(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 welcome. Yeah, it's great to be back at the Cardiff Buddhist Center and I'm going to see a good turnout tonight. And really great actually to be able to wave this book around because there's such a long process from inception to having something of substance in your hand. And what I want to do tonight is to communicate something of what I was trying to achieve in writing, this particular book about the Buddha. There are many ways you can approach the Buddha. So I want to talk about how I've done that and why I've done it. And you might be interested to know that this talk is one of a series. I'm doing a number of talks different Buddhist centers around the country. And I've decided that I would do different talks in each place and each talk will then be uploaded onto the web and they'll be a series. So that's another way that people can engage with this particular evening. So this is the second talk and I gave one in Manchester the other day. But I want to start with my own connection with the Buddha. And in order to do that, I need to go back to Nazi Germany where my father grew up as a young Jewish boy. His parents divorced when my father was about six or seven and his mother left Germany for one of the very few places that were open to Jewish refugees, which was Shanghai, which was a free city, so anyone could go there. And it attracted many Jewish refugees. In fact, I learned recently that there was an entire quarter of the city that was German-speaking. There was a few blocks of the city that was a German-speaking area that remained German-speaking throughout the entire war. So even when the Japanese invaded, they interned the British and they interned the Americans. But the Jews, the German Jews, were allowed to stay because they were German nationals. In other words, they were citizens of an allied country. So they stayed, which is quite ironic, of course. And that meant that a member of my family was in a somewhat Buddhist country. So when my grandmother in the late 40s, I think it was 48, sailed back from Germany to England, where my father had come as a refugee as a child. She brought with her a number of curios, artifacts. And in particular, one little butter image, only a few inches tall, that was there in my house. She gave it to my father, and it was in our house as I was growing up as a little boy. It's a little bit of gray-green stone. It's probably soapstone, I'm not sure. And I can now see that it's actually a very fine little carving. But when I was a child, I couldn't distinguish the figure from the background. Then one day, I was able to see that in the forefront was a very elegant, slender, poised figure of a butter holding a bowl. And behind it was a rather elaborate penumbra, a kind of floral motif. But I hadn't been able to separate out before. I had to see a kind of green swirl of shapes. And then I was able to see it. I had a similar experience with another painting that was on our wall by Franz Mark. One day suddenly, I could see the deer that was leaping in the painting. And it just struck me thinking about this book. That's an interesting image for how we relate to, how we might relate to the butter, distinguishing the foreground, distinguishing the figure of the butter, the historical butter in particular, from the elaboration that's developed around them. There are many ways in which the butter is presented to us, has come down to us. And I'm not of the view that any of them is better than the other. I'm not of the view that the historical butter is the real butter and the others to be dismissed. But let's just think what we had. First of all, we have the butter as a timeless archetype, as a figure multiplied, in fact, into numerous figures of numerous butters and bodhisattvas who are seated in full lotus, perhaps, like this figure behind me, in the midst of the clear blue sky. Not in a particular time and place. And over the years, I've found myself responding to various of those figures. In fact, just today, I was at an exhibition that's just recently opened at the Cardiff Museum of Chinese cave carvings. It's really very fine. Some lovely pieces there. There's a beautiful arvola catastrophe as you go in, representing compassion. It's a great figure, strong figure, poise, and the arms reaching out in all directions. The figure of Padma Samba, the great guru of Tibetan Buddhism, some schools of Tibetan Buddhism. And the beautiful figure that I took up as an object of contemplation and meditation, the slender, poised figure of Pragnya Paramita, the representation of perfect wisdom. So we have the timeless Buddha, we have these archetypal Buddha forms, we have the Buddha within, Buddha nature, we have the Buddha as me at the end of the spiritual path. Then we have the Buddha of legends, the various traditional stories that have been woven around the Buddha figure. And as well as that, we assume, I assume, but actually I can't prove it, that there was a person, someone who lived, and breathed, and walked the earth. And all these are mixed together in our image of the Buddha. And it's interesting, if no more than that, to experiment with what happens when you start to separate them out, what you gain, what you lose, what you see if you approach the Buddha historically, and what you lose if you turn your attention away from the archetypal or the universal, and the extent to which you can really look at the Buddha as a historical figure, irrespective of the mythic and religious things that are said about it. So when I started on this book, I wanted to perceive the Buddha as a recognizable individual. I wanted to find person and the personality. In the same way that you can, in fact, if you approach a figure like Socrates, who, according to the dates that scholars now believe, the Buddha lived in, was the Buddha's contemporary. If you read about