(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. - Okay, so, welcome to the world premiere. (laughing) Book launch of Vishpani's book, "Gather My Buddha". I'll just say a bit about Vishpani. I know that he's working on this book for about three years or something like that. And it's quite unusual for somebody to, within the Tree Rat My Buddhist Audio to be actually approached by a mainstream publisher to write a book. I mean, normally we've got our own in-house publishing house called Windos Publications. But Vishpani's reputation preceded him. So he was well known for having set up a Buddhist magazine. We used to have this Buddhist magazine called, "Golden Drum". This was back in the 1970s and 1980s. And it was a little bit in-house, not kind of really looking out into the Buddhist world. And at some point, Vishpani came along and he set up a new magazine called "Darm Alive". And that magazine really kind of went out and looked at the whole Buddhist world and tried to sort of address issues. And he would go and interview, well known Buddhist in America. He'd go and interview people like Harold Bloom, who's a well known academic in New York. Things like that. So it's a real sign that there's this real kind of active fervent sort of intellect going on there that wants to make connections. Wants to bring it alive in a kind of urban sort of way. And I think that magazine ran for about 10 years or something like that. And it became very well known in the Buddhist world. So I think that was the reason why Vishpani was invited by Krukus to do this particular book. So yeah, so this is the launch of the book. He's going to launch it again in Cardiff, letter in the week. He's going to talk about liberty and nature. And yeah, I think we're very privileged to have him here. So then Vishpani, thank you very much. (audience applauds) - Hello, welcome. It's nice to be back in Manchester doing the usual dodging the pillars thing. (audience laughs) So good to see you all, those of you I can see. Yeah, this is actually quite a big event for me. Hopefully it's got something to offer you as well. But this is the first time I'm introducing this book which I've been working on for three years. And it really feels really great to have it in my hand. And Krukus has done a very nice job in producing it in very handsome way. And it was initially commissioned as a series of great lives, although that's in fact being dropped. So it's simply a biography among the many biographies of a figure of world historical importance. Now, those of us here who are Buddhists, the Buddha has a particular resonance in a particular meaning for us. But actually he's important from almost any point of view. He's important as you could say the founder of one of the great civilizations of the world, one of the great religious cultures of the world. And it's still with us, not just in Buddhist centers, but the other day I opened a, brought a copy of the Guardian when I was coming up here and a little booklet on meditation dropped out. And then this morning I was staying with some friends that had breakfast TV on and this little thing on how to be happy. And there were people meditating. And then I was on the metro and I picked up, you know, one of those free newspapers. And it said sort of stories saying that about research, saying that if you meditate 27 minutes a day, then you can be pretty sure that your hippocampus will have more gray matter than other non-meditators. So congratulations. So it's with us still. And all of this does in various ways relate back to the Buddha, this figure of the Buddha. And we've got one on the shrine. There he is sitting on, well, a lotus. That's what that motif is at the bottom. And then a mat, it's actually a mat representing the moon. And there he is in a classical meditation posture. In fact, this is a slightly unusual depiction of a Buddha. I won't go into that. And although you probably, if you're not familiar with it, think that is the Buddha. He's actually a Buddha figure called Amitabh, he's an archetypal Buddha. And the reason we have this blue behind him is that he is seated resplendent in the clear blue sky. So this is the Buddha as a timeless figure. And that's one aspect of the Buddha, an important one. Then we have the many legends that surround the Buddha. And if you look on the back wall there, you can see that they're depicted. Seen some life, the Buddha that have been told and depicted and represented countless thousands of times. Things like his departure from the palace, before sites where he sees a sick person, an old person, a corpse, and finally a religious figure, a spiritual figure. And so this body of legendary material has developed around the Buddha. And actually there are many books out there that tell and retell those stories in very familiar ways. I remember first hearing those stories in religious studies, which we have in England. We don't, I know it's a rather strange idea for Americans, but we have taught religious studies and you learn these stories. And what are we dealing with when we encounter those stories? I mean, did those things actually happen? Was the Buddha actually in this magical palace environment or not? Can we say? When we're dealing with that Buddha, are we dealing with a figure who we can investigate and discuss in the way that we might discuss Winston Churchill? Or are we engaged with a figure who is more like King Arthur? Or maybe Rama or Krishna, who, you know, are not claiming to be historical in quite the same way. So the legends, the legendary Buddha, really exists in the realm of legend. But there was, I think, although not all of the scholars will actually agree