MING: Well, good
afternoon, my friends. My name is Ming. I'm the Jolly Good Fellow
of Google for one more week, because next week
I'm retiring from Google. And this is the very last
guest I am hosting at Google, and very fittingly, it
is Professor Bob Thurman. Bob is a wonderful human being. Behind his back, we
call him Buddha Bob. He's sort of like--
I think he should be more like Bob the Buddha,
sort of like Bob the Builder, except with better karma. Bob the Buddha is considered
the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism. In 1962, Bob became
the first American to wear the robes of a
Tibetan Buddhist monk outside of Halloween. Eventually, he left his job,
and he became a professor at American University,
and right now, he is a Jey Tsong Khapa professor
of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University. He's also the president
of the Tibet House, which he founded with this guy called
Richard Gere, which you may or may have heard of, and
also Philip Glass, which you may or may not have heard of. He's also the president
of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. He was see considered one of
25 most influential Americans in the 1997. And in 1998, he didn't
do anything after that. He has been profiled in "The
New York Times," in "People" magazine, in "Time," he has
appeared on CNN, "The News Hour," Larry King, Oprah. He is close personal
friends with the Dalai Lama. He knows all the dirt,
so ask him later. He's also the father
of Uma Thurman, so he knows the dirt as well. Ask him too. His hobbies are carpentry,
landscaping, and saving the world. He's here to talk
about his latest book, "Love Your Enemies." So now that I have this
book, all I need is enemies. My friends, please welcome
our dear friend, Bob Thurman. [APPLAUSE] ROBERT THURMAN:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Ming. So sweet. That was very sweet. I really enjoy your introducing
me more than talking. I'm sure. And just I'm doing this, or
my wife will be mad at me if I don't. So great. So hi, everybody. I was asked to
talk about ethics, and I just made a slide. I do have a lot of PowerPoint,
but for some reason, I didn't feel like
doing PowerPoint. So you probably get
PowerPoints all the time on engineering problems and
God knows what down here, so I didn't think I would
do that while I was here. But then I decided I
would make this one slide. And my talk takes
off from a book that His Holiness
the Dalai Lama wrote called "Beyond Religion--
Ethics for a Whole World." Have any of you ever seen
that book or read it? Ming has, I'm sure,
and a few people have. And what he does there is
because His Holiness has always been trying to
improve understanding between different kinds of
groups of people who identify themselves as different
from each other, and his main job there, one of
his three main jobs in life, as he puts it, is to improve
the mutual understanding of the world religions, because
there's been so much conflict in history between them. But one thing that he does
when he has meetings, world religious meetings,
he always a little bit flummoxes the other
world religious leaders by saying that there's
another world religion which is secularism, which are
nonbelievers, as he puts it. And he used to say-- I don't
know the statistical basis of him saying that. I never did ask him. He used to say, if there are
4 billion people who believe in some religion or another,
there are at least 1 billion or 1 and 1/2 billion who don't. That was a previous
earlier count, I guess. Now we're up to seven. So I don't know how
he does it just now. And they do have a belief,
and they have a belief of what lies beyond death. They have a belief,
and actually I think I can prove to anyone who
wants to debate it that that is a faith belief actually, rather
than an evidenced belief, which we can discuss. And so in that book,
which he originally wanted to title "Secular
Ethics," he wanted to show that there is a reason
and a motive for human beings to be ethical,
because it fulfills the aim of human beings,
which finally, of course, like all animals, the aim of
any animal is to avoid pain and to achieve happiness. Avoid suffering and
achieve happiness. That's sort of the
basic goal of everyone. Whatever other goals
they may set themselves, no one wants to suffer. No one wants pain. Everyone wants pleasure
and/or happiness, depending on how
they define them. And then there's
mental levels of pain and physical levels of pain. And so he wrote that
book, and in the book, basically, he used sort of
anthropological insights, pretty much, and some
biological, a little bit of biological thinking
of secularists or scientific
materialists to prove that the human being as a
mammal, as a being that when it's young is helpless for
many years, at least a decade, at least till the teenage
time, at which point the human being thinks
they're independent. But the parents don't. The parents think they need
help right up until they're parents themselves pretty much,
and sometimes even after that. Grandparents get sucked in on
babysitting and what have you. And I can attest to that. And so because of
that, human beings do depend on the kindness of
strangers, not only Mae West, but everybody. After all, the mammal
conceives a new life, the more intelligent half of the
mammals, that is-- the females. They allow a total
stranger to come and have a condo in their
belly, which is quite a thing. I think if guys think about
it, I think you'd be hesitant. I would. I don't know about you, but
suddenly, there's something down there, and it wants
a different kind of food, and it wants this and that,
and it kicks after awhile. And then it's a
real pain more than in the neck to get it
outside of yourself. And so that's all a bunch
of altruistic activity of the females, and the
males have to carry along. They have to end up helping,
so mammals' basic nature is what he's trying to say. Buddhists don't like
the idea of anything having an absolute nature. They have a wonderful
hermeneutic principle in Buddhist thought, in
Buddhist science, I should say, because in Buddhism,
philosophy and science are not necessarily separated so
