Belief on the Path to Enlightenment: A Buddhist Perspective

thank you what ism entered Tibet in the seventh century of the Common Era at that time Tibet did not have a written language and so according to the tradition the king of Tibet sent a delegation of young man to India to study sanskrit and sanskrit grammar to return to Tibet and devised an alphabet and grammar for Tibet for this whole purpose of translating Buddhist scriptures into from Sanskrit to Tibetan the first Tibetan language newspaper was published beginning in 1925 it was called Malone which means mirror in Tibetan and if you look back at the June 28th 1938 issue of male ohm and you turned to page 11 you see a hand-drawn globe and under that in bold letters the headline the world is round this was news in Tibet in 1938 when the current Dalai Lama was about to turn three according input into Buddhism the world is flat the world is consists of a vast ocean surrounded by an ring of iron mountains and the center of that ocean is a great mountain called Mount Meru it has four flat sides and a flat top each of the sides is made of a different precious substance so one face is gold one face is silver one face is Ruby and one SOT one face is lapis lazuli there are four island continents that surround this great mountain one shaped like a circle one like a square one like a half circle and one like a triangle we live on the one shaped like the triangle called jumbo drita shaped remarkably like India with its base facing north it's the southern continent we face the side of Mount Meru that is made of lapis lazuli and therefore when the Sun shines on this on the lapis face of this great mountain every day our sky turns blue this mountain is very important in in Buddhism on the top there is a heaven called the heaven of the 33 the Buddha's mother died seven days after he was born and was reborn as a God in a Buddhist heaven and after his enlightenment the Buddha flew up to the summit of the heaven of the 33 to teach his mother who'd been reborn as a God the Dharma going up every day he was still a monk so he had to fly back down to earth and begged for his food eat his lunch and then fly back up while he was eating his lunch he would repeat what he told to the gods on the mountaintop to a monk called shotty Putra and from this we get something called the abhidharma so there are gods in Buddhism there's no capital G God but there many small G gods they live some live on the upper slopes of Mount Meru another group of God to live on the summit of Mount Meru and then there another group of gods live in four heavens above in the sky and most Buddhists over the course of history have sought to be reborn as one of these gods and so it's something very central to the tradition like theologians of all religions Buddhist thinkers have asked the important question is their sex in heaven and the answer is yes when we look at the six Buddhist heavens of our world our world in in Buddhism is called a realm of desire we have five different forms of sex so the gods who live actually on Mount Meru on the slopes and the summit have sexual intercourse in the way that we understand it the gods in the first heaven above the mountain have sex by simply by embracing the ones in the heaven above that do so simply by holding hands the ones above that enjoy sexual intercourse simply by smiling at each other and in the highest heaven sex is simply eye contact imagine how different life would be if we had I contact orgasm but when we think about this particular sequence and we reverse it from eye contact to smiling to holding hands to embracing to intercourse we see enshrined in this ancient Buddhist system the mating rituals of the American adolescent so there's something very profound there so this world is flat and a tibetan scholar in 1938 wrote this article explaining that it's round in 1873 in the island of Sri Lanka a Methodist minister missionary and a Buddhist monk had a debate about which was true Buddhism or Christianity and in order to disprove Buddhism the missionary brought out a globe and asked the monk to show him where on the globe Mount Meru is located the monk did not respond but he did point out the fact that we do live on the southern continent and all magnitudes point north the Buddhist won the debate by the way so in the 1990s the dalai lama now grown up has declared that the world is round and that those elements of the buddhist tradition which are contradicted by modern science are to be discarded so far that's the only one so when we think about belief in Buddhism we need to think about how this category exists in Buddhist philosophy and what is thinkers tend to divide the things that we can know into three categories the first is called the manifest these are things that we can perceive with our senses that we can see or hear directly and interestingly in that category of the manifest is not Meru something that is to be seen the second category is something that they call the hidden the hidden are things that we cannot see with our eyes or hear with our ears but that we can infer that we can know through reasoning and it's important to note that those things that we say are Buddhist beliefs Buddhists believe in rebirth Buddhist believe in reincarnation Buddhist believe in impermanence Buddhist believe in Nirvana all of these things from the Buddhist perspective are not things that are known through belief there are things that can be known through reasoning and inference and hence because things break things fall apart we die things change from what the Buddhist would call gross impermanence those changes that we can perceive with our senses we can infer something called