with this, but I think it's pretty clear that there was a person and we know that he was called Gautama and we know he lived several hundred years before Christ and that he in some way started this movement that we came to call, that we now call Buddhism. So we can also speak of a historical Buddha. And that was my focus in writing the book, partly because that's what I've been asked to do, but also because I think there's this distinctive value in focusing on the Buddha as a figure of history rather than the figure of legend or a transcendent figure. Though I hope it will come clear in the course of this talk that I don't consider these to be mutually exclusive rounds. And what I want to do, I suppose, is to communicate some of my explorations of that figure of the Buddha in history. What I'm not going to do in this talk is to talk about whether you can really get to the historical Buddha. That is the question of methodology. And I'm not going to do that, partly because I'm going to do that in another of the talks and these talks will be a series which we'll be able to listen to on free Buddhist audio. And I'm not sure that starting with methodology is the most engaging place to start. Can we really be sure about this? Can we really be sure about that? What I'm going to do is to pick one of the themes which is threaded through the book. The book is written chronologically starting with, you know, Buddhist birth and then going to his death. In fact, beyond that. And there are themes that are kind of woven into that narrative. And what I want to do in this talk is to draw out the theme of the Buddha and what we can say about his relationship with nature. I've already written about this in a phone or if you're interested in looking that up. And different themes are going to be looked at. I'll be looking at different themes in future talks and you'll hopefully, before too long, be able to hear them on free Buddhist audio. So let's start by imagining the Buddha because however historical we intend to be, the act of engaging with the historical Buddha is an act of imagination. Let's imagine the Buddha not as this archetypal figure that we see before us and not as a glowing figure in resplendent robes because we've got no reason to think that he actually looked like that. So what would he have looked like? Would he would have been Indian for a start? Or maybe Northern Indian, you know, pale skin perhaps. The robes that the Buddha seems to have worn weren't wonderful silk or saffron or anything like that. They were gathered from scavenged, from cremation grounds, discarded bits of rag sewn very roughly together, made out of hemp. His face would almost certainly have been whizzened and in fact, in one of the best known sitters of the texts that we have, Arnanda, his companion, says, "It's amazing. "You used to look really great, "but now you've got all the wrinkles on your face." So as he got older, he looked older. The Buddha in Monk's own shave once a month. So he probably had considerable amount of beard and a fair bit of hair on top. Should he be so lucky? And his skin would have been darkened. And this was actually quite an issue in the Buddha society because the rich peoples, the Brahmins, are sort of stayed indoors. But the workers, the shoulderers and the people who came out costs, they were out in the fields. So their skin became dark. Now, the Buddha was walking the roads. So he'd have had dark skin, darker than average, weather beaten and he was probably pretty fit because he did so much walking. Now, as well as that, we read that he had a kind of an aura, a kind of effect that people who met him felt they walked into this force field of loving kindness. Certainly, not everyone felt that, but some people did and they felt a powerful presence. And this presence that he had is often associated with the natural world. So it said that when he spoke, it was as if he was expressing himself like a lion's roar. And he's sometimes compared to an elephant or a tiger. So there's something dangerous in his presence. There's something that speaks of the wild. But perhaps I should add, the wild that's been tamed, the wild that's been brought under control. So that's in a way a starting point for looking at, well, what is this connection between the Buddha and the natural world, which of course we don't have if we imagine him in a clear blue sky. In order to, and I'm just going to preface this with a comment, which is that when one says a phrase like the Buddha's relationship with nature, we understand that in terms of the way that we understand and envisage nature ourselves. So how do we do that? Well, we live in urban environment, in a country where you have to search very hard for anything around here that looks like wilderness that's uncultivated. So nature has been the natural world, natural environment has been tamed, is under control for us. And we also inherit the romantic's idea of the spirit of nature with which we can commune in some way. So we can engage with that. And then we have our environmental concerns that we control nature to the point of spoiling it. And we fear that something is a right, deeply a right in our relationship with nature. We may well be right. So that's us and nature. And part of the value of placing the Buddha in his historical environment, in order to engage with the Buddha historically, we have to put that by. We have to envisage a culture, a society, and a mindset which relates to nature in a very different way from the way that we do. And what I'm going to be suggesting is that only by making the Buddha strange, only by making him different from us, by historicizing him, by placing him