Socrates through the works of Plato, you can start to get a very vivid figure of someone in a recognizable society. What can you do that with the Buddha? Using the texts that we have. So in this process of separating out legend and history, what can we say for sure isn't right? When I was at school, this is probably the next step in my connection with the Buddha. Religious studies lessons and being told the life of the Buddha, and that focused on the four sides. The Buddha, having grown up in his enchanted palace, then leading the palace to see, first of all, a sick person, then an old person, then a corpse, and finally seeing a religious homey man, Ashramana. And this made an impact on me because it seemed to be the story of someone discovering these vital truths about life in the scriptures they're called divine messengers. These vital truths about life that he'd hitherto ignored, turned his attention away from. And that seemed like a really important mess and something quite universal in that desire to seek something beyond sickness, old age and death, seeing beyond the world of pleasure and privilege. So when you come to look at the early scriptures, and I'm using early scriptures now to mean what we generally refer to as the canon of scriptures in Pali, the Pali canon. They're also Chinese versions of these scriptures. And these are probably the earlier scriptures that we can look to. We find that this story doesn't appear. No four sides in the Pali canon headline. Does this mean it didn't happen? Well, what we do have in the Pali canon is a text called the Mahapadhanah sutta, where the Buddha tells this story about someone else. Now, actually, someone else is another Buddha called Bapasi, who lived in past ages. He does say that the things that happen to Bapasi happen to all Buddhas, but it doesn't say that it happened to him, Dottama. Doesn't say that anywhere in the early scriptures. So then you can trace in, first of all, the stories about the Buddhist past lives called Jatakas. And then next, in the more poetically composed lives, things like great text, the Buddha Charita. You see how this story develops. And so bit by bit, the story that starts off relating to this past character called Bapasi, gets told about the Buddha that we relate to, Gautama. So therefore, you can say, nah, that's how a legend develops. It didn't happen to him. That's what scholars tend to say about that particular incident. There are lots of other things that aren't there in the Pali canon. And come on to the extent where she can trust the Pali, can you admit it? But the story that Gautama was the son of a king. Not there. The tradition that he was called Sivhāmṭa. Not there. That he had a wife called Yashedira. She's not mentioned. The mentions of his wife, she's called Rāhula Māta, which means the mother of Rāhula. Now Rāhula is mentioned, but there's no mention of the very romantic story that develops over the centuries of him stealing away in the middle of the night. And stealing one last glimpse at his family. Would he reach out and touch his son's head? No, no, no. Opie Gwen, doesn't appear anyway. And more broadly in the poetic life. So recently, he wrote a very good new translation of the Buddha charity, which I'd recommend to you by Patrick Olival's beautiful poetry. And it sets the Buddha in the context of a Brahminical society. That's the society of the people pulling the Vedas and having the various castes and so on. And that really isn't what you've discovered if you read the earlier scriptures. He's not growing up in the Brahminical society. There are Brahmins, but they seem to be coming in from the outside, from another culture. So here I am dismissing all of these fables, which I am aware that if you've come to a Buddhist center like this, you may well have heard these in your introduction to Buddhism course. In fact, I've told some of them. And I've said the Buddha had four sides. And that may have touched you very deeply. And they have been very important as a window into the Buddha's message. And here I am saying, well, it didn't happen. Well, fables have power. But when we relate to a figure of fable, it establishes a particular relationship with that figure. It invites us into a certain mode of relating, a certain mode of thinking. And if you can't enter into that mode, it's quite distancing. So if the Buddha is an inhabitant of a fairy tale domain where he lives in a palace as a child, entirely devoted to pleasure, where his father has ensured that the thorns are taken off the rose bushes so that he never experiences pain, then he's living in a different world than the one that we inhabit. In the case of the four sides, you really have to imagine yourself into this kind of fairy tale world in order to relate to those four sides. And that has a strong effect. And Dr. Ambedkar, for example, who is a great figure who led the conversion to Buddhism among Indians from the lowest stratum of Indian society, have been considered untouchables under the caste system. He very angrily rejected the story of the four sides because he felt that that was entirely confusing for his followers, rejecting the world in that way. Wasn't something that he wanted them to do. He wanted them to change the world. And an image of a world of pleasure will be something they can relate to when they're experiencing such prosecution and suffering was nonsense. So for Ambedkar, the four sides was definitely something to be rejected. Fables shape our perceptions. So what about the truth? Well, I'm not going to say that in my book, I've got the truth about the Buddha by no means because what we have is texts about the Buddha. But some of those texts have a kind of power, a kind of immediacy, which is quite different from the legends. And it can sometimes seem as if a veil is being torn away or at least removed. And we discover, in certain places in these