subtle impermanence a constant falling apart breaking apart in every single instant both of our bodies and in the object of our experience rebirth which we tend to regard as a matter of faith or belief in Buddhism for Buddhist is something whose existence can be inferred through reasoning in order to do that we have to recognize that Buddhism is a strongly dualistic tradition there is mind and there is body there is consciousness and there is matter there's thought and there's form mind therefore in Buddhism is like everything else in a permanent process of moments of consciousness one moment of consciousness producing the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one and those series of thoughts and sense experiences continue from the moment we're born to the moment that we die and when we die what ends is the body what continues is this series of moments of consciousness when the Buddha was asked why is how is it possible for consciousness to go from one lifetime to the next without there being some souls without there being some self the example was given of the candle in which one candle can be lit from another without a single flame passing from one to the other it's a process of oxidation and it's possible for that flame to go from one physical basis to another in the same way consciousness can go on after the body is dead where does it go Buddhists believe in karma and the cause and effect of actions that virtuous deeds lead to happiness evil deeds lead to suffering those sufferings occur in mental and physical forms the deeds that we perform in this life and our past lives has created this space that we're sitting in today it's created the bodies that we have it's brought us together in this place all experiences that happen in the world from war to a hangnail as a result of our past deeds all happiness is a result of our past deeds and so when one dies consciousness as the Buddhists say is blown by the winds of karma some Buddhist schools believe that one is reborn in the next instant others posit something called the untrod bhava the intermediate state and Tibetan it's Bardo Lincoln in the Bardo this is where that comes from the Bardo is a time that lasts from one second to forty-nine days and it's during that time that consciousness is seeking the next place of rebirth not consciously but being blown by one's past deeds and it's something that we would see echoing in Freud many many centuries later if one is to be reborn as a human consciousness approaches the copulating couple and if one is to be reborn as a male one feels desire for one's future mother and hatred for one's future father if want to be reborn as a female one feels desire for the father and hatred for the mother it's that moment of hatred that kills the Bardo being in the intermediate state and causes its consciousness to enter into the drop in Buddhist terminology of blood and semen that takes place at conception and so if we take that process backwards in time go from death to the moment before death to the moment before that and we go back in time to the decades of one's life and we go back to the time of one's childhood and to one's infancy back to the moment of birth back into the womb where consciousness for the Buddhist also exists back to the moment of conception where consciousness enters the drop of semen and blood where did that consciousness come from it cannot come from matter it must come from mind therefore it came from a moment prior to the moment of conception therefore for the Buddhist rebirth is proved what it would also say that enlightenment is not something to be believed in but it's something to be proven and their argument runs something like this the mind as we know from our own experience is transformable through study through meditation we can change the way we think we can remember how little we knew as a child how much we know today and we can see how learning and refinement takes place the sex in heaven thing as humorous as it may seem to us holds an important Buddhist truth what is believed that the process of the path is one of refinement that the kind of mind that we have is a mind that is its course is untamed is distracted it's not strong enough to understand the nature of reality one must engage in specific practices to build the mind up to a certain level of power to be able to see the truth and when one raises the mind to that level one looks back at the old mind and you see it as something course as something crude when I was a child I spake as a child now I've given up childish things and as you move through each of the stages of meditation the earlier state seems banal mundane the higher state seemed refined there's a kind of aesthetics of enlightenment the kind of sensibility that grows as one moves up and up and up on the path and therefore the claim is that this process of transformation is unlimited the possibility of the mind to transform itself is infinite based on our own experience and also based on a famous Buddhist statement that we find in an early text which says the nature of the mind is light the defilements are it's a gong to in Sanskrit it's a word that means added on superficial superfluous extrinsic incidental accidental those emotions that seem to define who we are our likes our dislikes the things that we love the things that we hate our desire our craving our attachment or hatred our anger our enmity our jealousy all of these things are ignorance our confusion our distraction all these things are superficial they're not of the nature of the mind the nature of the mind is light and therefore these things which tend to define us in our own thoughts and experiences everyday they're just