in his own culture, can we see clearly what it is that he really did with conditions that he inherited? And only then can we see his achievement. So the irony I want to explore is that by seeing how different the Buddha is, that's the way that he can be accessible to us, okay? So let's see how we can, let's explore this a bit. In his youth, the Buddha lived in, let's say, the youth, Gautama, grew up in a agricultural society, in an agricultural environment. And we have some descriptions of that. And that's rather different from living in the wilderness. In fact, completely different. There's one description in the text called the Vinaya, which gives very stories about how people join the Massey quarter. And one of the characters is considering joining the Massey quarter does so because of the reality of what that life involved. So let me just read you. It's text, which is very dull, but I think it's very revealing. First, you have to get your fields plowed. Then you have to get them sewn. Then you have to get water down over them. Then you have to get the water lead off again. Then you have to get the weeds pull up. Then you have to get the crop reaped. Then you have to get it carried away. Then you have to get it arranged in bundles. Then you have to get it trodden out. Then you have to get the straw picked out. Then you have to get all the chaff removed. Then you have to get it winnowed. Then you have to get the harvest garnered. Then you have to do just the same the next year and the same all over again the year after that. The work is never over. So that is, I think, a very interesting description of the constricting rhythms of an agricultural society. As if you're enslaved to the rhythms, you just have to keep feeding this agricultural system in order to get the food out. And that constricts the whole of your life. And that is how we have to imagine the Buddha growing up. And he may well never have left his native country, which is called Shakya, which is the land of the Shakyaan people in northwestern India. And that changed when he decides to leave home for whatever reason, some kind of disillusionment and became a wandering holy man, they were called shramunas. And he followed a path. So he left his home. And there was a great trade road going through his home that led to the west, to Persia, all the way to Persia. He could set out from his front door and walked all the way to Persia and beyond to Greece, to Egypt, and traders sometimes did that. Or he could have gone the other direction and gone right into the heart of the Ganges culture, where he was living. The culture that grew up in the alluvial flood plains around the Ganges Valley, that's actually what he did. So he followed the path, both literally and methodically because he was also following a spiritual path or a path of religious practice. And even then, even as a shramuna, he would have skirted the wilderness that was a very strong presence and stayed near towns on the edges of villages and begged his food from the villages. In a discourse called fear and dread, we have a dialogue between the Buddha and a Brahmin, who's also become the Buddhist follower, called Janasoni. And Janasoni, essentially, he's struggling with the way the Buddha is instructing his disciples, the monastic disciples, because he's telling them to go off into the jungle. And suppose Janasoni is concerned, this is insane, because people go mad in the jungle. It's incredibly dangerous. He says to the Buddha, is this really what you ask? And the Buddha agrees with him. He says, remote jungle thicket resting places are hard to endure, seclusion is hard to practice, it's hard to enjoy solitude. The jungle will rob a man of his mind if he has no concentration. So the jungle is an all-pervading presence on the edge of the civilization that the Buddha inhabited. The jungle is a place of fear. It represents everything that's foreign, unpredictable, dangerous, of four great forests that dominated northern India. And the settlements had been carved out from these forests and from the swamps. Over the centuries before the Buddha was born, the land around the river had been drained, and it had become incredibly fertile. You can get two or even three harvesters a year of rice or barley out of this drained river land. But beyond that were swamps, marshes, mountains, inhospitable hills, and above all, the forests of the jungles. In the forests live snakes, tigers, boars, and are also home to bandits and indigenous tribesmen who hated the city dwellers. They're mosquitoes. They're gamflies. There's cold rain, humidity. And above all, there were ghosts. Ghosts and spirits and demons, and they've got great names like praetors, ratcheters, and yakas. And that is the domain of the wilderness that Janusoni is saying, why on earth do you send your people out into this land? What the Brahmins did was perform sacrifices and bit by bit encroach on the wilderness to placate the yakas, placate the spirits and demons and win back the territory. And if you move the Vedas, look into the Vedas, there are prayers after prayers. Essentially, magical ceremonies to guard humans from the spirits that inhabited the wilderness. The popular religion of the Ganges focused on shrines to the local gods, the local spirits. So if you lived in a village, then the spirits were all around you. And you had in some way to protect yourself from them by making friends. You usually did that by performing a sacrifice by making offerings to the shrines, the shrines were on the edge of the villages. And we have many descriptions of this or many references to it in the Buddhist scriptures themselves. So what the Buddha says in