scriptures, powerful emotions, turbulence, a desire to change the world and vivid perceptions of what's going on. So let me read you something which I find really striking. It's called the utter dandha sutta. And it's sometimes translated as taking arms or something like that. And this is a translation by a modern American called Andrew Lenzke. Fear is born from arming oneself. Just see how many people fight. I'll tell you about the dreadful fear that caused me to shake all over. So this is the Buddha telling us the story that's also told in the four sides. And he's going to tell us about the dreadful fear that prompted him, caused him to shake all over. This is a bit cryptic, this sutta, and it's metaphorical. But if we imagine ourselves back into an intense court life and tense political life of a group of nobility who are competing against each other and struggling with various tensions in their society, it might start to make sense. Seeing creatures flopping around like fish in water too shallow, so hostile to one another. Seeing this, I became afraid. So this image, which is actually a traditional image in Indian literature of a state of primal anarchy, gives us people flopping around like fish in water too shallow, struggling for space, struggling to survive and becoming hostile to one another. He says, 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 caught in conflict, I became completely distraught, and now here's change. But then I discerned here a thorn here, hard to see, lodged deep in the heart. It's only when pierced by this thorn that one runs in all directions. So that if that thorn is taken out, one does not run and settles down. So this quite compressed, very strong image, kind of visceral image of having something stuck into your chest. Sometimes it's thorn, sometimes it's translators arrow. We have essentially the four noble truths. Why are people fighting with each other? This is the young go to my asking, why is this place such a mess? Why this turmoil? And he looks at himself and he sees that there's something amiss, something awry, there's something stuck in his chest. He sees it in his chest and he realises that everyone else has got one as well. Everyone else has got this thing in their chest where they feel things, where they feel their emotions in their hearts. And that's what causes them to run in all directions. That's why we have this struggle that we call society. So we have the fact of suffering, we have the cause of suffering. And then he says, if that thorn is taken out, one does not run and settles down. Well, that's the cessation of suffering, the third noble truth. We only got the path, because this is still the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, the young go to my before enlightenment. He doesn't know what the path is at this stage. So, for me, this sort of this poem, really, takes us quite deeply into the experience of a young man who's deeply troubled and sees that in order to get to the root of that trouble, in order to pull out the thorn, he has to change himself quite fundamentally. And also sees, and I think one of the things that made the Buddha such a genius was that he could see that things in his own experience were affecting everyone else, he could generalize from his experience. He saw that what he had understood about himself explained everything about everyone else. Actually, the common for us pick up some of those images and they place that story in a very dramatic setting where the shakias, the Buddha's own kinsmen and their close neighbors, the Colliers, are about to fight a war over the diminishing water in the Rahini river that ran between them. And that's really picking up the image we have in the park, in the sutta, of creatures struggling around, like fish and water that's too shallow. And then in the story that we have in later tradition, the Buddha intervenes and stops them fighting. Two questions arise. That, to me, is a powerful insight into the Buddha, but is it really? Can we rely on that, that particular text? Is that the Buddha's voice? Sounds like it to me, but can I know that? And secondly, this business that I'm talking about now about finding a historical Buddha, finding the person, finding the personality, placing him in a real society in a real time, is that just something that Westerners like doing, or modern people like doing? Is this because we can't engage in a more traditional way of thinking, which is all about legends, symbols, and images? Is this something that we impose on the Buddha? So, let's just think a little bit about this. Well, no, I'm not going to investigate all of this. I'm not going to go into the extent to which you can rely on the polycan as a historical source. There are lots of books you can read about that, and I'm just gonna tell you what I think about it. Now, you can't read these ancient texts as being straightforwardly historical, and just assume that everything in them is true, because it's a text that says this is a Buddhist scripture. But I think we often are too wary of them. Some scholars say you can't believe anything about these texts, did the Buddha even exist? Can the texts tell us anything about anything at all beyond themselves? Others disagree, other historians disagree. And what I find when I read these texts is that if we trust them and take them as a window onto something that actually happened, then something tremendous opens up. And that's what I really discovered, going much more deeply into the early texts than I'd ever done before. First of all, there's this commanding presence at the heart of them. This personality of the Buddha, he's got a very distinctive sense of humor. He tells jokes. He makes an ironic aside. He can just turn his attention on someone and give them his utmost full attention and overwhelm them as a result. And he can be very charming, very polite. And sometimes