2,500 years ago,
nestled in a fertile valley
along the border between India
and Nepal, a child was born who
was to become the Buddha.
The stories say that before his
birth, his mother, the queen
of a small Indian kingdom,
had a dream.
A beautiful white
elephant offered the queen
a lotus flower and then entered
the side of her body.
When sages were asked to
interpret the dream, they
predicted the queen would give
birth to a son destined to
become either a great ruler or
a holy man.
One day, they said, he would
either conquer the world or
become an enlightened being,
the Buddha.
People like stories.
It is one of the ways we learn.
The story of the Buddha’s life
is an archetypal journey.
But it is a means to an end.
It is not an end.
Within ten months,
as a tree lowered a branch to
support her, a baby boy was
born, emerging from her side.
Seven days later, the queen
died.
"The world is filled with pain
and sorrow," the Buddha would
one day teach.
"But I have found a serenity,"
he told his followers, "that you
can find too".
Everybody understands
suffering.
It is something that we all
share with everybody else.
It's at once utterly intimate
and utterly shared.
So Buddha says, "that's
a place to begin.
That's where we begin".
No matter what your
circumstances, you will end up
losing everything you love.
You will end up aging.
You will end up ill.
And the problem is that we need
to figure out how to make that
all be all right.
What he actually said was
that life is blissful.
There's joy everywhere,
only we're closed off to it.
His teachings were actually
about opening up the joyful or
blissful nature of reality,
but the bliss and the joy is
in the transitoriness.
"Do you see this glass?
I love this glass.
It holds the water admirably.
when I tap it, it has a lovely
ring.
When the sun shines on it, it
reflects the light beautifully.
But when the wind blows and the
glass falls off the shelf and
breaks or if my elbow hits it
and it falls to the ground,
I say, 'of course.'
But when I know that the glass
is already broken, every minute
with it is precious".
The Buddha can shine out
from the eyes of anybody.
Inside the buffeting of
an ordinary human life, at any
moment, what the Buddha found,
we can find.
in southern Nepal,
at the foot of the Himalayas,
is one of the world's holiest
places, Lumbini; where,
according to the sacred tales,
the Buddha was born.
Today Buddhist pilgrims from
all over the world make their
way here to be in the presence
of the sage whose life story is
inseparable from centuries of
anecdotes and legends.
There are countless stories
of the Buddha.
Each tradition, each culture,
each time period has their own
stories.
We have lots of visual
narratives and artwork from
all over Buddhist Asia.
But the first written material,
actually... the first biography,
say, of the Buddha...
really, we don't see that before
about 500 years after his death.
For the first few centuries,
Buddhist narrative was oral.
Historically, it is based
on something certainly
that happened.
There must have been someone
who corresponded with Gautama
Buddha, but we don't know.
We don't know how much of it is
pure fairy tale and how much of
it is historic fact.
But it doesn't matter.
It touches something that we all
basically know.
The relevance of it is in
the message of the story,
the promise of the story.
Like any good story, it has
a lot to teach.
So the story of his life, then,
is a beautiful way of telling
the teaching.
"He who sees me sees
the teaching," the Buddha said,
"and he who sees the teaching
sees me".
Born some 500 years before the
birth of Jesus, the Buddha would
grow to manhood in a town
vanished long ago.
For nearly three decades,
he would see nothing of the
world beyond.
The tales say he was the son
of a king, raised in a palace
with every imaginable luxury.
He was called Siddhartha
Gautama, a prince among a clan
of warriors.
"When I was a child," he said,
"I was delicately brought up,
most delicately.
A white sunshade was held over
me day and night to protect me
from cold, heat, dust, dirt,
and dew.
My father gave me three
lotus ponds:
One where red lotuses bloomed,
one where white lotuses
bloomed,
one where blue lotuses bloomed".
The father wants him to be
a king; wants him to conquer the
world and to be the emperor of
India, which at that time was
16 different kingdoms.
And it was predicted that he
would be able to conquer
wherever he wanted if he
remained as a king.
So the father was creating this
artificial environment to
coddle him.
His father wanted to prevent
him from ever noticing that
anything might be wrong with
the world because he hoped that
he would stay in the life they
knew and loved and not go off,
as was predicted at his birth,
and possibly become a spiritual
teacher rather than a king.
Shielded from pain and
suffering, Siddhartha indulged
in a life of pure pleasure:
every whim satisfied,
every desire fulfilled.
"I wore the most costly
garments, ate the finest foods.
I was surrounded by beautiful
women".
"During the rainy season,
I stayed in my palace, where
I was entertained by musicians
and dancing girls.
I never even thought of
leaving".
When he was 16, his father,
drawing him tighter into palace
life, married him to his cousin.
It wasn't long before they fell
in love.
He was totally in love
with her.
There is a story that on their
honeymoon, which was about ten
years long, at one time, they
rolled off the roof that they
were making love on while in
union, and they fell down but
landed in a bed of lotuses and
lilies and didn't notice they
had fallen.
And so, the stories
say, he indulged himself for
29 years, until the shimmering
bubble of pleasure burst.
His father does everything
he can to never let him leave,
never let him see the suffering
that life is.
But one day, he goes outside,
and he's traveling through the
kingdom, and he has the first
of four encounters.
He sees an old man.
And he asks his attendant,
and the attendant says,
"Oh, that's change.
One doesn't always stay young
and perfect".
Then on the next tour outside,
he sees a sick man and doesn't
quite understand what it is.
He asks his attendant,
and the attendant says,
"Oh, that happens to all of us".
Everybody gets sick, and
don't think, "you are a prince;
you will not get sick".
Your father will get sick.
Your mom will get sick.
Everybody will become sick.
Then he sees that it isn't
just this sick person;
in fact, it's universal.
And something is stimulated
inside of him.
So he keeps getting the chariot
driver to take him out, and he
sees, you know, horror after
horror.
And on his third trip
outside, he... he meets a corpse,
and he recognizes impermanence
and suffering and death as the
real state of things;
the world that he had been
protected from, shielded from,
kept from seeing.
And he was shocked.
You know, he was shocked, and
he realized, "this is my fate
too.
I will also become old.
I will also become ill.
I will also die.
How do I deal with these
things?"
These are universal questions
in any human being's life:
what it's like to be in a body
inside of time, and our fate,
and how do we navigate that?