response to Janusoni is to recount his story. And this suit of fear and dread is one of the most important sources we have for what the Buddha got up to, what he did, before he was enlightened. There aren't actually very many suitors, and this is one of them that talk about that period. It seems that he'd really rejected, at a certain point in his time as a wandering holy man, he'd rejected all of the things that he'd been told about how to live a spiritual life. He'd been told probably that there was some kind of meditation you can do that was to do with achieving union with God. And in some way, find your way back through the process of creation to the primordial arm, whatever it was, we're not quite sure. The primordial nothingness is actually what it says. So he had figured out that that approach mixed two things together, which was his experience and views, religious, metaphysical, philosophical views about the nature of existence. And he'd rejected the views. So he decided to confront and explore and excavate the true nature of his experience as it was, as it presented itself to him, especially when he cleared his mind and went deeper into his experience in the process that we now call meditation, which I believe largely was invented by Buddha. I don't think he learned a lot of what we think of as Buddhist meditation comes from him, rather than being inherited from the prior tradition. And as part of that, he noticed what was going on in his experience. And above all, he noticed fear, because he was living in the jungle. He noticed that he was scared, deeply terrified, of these spirits and the shrines where they lived. And he decided, he said in this sitter, to confront that fear directly. And the whole of the jungle was dangerous, because it was a spirit realm. But in particular, there were the places where the spirits lived, the trees where they lived, and the shrines under their trees. And because the spirits were propitiated with sacrifices, these shrines were probably strewn with, you know, decaying animals and so on. So you simply didn't go there, except to perform a sacrifice. Or if you did go there, you really didn't go on certain nights when the earth's energy was roused, when the spirits walked abroad. And these were the nights of the phases of the moon. So go to my thinks, okay, I'll do that then. I'll go there. And he describes it in a beautiful description. There in the darkness or the moon cast shadows, I would hear an animal approaching. Or a peacock would break off a twig, or the wind would rustle the fallen leaves. And I thought, is this it coming now? The fear and dread? So he feels the fear rising up in him. And he asks himself, what am I doing here? Waiting for this to happen. And if it does happen, why should I not drive it out? And he says that he just decided that if he was sitting and this fear caused through him, he would carry on sitting. He's standing, he'd carry on standing. He's walking, he'd carry on walking. If he's lying down, he'd carry on lying down. In other words, whatever arose in his experience, he would turn towards it and he would face it. And here's an important point, he was facing it as an experience, whereas his culture had told him to face it as a spirit, or as a god, a god who needed to be propitiated. So what we see in this moment of the Buddha's career is his capacity to internalize what has been, presenters being outside him. Let's say that he didn't believe in the spirits, but what his focus was on was his relationship with them. And he found that he was able to transform that by becoming aware of it. And that if he could open his awareness to that experience, he could face any fear, any dread, no matter how deep it went. And in the sutra, the fear and dread, he says, and after that, I practiced the four absorptions, which is the status of meditation, meditative absorption, and I became enlightened. As if one leads to the other, it is essentially saying in that that the key to my enlightenment was facing my own mind and transforming my relationship with everything that had been projected out onto the outer world as spirits and demons. And I just want to throw in a little suggestion. If you know anything about the Buddha's life, even seeing a movie like Little Buddha, you probably are familiar with the figure of Mara, who is a demonic figure in the legendary versions of life. And actually this goes back even to the early texts, who arises up in front of him at the point of his enlightenment, just before his enlightenment and challenges him and expresses his doubts. And my suggestion is that this sort of fear and dread, this encounter with the spirits and his willingness to face it, is actually the same, the same incident that we have in the Mara story, that Mara was, if we take him out of the realm of legend and place him back in the realm of religious practice, that Mara was one of the spirits that people worshipped. And he was felt to be a real force, a real presence in the world, and the Gautama actually confronted him. And the model here that we could say is the shamans encounter with the spirit world. But where the Buddha differs from, what a shaman does, a shaman engages with spirits and may subdue them or may engage with them, the Buddha, his focus is on his mind and how he's perceiving these spirits and how he's responding to them, how he's relating to them. And in that way, the Buddha escaped the fear of nature that pervaded his culture. After the Buddha's enlightenment, we have many stories and many dialogues and usually they take place in cities. And because they're dialogues, because that was the aim of these texts, was to pass on the things that the