he can just melt into the background. He gets annoyed about things, tongue-golicization, we say that. But he does seem to. When people are really noisy, he gets droppy with them and tells them to be quiet and tells them to go away. And occasionally he just walks off into the jungle because he's fed up of all the noise that's going on. He likes quiet. So you have this very distinctive personality of the Buddha. We also have a reasonably coherent society that he lives in. One of the things I discovered in this, one of the great resources is a book that sounds like, if you see the Pali Canon, that looks like, just sitting there on the shelf, the most boring thing ever written. And the book that sounds like the most boring book ever written is the Pali dictionary of proper names. An extremely dull guide to extremely dull scriptures. That's what it looks like. Pali dictionary and proper names. Say not so. It's fascinating. It's entries on all of these characters in the Pali Canon. And it is there on the web now with clickable links that will take you from one character to another. And in that way, it will guide you through the world, all the characters in these scriptures who the Buddha knew. So there's a coherent set of personalities, very coherent, and there's a recognizable society with a certain level of development of politics and all the rest of it. Then, and above all, I think this is the important thing, there's a powerful, and I think essentially coherent, vision of existence. The Buddha's vision of what life is and a set of teachings about how to go about changing yourself in order to realize that vision for yourself. And it's put in many different ways, and no doubt the doctrines got developed and elaborated as time went on. But the essential point, I think, is very clear, and they're right across these scriptures. So what I find is if I read them more or less at face value, then they take me some of very interesting. They take me into a world where I'm encountering historical Buddha, and then it's possible to tell his story. One of the interesting things in writing this book, a biography of the Buddha, as it were, was discovering that no one had actually done it before. There are many retellings of legendary lives, and there are sort of short treatments of the Buddha, some of which are a little thin when you start to really investigate them. But there wasn't, and isn't, a kind of proper, thorough treatment of the Buddha. And I think scholars haven't done that themselves, academics haven't done that, because they're so aware of the problems around the texts. But I'm not a scholar, I don't have to worry about academic respectability and that sort of thing. So as an individual, as a writer, as a Buddhist, above all, I approach these texts and find that they are a treasure trove of insights and wisdom and stories, and they give me a personality, and they give me a coherent account of his life. But I'm aware that that's a choice, how you take the text as a choice, and an interpretation of the Buddha. This book is my interpretation of the Buddha. I think it's important to say that. One thing that set me thinking was a book by Harold Bloom, The American Victory Critic, called Jesus in Yahweh, The Names Divine, which surveys and investigates the figure of the Jesus of the Gospels and the historical Jesus, and also God as he appears in the Bible. These two figures, Jesus and God, his book investigates them. And he does a little survey of the various biographies of Jesus, which are all attempts to get to the historical Jesus, as opposed to the Christ of the Gospels, who's kind of a religious figure, a theological figure. So who was the real Jesus? And he says that having read all of these books about the historical Jesus, he came to the conclusion that none of them told him anything about this figure, Yeshua of Nazareth. All they told him was about the authors themselves. So that made me think, you know, Bloom says they went in search of Jesus, but they just found themselves. It made me think, is that my faith in going in search of the Buddha? And my reflection is that it's impossible, I think, to be neutral in relation to the Buddha. I don't want to be neutral, because when we engage with the Buddha, we're engaging with someone who claims to be enlightened, and who claims to have found the end of suffering and the causes of suffering, and to present a path beyond it. And I don't think anyone can be neutral in relation to that. We are all thrown into life and trying to understand our lives. And I don't think you can be neutral in relation to someone who says, here is a way of understanding it. I engage with the Buddha, because I want to understand my life more fully. That's why I interpret them as I do. So this book for me is really about imagining the Buddha, but an act of imagination that's constrained by the evidence. That's what I define as looking for the historical Buddha. In approaching the Buddha, I wanted to see his face. I wanted to know what he looked like. I want to hear the bustle of the cities where he lived. I want to hear the food tellers cries. I want to feel the dust and grime that coated his clothes. I want to see that whizzened skin, whether beaten by all those years, walking the roads of central India. I want to see those great bulging thigh muscles of someone who's been on the road all the time. But I also hope for a personality beyond my experience, a society that's very different from our own. What I'm talking about is finding an image of the Buddha that isn't perfect, that isn't beyond change, beyond the Sisitude, beyond suffering, beyond difficulty. And often what you have in the life of the Buddha is an account of his development up to the enlightenment, that he gets enlightened, and then that's it. It's over. Everything's formed as if the Pali Khan had appeared magically in his head, and he just dispensed