(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. - I'm very happy to be here at the LBC and see some familiar faces, some very familiar faces, and some not so familiar faces. And I'm also very pleased to be here launching my book. If any of you have ever done anything like that, you'll know it takes a long time to write a book. It's nearly four years since I started work on this one. And for a long time, it was in my head on my computer, changing it around. And there it is, it's now a physical object, actually wave one around. A rather lovely physical object. But my talk isn't really about the book. My talk is about the Buddha. And the book takes a narrative, tells the story of the Buddha's life. And I'm doing a number of different talks of different centers in relation to launching the book. And I'm doing different talks in each place. And I'll make a series and I'll be on the web on Free Buddhist Audio. And what I'm wanting to do, and I'm finding it's very interesting, as a different way of reflecting on the Buddha and what I've been writing about, is drawing out strands, trying to sum up some of the things that are threaded through the book. And it wasn't my intention to talk about this particular subject. But then I thought, no, that's what I want to talk about. About last week, the Buddha's personality, and it struck me that I'd never heard in having been around Buddhist centers for a long time, or even read anyone ever, trying to describe the Buddha's personality. So what that means will come to. But I want to start with myself, or at least with my relationship with the Buddha. I was, I ordained 19 years ago, 1992. And that's an episode in my own personal connection with the Buddha. When you are ordained, well, the formal way that it's put, is you make a commitment, or you go for refuge, to what we call the three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Some of you will be very familiar with this, and some of you won't. And those ordained as a place called Gihi Loka, which is a very beautiful, remote mountain retreat center in southern Spain. And we were doing a lot of meditation in the period leading up to the ordination, my ordination. And there were quite a lot of us there, all meditating away. And having the beautiful environment, these craggy peaks, having the context of a month of meditation, and having this event looming that really concentrates the mind, it really does make you think. Right. This is it. Now, I got very deeply engaged with meditation. And the day before my private ordination, I was meditating away, and everyone else left the shrine, and I was meditating away. Very absorbed, very concentrated. And the thought came into my mind. So what am I doing tomorrow? What is it? And I thought, okay, that's a good question. That's an important question. Going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. So what does that mean? What does it mean to go for refuge to the Buddha? And I thought, well, you know, I know the doctrinal explanations. Like you can talk about that. But it came to my mind was, well, when you're engaging with the Buddha, you're engaging with the part of the Buddha that makes him the Buddha. So that's his enlightened mind. So what is the enlightened mind? I just sat with that question, and it was one of those moments when you just get a bit of a glimpse, what is the enlightened mind? What was it like to be the Buddha? What was that consciousness? And one of those moments when your perspective sort of opens up and you imagine someone for whom all the things that befuddled us, me, all the complications around life, disappear and the connections between things are there. And one feels very much part of that. In a sense of great expansiveness, of course, I don't know what the Buddha's mind was, and I don't know what the Buddha's personality was. But when I read the Buddhist scriptures, one reads quite often of those sorts of experiences, people meeting the Buddha, and then some kind of expansion into a different space. Now, one of the ways that's talked about is the opening of the Dharma 'I'. I'm not saying that the Dharma 'I' opened for me at Gushiloka by any means, but I think you can sometimes, the Dharma 'I' can sometimes blink closed most of the time, then it blinks open, and you have a little vision of something, or a big vision eating. And then it closes again. And of course, if your eyes are closed in a lighted room, and then they close again, they open the closed again, then you'll remember what you saw, although memory might fade. In one of the scriptures, this happens to a fellow called Upali, he says, "Just as a clean cloth would take die evenly, so while Upali sat there, the spotless, immaculate, Dharma 'I' arose in him. Whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation." That's kind of a vision of how things change, how they're connected, how one thing leads to another, the way life is. I'm not talking about the Buddha's personality yet. This way of thinking about the Buddha, engaging with the Buddha, is what the Buddhist tradition has really emphasized. Perfect vision, which is really the start of the eightfold path. It is the start of the eightfold path. It's another way of talking about it. And one imagines the person who had this vision as being in some way perfect, in some way beyond change, beyond this