on the outside and they can be cleared away through the process of the path therefore enlightenment exists that's the argument there is a another category in addition to the manifest and the hidden there's a category called the very hidden the extremely hidden these are things that we cannot know simply through our sense experience or simply through our process of inference and reasoning these are things that are only known by the Buddha examples that are often given are the particular deeds that a peacock did in a previous life to cause each of the different colors in its tail but it also has to do with the particular deeds that one did in a previous life to have the body of a Buddha that is adorned with the 32 marks of a Superman marks of beauty and so we find in a Buddhist text the statement from giving wealth from ethics happiness that is by being a generous person one is wealthy in the future by being an ethical person one is happy in the future and the Buddhist system they're sick places of rebirth God's demigods humans animals ghosts and denizens of Hell one is read one is a God through acts of generosity in the past life one is reborn as a human through ethical activities in a past life keeping vows one is reborn as an animal through acts of stupidity in the past life one is reborn as a ghost through acts of greed and one is reborn in hell through acts of hatred in the Buddhist cosmology there are many heavens and their many hells eight hot hells ate cold hell's for neighboring hells and various trifling hell's as their call and so it's exactly how karma works not that karma exists in principle but how it works that is something that is known only to a Buddha and so despite the fact that we can use our power of reason to understand that rebirth exists that there will be a future life and there have been past lives despite the fact that we can use our reasoning to infer and conclude that enlightenment exists how to get to enlightenment how to reach nirvana this is not something that we can know this is something that we must turn to the Buddha for and he is to be believed because he is what's called a pramana Buddha a valid person so the advent of a Buddha into the world is a hugely important moment it's an epic own moment in history because the world has been bereft until someone appears someone who over the course of many millions of lifetimes has perfected himself so that he can be reborn at a time when there is no Buddha and figure out entirely by his own efforts what the path to enlightenment is and then to teach it to others indeed in the story of the Buddha's enlightenment he achieves enlightenment under the Bodhi tree - aged 35 and he spends seven weeks the same 49 days just in the vicinity of the tree trying to decide what to do and the god brahma comes down from heaven and begs him to teach a God comes to ask a man to teach the path out of suffering and samsara and the buddha says what i've understood is so profound it's so difficult is the just the benighted world cannot understand it and brahma says there's some indeed who have much dust in their eyes but others have little dust in their eyes and those little dust in their eyes can be taught and so the buddha decided to teach walks from gaya to sir not in the deer park where he finds his five old friends known in the tradition simply as the group of five and there he gives his first teaching what we call the Four Noble Truths it's actually a bad translation that's not the truths that are Noble the truths knowing these things these are truths for those who are spiritually noble those who can understand this world of suffering that we live in and so for those who are not spiritually noble those things are not true we don't believe that life is qualified by suffering we don't believe that the cause of suffering is the belief in self we don't believe there's a state beyond suffering and we don't know how to get there but for those who know these things then one can follow that path and therefore that those four truths in noble such people the term is is Orion that wonderful Sanskrit term that was completely ruined in the twentieth century it means Noble or superior it was a term an ethnic term in ancient India and the Buddha made it a religious term so he went there and he taught the Dharma he lived until the age of 80 at that time in a little town called kusinara he laid down on his right side and passed into nirvana before he did so however his disciples asked him what they should do with his body after he was gone he said I should be cremated and my the bones should be placed in a buried in a mound at a crossroads this term / Mound and Sanskrit is stupa where we get our word in English tope so he passed away their relics were gathered groups of his followers came from across North India all claiming the relics for themselves a fight was about to break out then when Brahman said let me divide these into eight piles and give those to the aid group to the Buddha's followers so it gave the eight piles of bone and teeth to his followers there was a bunch of ashes left that one young man took and then the Brahman himself kept the the bucket that he'd used to divide up the relics and that because it had touched the relics of the Buddha that was also sacred and so these relics were entombed in ten stupas around North India and that's a story goes 200 years later the emperor ashoka a great buddhist paid and went and broke open those 10 stupas took all the relics and when went about building 84,000 stupas across his kingdom so when you see a JD in Thailand or a stupa in India chew denim to bed a pagoda in East Asia these are all stupid they're all supposed to contain relics