it when he encountered people. So I wanted to see if we could find evidence that the Buddha was learning, was developing. I want to be surprised by the texts. Let me give an example. It looks like I'm very interesting. There's a text which is buried deep in this great time called the Sam Houston Iqayah about a character called Dhamma Dina. On one occasion, the blessed one was staying at Varanasi in the deer park at Isipatana. Then the lay follower, Dhamma Dina, together with 500 lay followers, approached the blessed one, paid homage to him, and sat down to one side. Sitting to one side, the lay follower, Dhamma Dina, said to the blessed one, "Let the blessed one, venerable sir, exhort us and instruct us in a way that may lead to our welfare and happiness for a long time." So in other words, the Buddha is at Varanasi. Lay people come to him and say, "Give us a teaching." Dhamma Dina, "You should train yourself thus. From time to time, we will enter and dwell upon those discourses spoken by the targeter." That's the Buddha. "Deep in meaning, super mundane, dealing with emptiness. Since such a way that you should train yourselves." Long pause. And they say, "Venerable sir, it's not easy for us. Dwelling in a home crowded with children, enjoying Kazee and Sandalwood, wearing garlands, scents and unguents, receiving gold and silver from time to time to enter and dwell upon those discourses taught by the targeter that a deep, deep in meaning. Super mundane, dealing with emptiness." As we're establishing the five train rules, in other words, we've learned the five ethical precepts. Let the Blessed One teach us the Dhamma further. So what they're saying to the Buddha is, we don't know what you're talking about. And we can't do that. Look, we know the five precepts. What we want to know is the next step for us, please. You find this if you're teaching. You get feedback, you start talking about voidness to people who just come to an introductory meditation class and they say, "I can't get to my mind's wandering all the time." So, feedback. Oh, therefore, Dhamma dinner, you should train yourselves thus. We will possess confirmed confidence in the Buddha, in the Dhamma, in the Sangha. We will possess the virtues dead, the noble ones unbroken, leading to concentration. Such a way you should train yourselves. It's going back to something they can relate to. Have confidence in the Buddha. Have confidence in his teaching. Have confidence in the community. And develop, virtue still to the noble ones. And actually, this might not make sense to all of you. The Buddha is saying that if you do that, you become stream-entrant. In other words, you become really advanced spiritual practitioner, which is quite surprising in terms of how we think about stream-entery these days. Anyway, that's not really my point. The point is that I'd love to discover things like that. Just in the process of ambling through, wandering through the Buddhist scriptures and bumping into things. That seems to be an example of the Buddha learning how to frame his teaching for lay people. And actually, it's interesting that the setting is a deer park in the Sangha. Because, so far as I can make out, and I have tried to check this out with other people. The only time the Buddha is recorded as being a Sangha in the traditional narrative is immediately after his enlightenment. He gained enlightenment at Vadgaya, and then he walked to Sangha where he taught, first of all, his five former companions, and then attracted other people. That's the story we're told. So it seems as if, if one is looking for a narrative, that having communicated the Dharma very effectively to some people, he just got it. Now he gets people coming to him from Varanasi, and they don't get it at all. Don't understand what he's talking about. So this is the Buddha learning, figuring out how to frame his teaching for everyone. People who aren't, what they say is, look, we've got kids, we've got houses, we've got our lives set up, we're not gonna become monks now. So you tell us what we can do. Don't tell us stuff that we can't do. There are all sorts of little gems in that. In future talks, I'm gonna, which might be interesting to hear on, but it's already, in fact, it's all in the book, looking at how the Buddha discovered the nature of his own consciousness. You know, how he struggled with what he'd been given by the religious society he lived in, and then found a way to really identify the nature of his consciousness and to change it. And also how, another thing I explored is how the Buddha's ideas grew as he engaged with his contemporaries, as he understood more clearly the views of existence that they already had, and he saw the detrimental effects of those views. And then he saw how he had to frame his teaching in order to challenge those views or undermine them or work with them so that people would go beyond them. So the Buddha's ideas, what we see in the Suttas, is the Buddha's ideas, his teaching, growing and changing as he engages in these very dramatic encounters sometimes with his contemporaries. Both the other wandering ascetics like him, Charmanas, and also the Brahmins, who don't understand a word that he's taught. They don't know what he's on about, and they don't know what any of these wandering ascetics are on about very often. And then he has to navigate the world of politics. King Countess Kings, who often give him their loyalty, become necessarily entirely trusted. There's a lot of Suttas investigate his relationship with King Pasenadi, the king of Kosovo, the country that he kind of grew up in. Okay, for details. And Pasenadi is devoted to the Buddha, apparently. But he never seems to take his advice. The only time that we actually see him taking advice is about dieting. He eats so much, he's become so fat that the Buddha gives him a set of verses, you know, about not eating too