dramatically as it has become in the West nowadays. But in Buddhist science,
there is a rule, a hermeneutic or a rule of interpretation. And that is that there is
only one kind of teaching that is considered
definitive in meaning, and that kind is the pure
negation of something of self, the negation of
substance, the negation of any sort of a relative
absolute, you could say. It's almost simplistic
and so simple, actually. The famous concept
of emptiness-- we've all heard of
it-- selflessness-- these are famous concepts. And what these mean, they don't
mean that things don't exist. Emptiness is not nothingness. Completely different word in
any of the Buddhist languages. And what emptiness means is
that all relative things are empty of any
non-relative element or what they would
call intrinsic reality, intrinsic identity, any
sort of thing like that, which is really almost like
it's a definition of the words. It's almost a tautological. If something's absolute, you
can't relate, because absolute is the opposite of relative. And so if anybody comes up
with some sort of an absolute and says it relates as some
monotheistic teachings do, as some versions of
Buddhism do, then they are simply misusing language,
to use a Wittgensteinian expression. And so His Holiness, therefore,
is very like a scientist, and great Buddhist
philosophers are like scientists in
that all teachings about relative
reality are relative. That is to say more or less
valid within a context. There is no absolute truth
about relative things, if you follow me, except that
none of them are absolute. That's the only one. That's really a logical thing. But why is that it? So it seems so simple like
why is that a big thing? The reason it's a big thing
is that the human bad habit, cognitive habit, emotional
habit, instinctual habit that causes all suffering for
human beings in Buddha's psychological and
philosophical analysis is the feeling that
we habitually have that we are absolute. The person has a feeling,
the unenlightened person has a feeling that the one thing
they are sure of-- for example, Descartes perfectly well
illustrates-- stop vibrating-- perfectly illustrated
that when he decided that the one thing he
was absolutely sure of was that he was worrying
about what was absolute. In other words, he was thinking. That's the famous thing. He didn't need
Buddhism for that. And everyone subconsciously or
subliminally or instinctively feels something about themself
is absolute, and therefore, when pressed in a corner
of a life and death thing, like my life is
the one absolute for me type of thing people feel
that, which, of course, from Buddha's point
of view is erroneous. His teaching of selflessness
means that that's an error. That doesn't mean
that I don't exist. It means that I am a relational
being, not an absolute being. That means that other beings
are equally as real and as important as I am, and that
little shift of not being the absolute center
of it all yourself, of coming to this
viscerally understand that, first intellectually
and philosophically understand that, and then viscerally
understand it-- that's the whole campaign
of Buddhist teaching. Because once you do
really understand-- like I had an old
Mongolian guru who had a couple of great sayings--
passed away a long time ago, but one of his
great sayings was, everyone goes around--
this was three or four decades before "The Matrix." He said, everyone goes around
secretly thinking, I'm the one. Therefore, I nearly fainted
when they started on that in "The Matrix," going to
see the oracle, who's the one, you know. So everybody secretly
thinks, I'm the one. And then the second
one is, people are not wrong to say that they are real. The problem is people
think they're really real. So all it is. A lot of people misunderstand
Buddhism and think that the big insight is
that you don't exist, and then you're free,
and everything is cool. And actually, there are
certain modern Buddhists who think that scientific
materialism ratifies that by discovering that
you're just a brain bouncing around
inside a skull box and running around until
the brain gets tired, and you have a stroke or
collapse or something, and then you don't
exist anymore. So in a way, essentially,
you don't exist. You're just a robot
that is deluded into thinking you exist, as
long as your heart is pumping, and your brain is registering
and convincing you that you're there, but
you're not really there, because if you just
squash your brain, you simply cease to exist. So that's what Buddha was saying
in selflessness and emptiness, and even some translators
used to translate emptiness as nothingness, which
is just completely very bad, because Buddha is
very clear that emptiness as a sort of ultimate
cosmological principle or something like that is
a middle way, a central way between nihilism,
nothingness, and absolutism, making some sort of
absolute out of something. Emptiness is therefore really
what it truly is is relativism, and Buddha really is the
discovery of relativity. And therefore, ethics was a
central thing for Buddhism, because ethics operates on
all levels-- physical, not just physical, not just
verbal, but also mental. Well, Jimmy Carter knew that. Remember, Jimmy-- most
of you are too young. Somebody remember Jimmy Carter
wrote in "Esquire" magazine how he sinned in his mind. He lusted after some
young thing or something. And I don't know how
Rosalynn took that, but the Buddhists say you
can do that in your mind. In other words, you can commit
a negative ethical act just with your mind, even
if you don't act on it. And that's one of
the reasons Buddhists are so much into searching
inside themselves. I have to say it with the
right emphasis in this room. So it's a very big deal. Ethics is a very big deal. Now the problem-- so then His
Holiness does that in his book by talking about what human
life is like and the fact that we do love-- are
happy when we love someone, not only when we're loved,
but also when we do love, we become very, very happy. You know, Gene Kelly dancing
in the rain, what have you. And he has two pillars, he
said, of his secular ethics. And one of them is
human nature, the nature of the human as a