of the Buddha but before he died the Buddha said after I die you should go on pilgrimage to four places the place I was born in Lumina Garden the place where I was enlightened at the gaya the place I gave my first sermon s or not and here where I'm about to pass away and those who go and program egde to these places if they happen to die along the way they'll be reborn in heaven so the death of the Buddha is a momentous moment in Buddhist history and the belief is that from the time the Buddha dies the farther we get away from the Buddha the more difficult it is to achieve enlightenment and various prophecies are made about how long his teaching will last us some saying hundreds of years some saying 5000 years but eventually his teachings will disappear completely another Buddha will not come to the world until the teachings of our Buddha Shakyamuni Buddha have disappeared utterly no more books about Buddhism no more lectures on a Saturday afternoon about Buddhism no more professors of Buddhist studies completely gone the word Buddha will not be known and at that time these relics that have been dispersed across the globe will break out of the stupas in which they've been enshrined for centuries and they'll reassembles in the form of a skeleton under the Bodhi tree in India to be worshipped by the gods one last time and then that will burst into and it's only then in the far distant future that the next wood though will come but we know who he is we know his name we know where he lives his name is Maitreya and at this moment he's living in the highest of those six heavens the one with the eye contact orgasm waiting for the time to appear in our world and when Maitreya is portrayed iconographically he does not sit in the lotus posture unlike all other Buddha's he sits in a chair like this and the reason that's given is that if any of you have ever sat in Lotus posture or tried to do so it takes a long time to get your legs sort of untangled and sometimes your legs are numb it takes a while to sort of get up but because Maitreya is ready to come he sits like this and he can just stand up and enter the room of his mother that doesn't mean that Maitreya is inaccessible and there have been many attempts over the course of Buddhist history to meet him and one of the most famous occurred in the fourth century when one of the greatest figures in Buddhist philosophy a monk named a Sangha attempted to meet with Maitreya he was the greatest philosopher of the day and therefore there was no one who could answer his questions only Maitreya could answer them and so he decided to enter into some meditations in an attempt to contact Maitreya he found a cave went in meditated for three years nothing so he was about to give up and he came out of the cave and he saw a man holding like a like a railroad spike like a big piece of metal and he had that in his left hand and a piece of the finest Banaras silk in his right hand and they were just rubbing this big hunk of metal and asanga said what are you doing sir he said I'm a tailor and I'm making a needle for myself and Sangha some um that's impossible I said no I've actually already made three at a little box of three needles he had made and so a Sangha thought you know I should probably give another try so I went back in the cave meditated for three more years and at the end nothing came out but noticed over the six years from the roof of the cave just a little drip drip drip of water had worn out a little depression in the stone for the cave and he thought that's really inspiring this little weak water has worn away stone through persistent effort let me go back in goes back nothing comes out again and notices that the bats who fly in and out of the cave every night and back in the morning with their little kind of skinny little bat wings have sort of smooth out the surface of the roof of the cave a bit and that sent him back in so now it's 12 years zero and he comes out and they're at his feet is a dog and she has a wound in her thigh in the back and the wound is infested with maggots and he decides he has to try to save this dog's life but as a Buddhist we know that animals and maggots are sentient beings they all are deserving of happiness and to avoid suffering and so he knows if he removes the maggots from this dog's wound they will they will die and he can't allow that to happen so he traded in his begging bowl for a knife and cut off a piece of little square flesh from his right leg and put that down on the floor of the cave to give to the maggots but then how do you move maggots from a wound to piece of your own flesh they're very fragile they'll kill them if he touches and they wanted to try to use a stick that wouldn't work and so I thought well you know the only possible way to do this safely is to use my tongue but he was disgusted by that as we would all be and so he put his hands over his eyes and stuck out his tongue and bent down to transfer magnet number one and his tongue just touched the cold stone of dick of the cave floor and he opened his eyes and Maitreya was standing there of course his first question was hey twelve years you know where have you been and Maitreya said you know I've been here the whole time I've been here all 12 years Anna Sangha said that's impossible because I you know I didn't see you the whole time and as the future Buddha Maitreya has very nice robes and he said to a Sangha take a look at the front of my robe here and it was covered with dried saliva and crumbs and pieces of food he said I've been so close to you for the past twelve years that when you eat your meal every day from your begging bowl you've gotten your crumbs all over all over my nice