much. And Pasenadi turns to his assistants, says, "Look, repeat that to me every time I have a meal." And he does it, and pretty soon he loses lots of weight. So dieting advice is the only thing that Pasenadi seemed to learn from him. Meanwhile, he's getting his own men to dress up as shamans, as wandering holy men, and go spying, so he's kind of using the holy men as part of his quasi-police state, I think you could say. With secret service, anyway. And that's the world, the one aspect of the world, that the Buddha had to navigate. He had to navigate the fact that what people wanted a holy man to be like, they didn't want a holy man to tell them how to get enlightened, at least according to the text. They wanted holy men to tell them what had happened to their relatives after death, where they'd been reborn, "I'm in heaven, or are they in hell?" They wanted holy men to give them some kind of foothold in the face of the spirit world that was so threatening to them. They wanted, if at all possible, that the holy men would tame the spirits that threatened their villages and make them subordinate, at least make them willing to accept their sacrifices and their offerings. And the Buddha had to find his own place in relation to all of that. So all of this is part of what I go into in the book. All history must be imagined. If you read a history book about Queen Victoria, that is a work of imagination. And all biography is a work of imagination as well, but it's imagination constrained by the evidence, and the more reliable it is, the more respect one gives to the evidence. But there's an additional issue in relation to the Buddha, because the Buddha isn't just from the past, he's enlightened. How can we write a life of someone who is beyond ordinary experience? Well, the reason we can, I think, is that after his enlightenment, the Buddha devoted himself to communicating what it was, through his teachings, through his examples, and through his actions, and through the character of the community established. So writing about the Buddha, and I hope if you get this book, you'll find reading about the Buddha is really a way of contemplating the Buddha, not trying to understand him completely, but for me, the more we can see the Buddha in his time, in his place, the more we can see him in his historical specificity, the more we can find something we relate to. Buddha said, the whole world, how it arises and how it ceases is to be discovered in the actuality of this fathom-long body. That's the heart of the Buddha's teaching. You don't need to know everything about the world to understand the world. You need to understand the nature of your experience, the nature of your fathom-long body. And then the secrets of the world will reveal themselves to you. So I want to finish by taking us back to the world of the Buddha, with a reading that I hope will suggest something of the way in which specificity, that attempt to really see the Buddha, can open out both in the scriptures and in the way we relate to them, to a sense of the mystery that's there within the figure of the Buddha. It's morning. Sun is hot, but not yet overwhelming. And the man named Bahia scows the streets of travesty. His gone frame is covered by a rough tuner that sticks together from pieces of tree bark and his weary after walking night and day from India's west coast. But he draws little attention from the townspeople, who recognize him as a hoey man, a part of the tide, spiritual seekers, that washes constantly through the city. Travesty is the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, and the major metropolis, the culture that thrives in the central Ganges Valley. We have known detailed descriptions of its streets to fill out the scene. But the city's ruins have been partly unearthed. They reveal it was a large town, guarded by huge ramparts, at the junction of three important trade routes, slightly later text, a vogue of fusion of such a city. Furnished with side foundations, with many gateways and walls, behold the drinking shops and taverns, the slaughterhouses and cook shops, the harlots and wantons, garland weavers, the washermen, the astrologers, the cloth merchants, gold workers and the jewelers. With such clues, we may imagine the scene that confronted Bahia. The waffle and door houses with domed roofs for 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 cries of food sellers. As Bahia jostles through the press, he catches sight of a singular figure and knows instantly it's a man he seeks. The account of the meeting of the ancient Buddhist 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 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-yed yellow fabric is much coarser than the embroidered muslim used by the rich or even the plain cotton of the poor. So patchwork sewed together from scraps gathered on rubber sheeps or from the char gremlins of the shrouds that cover corpses in the cremation grounds. These robes, along with a bowl made from dried 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 Gotana, the name of the clan into which he was born in Shakya, coastless north-eastern province. But his disciples, addressing by a host of titles, especially Bhagavat, meaning blessed lord, to target her, the one who is like that, and Buddha, the awakened. The encounter is intense and dramatic. Bahia throws himself at Gautama's feet in 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's hard to know how long you or I will live. The third time of asking, Gautama turns to face Bahia 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, you should 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. And I'm going to line them. The sudden moment of communion cocoons the man 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 sober. Street rises return, Bahia walks away and Gautama quietly returns to his arms round. (audience applauds) So