Buddha sent to people, we don't see him on his own. So we don't see him on retreat. We don't see him in the wilderness. But there are some little glimpses. In places where frightening serpents abide, lightning clashes and the rain God thunders, in the blinding darkness of the deepest night, there he sits, the monk who's vanquished his dread. We have these little glimpses of the Buddha, a figure who's absorbed the power of nature, who has subdued the demons, who has achieved a kind of self-mastery that makes him invulnerable to their power, then has capacity, which is incredibly important in his society, to tame them, and to turn them from enemies of society to friends, because they revere him, they revere his power, and they revere his attainment. And in that way, the Buddha opens up a new relationship with nature for himself, but also for his followers. So one of the great joys of this project for me has been discovering in these rather, what I'd always thought was rather impenetrable, dusty tones of what's called the Pali Canon, and even the name makes you want to keep the book firmly on the shelf and not opened. It's a treasure trove of really beautiful little literary images, and some of the more obscure places within it. There's wonderful poetry. The Terravada, which is a school which follows these particular suitors, usually has a rather problematic relationship with the world of nature and natural beauty. They have forgotten their own texts, and the testimony of the early monks in a text which I really come to love, called the Terravada. The Terri Gata, which is the songs of the nuns, is quite well known, because it's, you know, a unique document being despite the only religious poetry or religious scripture created by women. But the Terravada isn't nearly so well known, and it's full of beauties. It's the Buddhas in light and disciples recalling their experience, particularly the things that made the difference for them when they found their own awakening. So Chitika says, "The call of the crested, blue-necked peacocks in the Cora Vivia forest, urged on by the cool breeze, awakens the sleeper to meditation." Or Talupata says, "When the sky-daver has rained, sky-god, when the sky-daver has rained, when the grass is four fingers high, when the grove is in full flower, I shall lie in the forest like a tree. It will be soft for me, like cotton, but I shall be master." So we have these wonderful evocations of the life that these monks, following the Buddhas example, and following his urging of them to see nature in a different way that wasn't something they had to fear. We have these wonderful evocations of what it was like to discover you could feel at home there and to become part of the natural world's beauty. And this is mixed with the emotion of meta or loving-kindness, which encompasses all life and is an open-hearted response, which is particularly important to practice if you're in the jungle, and this life was considering eating you. And this is not about attachment to natural beauty, that's made clear in the text, but nonetheless it's powerfully emotional. So what do we draw from this story? It's a story really about someone making a breakthrough for themselves so that the world of nature opens up for himself and for his disciples. And for Gautama, for the Buddha, becoming intimate with his mind enables him to find the roots of terror, which had colored entirely his relationship with the natural world. That I think is something that's very accessible, and it's not something I've ever heard or read about that the Buddha discovered the natural world and made it accessible to his disciples. That's very clear in East Asian poetry, much later Buddhists were very clear about that, but it's lost in the early tradition. And I think there's something about the value of seeing the Buddha as being different from us, of unearthing the society and the culture in which he lived, that shows us things that are actually very meaningful and significant, the value of changing our states of mind and how that creates a whole world view, and the value of facing even the most difficult and dangerous fearful aspects of our experience. The Bodhisattva that the Mahayana tradition, that later Buddhism, when later Buddhists came to tell the story of the Buddha, they increasingly came to imagine that he'd already been enlightened, in effect, or very nearly enlightened by the time he was born. So they had to skate over these passages, which are very clear, that he was actually capable of feeling intense fear. They just ignored all of that in the Mahayana. So if we don't do that, then the Buddha becomes as much fuller figure. And I don't think that that reduces him to the merely historical, which is another issue, if you're approaching a figure like the Buddha, it probably applies to any religious figure, in historical terms, because you can imagine that that means simply seeing him as another person, the product of his time and place. I think that if we return the Buddha to his time and place, then we can find out the lessons that are relevant now. That life is uncontrollable, and we find wisdom by opening to that, that to heal our relationship with nature, we must first heal ourselves, and that the transformation that occurs is on every level, not just the conscious. So, just conclude, I want to read the passage from the book. Just give you a sense of the style. And the way that I mix in the book, the historical, the textual, and also allows space for the legendary. The passage I've chosen isn't directly related to nature, but it shows the Buddha in that context. In these profoundly concentrated states, this is the Buddha in his