It really is a tale of the
transformation from a certain
naive, innocent relationship
to your own life to wanting
to know the full story, wanting
to know the full truth.
And then the fourth trip
outside, he sees a spiritual
seeker: someone who has decided
to live a life completely other
than his life in order to escape
from impermanence, suffering,
and death.
So he has this sort of
traumatic encounter with the
pain and suffering of life.
We try to protect our
children.
We don't want to let our
children see all the pain
that's in the world.
But at a very early age, at
a time before he could remember
anything, at a time before
there was conceptual thought,
he already suffered the worst
kind of loss that one could
suffer.
Suddenly and mysteriously,
his mother died when he was
a week old.
So something tragic happened,
you know, right at the
beginning.
That might be what it takes to
become a Buddha—is that you
have to suffer on such
a primitive level.
29 years old,
profoundly troubled, Siddhartha
was determined to comprehend
the nature of suffering.
He resolved to leave the palace.
His wife had just given birth
to a baby boy.
Siddhartha called him Rahula,
"fetter".
He names his son "fetter".
He names his son "ball and
chain".
"This is the fetter that will
keep me tethered to this life.
This is what will keep me
imprisoned".
Late one summer
evening, Siddhartha went into
his wife's room.
A lamp of scented oil lit up.
His wife lay sleeping on a bed
strewn with flowers, cradling
their newborn son in her arms.
He gazed from the threshold,
deep in thought.
"If I take my wife's hand from
my son's head and pick him up
and hold him in my arms,
it will be painful for me to
leave".
He turned away and climbed down
to the palace courtyard.
His beloved horse Kanthaka was
waiting.
As he rode toward the city's
northern wall, he leapt high
into the air.
Mara, the tempter god of desire,
was waiting.
"You are destined," Mara told
him, "to rule a great empire.
Go back, and worldly power will
be yours".
Siddhartha refused.
He left grief and probably
absolute puzzlement and dismay
in the hearts of wife, in the
infant son, who was innocent and
yet was suddenly fatherless,
and, of course, his own father.
But there is no knowledge won
without sacrifice.
And this is one of the hard
truths of human existence:
in order to gain anything,
you must first lose everything.
Siddhartha was alone
in the world for the first time.
On the bank of a nearby river,
he drew his sword.
"Although my father and
stepmother were grieving with
tears on their faces," he said,
"I cut off my hair.
I put on the yellow robes and
went forth from home into
homelessness.
I had been wounded by the
enjoyment of the world,
and I had come out longing to
obtain peace".
Siddhartha wandered south,
toward the holy Ganges river.
Once a great prince, now he
became a beggar, surviving on
the charity of strangers.
he slept on the cold ground in
the dark forests of banyan,
teak, and sal that covered the
northeastern plain; frightening
places where wild animals
roamed and dangerous spirits
were said to live.
He is going out to see what
there is.
He's a seeker.
He doesn't have a teaching yet.
He doesn't have
an understanding yet.
He doesn't have an insight yet.
He doesn't have a solution yet,
but he recognizes the problem.
Siddhartha could not
expect help from the religion
of the time, the ancient Vedic
religion, steeped in ceremony
and ritual.
Some of its rituals still live
on in ceremonies conducted by
Hindu priests, who chant Vedic
formulas more than 2,500 years
old.
For centuries, the
Vedic rituals had commanded
respect for the gods and
inspired conviction.
But by Siddhartha’s time, the
rituals no longer spoke to the
spiritual needs of many Indians,
leaving a spiritual vacuum
and a sense of foreboding.
The gods become less
important than the rituals
themselves.
It's a period of great unrest.
It was a period of social
upheaval, social change.
Cities were growing,
generating new wealth and
spiritual hunger.
As one ancient voice cried out
in despair:
"The oceans have dried up;
mountains have crumbled;
the pole star is shaken;
the earth founders;
the gods perish.
I’m like a frog in a dry well".
A lot of people aren't
satisfied with the religion
that they grew up in.
And when prince Siddhartha
decides to give up his life,
he's doing something that lots
of other people were doing.
Siddhartha joined
thousands of searchers like
himself, renunciants: men and
even a few women who had
renounced the world, embracing
poverty and celibacy, living on
the edge, just as spiritual
seekers still do in India today.
Now, at this time in India,
there were lots of renunciants
out there.
It's a flourishing renunciant
tradition.
There are many different people
who have given everything up
and practice austerities and
meditate in order to escape from
the cycle of death and rebirth.
The notion of reincarnation
is something that's part of
Indian culture, part of Indian
civilization, part of Indian
religion, that was there long
before the Buddha, and it was
the... in a sense, the problem
that the Buddha faced.
Suffering didn't begin
at birth and finish with death.
Suffering was endless,
unless it was possible to find
a way out, become enlightened,
become a Buddha.
In his time, there was
a sense of death not being final
but of death leading inexorably
to rebirth and of beings,
suffering beings, bound to the
wheel of death and rebirth.
It is said that
Siddhartha had lived many lives
before this one,
As countless animals...
innumerable human beings...
and even gods;
across four incalculable ages,
the sacred texts say,
and many aeons,
experiencing life in all
its different forms.
Siddhartha’s previous lives,
many aeons, sometimes as
a human being, sometimes as
an animal, but then gradually
using his practice, becoming
more higher and higher
and deeper, deeper.
The idea is, from life to
life, to progress more and more
towards the enlightenment and
become wiser and wiser.
Some beings will stubbornly
insist on their ignorance and
their egotism, and they will
charge ahead, grabbing and
eating what they can in front
of themselves and being
dissatisfied but thinking that
the next bite will do it.
And they will die and be reborn
and die and be reborn
infinite times.
It could take them, you know,
a billion lifetimes if they are
very stubborn, you know.
And becoming a Buddha,
becoming enlightened, is the
only way of getting out of the
continual cycle of death and
rebirth.
Now, rebirth here isn't the
popular notion that, you know,
in my past life, I was
Cleopatra floating down the
Nile or Napoleon.
It's as if every life is going
through junior high school
again, over and over and over.
With the authority of
the priests worn thin and
wisdom seekers like Siddhartha
roaming the countryside,
holy men emerged, teaching their
own spiritual disciplines.
Siddhartha apprenticed himself
to one of them, a celebrated
guru who taught that true
knowledge could never come from
ritual practice alone.
It was necessary to look within.