social animal, which he takes from a certain
side in anthropology, although he cites many studies. There are more and more
studies that-- actually, in the famous argument between
Ashley Montagu and Konrad Lorenz historically in the
history of anthropology, there are many more things
supporting Ashley Montagu that humans are really
basically gentle. They're basically kind. But they can become vicious,
worse than any animal, because the nature
of the human being is so completely programmable,
deprogrammable, reprogrammable, which is why education is
so critically important. Anyway, basically among animals,
the human is a more gentle one. We don't have claws. We don't have fangs. We don't have armored skin. We're soft-skinned and so forth. And the young take
existence inside the bodies of the female, which
is more of a connection to the next generation
than if you just drop an egg somewhere in the
riverbank or by the ocean and wait for the little
turtle to crawl out. There's a little less
parenting involved when you do it with eggs. So he uses that. And then the second one is the
relationality of everything and that everyone
is very interrelated and that people
are never happier than when they do something
successfully for someone else, and they feel really good about
that like seeing that person smile, seeing that child happy. They really do,
and then that leads to his slogan about
compassion that he does, where he says that if you
want someone else to be happy, be compassionate to them. And he says if you
want to be happy, be compassionate to
someone else, which is his favorite slogan
coming from the tradition of Shantideva, a great, great
Indian philosopher and sage and yogi call Shantideva,
who wrote a great book called "Way of the Bodhisattva"
that I recommend to everyone. It's one of the great world
classics of spirituality, actually, in which he makes the
argument very, very thoroughly that our nature
is such that when we do something for
someone else that succeeds, it is its own reward. And they may even make the very
clever psychological argument that when you focus on doing
things for others, then actually, you temporarily forget
about what you need yourself. You tend to. And then that's a
key to happiness, because the one certain
way to be unhappy is to think, how happy am I? That's an immediate killer. The minute you think,
how good is it? What am I getting out of here? What's going on? It's like, oh, no,
it's not that good. Whatever marvelous
experience it is when you turn to evaluate
it, you're never satisfied. The Rolling Stones have
a song like that, right? Ain't no satisfaction. So that's His Holiness's
thing on secularism, which is a beautiful
book, and it has trainings in the back,
which is another novel concept to Western
psychologists, which is that you can
train yourself to be more compassionate
and more loving, that it isn't that a
person is just loving. Of course, there's a
set point that Buddhists would agree from
one's upbringing if one is traumatically
brought up, it's maybe difficult to
feel it's natural to be nice and to be loving if you've been
guarding and defending yourself against abuse as a child. But basically, whatever
level of lovingness one is or has as a person can be
much more highly developed. And the negative side, the
opposite of loving-- hating, despising, et cetera-- can
be diminished by training. And that's very important. Should be a part of
everyone's education. It actually is the final purpose
of the Search Inside Yourself strategy, because once
you search in there, you find the negative
reflexes and mechanisms that have caused you trouble in
life, or you lost friends where you annoyed and
offended people, where this and that happened, where
you were dissatisfied also yourself, and then
you can deconstruct, and you can disempower those
negative mental habits, and you can reinforce and
empower the positive ones to a huge degree. And Buddhists would not agree
with those modern psychologists who keep insisting and
write all best-seller books about how helpless you are,
that your unconscious is doing everything, and you really
can't really-- what you think is a free choice is not. And Buddhists don't agree. They do agree that a very
unenlightened person is pretty much robotic in their
reactivity and their reaction patterns, but the
whole path of Buddhism is to become conscious of
your unconscious actually and to reshape it. It's like the Hercules myth
of cleaning the Augean stables is very perfect for the
Buddhist enterprise, because the human being
in Buddha's analysis, the reason it is such
a valuable life form, and that every one
of you has what they call in Buddhism
the precious jewel of a life endowed with
liberty and opportunity. And the liberty has
to do with the fact that you are free of
many kinds of defects. You're not born
in a species that has no language, that has
no culture, that can't share the mind of others
because of having speech and so forth,
literature, in our case, and memory, and a certain
type of self-reflexiveness is not available to lower animal
forms in the human animal form. And some humans, of course,
are less than others. And so they're not all the same. So the liberties are like
that, and the opportunities are where you can
educate yourself, because if a human being, if
a saint, or a near saint-- actually, in Buddha's view,
a complete saint can never become a murderer,
a perfect saint, but there are degrees of really
niceness and sainthood that could become very evil by
different circumstances and reindoctrination. And similarly, even the Buddha
had one famous disciple, Angulimala, who
was a serial killer and became a saint,
complete saint actually in his lifetime by
changing his behavior and so forth, and then went to
some of the families of some of the people he had killed. And he actually
was so genuinely-- he offered his life
to them anyway, if that would have helped. And they actually
didn't take his life when they realized he really
had totally changed, actually. Anyway, that's the Buddha's
analysis of the human being. So I presume, do all of what
is the fourfold for the four noble truths? Everybody know
that in this room? Anybody doesn't know