time approaching enlightenment. Gautama's mind was free from the distractions and hindrances that cloud ordinary experience, and powerful positive forces became available to it. Gautama said that his awareness was open and unenveloped. His experience was imbued with luminosity, and he realized that as he became more concentrated, the scope of his awareness expanded. He reflected, "When my concentration is immeasurable, my vision is immeasurable, and with immeasurable vision, I perceive immeasurable light and see immeasurable form." This could last for a whole day and night. The more a practice, the more it's successful his efforts became, and the more fully present he felt. "Tilous energy was roused in me," he says, "an unremitting mindfulness was established. My body was tranquil and untroubled, my mind concentrated and unified." On the full moon of May or June, in the blazing summer's heat, Gautama crossed the naryngara at a shallow forward and came to a clearing in the forest near a village called Uruvilleva, a place is now called Bodgaya. He recalled, "I saw an agreeable piece of ground, a beautiful grove with a clear-flowing river with pleasant, smooth banks and nearby a village for alms." A grass-cutter offered him a seat of fragrant kusagrass, some versions tell us, and he sat down by the silver trunk of a spreading fig tree, shrouded by the cooling bowl of its heart-shaped leaves. He faced west into the setting sun and the realm of night, darkness, and the deep and mighty ocean, and he sat motionless in the violet air. Legends relate that the trees bent forward to protect Gautama, and the animals and birds remained quiet to avoid disturbing his efforts. In the noble quest, that's one of the discourses, Gautama recalled that he'd said to himself, "This place will serve for striving." That's pleasingly straightforward. But later accounts placed into his mouth the more stirring injunctions he urged on his disciples. "My flesh may wither, and my blood may dry up until only skin, sinews, and bones remain, but I will not give up till I have found what firmness, persistence, and effort can bring. Until I have found liberation, I will sit here unflinching and utterly still." [Applause] OK, so it's a very difficult set of questions. Yes. Can I ask when you were asked to put the book together when there was anything specific that you were asked to draw out that you didn't vote for many other folks that were being written on the historical line of the book? No, because the publishers, actually the person who commissioned me, was in fact a Buddhist. But he was working as a freelance commissioning editor for the publisher. I think he, like everyone else, assumed there were lots of biographies of the Buddha. And I did as well. Because if you go into a bookshop, there are lots of books that say, "Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, the Buddha." I've called my Gautama Buddha. But there's nothing, actually, that's really that thorough. So it wasn't initially commissioned within a series called "Great Lives." So that immediately, you know, you can't tell a legendary version or a fictional version of someone's life if it's going to sit alongside Gandhi, which is another one of them, or Martin Luther King. So I thought, "No, I will try and take as historical a point of view as I can." And then I realized that there was a gap that no one had filled, and it was actually quite a big one, and quite an important one, I think. Thank you. Yeah. That man there. It sounds like true rights in the book, your relationship with the Holy Canon, or the type of change. Yeah. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that, what you feel, how you feel, that may have changed as an air experience of the Holy Canon and true visual book? Well, I've included lots and lots of quotes. Some of them longer quotes, and some of them little quotes, and I'm hoping that people will be inspired to, you know, go back and find the sources. I mean, there are lots of quotes. I mean, partly for Buddhist readers, I wanted to just have more stories than the ones that we tend to be familiar with. But also, I wanted to introduce to other readers the sense that this is really quite an incredible literary treasure, leaving aside the doctrinal content. In fact, I think Buddhists need to be reminded of that as well. And for me, there have been quite a number of phases with the Pali Canon. There's an essay by T.S. Eliot talking about Ben Johnson, where he says, "He was damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book, which is, you know, how we tend to relate to these ancient tomes." And bit by bit, I've had to work quite hard to find ways into them. And I think it was really the number of things. More I got a sense of why the Buddha was saying particular things. In other words, who he's talking to, what questions he's answering, what problems and issues he's addressing, that the doctrines became clearer to me. And I think also that there's something about simply reading a lot of it. But it starts to become less of a blur, and you start to see the patterns much more within it. But yeah, I know, amazingly, found it quite readable. I can sit down and read these things for pleasure, which is amazing. And I hope people will pick up on that. The other thing I'll say is I think that we're getting better translators now. I'm not a Pali reader myself, so I've drawn on translations that appeal to me most. And there are people like Rupert Gethin, who's very good. There's a little book which I really recommend called "Sains of the Buddha", which will be in the bookshop downstairs. And there's a wonderful translator called Andrew Olensky. He