"You may stay here with me,"
the guru told him.
"A wise person can soon dwell
in his teacher's knowledge and
experience it directly for
himself".
Siddhartha set himself to learn
the rigorous practices the guru
prescribed.
The teachers of the time are
already teaching forms of yoga
and meditation, teaching that
the self-reflective capacity
of the mind can be put to use
to tame the mind, to tame the
passions.
That was already established in
India.
And there were probably so many
schools of yoga and meditation
in those days, just as there
are now.
Although yoga appears
to focus on controlling the
body, it is in fact an ancient,
spiritual discipline,
a form of meditation,
harnessing the energies
of the body to tame the mind.
Some yogis learn to sit without
moving for hours, breathing
more and more slowly until they
seem to be barely breathing
at all.
All kinds of trance states
are possible through meditation.
If you hold the mind, if you
concentrate the mind on
a single object, you know,
be it a word or a candle flame
or a sound, it's possible to
transport the mind into all
kinds of interesting places.
The person who was to become
the Buddha was very good at all
of those practices.
He was a super student, doing
these practices, taking them to
their limit, and no matter what
he did in these practices,
he was still stuck in the pain
that he set out with.
He ascends to these very
rarified states of
consciousness, but it's not
permanent, and it does not bring
penetrating truth into the
nature of reality.
So these become a temporary
escape from the problem of
existence, but they don't solve
the problem.
Siddhartha apprenticed
himself to another popular guru,
but the results were the same.
"The thought occurred to me,"
he said later, "this practice
does not lead to direct
knowledge, to deeper awareness".
Disenchanted, he left this
master too.
Siddhartha continued to drift
south, still searching for the
answer to his questions:
Why do human beings suffer?
Is there any escape?
He's trying and trying and
searching and searching,
and he already experienced
extreme luxuries, so now he
tries extreme deprivation.
Among the renunciants,
asceticism was a common
spiritual practice: punishing
the body as a way to attain
serenity and wisdom.
Siddhartha fell in with five
other ascetics and soon was
outdoing them in mortifying the
flesh, subjecting his body to
extremes of hardship and pain.
The body represents
a fundamental problem.
Old age brings a decrepitude to
the body.
Sickness brings pain and
suffering to the body.
And death is ultimately the
cessation of the functioning of
the body.
So there was a sense that if
you could punish the body
sufficiently, you could escape
its influence.
You could transcend some of the
limitations that the body
seemed to impose.
The ascetic pursues the truth
by taking the requirements of
survival down to the absolute
minimum possible:
barely enough food to stay
alive, no protection from
the elements, no heat,
sit in the cold, sit in the
rain, meditate fiercely for all
the hours of awakening.
The step of renunciation, of
shedding everything, of dying,
the feeling that one is dying
to one's life as it was,
is essential to being reborn
as someone who sees.
Ascetics can still be
seen in India, firm in the
belief that by subduing the
flesh, they can gain spiritual
power.
emaciated, exhausted,
Siddhartha punished himself for
six years, trying to put an end
to the cravings that beset him.
He tortures himself, trying
to destroy anything within
himself that he sees as bad.
The spiritual traditions of that
time said you can be liberated
if you eliminate everything
that's human: you know,
everything that's coarse
and vulgar, every bit of anger,
every bit of desire.
If you... you know, if you wipe
that out with force of will,
then you can go into some kind
of transcendental state.
and the Buddha tried all that,
and he became, you know,
the most anorectic of the
anorectic ascetics.
He was eating one grain of rice
per day.
He was drinking his own urine.
He was standing on one foot.
He was sleeping on nails.
He did it all to the utmost.
"My body slowly became
extremely emaciated,"
Siddhartha said.
"my limbs became like the
jointed segments of vine or
bamboo stems.
My spine stood out like a string
of beads.
My ribs jutted out like the
jutting rafters of an old,
abandoned building.
The gleam of my eyes appeared
to be sunk deep in my eye
sockets, like the gleam of
water deep in a well.
My scalp shriveled and withered
like a green bitter gourd
shriveled and withered in the
heat and wind".
What he was trying to do was
pushing his body to the most
extreme that he could.
But then he realized that
from that, he cannot gain what
he wants.
Trying to torture the body,
the body becomes too much.
The whole attention is given to
the body, nothing else.
He surrendered himself
completely to the hard training
that he was given.
And what he discovered, having
tried this completely for many
years, was that he had not
answered his question.
It hadn't worked.
he was on the verge of death,
dying, unawakened, when he
remembered something.
he remembered a day when he was
young and sat by the river with
his father and the perfection
of the world as it was simply
gave itself to him.
Years before, when
Siddhartha was a small boy, his
father, the king, had taken him
to a spring planting festival.
while he watched the ceremonial
dancing, he looked down at the
grass.
He thought about the insects
and their eggs...
destroyed as the field was
planted.
He was overwhelmed with sadness.
One great taproot of
Buddhism is compassion, which
is the deep affection that we
feel for everything because
we're all in it together...
be it other human beings, other
animals, the planet as a whole,
the creatures of this planet,
the trees and rivers of this
planet.
Everything is connected.
It was a beautiful
day.
His mind drifted.
As if by instinct, he crossed
his legs in the yoga pose of
meditation.
And the natural world paid him
homage.
As the sun moved through the
sky, the shadows shifted, but
the shadow of the rose apple
tree where he sat remained
still.
He felt a sense of pure joy.
the joy that he found is in
the world that is already
broken.
It's in this transitory world
that we're all a part of.
And the fabric of this world...
despite the fact that it can
seem so horrible, the underlying
fabric of this world actually
is that joy that he recovered.
That was his great insight.
"But," he says, "i can't sustain
a feeling of joy like this
if i don't take any food,
so i better eat something".
And then at that moment,
a village maiden mysteriously
appears carrying a bowl of rice
porridge.
And she said to him, "here,
eat".
that moment of generosity and
release when he accepted the
rice was a decision towards
life.
It was what in the Christian
tradition might be called
"grace," that you cannot do it
completely on your own.
And in Christianity, the grace
comes from the divine.
In the story of the Buddha,
the grace comes from the
ordinary, kind heart of a girl
who sees somebody starving and
says, "eat".
There's something beautiful.
whenever I remember that story,
it makes me so happy because
I see the heart of Buddha
as the person he was, like the
Siddhartha.