that, Buddha's sort of original teaching? A few people. Well, I can quickly summarize. It's important to do,
because the people always think, especially new people,
that Buddha's main job was making a religion. Now I'm going back from
Dalai Lama to Buddha, because Buddha did the same
thing as Dalai Lama did in the sense that he grounded
his version of ethics in what would be considered
scientific reality of that time and actually may well still be
considered scientific reality. But I'm not going to get
into that necessarily, unless we go into a question
period, and you want me to. So in other words, what
His Holiness Dalai Lama is doing is same thing Buddha did. His Holiness is
doing it in terms of secular science or
materialist science today, which is the orthodoxy. It's not the dogmatic
orthodoxy among scientists today, scientific
materialism, and in his day, Buddha did that as well. Shakyamuni Buddha
did that as well, which is the basis
of Buddhist ethics, and that's what I
want to talk about it. Anyway, the four noble
truths, his first Noble Truth was that the unenlightened
person is bound to suffer. It's not really a
religious thing. It's a scientific and
psychological analysis of the human condition, and
and also of animals, actually, as well, at a worse
level than the human. But what it means
is that someone who has a false sense
of what they are, and this is especially
defined as it exaggerates their identity, thinking that
that's an absolute thing, and they are
absolutely themselves, and the rest of the universe is
absolutely different from them. That person in that condition,
and that's at a visceral level. They may not even have
that as a philosophy, but that's at a visceral level. That person is doomed to suffer,
because obviously, if it's you versus the universe, you're
going to lose that struggle. No one can overdo it. And then the theisms, the
different forms of theism tend to console us for that
losing experience of living life unto death, and with being
sick and growing old and having all kinds of things
happen to us, and having the pleasures and
joys that we have not last. But we're consoled that there
is an absolute being outside of the universe that somehow
put us in this situation, and as long as we pay
dues to that being and believe in it, that
being will save us. And then we'll have
bliss after death. But that's just
sort of transferring the locus of that absolute
thing into something that is just presumed to
be outside the universe. The person who
doesn't do that, they think that there's an essential
soul in themselves that's a fixed identity that is somehow
disconnected from everything, and they try to
withdraw and retreat into that in various ways. And actually, the
motor materialist thinks so too, surprisingly. They may think they
don't, but they actually do, because since they are
certain that by their brain ceasing, they will become
unconscious permanently, and their mind will
cease to exist forever, including having no memory
of ever having existed, they are saying that they
carry within them an essence of nothingness, actually. That's sort of the
existential thing. So like Jean Paul
Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou can light his cigar
and then light the fuse of some dynamite
sticks wrapped around his head, and then the screen goes white. And that's the idea that
they're reducing themselves to their essence, which is
anesthetic unconsciousness. And yet, there is no evidence
that you're ever going to have anaesthetic no
consciousness, and in fact, if anybody wants to debate the
point with me who considers themself a secularist, I
will be delighted to do so, because there is no evidence
that you will not exist at some point. There can never be, right? If it ever happened to anybody,
nobody ever found them, and they never reported back. I always tease my materialist
friends, didn't Carl Sagan show up after his death and
announce, it's cool guys. I really don't exist. So don't worry about
those churches. Don't worry about
that reincarnation, because I'm not here. Not only did he not do that,
but he never could do that, and no one will ever find
a non-existent entity. No one will ever
discover nothingness. They'll never get a Nobel Prize
for discovering nothingness. It can never be proven,
because it isn't there, and now I think that's
by definition nothing is not there. And therefore, it's a blind
faith belief, par excellence. There might be gods
that might be there. Maybe it wouldn't be quite
as absolute as people think, but there very well
might be some sort of angels and gods and
things, because at least that's something that you
might find or not find, so that can be proven or disproven. But nothing can never be
proven, because it isn't there. We know ahead of time. Anyway, I'm sorry. I know that's a digression. So everyone has that feeling,
the unenlightened person, and then people also
rag on the Buddha, because they say
he was a pessimist, and he was a depressoid, and
he was a killjoy, because he said it's all suffering. But he never said
it's all suffering. He said unenlightened
life is suffering, is going to be frustrating. And it's not as
depressed as Socrates, who said the unexamined
life is not worth living. Buddha never said the
unenlightened life is not worth living. He just said it's going
to be frustrating. And then the second
Noble Truth is the cause of that, which
I already explained. It's the distorted
sense of self, the deepest cause--
then craving and hatred and these mental things
that arise from you thinking you're separate from others,
and therefore, you're against your enemies,
and you're attached to the ones you
want to incorporate in your group, et cetera. And so those are secondary to
the basic sense of absolutizing the sense of separate identity. And that's the
second Noble Truth. The third Noble Truth
is Buddha's good news, which is the prognosis
of the diagnosis, and the prognosis is that
if you knew what reality was, if you realized your
true nature of yourself, which you can do, and then
you will be blissful. You will be in complete bliss,
not necessarily after you die, and not
necessarily by dying, but even in life, you