attitude, and then the imaginations of those Buddhists over the centuries who've reflected on that have captured that in these archetypal forms we have one here. So the Buddha as an archetype, the Buddha as timeless, the Buddha as eternal, and what we usually think about when we think about the Buddha. Now in my book, I found myself reflecting at the Buddha not so much in those terms. I found myself thinking about the other aspect of the Buddha, the Buddha who is time bound, the Buddha who is flesh and blood, and is distinct, is individual, is not simply a universal figure. And that's what I want to talk about tonight. I want to talk about it while not losing sight of that other dimension. I think the archetypal aspect of the Buddha, that sense of the Buddha as a universal figure, beyond change, has sometimes bedeviled the way the Buddha is seen in our culture. Go right back to the 1850s when Wagner discovered the Buddha, and he tried to write an opera about the Buddha, called the victors, it was to be called the victors. But he gave up, he couldn't do it. And the reason was, there's a letter in which he describes his reasons. He says, the most difficult thing was to lend dramatic, even a musical shape to that human being delivered of desires, the Buddha himself. How do you make an interesting character out of someone who is beyond change, who has no conflict? Well, that's maybe a question for dramatists to answer, and I don't know that anyone has really answered it. Then taking it for the century, in a book that used to be very well-known, and still fairly well-known, called "Zorba the Greek", by a Greek writer called Nikos Kazenzarkus. This book is actually about Kazenzarkus's struggle with the Buddha. This bit got left out of the Hollywood movie and the stage play. He's caught between two figures. One is the Buddha, and the other is Zorba. Zorba is a peasant and is full of vitality and life. But meanwhile, the main character, who's the alter ego of Nikos Kazenzarkus, is writing a poetic drama about the Buddha. Kazenzarkus, by the way, did actually write this drama, and we have it, and I've read it, it's quite interesting. And about halfway through the book, the Kazenzarkus figured reacts violently against the influence that the Buddha's having on him. He says, the Buddha is that last man, last man is a phrase from Nietzsche. That's secret and terrible significance. Buddha is the pure soul that has emptied itself. In him is the void. He is the void. Enter your body, enter your spirit, enter your heart, he cries. Wherever he sets his foot, water no longer flows. No grass can grow, no child be born. So that's a view of the Buddha. Because he is beyond life, he denies life, and the love of the Buddha is a sign of decadence of civilization. That's what Nietzsche said about the Buddha. That's when Kazenzarkus agreed. Writing the Buddha was, in fact, ceasing to be a literary exercise. It was becoming a life and death struggle against tremendous force of destruction lurking in my heart. A duel with a great no which was consuming my heart, and on the result of this duel, depended the salvation of my soul. He had to reject the Buddha to save his soul. Well, I have a different view of the Buddha. Probably we all do. But I can see how that view has developed from making the Buddha this transcendental figure. What is left when you cease to desire? Even in the early scriptures, we have this sense of the Buddha as being somehow perfect, a perfect being walking through the world. He's said to have 32 marks that are associated with what the Vedic tradition considered an enlightened being should have. Well, we still see them on the depiction of the long, ear lobes, the top knot. But it's also have very long tongues. And one way to find out if someone is a Buddha in this sense, you have to get them to stick their tongue out. And then, if you see that they can lick things off their forehead, then you know that they are either a Buddha or what's called a great agent, Chakravarti, Roger. And they've got sheathed penises. So that's the other way to find out if someone is a Buddha. 32 of those things. And what's going on here is that in the scriptures, that is what passes for physical description of the Buddha. And somehow there's this kind of mythology mixed with what one might actually have observed. Or maybe the Buddha did look like that. Except when you read the scriptures and by scriptures, I mean the Pali canon, in particular, the discourses of the Pali canon, which are, for those of you who don't know, I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of what texts were. They're sort of the oldest ones of the Buddhist scriptures that we have. When you read them, you find the Buddha can just turn up somewhere and people just start talking to him. And they don't say, sign your head. In a text called the Dutti Babangasata, for example, we have the Buddha sharing a heart. He needs somewhere to sleep. He's just wandering around and he's put up for the night in a heart. And there's another wandering holy man there called Pakusati. And they spend all night meditating. The Buddha sits there meditating because that's what he likes to do. And he notices this other champ. It's joining him. He's sitting there, seems very concentrated. So at the end of the night, he says to him, "Tell me about yourself." And Pakusati