doesn't do very much. He just does little bits. He's a scholar in a broader sense. And I've used as much of his as I can, because it's both accurate and really eloquent in a way that we haven't had. And that's a big part of it, you know, finding the right translators. Yes. And yeah, I really like the way he talks about the changes, because this is not reasonable. Yes. And then I was in El Salvador last year. Right. And then I was in El Salvador last year. And I was in El Salvador last year. Right. And I thought it was interesting when I thought about myself going on the tree, or others in this fighting. Yeah. And how different of control, our connection to nature, is what we're doing right now, by comfortable troops and by the war. Yeah. You have a life that's impressive. Yeah. It's probably not. And I just was sorry. I just thought in my head, I wondered how the Buddha would have dealt with the so-called fear, and faith in this fear. And I wondered about the function of fear and to keep us safe in a hostile environment. And how we, I mean, it's a big question. But I wouldn't have had any thoughts on how I would have been managed in an environment where fear and science that could catch you alive, and how we didn't get eaten by a tiger. Right. Okay. I think El Salvador was like a fear of the peaceful. Yes. So there's a, what you could call, what Sanger actually sometimes calls a rational fear. That's one thing. You know, that's to do with prudence and caution. And then there's irrational fear. I suppose it's really the distinction between the two. And noticing when the irrational fear, he says to himself, he's afraid of spirits. And he says to himself, what am I doing sitting here? You're fearing these spirits. And it's that question. And I think, I think about nature. Another word for it could be the uncontrolled, the uncontrolled things that they're in our experience. And, you know, for us living in a city, a city is a way of controlling the environment. A building is that. But there are always things in our life that we can't control. You know, we can't control the way other people act towards us. We can't really control our emotions, so psychologically facing the things in our lives which we can't control is an important practice for anyone who's wanting to follow this sort of path. That's important for all of us. And then looking at the ways in which we keep things under control, we keep our relationships under control, we keep our environment under control, we keep our lifestyle under control, and exploring what that might mean. And we turn away from the things that threaten it like old age sickness and death. So I think that it's a relevant theme for all of us, the things we fear. Yeah, hi. And I was interested in, especially in the healthcare and the image of Maara, you just thought just this second facing things that we can't. Yeah. There's a direct link between those. But a place that's where we have controlled, well controlled systems, it isn't really. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, Maara is a lot of death. And I think there's an important relationship between nature and his spirits and death, and between Maara and death. And, you know, death, our own death, so the deaths of loved ones or the fear of death, is one of the, you know, that is the great uncontrollable, who cannot avoid death. You know, fundamentally, one of the things that Maara represents is the Buddha facing death, facing his own death, and seeing what that meant, seeing what that means for him in this moment. Yeah. Coming to terms with that. You know, the lessons really, because it's going on with practice and the streets and study. It's going to be more fun by having a camera than it is there. The Grim Reaper. Maybe coming to terms with that, I'd say. We all have to make our own sense. Sorry, I'm not quite sure how to answer that question, but I hear what you're saying. I don't use the question. An easy one. That's how they suck at you, isn't it? They're insane, and then, could you just explain this doctrinal part? I've never been quite clear. I've gone for that money. Yeah. You said that you got a lot of quotes on that. That I immediately started withdrawing my 25th quid, putting back my pocket. [laughter] Oh, there you go. That's pretty much the answer. Yeah. I'm sure you've got it covered so I'll propose the answer. You know, just give quotes. You actually help me into these quotes. That section I just read probably had about 20 quotes in it. It didn't sound like it, did it? The point is that I tried to integrate them into a narrative, into a flow. I tried to make the whole thing seamless, drawing from different parts of the canon. And then, if you want, you know, the bits of the quotes have got quote marks around them, which is telling you that I'm telling a story that's drawing on all sorts of different sources. And then, if you want to, you can look them up. But if you don't want to, there's a story there. That's where I've written that. I'm saying I really like the vicious part of this talk. And your take on how the Buddha turns a culture around your spirit. Yeah. I mean, that kind of feeding me with your take. Yeah. Wow, I haven't thought of that. Yes. Great. And then we did a bit about the quotes. I thought, oh, yeah. Ah, yes. Yes. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? What turns you on or what turns you on? But it's important for me. It's important for me to really draw on the sources. So I wasn't just theorising about, you know, my opinions about this. But I was opening up what these texts say, which aren't as dull as they might appear. Yeah. So it's the way that they forget what they're talking about. Yeah. I don't know how to test any of any of them. Yeah. But that paragraph is instead. Yeah. Yeah. It turns to me that you're telling the story and in the sense that you sell the book. That's right. Yeah, that's what I've done. And so it's flooring. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. That was the writing challenge because you also get something to flow. When you're drawing on lots of different sources, you need to work really hard on the writing. I probably rewrote that a hundred times. Two hundred times. I mean, quite literally. But I just read to you. That's how you get it to flow. Yeah. I just, in the north, said it's a statement. I find that we do quite exciting. Alright. How exciting to go. I'll try to count it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to do it. Yeah, yeah. You're impressed. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. It was towards it. I think what you told is you made, for me, potentially made it much more accessible. And so this development has created a hearing. It's so narrative. Yeah. I think it's a whole kind. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's the potential that you want to serve. And it moves into a whole kind. Yeah. And it initiates it, right? Er, the design first thing. Really. Hm. I think that's great. I think, as you say, lots of the kind kind is repeated, intended. You know, very well-known, but not, not the less well-known ones. So, yeah, that's very appreciative. Well, you don't really think it's possibly creating a re-visioning of the kind kind. Well, I hope so. And, you know, that's with someone who would, you know, interested. You'd like to read this stuff, but it's a bit, how do you get into it? But I think, in terms of bringing the Buddha alive, it's a historical figure for general readers as well. It's quite something that we have this character. And we have, according to tradition, 17,000 suttas, 17,000 of these little discourses, and some of them are really beautiful. You know, there's also quite a lot of nuggets in there. Now, of course, there's a big question which I haven't gone into tonight on whether we can take those as being historically accurate. But if we simply just put that by for a moment, then we've got this extraordinary, extraordinarily rich resource of the words, descriptions about an ancient society and this remarkable figure with this very distinctive, commanding personality, quite unique in history, I think. And that is an incredible amount of data to be able to draw on. Now, I don't think we can draw on it uncritically by any means, but if you trust it and put by some of the kind of scholarly objections to it, it's an extraordinary resource for everyone, not just for Buddhist. And then we've got this really detailed, deep, remarkable depiction of this character with these incredible ideas in a very vividly represented society as well. It's very different from our own. How are we doing? One more. Yes. You talked about the historical Buddha, which is extremely interesting, but you also mentioned a more legendary society. Yes. Yes. Since the importance of the legendary interpretation of the Buddha and what that says about society that came up with these legends in order, religion. Right. Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. How can I answer that? Well, maybe I'll just say that there are so many legends. I'm thinking how to answer that because there are so many examples. I think sometimes the legends really draw out a kind of universal meaning and something that is a specific event. But I suppose the main response I have is I don't think you can actually speak about the Buddha in purely historical terms. Although I've used the word legend, even in the earliest text, it's a figure of this mythic significance. So even in that section that I read, well, the Buddha sits facing west into the setting sun, the realm of night, darkness, and the deep and mighty ocean. So in some of the later accounts, you know, the Buddha sits under this tree. It's called the peepodric, or the Bodhi tree. And he initially is facing south. No, no, no, no. That's not the right. The gods tell him. That's not the right way to sit. Then he tries east, then he tries north. But eventually he realizes he has to face west. And that's because, and I actually can't tell you why it is, but it's because of the mythic significance of west. And west is, you know, the Indians envisaged the cosmos in terms of north-south-eastern west. And each of the cardinal points you have the kingdom of one of the guardian kings. And in the middle, you've got Mount Meru. And so even something like a little detail, like which direction the Buddha sits, is actually woven into a mythic framework. And that reminds us that in later tradition, and even in some of the earlier texts, the Buddha is this kind of cosmic figure who's already had countless lifetimes. In the previous lifetimes, he's been a universal monarch, reigning for the good of all. And now he's going to become a kind of divine monarch in some way. So even the incidental details that we have in the plain narrative are woven in to this mythic framework, and we can't really get past that should we want to. And why should we want to? That's the way that the Buddha's culture envisaged the world, you know, that a direction had a significance in terms of their cosmology and their mythology. So why should we want to get beyond that? Which isn't a question for us, I think. Not really a question for the Buddha. I don't know if that answers your question, is there something anyway? All right, should we leave it then? We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