can be in perfect bliss. You can live in a way
like you were living in a dream in a matrix,
but a lucid dream, where you live a
lucid life, and you know exactly what's
going on in that life, and therefore,
although you might seem to be suffering
to others, you actually don't really suffer. It's an amazing
claim, and he didn't expect people to believe it
actually when he said that. The Third Noble
Truth, he said, this is true for a noble person,
which he defined as someone who understands that. And he said it's
only imaginable, and it's even
difficult to imagine for an unenlightened person. So what you have to do
with this third Noble Truth is try to imagine it. Try to imagine some
kind of perfect life of being blissful at all times. Everyone's been
blissful here and there. I hope everybody at Google
has had a moment of bliss. I really do hope so. I'm not asking for a show of
hands, but I just hope so. So all they're saying is that
if you attain, if you understand reality, what Buddha's discovery
is, that when you fully understand reality, which
again, is a revolutionary claim that a human being can
completely understand reality themself and the world
itself fully and completely, and when they do, they realize
that that reality is bliss and that everything is made
of the energy of bliss. That is to say nirvana
of the Four Noble Truths, only the third is really real. You know the first,
second, and fourth are only relatively real, and
therefore, somewhat unreal. So then the fourth
Noble Truth, which is where I'm finally
going to get to ethics, the fourth Noble
Truth is the truth of the path to the realization
of the nature of reality, which he said was
nirvana, and I'm still hoping it is the case. After 50 years of pursuing
it, I've had hints, and I think it is more strongly
than I did when I started, but I don't claim to be
certain, because you have to be a Buddha to be certain. So anyway, that path is
an educational path, not a religious path,
because you realize that a person who diagnoses
reality in such a way that salvation or liberation,
whatever you want to call it, is accomplished not by
faith, but by understanding. That person is forced
to be an educator. They can't really
just be a preacher like, yeah, believe what I say. Believe this, believe
that, and then you'll be fine, because it
won't necessarily be fine. Belief is not
enough to transform your whole visceral instinctual
structure that it is distorted, and thereby brings
you into conflict with what you relate to, and
therefore, sooner or later inevitably, it therefore
makes you suffer. So then there's the
educational path. The educational path has
eight branches, components, and they have a certain order. And this is where I'm not
against the meditative craze, the meditational craze. I'm for it. But it's not enough by itself
from the Buddhist point of view. In traditional
Buddhist teaching, the meditation part comes after
one has clarified one's world view, as they put it, what
they call developing what-- I got from Alan Wallace actually
this way of translating instead of right view-- he's the one-- I
don't know if he originated it, but he's the one I
first read somewhere. He calls it realistic world
view versus unrealistic, and I really like that. I've always used it
ever since myself. He was my student,
but I'm not too proud to have learned
from him, and we do learn from our students. And realistic world
view is really correct, because it leads to
really what Buddhism really is is realism, because
it's based on the discovery by someone that
reality is bliss. So ignorance can't be bliss. Well, even ignorance
is bliss on some very super non-dualistic way, but
ignorance of that reality causes suffering. And knowledge of that reality
then is knowledge of bliss, that bliss is what you are
and what everything is, and therefore conveys bliss. But you have to
re-educate yourself. You have to develop the
critical intelligence to get rid of all kinds
of half-witted ideas and get rid of them
and see through them through critical thinking. And then that's
rectifying your worldview and making it more realistic. And there, again,
it isn't that you have to believe there is
such a thing as Buddha, you have to believe in nirvana. You're not asked to do
that, because Buddha knows that we don't believe that. If someone comes up and
says it's all bliss, we're going to think,
what are they selling? Snake oil? What is that? I'm not in bliss today. And you know that bliss is
hardly legal in most societies, in fact. It's more or less illegal. So that's not what he wants. What he wants is to look
at what we do think. He's challenging us to shift
our sense that where we ascribe and invent, what we invest
reality in to challenge it, and that's what the
realistic world view is. Realistic world view is
acceptance of causation. That's what Buddha
is truly celebrated as [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. That's Buddha is
the one who argued for the existence of
causation, so what are the causes of
things, and how do you interfere with the causes
of negative things? That's what the
Buddha's teaching was, which is not all religious
teaching if you think about it. But why is acceptance of
causation the beginning of the path of realism? Because that self, that
precious absolute self somewhere in there that
Descartes imagined was there, that less philosophical people
have imagined was there, and we visually imagine
about ourselves, that is some immune to causation. It's like that
point of awareness you have when you remember
what happened 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and the way
you sort of remember is that you are thinking
to yourself like, you were the same point of
subjectivity then as now. There's like one thing
that doesn't change is our sort of point
of subjectivity, which, of course, is what Descartes was
looking for, which he actually failed to find if you remember
if you read Descartes. Then he just presumed that,
well, because I'm looking, that's-- I'm sure of that. But he couldn't actually
find himself, actually. He was like a Buddhist
Yogi in that sense. So the point is if you
accept causality, then even your identity is a construct. It comes from your education,