says, "Well, I've come here to meet the Buddha. "I hear he's really a great teacher." In other words, he hasn't noticed anything about the person with whom he's sharing a heart that will tell him that he's actually or found him already. And there are quite a lot of examples like that. So this idea that the Buddha looked really distinct, it isn't properly carried through. So what did he look like? Well, it's said that he was very handsome. He's good-looking, he was tall, but not too tall. He was radiant. He literally shined, especially at certain times. But one still has a feeling that there's an element of hagiography in those descriptions. It's still matching an idea of what a Buddha ought to look like. But then what about this? A Buddha's old now. Ananda is with him. Ananda is his companion. They've been together for 25 years. And they spoke with great familiarity. Ananda says, looking at-- so I mustn't catch anyone's eye as I do this. He says, "It's amazing, Lord. It's astounding how the blessed one's complexion is no longer so clear and bright. His limbs are flabby and wrinkled. His back bent forward. There's a discernible change in his faculties." So he's saying, "B Buddha, you used to be really good-looking. Look at you now. He used to be young, fit, and strong. Isn't it amazing how flabby you look?" The Buddha says, "Well, that's the way it is, Ananda. When young, subject to aging, when healthy, subject to sickness, when alive, subject to death." And you imagine a long pause between them. They sit there, reflectively nodding to each other. I love that sort of sense of intimacy. And we don't have any sense of idealizing the Buddha. No, that's not to say the Buddha wasn't good-looking and strong and fit and healthy. No reason to think he wasn't. But that isn't serving a polemical purpose. That isn't a archetype. That's the sort of thing that makes me trust the sitters as the containing material that really goes back to the Buddha. But what kind of person was he? There are passages in the sitters that say, well, he was incredibly compassionate. He was incredibly mindful. And so it doesn't really tell us very much. We learn more when we observe the Buddha talking to people or responding to them or in a certain situation, a difficult situation. He was in some very difficult situations. We learn from what he liked and what he didn't like. And the Buddha certainly had things he didn't like. In this way, a quite distinctive personality emerges. So let me try to evoke it. Let's start with an episode that goes right back to the period just after the Buddha's enlightenment. This is a very well-known episode in the Buddhist tradition. So the Buddha was enlightened, and he was absorbing the depth of his realization. And he thinks, hmm, what shall I do next? It occurred to me that the truth I had found was profound, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, sublime, beyond the sphere of mere reasoning, subtle, to be understood only by the wise. Should he try to communicate this? And he thinks about it, and he says, if I try to teach this, it will be distressing and hurtful to me. And he says, he inclined to the least discomfort, to not teaching the truth. So this is quite remarkable. And Buddhists have always struggled with this. How could someone who is so wise, so compassionate, consider not sharing his teaching? And it's been interpreted in various ways. But I want to try and interpret it sort of psychologically. In the story, what happens is a figure called Brahma, who's basically God, the ancient Indian equivalent of God, appears to the Buddha and says, please teach. Not God in the sense of creation of the world, but God in the sense of the supreme spiritual being of this world. And then the Buddha does teach. But the phrase that he uses, this would be difficult for me. He says, the Pali word is-- I'm not even going to try and pronounce it, I'm afraid-- the Han-san-san-i. It translates as something like, bother. It would be a lot of bother to me to teach. Or hassle, I think, might be another word. It would be so much hassle. So at the risk of making the Buddha sound like a stoner, he doesn't really want to get involved in that. Now, I'm going to put that together with a little saying that there are another text. He says, the two commonest thoughts for me are the welfare of beings and solitude. And it seems pretty clear that the Buddha really liked being on his own. He just liked solitude. He felt most at ease when he was deeply absorbed in meditation. And yet, there was this other thought, the welfare of beings. So when we have the phrase like this, the two most common thoughts, we have a non-psychological language about the mind. He's not saying, well, there's one part of me that really wants to teach you the Buddhist center. There's one part of me that really wants to be on retreat. This doesn't have that language of two parts of me. He has this language of there are two thoughts that come into my mind, the welfare of beings and solitude. And very often, we see there are stories where the Buddha is engaging with other people. He really wants to engage with other people. But it gets to a point where he thinks, no, I am not going to give up who I am. I'm not going to get too involved in the problems that they're involving me in. There's one little phrase which I really like, a little quote. So