This dish was the dish he used
to be fed by his stepmother,
rice pudding.
He was missing that so much.
and then he remembered maybe
further and further, and he
remembered about his wife,
about his son.
And the deepest emotions that
he had suppressed, they
overpower.
They came up.
They were still there.
And he had a feeling of missing.
He had a feeling of seeing his
son and a feeling of being near
his loved ones.
They were so powerful.
Oh, this must have soaked his
whole entire being.
He was actually an utter
failure.
He had been clinging to the path
of asceticism.
And when he took the food, what
followed was a return of his
original question.
Life is painful.
Life involves change.
This is still a problem.
The problem didn't disappear.
It wasn't long before
the ascetics who had been
Siddhartha’s companions found
him eating and turned away in
disgust.
"Siddhartha loves luxury,"
they said.
"He has forsaken his spiritual
practice.
He has become extravagant".
But the man who will become
the Buddha realizes that extreme
deprivation isn't the way to go.
We can live as normal human
beings.
We can eat and drink.
And, in fact, we kind of need
to eat and drink and be normal
human beings in order to break
through, in order to attain the
kind of realization that he was
looking for.
Siddhartha had put his
faith in two gurus.
They hadn't helped him.
He had punished his mind and
body.
That had almost killed him.
Now he knew what he must do.
to find the answer to his
questions, he would look within
and trust himself.
Bodh Gaya is a small
town in northeastern India.
Throngs of pilgrims have come
here from all over the world
for more than 16 centuries.
For Buddhists, there are
hundreds of holy places but
none more sacred than this one.
Bodh Gaya is the sacred point
from which the Buddhist faith
radiates.
Some pilgrims travel great
distances, reciting prayers and
prostrating themselves every
step of the way.
It is their Mecca and Jerusalem.
Their holy of holies is not the
imposing temple beside them but
a simple fig tree: ficus
religiosa, the Bodhi tree.
The tree, it is said,
is descended from the Buddha’s
time.
Every pilgrim knows the story
of how Siddhartha, after
accepting the rice milk from
the young girl, put aside the
rags he was wearing, bathed
himself in a nearby river, and,
strengthened, sat down in the
shade of the Bodhi tree,
and began to meditate.
It was springtime.
the moon was full.
Before the sun would rise,
Siddhartha’s long search would
be over.
He sat down under a bodhi
tree, in the shelter of the
natural world in all of its
beauty and fullness,
and he said, "I will not move
from this place until I have
solved my problem".
"Let my skin and
sinews and bones dry up,
together with all the flesh and
blood of my body," he said.
"I welcome it.
but I will not move from this
spot until I have attained the
supreme and final wisdom".
All at once, Mara, Lord of
Desire, rose to challenge him.
With an army of demons,
he attacked.
Siddhartha did not move,
and their weapons turned into
flowers.
Mara is the ruler of this
realm of desire, this world
that we all live in.
And what he's afraid Siddhartha
is going to do when he attains
enlightenment and becomes the
Buddha is conquer that world.
That is, he's going to do away
with desire.
He's going to... he's going to
wreck the whole game.
Mara did not give up.
He sent his three daughters to
seduce him.
Siddhartha remained still.
When he faces Mara, he faces
himself and his own destructive
capacity.
But he's not the warrior
trying to do battle with those
qualities.
He's discovered his own
capacity for equanimity.
He has become like, you know,
the top of the great Himalayan
mountains, you know:
the weather is passing over him,
storms are raging around him,
and he sits like the top of the
mountain... impassive...
not in a trance state, you know,
totally aware of everything.
So he frustrates Mara.
Siddhartha resisted
every temptation Mara could
devise.
The Lord of Desire had one
final test.
He demanded to know who would
testify that Siddhartha was
worthy of attaining ultimate
wisdom, and his demon army
rose up to support him.
Siddhartha said nothing.
he reached down and touched the
ground, and the earth shuddered.
Mara's demons fled.
the Buddha reaches down and,
with his finger, touches the
Earth.
he says, "the Earth is
my witness".
He said, "Mara, you are not
the Earth.
the Earth is right here, beneath
my finger".
And the Earth is what we're
talking about...
accepting the Earth, not owning
the Earth, not possessing the
Earth, but the Earth just as it
is: abused and exploited and
despised and rejected and
plowed and mined and spat on
and everything else, you know.
It's still the Earth, and it's...
it is... it's...
we owe everything to it.
Siddhartha meditated
throughout the night,
and all his former lives passed
before him.
He remembers all his
previous lives, infinite numbers
of previous lives, female and
male and every other race and
every other being in the vast
ocean of life-forms.
And he remembered that all
viscerally.
So that means his awareness
expanded to be... so that all the
moments of the past were
completely present to him.
He gains the power to see
the process of birth, death,
and rebirth that all creatures
go through.
he's given this sort of cosmic
vision of the workings of the
entire universe.
As the morning star
appeared, he roared like a lion.
"My mind," he said,
"is at peace".
The heavens shook, and the bodhi
tree rained down flowers.
He had become the "Awakened
One," the Buddha.
Something new opens up for
him, which he calls "Nirvana"
or which he calls "awakening".
He said, "at this moment,
all beings and I awaken
together".
So it was not just him.
It was all the universe.
He touched the Earth.
"as Earth is my witness,
seeing this morning star, all
things and I awaken together".
It's not like entering
a new state.
It's uncovering or surrendering
to the reality that has always
been there.
He realized he'd always been in
Nirvana, that Nirvana was always
the case.
Your reality itself is Nirvana.
It's the unreality, it's your
ignorance that makes you think
you're this self-centered
separate being trying to
fight off an overwhelming
universe and failing.
You are that universe.
You're already enlightened.
He's saying the capacity for
enlightenment... that your
awake-ness already exists within you.
Nirvana is this moment seen
directly.
There is nowhere else than here.
The only gate is now.
The only doorway is your own
body and mind.
There's nowhere to go.
There's nothing else to be.
There's no destination.
It's not something to aim for
in the afterlife.
It's simply the quality of
this moment.
Just this.
Just this, this room where
we are.
Pay attention to that.
Pay attention to who's there.
Pay attention to what isn't
known there.
Pay attention to what is known
there.
Pay attention to what everyone
is thinking and feeling,
What you're doing there.
Pay attention.
For weeks, the Buddha
remained near the Bodhi tree,
peaceful and serene.