from your language, from your associations,
it changes all the time, and therefore, you're
a work in progress. You're a Google program. You can be improved. I think I read
something about Google. You're never satisfied
with the way things are. There's something of
your 10 points of Google. It's because if people
think about it in a new way, they'll find a
way to improve it. But that's just the same
as yourself is like that. If you really realize viscerally
that you're a relative self, you would be very careful
what you associate with, what you subject yourself
to, your consciousness, and you would want to turn
it into positive things, and you would want to
develop it artistically. You'd become a work of art
in a way, your identity and your self. It constantly changes. It's not actually [INAUDIBLE],
which means sameness, because it always changes. But therefore, it can
change for the far better is the key thing. So once you realize that you
are this relational thing, inextricably interwoven with all
other relational things, beings and things, then you
get realistic motivation of what to do with your
life, this precious thing that you have of being such an
intelligent, self-reflective self-creative or
self-destructive being, and you don't want to
be self-destructive. You want to be self-created, and
particularly because you don't indulge in irrational
things that just by dying you escape from
every causal consequence, because you accept causality. Therefore, there's no first
cause or uncaused cause. Universe is beginningless. There's no final
destruction of everything. There will always be more
for effects and more effects. Therefore, everything you
do now physically, verbally, and mentally will
have an effect, and that effect is
potentially infinite. The consequences are infinite,
which puts tremendous weight on what you do, because
you a little bit better and a little bit
worse can magnify over an infinite canvas to
limitless proportions, negative or positive. So then third branch of the
Eightfold Path-- now finally, we reach ethics. Third is realistic speech,
realistic evolutionary action, as I translate karma, and
realistic livelihood-- those next three. They are ethics. Now in their ethics one,
here I have my slide. There is this marvelous
thing, which is called [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. The tenfold skillful
and unskillful evolutionary action
path, which is karma. And I call it
evolutionary on purpose. Some of my translating colleague
friends get all nervous. Oh, no. That's the Darwin's word. You can't use that. But that's just silly. Darwin is just a British
gentleman in the 19th century, and he noticed that he had
some monkey-like qualities, and the Galapagos
turtles-- I don't know what all-- the Beagle. The Beagle was the boat, right? Not the dog. Whatever. He did that, and he
noticed this relationship, which was a big shock to
the other white male bearded British gentlemen that they
might be related to something, some fuzzy wuzzies,
some people they were busy genociding
all over the planet with their colonialism. And Buddha recognized
that way back, Buddhists. Buddhists were like,
not only are we related to a bunch of chimpanzees and
dogs and cats and whatever, we've all personally been
chimpanzees and dogs and cats, so of course we're related. And if we're not careful,
we'll return to that, which would not be desirable. You wouldn't really be able to
do a Google search very well with a paw and a claw. We couldn't read. So what I love is this
word kushala in Sanskrit. Kushala-- people
always translate it as virtuous and
non-virtuous, because they want to get into moralism. But actually the
word is skillful, and why is it skillful? Why is it skillful
to save lives and not to kill and to take lives? Why? Because what did you have
to realize what the goal is? Buddha's definition-- when
you understand reality, in order to understand,
reality is infinite, right? You have to become infinite to
understand an infinite thing. Now everyone here,
not only have they had their moment of bliss,
at least one or two, but they've had
long time of bliss, and they've been in love. Everybody in here has
been in love, I'm sure. Some may still be-- oh,
there they are, 19 years. They're in love still. And when you're in love, you
identify with the other person, and you consider their feeling
as important or more important if it's really good. When love really
lasts, each one. That's why other people get
jealous of people in love, because they're so
deluded the two of them. Because each one thinks
the other one is so great, and nobody else thinks
anybody's great. And so here are these two
people confirming each other. Oh, you're the greatest. Romeo and Juliet, they
kill them off, whatever. They do their best. But the point is we know
in a parent and a child, especially mother,
but father can also identify completely with
the life of the child and sort of feel it. And the good mother knows when
that child needs to be burped, when it needs food, whatever
it is, it can sense it. She senses it, because she
empathizes with that child. So a human being has
this-- but the guys, they empathize with their
teammate on the football team or their platoon in
the army, a buddy. And so we have this
ability to expand our sense of identification. Human beings do. So Buddhahood is simply where
that sense of identification has infinitely expanded,
where her being is completely filled with every life is
their life, the same as them. And they identify
with all of it, and they have the
bliss energy to be able to even feel the
sufferings of the others without being dragged into
them, but be well enough to be able to interact
with them, to try to help them suffer less, which
is what the Buddha's job is like a doctor. So if that's your goal, if you
imagine there is such a state, even though it might take a
million lifetimes to achieve, but since you feel that you are
a continuity of such lifetimes anyway, so you might as well. How many of you have
heard of a Bodhisattva? A lot of you. OK, good. So one time His Holiness
asked me to give an evening talk before a bunch of people,