it's when I'm traveling along a road and see no one in front of me or behind me, then I feel at ease, even when I'm urinating or defecating. That's what he says. And there's a story that literally evokes us very well. The Buddha is surrounded by all of the paraphernalia of a developed Buddhist community. There are nuns, there are monks, there are laypeople, there are kings coming to visit. And there's lots and lots of kerfuffle. And in some versions, the epsilon I'll tell you about, comes immediately after a dispute in the Sanga, where there are two groups of monks who are at dangers drawn with each other. They've fallen out over a bit of minutiae about monastic discipline. And the Buddha comes and says, look, you've got to be in harmony with each other. And they say, you keep out of this. And they keep on arguing. And eventually, so there are two versions of the story. One, he's just surrounded by busyness. The other, he's involved with a dispute. And in both cases, he just walks off into the forest. Just walks off, and in one version of the story, what is he walks off into the forest and sits meditating beneath a beautiful spreading fig tree. Meanwhile, an elephant, a bull elephant, has been in a similar position. Every time he wants to have a bath, he finds that the she elephants have mudded the water with having a bath before it. He's not happy about this. And every time he wants to eat a bit of bark, he finds that the young elephants have already eaten it. So he's surrounded by family life. And again, he just walks off, not recommending this to anyone. He walks off and they sit there, the Buddha and the bull elephant, two grumpy old men in the forest together. And the bull elephant feeds in water from his trunk. So this lovely little story. You may not like the story, but I do. And it's evoking a certain kind of person. So the Buddha, he just sometimes just walks off and goes on retreat. He walks off into the forest and says, he sometimes goes off for months on end. He doesn't want anyone with him, not even an attendant. At the same time, the Buddha is clearly a very kind man. We'll come onto this again, but one of the aspects of this is that people feel sometimes when he comes towards them, that it's as if they're absorbed in a sort of a force field of loving kindness. There are a few stories about this in the monastic code called the the Naya, that the Buddha just extends this meta of loving kindness. And suddenly, all of their reactions and their irritation with him is dissolved and the sort of communication takes place. The other story is quite well known is how he tames the wild elephant through radiating loving kindness. And there are stories of monks even in modern times when they're in a jungle and a tiger comes up to them. They radiate kindness and it seems to work. The tiger doesn't eat them. Of course, we only have stories from the ones who didn't get eaten. So we have this sense of the Buddha being able to show a kind of loving aspect to himself. And this business about not wanting hassle, not wanting bother, becomes a principle that he builds into the way his disciples are to interact with their peers in the community, in the world of Shramun, as they're the wandering holy men of whom the Buddha was won initially. The Buddha sometimes parodies what went on in those communities. They loved arguing. They loved debating. You don't understand this teaching discipline. I do. How could you understand it? Your practice is quite wrong. Mine is right. What I can say can be backed up. Yours can't. Yadda yadda yadda. That's essentially what's going on. And they love to talk the Shramun as according to the texts. But when the Buddha comes, they know that he likes quiet. And he doesn't delight in disputes. So sometimes they tell each other to be quiet. And they say, no, we should greet and respect them. We should stop chattering away. And sometimes they don't. And there are stories of people saying, I'm going to have a go at that Buddha, that go to know. Because I'm going to drag him round by the hair. I'm going to bounce him off the floor. Because he is wrong. I'm going to beat him in dispute. No one ever does, of course. And some think, because he isn't willing to engage in debates, he's weak. The ascetic godma's wisdom has been destroyed by his solitary life. He's unused to gatherings and no good at conversation. He's out of touch like a bison that circles around the herd but stays at the edge. If godma were to join us-- this is one group of Shramun as-- we could confound him with a single question. What the Buddha actually does is to practice what we could call kindly and skillful speech. And he says of himself, of the people he met and in his communication, I matched my appearance to their appearance. I matched the sound of my voice to the sound of theirs. I instructed them with talk about the teaching, encouraging, infusing, and inspiring them. This isn't the only way to teach, but this is the way the Buddha chose to teach. I matched my appearance to their appearance. Someone's sitting down. He sits down. They're standing up. He stands up. He's establishing rapport. I matched the sound of my voice to the sound of their voice. That's quite subtle level of communication skills going on there. I instructed them with talk about the teaching. He doesn't get involved in saying why they're wrong. He