robe here so twelve years of meditation was not sufficient for you to be able to see me your karma was not pure your mind had obstacles that were preventing you from seeing me although I was here that one moment of compassion for the dog that cleared a way that those obstacles from yours from your eyes and you could now see me so Sangha wasn't so sure about this so he said well let's go into town and in one of the odd moments in Buddhist history the Sangha puts my tray up on his shoulder carries him into town nobody sees anything he sees a monk walking around with his arms like this one old woman saw asanga carrying a dog on his shoulder so they said let's go and Maitreya said grab on to my robe when they flew him up to the sixth heaven there and gave him five books called the fireworks of Maitreya that you can find in any university library today so we're left then with this idea that the scriptures of the Buddha is more what Buddhists need to believe in and those scriptures are important and so we find people going on pilgrimage as the Buddha said but then beginning as Buddhism begins to spread monks going from China particularly from Sri Lanka to India to get scriptures and so the latest book of mine that was mentioned is about a an eighteen-year-old Korean monk who in 7:20 went to China got on a Persian ship sailed along the coast of Vietnam then down to Sumatra where he stopped on to India to Gbenga got off the ship went to the four places that the Buddha said to go to where he was born enlightened gave his first sermon and died he went to the place where the Buddha descended from heaven after he taught his mother some kasha where it said that the latter the the stairway that the Buddha came down on was still to be seen he traveled south to some of the great cave temples of India then up north to Afghanistan and Pakistan which was at that time a major center of Buddhist practice remember the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in Afghanistan then this young monk for some reason took a left turn he went to Persia and Arabia found his way back and made it back to China that entire journey took him only three years his name was Jay Chou and so what I've tried to do in that book is to imagine what he saw but twelve places where he's I told this story that he would have known what it would have known the artwork that he would have seen he didn't stay anyplace long enough to learn Sanskrit to learn languages as the as many other pilgrims did from China his encounter with Buddhism was through art and architecture so in 1978 I was a graduate student on a Fulbright fellowship living in a Tibetan monastery in South India I was the only white guy there it was all Tibetan monks all men and me and at night the young monk would come to my room and they would say we've heard that the world is round is that true and I said yeah it is you know we've now you know sent the Apollo spacecraft has gone into space we have these fabulous photographs that show around world and the world is round then one night an old monk came to my room one of the senior monks of the monastery he said understand he was telling the young monks that the world is round and I said sir yes I've been saying that we have these photographs from space and the other thing is that just the entire world has been explored and no one has seen Mount Meru and he said you could see it if you had pure karma thanks very much [Applause] a chair has been placed here for me to respond to any questions that you might have so I think the lights are going up and people are there with microphones yeah so how does Buddhism explain what's happening in Myanmar Buddhism does not have a good explanation what's happening Myanmar the Myanmar situation has to do with ethnic tensions between the Burmese and the baranca people as you may know the British fought three wars with Burma called the 1st 2nd and 3rd anglo-burmese wars and in the third one they completely conquered the come to the country deposed the King deposed that can't be the head of the Buddhists order this head monk they brought in then workers from Bengal who were Muslims and these are the people now being persecuted and so there is nothing in Buddhist doctrine to justify what's happening there it is the case that there have been tensions historically between Islam and Buddhism Buddhism disappeared largely from the Indian subcontinent around the 14th century and one of the several factors that led to its demise were Muslim troops coming in through Afghanistan and moving moving to the east so there's some historical memory there but in my own opinion it's just largely racism and the fact that Buddhist monks are condoning this is very unfortunate hello at one point you mentioned how Buddhism considers there to be many hell's or many different places that are held and I was just wondering if according to Buddhism is this world a hell just wondering is this word a hell is this world to hell no so this world is you mean the human realm you're talking about right the human realm is is the best place to be because gods in Buddhism are there blissed-out they're just they have they have pleasures beyond those that we can imagine they're too happy to think about anything like liberation from suffering because they have almost no suffering the beans and in hell are so tortured by and the tortures there are unspeakable they just don't have the any possibility of thought to think about anything other than just experiencing this awful pain so the human realm is said to be the ideal place for the practice of Buddhism because we have enough suffering to know that suffering exists but we're not destroyed we're not paralyzed by suffering