these different kinds of people. So what we have here is the Buddha taking a myth and infusing it with an ethical meaning. And there are a number of examples of this. Maybe I won't go through them. He offered teachings that worked on different levels. So on a very simple level for people outside of his community, his monastic community, he said, well, we have this thing, this force in the universe called karma. If you act in a certain way, then good things will happen to you later on. In a way, it's as simple as that. At least as we have it in effect. But beyond that is a somewhat more subtle teaching about ethics. There are principles involved in this. How you should relate to different kinds of people. How you should act in the world. And then beyond that is another teaching that the real meaning of ethics and the real meaning of karma is your motivation. What's going on in your mind? So if you want to transform your future, you need to transform your mind. You need to create positive, skillful mental states as the way he puts it. States of loving kindness and generosity. And those will body forth in a different kind of life for you. So the Buddha here is opposing what he spoke of as views. He opposed very strongly the belief systems all around him, which he saw structuring, forming the society that he lived in. When those views were really just rationalisations or projections or expressions of desires, craving of unskillful emotions. For example, the idea that you should have a social structure with the priests at the top and the workers at the bottom, the outcasts at the bottom, he saw really as an expression of craving. It suited people to think that way. And he challenged those kinds of views. He challenged magical thinking in a certain way. The magical thinking of his society, where people did think in terms of God's punishing you and that sort of thing. And he asked people to look directly at their own experience to see what really made sense to them in terms of their life experience. So he was a pragmatist, but the pragmatic reality that he experienced and the people around him experienced included gods and rebirth and karma and so on. Maybe one last point before I move on to concluding. There is a lot of mythic thinking in the Buddha's teaching. For example, in Sigalavada Sita, seeing the six directions in relation to the main relationships that you have in your life. He's using a mythic structure. He's still using a mythic kind of way of thinking, but he's bringing it into accord with what he called dharma or truth, which you can also speak of in terms of reason. So what can we learn from all of this? It's kind of interesting to know that holy men had to work with the spirit world. But what can we learn from it? Go back to something I said at the start. It seems to me that we need to start by acknowledging how different the Buddha's society was from our own. We don't learn the lessons of the Buddha's life if we imagine that he was a kind of a modern person in an ancient world or that the ancient world was really just a modern world in Togas. We need to imagine a very different world and a very different kind of society. The first thing that we see that I think we can draw a lesson from is the Buddha mainly convinces the general public to use that term and people like kings through the transfixing power of his personal example. In the first instance, it's who the Buddha is, how he lives, what he is in himself, the fact that he is a different kind of being from anything that they'd encountered before, a revelatory kind of difference. That's what impresses people. That's what gets them to listen to him. And later on in Buddhist history, we have the example of the emperor Ashoka, who is the hero of Buddhist civilization because he tried to create a Buddhist civilization across India, across much of India. And Ashoka, his conversion from what we can tell seems to have come simply by being impressed at a time of spiritual crisis in his own life when he was feeling a lot of remorse for his military adventures. He was impressed by the personal example of the Buddhist monks he encountered. So that I think is the first lesson from the life of the Buddha. His strongest argument he has is the power of his personal example, who he is in himself. And he offers alternative ways to live and to engage with the issues around him. So we can't go to the Buddha, the example of the Buddha, for a pository of answers or a political agenda or a political philosophy. And it's evident that you can be a Buddhist and vote for a right-wing party or a left-wing party. There are all sorts of lessons you can draw from him. We won't find answers. What we will find is the example of someone who's really trying to stay true to his own principles. He's not willing to give up his own ground. The Buddha is willing continually to identify the views that are going on in his society, to identify where their expressions of unskillful states. And especially where they mix some wonderful sounding philosophy with frankly self-interest and modern discourse, or not so modern discourse, the word for this is can't. He has a very strong eye for can't. And the Buddha is also quite realistic. It seems to be quite realistic about what is possible to do in terms of changing the social order. He lived in a fairly brutal society where kings kept spies, where rulers were under threat. They were surrounded by military guards, by their own personal security guards, as it were. And where they used holy men to their own ends, sending them out of spies, for example, or dressing their spies as holy men. But the Buddha insisted on retaining his own ground. And I think those are the lessons that I would draw from the example of the Buddha. The need to offer a real alternative through one's own personal example. And the willingness to identify and challenge the views that underpin the philosophy that people seem to present in, that might sound okay in his own terms. And the willingness to stand one's own ground come what may. (audience clapping) - We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