says what he believes to be the truth, encouraging, infusing, and inspiring them. So when the Buddha meets people, very often, what he does, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat argument. And this, I think, is something that we could reflect on and learn from. He tries to understand the way the other person thinks. He tries to see what is valuable for them. Usually people in this world just come out, you know, very forthright. This is what I believe. If they believe in exciting mystical experiences as a result of meditation, he goes, oh, OK, great. But what is the real point of it if they're very taken with notions of cast purity and being an Aryan? He says, ah, Aryan. That means noble, doesn't it? So what is really noble in life? Is it a matter of birth? He does this very much with the Brahmins. They'll be priestly cast. So one Brahmin, sonadanda, decides he will actually enter into discussion with the Buddha. Even though everyone tells him, no, no, no, he's shamanist. You shouldn't talk to him. You're the real expert on religious matters. He says, no, no, I will talk to him. But he's worried, sonadanda's worried that the Buddha will ask him about all these sort of philosophical things that the shamanist know about. The Brahmins don't know about that. They know how to perform sacrifices. But the Buddha doesn't do that. He asks him, well, what is a true Brahmin, really? And step by step, he leads him to the conclusion that being a Brahmin, which for sonadanda is about being the most noble, holy, spiritual kind of person, fundamentally has nothing to do with birth, nothing to do with appearance, nothing to do with knowledge of the sacred mantras. In other words, nothing to do with any of the things that sonadanda actually did and actually believed in and was meant to believe in. So what he does, what the Buddha does again and again, is to accept the terms in which people think and find the inner meaning of them. So being a Brahmin, if that's about moral and spiritual qualities, as well as a social role, being a Brahmin combines those two aspects, moral and spiritual qualities, and a social status. And the Buddha inverts the way that people think, which is to emphasize that I am a Brahmin because I was born a Brahmin, to find the inner meaning of it. So this is really quite remarkable as a level of communication that people can come along with whatever is valuable to them. And you can find the universal aspect, the Buddha can find the universal aspect in whatever they have to say. The Buddha is funny. He is funny. The Palmi Canon, which sits arrayed on our bookshelves, or the library bookshelves, in the most of putting volumes that you could possibly imagine, that really quell any desire to reach for them and open the book. And if you do, then the language pretty soon puts a stop to an enthusiasm I have been feeling. It's funny. However, it's not for the belly laughs, or one liners, or cracks. I think there's one thing that might actually be funny without any explanation, although come to think about, I'm going to have to explain it. This is something that the Buddha says to monks, for whom the biggest temptation they faced was food, could lay people, and you still get this in terravaran countries, gain merit by feeding the Buddhist monks. And the monks are meant to be wandering, they're meant to be very ascetic, they just take what they're given. But what happens if you find a family that really likes to feed you, and feeds you really good food, very tempting to just stick with them? And the Buddha says to the monks, "Suppose there was a dung beetle that was gorged with dung, and had a huge pile of dung in front of him. He would look down on other beetles and declare, 'You pea, I'm a dung beetle with a huge pile of dung in front of me.' And he says, 'You, that's what you would be like.' Best as funny as it gets, so, you know, we're not talking belly laughs, sir. A king shaves off his hair and beard, putting on a rough height, this is description of biomedical rituals. He smears his body with ghee and oil, scratches his back with a deer's horn, and enters into the hall. He lies down on the bare grass, and milk is drawn from the first nipple of a young cow to feed the king. From the second to feed the queen, from the third to feed his chief advisor. So you can imagine people who actually know this, and the Buddha presenting this bizarre ritual, as if it was actually bizarre and causing hilarity among the monks. Then he orders people to kill bulls, cows, goats and sheep, and it turns, for the sacrifice. Trees are felled, grass is cut, meanwhile his terrified and tear-stained servants are threatened with punishment and made to do the work. In this way, people make themselves suffer and make other people suffer. Even the humor is in the tone of voice, and you have to imagine sometimes that the Buddha was a bit of a mimic. It's quite a well-known text called the Dhammapada, where the right at the beginning, the Buddha says, "He hurt me, he abused me, he robbed me." Those who think such thoughts will not experience peace. Well, imagine that with a whiny voice. Then the Buddha's acting out the resentful train of thought that goes through our mind. "He hurt me, he abused me, he robbed me." So it's in those little turns of phrase that I think we find a distinctive voice, and a humorous