thank you, Bishop Honey, for what I think you agree is a very gripping account of a book that I personally can't wait to buy. We have time for any questions you might have about what Bishop Honey's been describing tonight. So, how do I ask? - When the party can be written, was it written at the time of the book you think, or was it written after? - Oh, yes. - Or at the time of the time we've time gone by and things did build something like that story, for example. How would that have been the clear energy? - Yeah, I didn't want to go into all the detail in my talk 'cause there's enough detail as it was. But we start with a traditional account, which is that the Buddha had a companion called Ananda and Ananda remembered everything that the Buddha said and then immediately after the Buddha's paranoia is demise. The council was called the first council of 500 Arahants, 500 of the senior monks. And Ananda recited all of these talks that the Buddha had given and the incidents around them. And then, those were memorized. And a whole system of memorizing and reciting and passing on down the centuries was instigated. And then eventually, and there's some debate about how much later, but eventually, initially in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, these were written down. And if you calculate things one way, people often say it's about 500 years between the death of the Buddha and when things are written down. Other people make that quite a lot shorter. Jeffrey, do you have any dates that you would, what would you say? - Yeah, maybe 350 or 400. - 350 or 400 is very much open to you. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's off that order. So several hundred years, enough time, plenty of time for lots of things to happen. And it depends how you interpret that really. You talk about it briefly because there's so many theories and so much investigation about whether things changed or not. And whether these things were affected by the people who were passing them on and changing them, who were monks. You had a particular agenda, a particular perspective on things. Whether they're affected by the process of needing to turn things into a form which you could recite and memorize and pass on in that way. So yeah, you can't take them at face value, but really what I say in my talk is, I think my advice is to put by all the kind of concerns that raise and plunge into the early sources. And if you do, you find something that seems to be coherent in my view. Not universally so, you know, we can't take it naively, but I think we worry too much about the problems around the texts. Yes. - Sorry, I'm very new. I said we give a song. - Okay. - My name is Matt, I'm doing a PhD in translation study. I think, yeah, I agree with you that there is not, it's a picture that there is a historical point of view or a neutral point of view from which we see the past. I mean, there is not such a thing. I think that the translation is a political translation. - Yes. - But I think in this respect, when I was recently doing speech, I think, I think it's a strength of goodness that you could do your work empirically. And I was surprised that we would say, well, at the end of the day, it's my work. I'm not an academic, so I don't have to know. - Yes. - But I think it's a strength of goodness that you can do things empirically and say, this is what the empirical things show to me. - Empowerfully doing by looking your own experience. - Yes, you know, you were saying, in my book, I write that these are made and the reality is enough. And it's a good point, you can do that, because I think it appears to our functionality, which is something that I try to do so. - Yeah. - So I think it's a strong point, just one about new research. It's sort of like a Western way, isn't it? We are not having to worry about destroying something precious, I don't know, or is there probably more than interpreting what you want to say? - I'm not hearing a question, and that's fine. - You're right. - Yes. - You're right. - All right. - Just a statement. - Okay. I think that this idea of imagining, what I was doing essentially was imagining the Buddha. Is there something that's come to me more recently since I finished working on the book? Because when I was writing it, I was trying to be as true as I could be to the sources. I suppose my reflection is that if we're going to approach a character, actually any historical character, any historical event, you have to engage in an act of imagination. Because the evidence that you have from things like texts and sources, even archeology, is fragmentary, you have to build a picture using that. And all the more so with a character like the Buddha, everything we are told about him is of an order that goes so far beyond our ordinary experience. If we're going to engage with the Buddha until we have to imagine him. And that's what Buddha still has done down the ages. They've imagined him through their legends, they've imagined him through visualizing the Buddha's form, sitting on a lotus or whatever. And they've found different ways of engaging with the Buddha through that act of imagination. And I think for me, and maybe more broadly, for a modern Western mindset, it's important that that act of imagination is at least congruent with what the evidence tells us. If it goes against the evidence, then we start to lose credibility. For me, and dare I say it for us, in a way that it might not do for people in more traditional society, or with alternative cultural models. So I'm quite taken by this model of imagination, but imagination that's disciplined by the evidence. I'm just wondering if you've been researching what it was like in perhaps more of a Western type way than you'd come around to a bit of an experiential equation. I'll just text us about how long you would have practiced on your meditation and your interaction with