and we have enough happiness to understand that happiness exists but we're not completely just intoxicated by it so from the Buddhist perspective rebirth as a human is something very good and extremely rare and therefore not to be squandered do bill disagree on the concept of Nirvana nirvana yeah yeah Nirvana is the word in Sanskrit means like to blowing out like a candle going out Nirvana and the early tradition is essentially the end of rebirth and so it doesn't sound particularly pleasant to us from our limited perspective the idea is that in Buddhism is that we've all been reborn literally infinite times in the past there's no beginning to the process of rebirth we have been reborn in every possible form every possible species all of this has gone on and on and on such that we just want this to stop the fact in Buddhism the fact that we that change occurs that we have no control over what's going to happen in the next second that none of us can say with certainty that we're not going to die in five minutes that is unacceptable uncontrollable change and therefore the Buddha is trying to then posit a state beyond suffering and at least as its set forth in the early scriptures that state requires the cessation of mind and body so Nirvana is it's not that you go to Nirvana because there's no one to go there it's not that you're in Nirvana because there's no one to be there when the Buddha died when he passed into Nirvana as the tradition describes at the age of 80 his he was not reborn again therefore just as the continuum of form the physical body ceases dies at death Nirvana is also the death of consciousness it's just stops because it is beyond thought because there is no consciousness there it's literally inconceivable to us we can imagine it what that would be like just as Ford says it's impossible to imagine what it means to be dead and so from a certain perspective the early tradition is saying that this life of uncontrollable change in all different forms of rebirth most of which are spent in Hell or as a ghost or as an animal this has to end and so Buddhism in a certain sense in the early tradition is just sort of just saying please let me let me die let's just let this stop and that state of cessation is called nirvana yep after seeing a film about the Buddha I decided he had what in modern psychology would be called an attachment disorder and from listening to what you've been saying and now with Nirvana being described that way it seems like an effort to avoid attachment and Nirvana is certainly a hundred percent detached after all Buddha did leave his wife and child twice so yeah but they both achieve Nirvana both right the wife and the child so deaf guy means certainly attachment is one of the great fears in Buddhism right attachment means that one is craving things and when they fall apart that just causes suffering and so again we have to think about this in terms of rebirth that the things that we're doing in this lifetime we've done already a thousand times we've been everything the attachment hasn't gotten us anything other than more suffering and so there's also a philosophical reason behind not attachment which is that there's no self we are just a process of thoughts and a form we're a psychophysical process there's nothing in us that lasts longer than that and therefore there's no person there to get attached to these things that we want are all falling apart all the time and so non-attachment is the proper attitude toward those things which are all ephemeral anyway it is the case that the Buddha did leave his wife behind at age 29 and he left behind a newborn son but from the point of view tradition he came back his wife was not happy when he returned she said I want you to give you her son his birthright little little five-year-old boy six-year-old boy and the Buddha ordained him as a monk which made her very unhappy and made his father unhappy and the father said listen you cannot do that this is my grandchild you know you cannot make him a monk and the Buddha said well I'm sorry and going from now on will make a rule that says you have to have your parents permission to become a monk of course I'm his father so I'm giving permission but in the future we won't do that then his wife and as well as his stepmother they were the sum of the first nuns and when the Buddha ordained women he did say something that was revolutionary in ancient India which was that women can achieve enlightenment and both his stepmother and his and his wife also did so so what is the gift that one is giving what it what is attachment mean if he is able to then provide them with the path to liberation from the Buddhist perspective that's the greatest gift of all despite the fact those of us who are parents would find this very hard to deal with yep well right now we're in 2017 this is son yeah we're in 2017 and the Dalai Lama is the center of the Buddhist religion and the Chinese are doing everything they can to get rid of him and name their own person which hasn't quite worked so far what do you see happening to Buddhism when the Dalai Lama is gone well so the Dalai Lama is not the head of Buddhism's this is very important to know the Dalai Lama is definitely the world's most famous Buddhist that's that's not disputable but the dalai lama is obviously a follower of only one of the many forms of Buddhism Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan Buddhism there are four schools of Buddhism and he is a member of one of those four and so he's a particularly important figure in one sect of one form of Buddhism for historical reasons he's a very famous figure worldwide now but he does not speak for Buddhists outside of