big 500, 800, 1,000 people were going to take a
Bodhisattva vow, where you say I want to
help all beings become free of suffering. I want to save all
beings from suffering. It's like [INAUDIBLE] like that. So I did the night before, but
then my main point of my talk was to urge people not to
take that vow too lightly, because unless you
think that you have a common sense of
reality that you are going to have this
infinite continuum of future, or rather that's your best
bet-- you don't really know, but everything else in
nature has a continuity. So there's the law
of thermodynamics. So why is your consciousness
the one piece of energy that won't have a continuity? So the best bet is that
there will be a continuity, and as long as you don't have
that as a common sense feeling, then it's silly to say, I'm
going to save all beings from suffering, because you can't. There's no time. Only if you and the
beings are going to be carrying on forever. Now imagine the opposite. Imagine where you had
a common sense feeling that you're never going to get
out of everybody else's face, and they're not going
to get out of your face. Instead of leaving here when
this talk is over and came back to whatever, I'm going to
be in your face forever. Next life we'll be
back in a lecture hall. You'll be giving the
lecture that time. I'll be listening. This will go on endlessly. It's like "Groundhog Day,"
that brilliant Bodhisattva movie of Bill Murray,
who is one of my gurus. And until you get it right,
you keep repeating it. So you might as well
take a Bodhisattva vow. Why? If you're going to be tangled
up with all beings forever, then you better optimize
your tangling up with him. And what's the optimal way to
be tangled up with someone? You love them,
and they love you. You love them. You can't force
them to love you, so you try to be
as loving as you can yourself by becoming
a Buddha, love meaning wanting them to be happy. And then when they really get
happy, they will love you. So then that's the best way. Buddhahood, they
have these pure lands that they describe
where you become Buddha, and you help all the other
beings to become Buddha. And I always think of them
as John Belushi's Food Fight Universe. Why? When I have a cookie,
I want my cookie. Well, maybe I'll share it
with you if you want a cookie. And that's how we are
in the ordinary world. But in a Buddha land,
well, if I have cookies, I want you to have the cookie. But then you want me
to have your cookie, so we end up throwing all
the cookies at each other. And it's a much better
way when you are just trying to grab cookies for
yourself, as a friend of mine used to say, it's everybody's
out before himself. You have to fight over all these
people who want your cookie, but when everybody
loves everybody else, then you don't worry
about yourself. You're willing to
give everything away, but you get buried in cookies. So it's a much better way. So then take a Bodhisattva vow. Then I want to make
a world like that, where everybody loves everyone,
because these beings won't be happy. I won't make them happy
unless they love each other. So if that's the goal is
to be that kind of a being, when you save the life of
another being, in a way you're identifying
with their life. They become some tiny
bit one with you. They have those
things in cultures where if you save
a life, then you are responsible for
the person you save. The person they want to serve
you and help you, et cetera. They have like these codes
of warrior, things like that, and those are sort of
superficial forms of that. But the basic idea is the
same, whereas when you kill, you're saying, we're not in the
same universe of that being. Of course, in the Buddhist
view, when you kill, you haven't
destroyed that being. You've just taken
away their body, but you have said that
their interest is not mine. I don't identify with them. So you're making
yourself narrower as a being, whereas
when you save a life, you're expanding as a
being, because the life you saved you are connected to. It's a piece that you have
a relationship with that. Similarly, when you take others'
property, which is literally steal, means take what
is not given to you, then you're disregarding
other beings' sense of owning something. And you're their feeling
that they own that. It's nothing, and
therefore, it's like a kind of killing
them in your mind, whereas when you
give them a gift, and, oh, I'm expanding my
pleasure of this object by them enjoying it. And so you're, again,
incorporating them. And finally, sexuality
is really important, because that's
when the human form biologically does sort of
melt into the other, ideally. I mean not always, obviously,
but ideally, it's supposed to. And it's a time when
the boundary normally dissolves even without any
question of enlightenment, and beings kind
of merge together. So it's a very sacred
thing, actually. So when even that time
when the human sort of drops their identity
and allows themself to melt, if they keep the
control thing where they're doing it in some harmful and
abusive way to the object in treating another
being as an object, then that which is the deep
visceral lesson of expanding their sense of identification
through love is being abused, it becomes another way of
narrowing your existence rather than expanding it,
whereas loving sexuality is a way of acknowledging
and experiencing a merger with another
being and is, therefore, a very expanding of when
one becomes a larger being by doing that. And similarly, when you lie,
you create a false universe for the other person. You don't include
them in your universe. When you speak to slander
people to cause them to dislike each other, then you are
harming both of them, whereas when you reconcile
them and make them peaceful, then you're enjoying their being
harmonious with each other. When you use speech
violently and harshly just to injure someone's
feelings, emotions, whatever, then similarly,
it's like you're verbally killing them, or
speaking sweetly, you're inviting them
and embracing them. And finally, this is
a neat one I like. It's a little bit the equivalent
in the 10 commandments of blasphemy, but it's
more specific in the sense that speech is what gives