He was tempted to retire into
a profound solitude, instead of
trying to teach others what it
had taken him six long years to
discover for himself.
He wants to stay there.
He's very happy.
He doesn't want to go out.
He says to himself, "No one is
going to understand this.
You know, people are going to
think I'm crazy.
They're going to think I'm
nuts".
Buddha saw the nature of the
people: envy and jealousy and
the strong negative mental
states.
All the people in the world,
they are like the fishes
wriggling in the very shallow
water.
So Buddha, he himself afraid to
teach the people.
The myth is that a god
comes to the Buddha.
Brahma comes on his knees and
says, "Please, we need you.
Why don't you try talking about
what you just understood?
'Cause the world needs... the gods
need it, and the men need it".
You know, "the people need it".
And then Buddha decided to
give his teachings...
because of a great compassion.
It's not an ordinary compassion.
When you feel the feelings
of others, you automatically
don't want them to feel bad.
You feel the feeling of your
hand; you don't put it
in the oven.
I mean, you're not being
compassionate to your hand.
You just feel the pain,
so you're not gonna
put it there.
So if you feel other's pain,
you're going to do your best to
help them alleviate it.
When somebody becomes
enlightened, something blooms
in his heart.
It's like a flower blooms, and
it cannot hold the fragrance.
It has to naturally release.
so it's like he naturally had
to release his radiance.
He has to share this joy that
was in his heart.
35 years old,
the Buddha would devote the rest
of his life to bringing his
teachings... the Dharma,
the fundamental laws of
all things... into the world.
But as he had feared, it would
not be easy.
As he set off to share what he
had learned, he met a wandering
ascetic.
"Who is your guru?"
the ascetic asked him.
the Buddha said he had no guru,
that he had attained
enlightenment on his own.
"It may be so," the ascetic said
and walked away.
On his first attempt to teach,
the Buddha had failed.
Buddha meets someone who
doesn't see anything special
about him, because the awakened
Buddha doesn't look any
different from anybody else.
He is ordinary.
Buddhism is not about being
special.
Buddhism is about being
ordinary.
And it is not about the
continual exudation of bliss.
It is about walking a normal
human life with normal human
beings, doing normal human
things, and this reminds you
that you yourself might be
a Buddha.
At this moment, the person
you're looking at might be one.
It's an interesting practice;
just each person you see as you
walk down the street: "Buddha?
Buddha?
Buddha.
Buddha".
from Bodh Gaya, the
Buddha walked west nearly 200
miles and crossed the Ganges
river.
He was still searching for a way
to explain to others what
he feared was unexplainable,
the path to the enlightenment
he himself had experienced.
In a deer park in Sarnath,
not far from the Ganges,
he would try again.
His five former companions were
still practicing the
austerities he himself had
abandoned.
"From far off, they saw me
coming and, on seeing me,
made a pact with one another,"
the Buddha recalled.
"Friends, here comes
Siddhartha, living luxuriously,
straying from his ascetic
practice.
He doesn't deserve to be bowed
down to".
These are his buddies, who
were just disappointed and
disgusted with him for giving in
after they'd all been trying
to starve themselves into
enlightenment.
So they... they're a little
distrustful at the beginning.
They refer to him as an
equal, and he then tells them,
"No, that's not the term you
should use when you refer to
a tathagata, a being who's gone
beyond".
And so he sets them straight.
and they then become the first
people to hear the content of
what he realized under the
Bodhi tree.
His first teaching
would later be called ‘setting
in motion the wheel of the
Dharma’ because it brought the
Buddha's message into the world
for the first time.
He did not propound a dogma.
Instead, he spoke from his own
experience, out of his own
heart.
He had known the abandon of the
sensualist and the rigors of
the ascetic.
Now he would disavow both of
them.
The Buddha said, "I've
discovered a new way, and it's
not the path of asceticism,
and it's not the path of sensory
indulgence.
It's the middle way".
What the Buddha was always
doing was saying, "Everything
needs to be balanced".
So, you know, the middle way
was always balancing between,
you know, excesses on this side,
excesses on the other side.
"fair goes the dancing
when the sitar is tuned.
Tune us the sitar neither high
nor low,
and we will dance away
the hearts of men.
But the string too tight
breaks...
and the music dies.
The string too slack has
no sound, and the music dies.
There is a middle way.
Tune us the sitar neither low
nor high,
and we will dance away
the hearts of men".
The path to
enlightenment lay along the
middle way, the Buddha taught,
and the ascetics listened.
Now he would answer the question
that six years before had
provoked his spiritual journey:
the question of suffering.
Buddhists don't have
a creation story.
There is no creator deity.
It's not really of interest.
It's not an issue.
What's of interest is the
problem of human suffering and
the solution to human suffering.
Pretty much everything else,
all right, is beside the point.
The Buddha's analysis
of suffering came in the form
of what have come to be called
"the Four Noble Truths".
There is no commandments or
anything.
The first Noble Truth is that
there is suffering in this
world.
Generally, this "suffering" has
been mistranslated.
"Suffering" is not entirely
accurate to the word that the
Buddha probably used.
It means something closer to
"dissatisfaction" ...that,
you know, we're never quite
happy, and if we are, that's
gone in an instant, anyhow.
And he says that this
suffering, this
unsatisfactoriness, doesn't
arise by itself; it has causes.
Our own mind causes it.
While the Second Noble
Truth asserts that suffering
has a cause, the Third Noble
Truth makes an astonishing
claim.
You really can be free of
suffering by understanding
the cause of suffering.
But nobody tells you that,
and so that was a huge
announcement.
The problem, Buddha
taught, is desire,
how to live with the confused
and entangling desires of our
own minds.
People often misunderstand
Buddhism as saying:
"In order to wipe out suffering,
you have to wipe out desire".
If that was what the Buddha was
saying, then where does the
desire for enlightenment fit in,
you know?
The Buddha's saying:
"Be smart about your desires".
With the Fourth and
final Noble Truth, the Buddha
laid out a series of
instructions for his disciples
to follow, a way of leading the
mind to enlightenment called
"the Noble Eightfold Path,"
the cultivation of moral
discipline, mindfulness,
and wisdom.
They are, as I like to think
of them, a set of possible
recipes that you can try on
your own life and see which one
makes the best soup.
The Buddha didn't speak
for long, but when he was
finished, the five skeptical
ascetics had been won over.