others. Yeah, you'd get around to that. Well, I don't know about my interaction with others because so many other things happen in my life, like becoming a father and things like that, and of course, of writing this book. But it has affected my relationship with the Buddha. Now, when I think of the Buddha, I think I know him. I mean, this is maybe my fantasy. I think of him like someone I've spent a lot of time with and had many conversations with, and is a good friend. I think of the Buddha, I feel happy. It's like when I think of some of my teachers or other old friends who have got a very strong association. It's as if there's a memory of quite a deep communication that's been going on. And when I meditate now, if I meditate on the Buddha, I have a feeling of just sitting with this friend and enjoying being with him, and then opening myself up to the fundamental question, which is really what is the mind of the Buddha? What is this experience of this person? And I've had this experience, that same feeling in relation to the most experienced people on the Buddhist part that I know of, that Sandra Rachita, knocking around with him, chatting, talking about the things he likes to talk about, like literature, which actually I like to talk about as well. There's been a lot of time with him. And then sometimes thinking, having a sense, you know, there's consciousness here that's actually a lot bigger than mine. With the Buddha on another level, entirely, opening up to that, it's something to seep in sometimes. Surprises me, right? I'm just not thinking about the Buddha that I think, wow, yes, of course, I'm going to forget about it. - My question is very similar to what I thought on the one. (laughing) Yeah, I was going to be along the lines and do you still like him? (laughing) - No, no, no, it's great, it's great. I love his jokes. - Yeah, yeah. - Very funny, man. - So it's important to be, you know, like a couple of people say with the Bible, basically, if you find a statement, you can usually find another statement to contradict it. Did you find that in this? You know, and I've got some sort of conflicting things that you've had to sort of somehow work out, or maybe that one feels really, yeah. - I'm not in quite the same way. Not in the way that if you take injunctions and stone adulterers in One Bird the Bible and to forgive prostitutes in the Gospels, it's nothing like that. The differences are there. I mean, if you look at the Buddhist tradition that comes out of the Buddha, it's very, very diverse. And actually, you can see the roots of some of those different interpretations that we now have in the Buddhist world in the scriptures. So they're important, but that's not really been my focus. Some people spend their lives looking at that sort of question, but my focus has more been trying to discern the vision of existence, the basic view of existence, which is there behind the various teachings and traditions. Some are very simple, some are very direct, like the teaching to Bahia. Some are much more technical, much more elaborate. Some of them say, well, you've got to practice for many years, in fact, in order to realize things. Others say, "Nake, we can realize them right now." So there are also different emphases, but my main focus, and I would say our main focus, should really be, what is the vision of life that's there at the heart of it? I think if you start to see that, then the different teachings start to make sense. More. - So you mentioned that he had a sense of humor. - Yes. - Do you recall any jokes? (audience laughing) They're more wise smiles. (audience laughing) I'll give you a couple of examples, though. It's one quite well-known one. And you see, it depends on the tone of voice, which is safe and so there's a very well-known passage in the Dhamma Pada, right at the beginning, where the Buddha says, "He beat me, he abused me, "he robbed me, those who think such thoughts "do not come to happiness," or something like that. Now, try that with a whiny voice, okay? (audience laughing) "He beat me, he abused me, one." - Those who think such thoughts will not come to happiness. - Yeah, you know, so it's a tone of voice. That's what I mean about interpreting, 'cause that's not how that passage is usually. (audience laughing) - Red out and pooed you, something, something. (audience laughing) - There's one I like, which is, the Buddha's talking to the monks, and he's often telling the monks, "Don't settle down, don't get lazy, "and don't get into food too much." And if you actually go to Asia, now, and stay in a terra-barden monastery, you can see exactly what I've stayed in a place in Sri Lanka, and then a special day comes round. And the monks line up, and the lay people line up with, I hope I'm not, if anyone's culture here, but great big vats of food, and the monks are there, and that the food is piled up in front of them, and their job is to eat, and it's an important job in that culture. So, the Buddha says in one scripture, says, "Imagine a dung beetle." Imagine this dung beetle wakes up one day and finds itself in an enormous pile of shit, and he wakes up and says, "Yippim, I'm a dung beetle, "and I'm in an enormous pile of shit." (audience laughing) If you dwell with families for the food, you will be like that dung beetle. Now, I'm interpreting the parlors a little in the way, and remember, they're not actually not very much. So, that's funny. There's not many like that, though. Anyone else know any jokes in the parley canoes? (audience laughing) How many Buddhists does it take to memorize the parley canoes? - Don't worry. - On and on. - It's not very funny. (audience laughing) Any more? - But we can continue talking. - Yeah, we can continue talking. Okay, thank you. - So, we'll see you in a minute. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) - 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]