one. I am an old and aged man, Armandar, who has done his time and reached old age. I have turned 80, and just as a worn-out cart is kept going with a help for repairs, so it seems my body is only kept going with repairs. If it wasn't for this, I'd fall apart. The Buddha, as well as being humorous, is intensely creative. Sometimes people, scholars argue that the text of the Pali Canon are written by sort of committees of monks in later years who are wanting to put forward some kind of doctrinal orthodoxy. Well, there are texts that are written like that. They're called the Abhidharma, and they read in a certain way. They're very, very technical and very dull, extremely dull, genuinely dull, but in the Pali Canon, in the discourses, you have metaphors, similes, and parables, some of which have a quite extraordinary degree of creativity, and that creativity and originality is only apparent sometimes when you know a little bit about the context, but the Buddha describes the mind as a fire, the mind as water, the mind as a house, the mind as a mass of foam floating down the Ganges, the mind as a bubble on the surface of the water, a mirage at dawn, an illusion at the crossroads created by a traveling magician. The Buddha we think of as the silent sage who didn't like to say much. In fact, you have a torrent of poetry, of metaphor, of images. The Buddha puts things in so many different ways. He has a vision of reality, that's very clear, and then he finds an abundance of ways of expressing them, and I don't think committees come up with that creativity. He stretched the language, and he opened up the ways of thinking that his contemporaries had, the myths that they had, he gave a new meaning. So one of the little myths that the Buddha's retelling of the myth that I really like is the story of Vepiciti, Lord of the Arseus. The Arseus are sort of demons or titans, and they are like the titans and gods of Greek mythology. The Arseurus and the Davas are always fighting in Indian mythology. So there was Vepiciti, the Lord of the Arseurus, bound, neck, hand and foot. Vepiciti is the king of the Arseus, and he's been captured in battle, and he's been given a very particular, incredibly subtle punishment. There was Vepiciti, the Lord of the Arseurus, bound, neck, hand and foot. When the thought occurred to him, the Davas, the people who imprisoned him, are in the right, and the Arseurus are in the wrong, I'm now going over to the city of the Davas, then he viewed himself as freed from that five-fold bond. In other words, when he thinks these people who've imprisoned me, they're great, then his shackles drop off. So when he thinks the Arseurus are in the right and the Davas are in the wrong, I will go over to the city of the Arseurus, then he viewed himself as bound with the five-fold bond. So in other words, when he gets angry with the gods, then the shackles reappear. Now in that, that's like an image out of Kafka or something, isn't it? And the Buddha's point about it is that this is exactly what we do to ourselves. When we think in a certain way, then the shackles appear. When we think in a different way, the shackles disappear. The mind forged manacles, that's a phrase from Blake, we don't know. So yes, a committee didn't come up with that little story. That was some kind of genius, some kind of literary genius and it takes us into the intricacy of the Buddha's mind, a very intricate intelligence, able to bring that out. He's a silent sage who's also the master of language. Now having spent several years reflecting on the Buddha, reading these stories about him, reading these dusty tones, his texts, and looking for the personality of the Buddha. Looking for the Buddha as an individual being, I find I have an illusion that I know him. When I think about the Buddha now, I think about the Buddha as a very familiar and close friend. I must think that I know the Buddha. Of course, he died two and a half thousand years ago, but I've come to enjoy his company. I've come to feel a certain quality which I associate with his presence. And I hope, coming back to the book launch aspect of this, that my book will convey some of that to you. That doesn't mean I think that I understand the Buddha, doesn't mean I think I've encompassed him, because I don't know that I understand even the friends of mine who I actually know. And I'm well aware that any images of my own, of the Buddha's personality or what it was like to be around him, what it was like to be with him, may well be my fantasies and my projections. And yet, that is what I had come to believe. And I also believed that the Buddha was most himself in certain moments of inspired utterance. When he spoke seemingly from a far region, which he could describe only through negation, where water, earth, fire and wind have no footing, there the stars do not shine, the sun sheds no light, the moon does not appear and darkness is not found. And when a sage, a Brahmin, through wisdom, has known this for himself, then he is freed from form and the formless, from bliss and from pain. This is the Buddha of negation. And yet, the suttas also give us a vividly real Buddha who walks the roads and habits the cities and the plains, an untamed free spirit, a powerful presence, who we can know, but we cannot necessarily comprehend. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