They became his first disciples.
Word quickly spread of the sage
teaching in the deer park at
Sarnath.
Hundreds came to hear him and
became disciples too.
Many were wealthy merchants or
their sons, living just five
miles away in a thriving
trading center on the Ganges,
the holy city of Benares.
Today Benares is the most sacred
city in all of India, as it has
been for millennia.
Even before the time of the
Buddha, pilgrims came here to
worship their gods and bathe in
the holy river of heaven.
You see people purifying
themselves bathing in the
Ganges.
You see priests performing
rituals.
You see corpses, because that's
the best place to end one's
life.
So you see going on there
a great range of religious
activity, and much of it
of the type that does go back
to the Buddha's time.
Many of today's sacred
ceremonies on the Ganges echo
the ancient practices of the
Vedic priests, the Brahmans.
In the Buddha's day, only the
Brahmans could mediate between
the gods and men.
Only they could conduct the
holy rituals that were said to
preserve the universe itself.
The Brahman priests stood at
the pinnacle of a rigid social
hierarchy: a sacred system of
caste.
Beneath them were the warriors,
the caste to which the Buddha
belonged.
Below them were farmers.
at the bottom were the
servants and, still lower,
outcastes.
Those social groups are not
merely social conventions, but
rather, they're hardwired into
the nature of the universe.
You're supposed to stay in that
group, and the survival of
society depends upon your
continuing to perform the
function associated with that
social status.
Caste was irrelevant
to the Buddha.
So were priestly rituals to
preserve the universe.
His teachings focused on the
universe within.
The Buddha said you could be
from any caste.
What makes you noble is if you
understand reality, you know,
if you're a good person.
If you're a wise person,
then you're noble.
In time, a devoted
gathering of monks formed around
the Buddha at Sarnath, near the
Ganges.
Broken stones and fallen
pillars mark what remains
of what grew to be a vibrant
monastic community, the Sangha.
It took the Buddha many,
many years to find his way.
But he didn't want it to be
so hard for people, and so
he established a community who
could live together and help
one another.
In a ceremony evoking
the beginning of the Buddha's
own spiritual journey,
fledgling monks of all ages
say good-bye to their families
and homes and join the Sangha.
I go to the refuge of the
Buddha, I go to the refuge of
the Dharma, and I go to the
refuge of the Sangha.
the Sangha is an embodiment
of Buddha's experience and
wisdom.
What happens if people practice
this thing?
Are they truly happy or not?
Are they joyful or not?
So I think Buddha wanted us to
lead a perfect example of his
teaching: an alive teaching,
a teaching that walks,
a teaching that can talk,
a teaching that can laugh.
So I would say sangha is just
like a living example of
Buddha's teaching.
the first Sangha was
a radical institution,
open to people of every caste
and, remarkable for the times
in which the Buddha lived,
to both men and women.
The Buddha was part of
a culture deeply suspicious of
women.
The attitude towards women
at the time was very critical,
and many things were impossible
for them.
So that was a very
revolutionary thing to do that
in that times of India.
By ordaining women as
nuns, the Buddha gave women the
chance to escape the drudgery
of daily life.
Life was so hard for most women
that entering the Sangha was
a liberation, as we know from
their ecstatic, heart-rending
poems.
"So freed! So freed!
So thoroughly freed am I...
from my pestle, my shameless
husband, and his sunshade
making, my moldy old pot with
its water-snake smell.
Aversion and passion I cut
with a chop.
Having come to the foot of
a tree, I meditate,
absorbed in the bliss.
'What bliss!'"
Bliss, Nirvana, the Buddha
taught, could be found in the
fleeting moment through the
practice of meditation.
The Buddha showed his followers
how to come to terms with their
own roiling thoughts and desires
by paying attention to them,
by becoming aware,
becoming mindful.
As an ancient poem counsels:
"Like an archer, an arrow,
the wise man steadies his
trembling mind, a fickle and
restless weapon".
Many times, our mind is not
peaceful enough.
So we realize that perhaps we
need to understand more about
mind itself and how to balance
the emotions, how to balance
our mind, and try to cultivate
more happiness.
The difficulties come from
within.
One experiences unexpected
things from one's mind:
the most dangerous skeptical
doubts, doubts about one's
self, doubts about the Buddha.
Physical is... we can get from...
from the food and from the
supplement of vitamins and...
yeah, and for the mind, this is
the only way we have to...
only medicine.
Meditation is not about
getting rid of anger or getting
rid of lust or getting rid of
jealousy.
Even while becoming a monk,
often we experience angers;
it happens.
And it often happens when people
start teasing you, like,
"shaven bald-head person".
But it gives a good chance for
us to realize that, "Okay,
let's see, this anger arises.
What is it?"
What most often happens in our
ordinary life is that whenever
we experience these emotions,
we get stuck into it.
It starts twisting us.
But Buddhism is going through
inside it and getting out of it
peacefully.
And I think that gives us more
joy.
And that makes human life more
full, more round.
It's not like... we are not living
a partial truth, but it's like
the whole of things together.
It takes time to comprehend
this.
and then by practicing again
and again, the practitioner
becomes very balanced, and one
reaches the state of very strong
equanimity, equanimity towards
the physical and mental objects.
And this is the base camp
for the summit:
enlightenment.
"After washing
my feet," a disciple said,
"I watch the water going down
the drain".
"I am calm.
I control my mind, like a noble
thoroughbred horse.
Taking a lamp, I enter my cell;
thinking of sleep,
I sit on my bed.
I touch the wick.
the lamp goes out:
Nirvana.
My mind is freed".
"The mind is
as restless as a monkey,"
the Buddha taught.
Who you are, what you think of
as your "self," is constantly
changing...
like a river, endlessly flowing,
One thing today,
another tomorrow.
There's water in a river,
then there's water in a glass,
and then the water is back
in the air, and then it's back
in the river.
The water's there,
but what is it?
That's a way to think about the
self in Buddhism.
one moment you're angry.
The next moment you're laughing.
Who are you?
"A seed becomes
a plant.
Wisps of grass are spun into
a rope.
A trickling stream turns into
a river".
The self comes, and the self
goes.
Simply notice how from one
moment to another, your self is
actually not as much the same
as we think it is.
What the Buddha realizes is
that if we can get rid of this
fundamental misunderstanding
of the nature of the self based
on egotism, we won't cling to
things; we won't screw up
everything we do because
we're thinking about it
in the wrong way.
