"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." "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." "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 rolling 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"."