the Tibetan tradition and there would be some Tibetan Buddhists who would also say that he doesn't speak for them in 1642 a Mongol general defeated the enemies of the Dalai Lama and placed him on the throne of to bed so it's only sense to well only since 1642 that the Dalai Lama has been head of state this was a time of the fifth Dalai Lama so he is he was born in 1935 and so he is getting on in years he will at one point pass away according to Buddhist doctrine he can choose where he's going to be reborn he is a kind of advanced being who can choose his place of rebirth and he has said that he'll be reborn in exile not if not in Tibet and so what is likely to happen is that at the time of his passing a Dalai Lama will be found in exile and the Dalai Lama who found into bed there will be two two little babies and then we'll see what happens I mean this form of succession that the Tibetans came up with in which the leader dies and then is found as a child and then takes over when he becomes twenty is a very inefficient form of political succession and that will be tested in the future yeah could you a please speak to the function of chanting and be nowadays everybody says well you perform good works so you get good karma that's your reward or you've been bad and so you get bad karma could you please elaborate on that or correct it chanting so chanting can mean many things in Buddhism I mean something that's important to know about the Buddhist tradition is that the Buddha probably died around 400 BCE it's interesting that scholars have been trying to figure out when he lived for a long time and there been big debates in terms of entire centuries right you find articles written by New Testament scholars arguing whether Jesus was born in three BCE or 1 BCE and we don't even know when he lived with many precision at all it is the case however that in ancient India whether it was the Hindu Vedic tradition or Buddhism teachings were not written down writing existed but writing was for commerce the truth is something that is spoken the truth is something that is heard and so nothing that the Buddha taught was written down for 400 years after death if I'm remembering correctly the earliest of the four Gospels was written something like 35 years after the crucifixion in the case of Buddhism were talking about 400 years and so what buddhist monks did was chant that's their job and we look at the way a monastery is is divided we have monks whose job it is to memorize and chant the long discourses and the middle sized ones and the short ones and so this chanting of the scriptures goes way back and continues to the present day karma it's a whole nother lecture but in in brief the Buddhists want to say that the universe is naturally ethical that good deeds bring about happiness in the future and bad deeds bring about suffering without their need for God to reward the good and to end up and to punish the bad of course what does good and bad mean is of course the obvious next question and the Buddhists have a very lengthy answer to that but they would say that in general there are ten bad things one is is killing the second is stealing the third is sexual misconduct the next is lying the next is speaking divisive ly next is speaking harshly next is speaking senselessly and then being covetous wishing harm for others and wrong view those 10 things and when we look at that list which again is quite fascinating we see that the first three killing stealing sex misconduct are done with the body the next four are done with speech and the last three are done with the mind right coveting wishing harm and wrong view such that thoughts create Karma not just what you do or what you say but what do you think and these deeds karma just means action these deeds accumulate have accumulated over all of time such that everything that we experience good or bad as a result of these past so enlightenment then when the Buddha sat that under the tree that night not only did he understand something that made it impossible for him to create anymore karma but most importantly that vision of reality incinerated all of all the Karma he'd accumulated over infinite number of past lives so that when his lifespan which had already begun ran out at the age of 80 there was no karma to impale him to the next rebirth and therefore he entered nirvana you mentioned the four places of pilgrimage yeah and you mentioned the four sects thinking about places that are important to Buddhists where might they be such as in the Buddhist caves in India or on the Silk Road or where are some of the places that that this this activity happens today oh they're there hundreds and thousands of such places so I mean it's important you know we can we've put because of particular events of the 20th century we tend to believe that the primary practice of Buddhism is meditation that's false over the course of human history the vast majority of Buddhists have not meditated for one minute what they do is to make offerings and what they do is go on pilgrimage so if you live in North India it's easy to go to the place where the Buddha was enlightened the most sacred place in the Buddhist world but each Buddhist country has its own places of pilgrimage its own sacred places and going there and making offerings this is a way of accumulating good karma and so every Buddhist country has its own very famous place which people still go to to the present day yeah [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 2,118

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Donald Lopez, Religion, Buddhism, Belief

Id: 5hwl22kvt8Y

Length: 55min 35sec (3335 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018