Once you stop centering your
feelings about your feelings on
your self, what naturally arises
is simple compassion:
compassion for your own
suffering, compassion for
the suffering of others.
Even the most abstract
of the Buddha's teachings had
a practical, ethical dimension.
Compassion, the Buddha taught,
comes from understanding
impermanence, transience, flow:
how one thing passes into
another, how everything and
everyone is connected.
"When this is,
that is.
From the arising of this
comes the arising of that.
When this isn't, that isn't.
From the cessation of this
comes the cessation of that".
This is always connected
to that.
Everything is connected
to everything else.
You never live by yourself.
You live always within a family,
a society, or culture.
You constantly interact with
other people all the time.
So our happiness depends on
their happiness as well.
How can we be happy if we are
the only one happy in...
on, you know, just an island
of happiness within an ocean
of misery?
Of course, that's not possible.
Compassion stirred the
Buddha to send his monks out
into the community.
Sworn to chastity and poverty,
they wandered the roads,
bringing the Buddha's teachings
into the world.
"Go forth, monks, for the
happiness of the many,
out of compassion for the world.
There are beings whose eyes have
little dust on them, who will
perish if they do not hear
the teaching.
But if they hear the teaching,
they will gain liberation".
The monks exist by begging.
we think of begging as kind of
a bad thing.
Begging in this tradition is
a good thing.
It's a sign of spiritual purity.
You're not allowed to beg
tomorrow's lunch today...
only today's lunch.
Then you can't eat from noon
until dawn the next day.
Then you have to go out and get
another lunch.
And then in exchange for lunch,
you give a lecture,
unless they say, "we don't want
to hear about it".
Then you don't.
But that's the only thing...
but that forces you to interact
with the lay community.
And if you're not serving
them, if you're not doing
something useful for them, they
won't put anything in your bowl,
and that will be the end of your
community.
The Buddha himself
wandered across northeast India,
teaching and gathering new
disciples everywhere he went.
You didn't have to become
a monk or a nun to become
a Buddhist.
The Buddha's teachings were
for everyone.
"Everything is
burning.
What is burning?
The eyes are burning.
Everything seen by the eyes
is burning.
The ears are burning.
What is burning?
Everything heard by the ears
is burning.
The nose is burning.
Smells are ablaze.
The tongue is burning.
Tastes are ablaze.
The body is burning.
The mind is burning".
We're on fire.
We may not know it, but we're
on fire, and we have to put
that fire out.
We're burning with desire,
all right?
We're burning with craving.
Everything... everything about us
is out of control.
The Buddha goes on to talk
about The Three Poisons,
greed and anger and ignorance,
and how The Three Poisons are
what is making the fire,
and the way out of doing this is
not to deny The Three Poisons
but to recognize that if you
turn them around, you come to
their opposites.
Instead of greed,
you have generosity.
Instead of anger,
you have compassion.
And instead of ignorance,
you have wisdom.
"I can give
my teachings in brief,"
the Buddha said.
"I can teach in detail.
It is those who understand that
are hard to find".
There are stories of people
coming to the Buddha and saying:
"I am leaving your teaching
because you have not told me
about whether there is a life
after death or whether there is
another world".
And the Buddha says, "did I ever
say that I would give you
the answer to these things?"
"No, lord, you didn't".
"Why do you think that I never
said that I would give you the
answer to these things?
Because these are not the things
that you need to know.
The thing that you need to know
is how to deal with suffering,
because at this very moment,
what made you ask that question
was suffering".
The Buddha was,
above all, a pragmatist.
he did not expect his followers
to agree with everything
he said.
He encouraged them to debate
and argue, to challenge him.
Buddha said, "My followers
should not accept my teaching
out of devotion but rather your
own experiment".
Even Buddha himself, in order
to get final enlightenment,
need hard work.
So investigate based on reason,
through logical investigation.
If something contradict,
in Buddha's own words, then we
have the right to reject that.
As the Buddha gathered
more and more followers,
stories spread of his miracles,
which mixed the marvelous with
the mundane.
One story tells how
500 pieces of firewood split
at the Buddha's command.
In another, a mad elephant
charged wildly down a street,
forcing everyone to flee.
Only the Buddha remained,
quietly waiting.
The elephant, overcome by the
Buddha's radiant kindness,
knelt before him,
and the Buddha patted his
leathery trunk.
Because miracle is something
you cannot understand.
so now I think that within this
century, we may find some new
ideas or new facts.
so far, we spent all our energy
and time for research on
matter, not internal world.
This skull, a small space,
but lot of mysterious things
still there.
The great field of knowledge
is as tiny as the Earth is
in the universe.
I mean, it's a tiny...
it's a speck.
And the... the universe is what
we don't know, and it will
always be that way.
However much we find out,
it will still be that way,
because the unknown is vastly...
it's unspeakably greater than
anything we will ever know.
In one of the most
storied miracles, the Buddha
strode on a jeweled walkway
suspended in midair
while streams of water spouted
and flames flashed from
his body, shooting out to the
very edge of the universe.
And as the Buddha sat on a lotus
flower giving his teachings,
he replicated himself, filling
the sky with multitudes of
Buddhas for all to see and
wonder.
Do we believe that literally?
Does it matter whether we
believe it literally?
What many of those miraculous
stories are about is the sheer
wonder of it all.
The very fact that the whole of
unknown time and space has
led down to this... led to this
very moment when we're sitting
here talking... when we are
sitting here talking to each
other is utterly miraculous.
Sitting here in a room,
having had a cup of coffee,
having taken it out of
a beautiful blue-and-white
porcelain mug, what could be
more miraculous than that?
Everyday life around us is
already so implausible and
so glorious, that what need for
further miracles?
And that's the teaching
of the Buddha.
That's the miraculous teaching
of the Buddha.
Violence, the Buddha
taught, always leads to more
violence.
"To the slayer comes a slayer.
to the conqueror comes
a conqueror.
He who plunders is plundered
in turn".
War was endemic in the Buddha's
age, ravaging northeast India
again and again.
Although kings and their
ministers sought his council,
the Buddha offered no grand
political vision.
He was powerless to stop the
killing and the fighting.
Even the men, women, and
children of his former kingdom
were massacred by a marauding
king: forced into pits
and trampled by elephants.
It was said that the Buddha
received the news in silence.
The Buddha failed, but we,
as the Buddha, fail constantly,
and part of our suffering is
our... is our failure, our
recognition of our failure.
Buddhism doesn't argue with
reality.
There will always be both the
potential for awakening in any
moment and the potential for
incredible damage at any moment,
and if we fool ourselves into
thinking we're past that,
we will do incredible damage.
Change, the Buddha
said, must come from within.
The Buddha starts always
with the mind and talks about
the violence in the mind and
says that violence in the world
is a result of violence
in the mind.
A tree lives on its roots.
if you change the root,
you change the tree.
Culture lives in human beings.
if you change the human heart,
the culture will follow.
For decades, the Buddha
shared his teachings all across
northeastern India.
"Let all beings be happy,"
he taught, "weak or strong,
great or small.
Let us cherish all creatures,
as a mother her only child".
Barefoot in his robes,
he was still walking the roads
when he was 80, but old age was
upon him.
His back hurt.
His stomach was often in pain.
"I am old, worn out," he told
a trusted disciple,
"like a dilapidated cart held
together with thin straps".
The world is so sweet, he said,
that he could understand wanting
to live for at least another
century.
But he was frail and exhausted.
He became ill near Kushinagar,
a remote village near the border
of Nepal, when he was offered
a meal which would prove deadly.
The food was spoiled.
He ate what was offered to
him, and it's said that he knew
it was bad, but he took it
anyway 'cause it was offered
and didn't want the person who
offered it to feel bad,
'cause it was his time.
Today Kushinagar is
revered by pilgrims as the place
where the Buddha finally left
the world.
It was in Kushinagar where he
grew weak and asked to be laid
on his side in a quiet grove of
sal trees.
As he neared the end,
his disciples began to weep,
stricken with grief.
But the Buddha reassured them.
"all things change," he said.
"Whatever is born is subject
to decay".
He's saying this is
a natural process.
He tells his disciples: "Use
this time, use the energy here,
even this, for your own
awakening".
So he used even his own death
and their sadness as a time to
remind them of what their real
task was.
What he's actually doing is
inviting those who are close to
him into the experience.
I don't think the Buddha's
teaching in any way argues
against grief or sadness
or loss.
The teachings, if they make
any sense, have to make sense
in ordinary circumstances,
in ordinary lives.
And in ordinary lives,
we grieve when we lose.
We... we grieve. We...
when it hurts, we say, "ouch".
Buddhism is trying to look at
things the way they are,
the way it is, just as it is.
It hurts.
This is life.
This is our life.
And our relation to life
involves losing it too.
You don't get beyond these
things.
You don't get beyond them.
It's all right to feel what
human beings feel, and we are
not supposed to turn into rocks
or trees when we practice
Buddhism.
Buddhas laugh, cry, dance, feel
ecstasy, probably even feel
despair.
It is how we know the world.
It is how we live inside of
our hearts and not dissociated
from them.
The Buddha had always
been saying good-bye.
Now he prepared to leave the
Earth forever.
He would never be reborn, never
die again.
"It may be that after I am
gone," the Buddha told his
disciples, "that some of you
will think, 'now we have no
teacher.'
But that is not how you should
see it.
Let the Dharma and the
discipline that I have taught
you be your teacher.
All individual things pass away.
Strive on, untiringly".
These were the Buddha's last
words.
The Buddha died
peacefully.
His head was pointed to the
north, his face to the west.
The stories tell how the Earth
shook, and the trees suddenly
burst into bloom...
their petals falling gently
on his still body,
falling out of reverence.
Divine coralflowers and divine
sandalwood powders fell from
above on the Buddha's body
out of reverence.
His disciples were quite
upset: "What are we going to do
without our teacher?
We will be lost without our
teacher".
But his instruction was
so simple and so clear:
"I am not your light.
I am not your authority.
You've been with me a long time
now.
Be your own light".
The Buddha saw death and
life as inseparable.
These are two sides of the same
thing.
Death is always with us.
Death is part of the whole large
unknown.
And if we are unable to smile
at the idea of the unknown,
we're in real trouble.
That's the realism that the
Buddha was talking about: trying
to come to terms with reality.
When he was 29 and
still prince Siddhartha,
the Buddha had left his wife,
child, and family to try and
understand the nature of
suffering.
He had attained enlightenment,
shared what he had learned,
and left a path for others to
follow.
Now he was gone.
But before he died, he had asked
his followers to remember him
by making pilgrimage...
to the place of his death...
to where he gave his first
teachings...
where he achieved
enlightenment...
and where he was born.
Those four places mark out
a sacred biography.
And in tracing that pilgrimage
route, you are learning the
story of that life.
At places of pilgrimage,
temples were built,
images were installed,
and relics were enshrined.
Although the Buddha had
predicted that his teachings,
like everything else,
would in time disappear,
Buddhism flourished in India
for 1,500 years,
spread into Sri Lanka,
central and southeast Asia,
Tibet, China, Korea, Japan,
and in the 20th century,
to Europe and the Americas,
adapting different forms and
shapes wherever it took root,
attracting many millions of men
and women who practice the
Buddha's teachings both within
and outside the monastic
community.
But everywhere and in every age,
the essence of the story remains
the same.
The Buddha said that we've
turned this world into a painful
place, and this world does not
have to be a painful place.
This world can be a world
inhabited by Buddhas.
But it's up to each one of us
to turn ourselves into a Buddha.
That's really... that's the work.
If the Buddha is not you,
finally, the Buddha is of
no interest to you.
The Buddha is... the Buddha is
of such interest to you because
you are the Buddha.
I know that there are
supposed to be preserved
footprints of the Buddha which
are kept in one of the sacred
places in India or Nepal, and,
you know, you can stand in them,
and if you stand in them, maybe
you realize, "Ah, ten toes.
Me too".
There is a story of
a Brahman who one day found the
Buddha under a tree, calmly
meditating.
The Buddha's mind was still.
he radiated such power and
strength that the Brahman was
reminded of a tusker elephant.
The Brahman asked him who
he was.
"Imagine a lotus that had begun
life underwater," the Buddha
replied...
"but grew and rose above the
surface until it stood free.
So I, too, have transcended the
world and attained the supreme
enlightenment".
"Who are you then?"
the Brahman wondered.
"Remember me," the Buddha said,
"as the one who woke up".