us a collective mind. When you speak and
someone listens, you share minds all
imperfectly, since everyone has a little different
meaning of words, and they don't
necessarily understand, and even the people who
speak don't necessarily know exactly what
they're saying. But if they're trying to speak
in a meaningful way, where the other person has some
benefit for opening their mind and listening, then they're
being helpful to that person, ideally, meaningful, and
meaningful especially tends to mean
something liberating, something that expands their
understanding so that they then can become bigger people and
understand their world better, whereas meaningless
is the kind of people who'd blab away not knowing
what they're talking about. And they're wasting
your mental space by blabbing at you a bunch
of meaningless drivel, and there are a few
people who do that on the media and everywhere. So speech is the same way. Then this is really the
mental, and these three are the like the three poisons--
greed, hatred, and delusion. They're very similar to that. Your unrealistic world view,
you get back to that here in the tenfold thing, and
then this is the anger poison, and this is the lust and desire
and greed poison attachment and so forth. And the opposites are generosity
and lovingness and realism. But what is powerful about it
is that those mental states are considered more powerful
even than the physical ones, because action only becomes
evolutionary in the sense of it has an impact on you when
it relates to the motivation that you do the action out of. So motivation is really
critically important, and this is then why in those
countries, in countries where Buddhism has had a long
sway, thousands of years of experience, centuries of
delivering educational service, whether or not someone is
Buddhist in those countries, there is a greater
tendency for people to search inside themselves,
because they realize that your life is
good or bad depending on how you react to
your situations, more than the situations. We all know when we've been
very happy in a very good mood in a difficult circumstance. We all know when we've been in
supposedly great circumstance, and yet for some reason, we're
having a tantrum or a fight, or we're very mentally unhappy,
and we're not enjoying it. And we've all had that
kind of experience, because the mind is
the predominant one. That's why in Indian science,
unlike Greek science, and unlike your early Chinese
science, in Indian science, the psychology and
philosophy science field was considered the king
and queen of the sciences. Not physics and not
biology or anything, but they were not unimportant,
and they had their own physics and things. But it was the
mind sciences that were considered most
important by far, because that's really what
controls the quality of life. And I always laugh. There's a great verse
in Shantideva's book, and he says-- but he's talking,
of course, about patience. It's in his chapter on
patience or tolerance, developing patience as
the antidote to anger. And he says, you have two
choices when you don't want to walk-- if you have to walk
barefoot, if you're barefoot, and you don't want
to walk around on sharp stones and twigs
and thorns and things as you walk around the
earth, you have two choices. Cover the Earth with leather,
or make yourself a parachute. Because I love that, because
to cover it with leather is like Western culture. It's like a big
softball or something. The planet has turned
into a softball. Then everyone can walk around
barefoot, and they're happy, but actually, at
the end of life, I have no food or
nothing, whereas you have a pair of sandals,
and then there, you can allow your
crops to grow, whatever. Things can be-- it's much
more practical, actually. And this relates
to my hope, which I have failed to achieve
in my teaching career, but I'm hoping someday that the
colonial era will be reviewed, and the West that conquered
the world will be seen as inferior for having done so. And Asia and the
indigenous people who didn't go out
and conquer the world will be seen as superior
for not having done so, just as if you have a bunch
of gentle people on your block who have lovely parties, who
play Monopoly and Scrabble and whatever, and
you google lots of interesting
things and nice time, and then some mafioso
bully comes on the block and demands-- starts a
protection racket on your block and beats a few
of you up, you're going to be afraid
of that person, and they might extract
some wealth from you, but you're not going to think
that's the superior person on your block. You're really not
going to think so, but now our history
is still taught like empire, sun never set. It was all so great. And we're in a way still
stuck in that attitude, and that's really too bad,
because that is a mistake, whereas the Asian
people, we wrongly don't know where-- we want to
reinvent the wheel of the mind sciences, for example,
instead of realizing that the search inside
yourself was well developed. So I'll say it again. It's [INAUDIBLE] path. Finally, I'm going
to stop now, almost. Then there's realistic
creativity or creative effort after these three ethical
things, and this tenfold path of skillful and
unskillful-- oh, yeah. And why is it called
skillful and unskillful? Quickly, because you know when
you lift weights or you train or you memorize something,
your memory improves. Your muscles improve. When you walk or your bike,
you feel more healthy. Someone doesn't
come and award you with improved muscles or
better memory or something because you did something. The doing of it shapes
and changes you, so similarly, an evolutionary
action or karmic action, if you kill, if you live by the
sword, you die by the sword. If you become a killer,
you end up living in armor. You carry around coats of armor. You become more invulnerable. You become more walled off and
paranoid about other people. So the act itself changes you. It evolves you or devolves
you, one or the other. And all of these
acts are like that. Therefore, this
is very key if you know anything about
modern ethical philosophy. Because of scientific
materialism crushing philosophy as a key
and live and important pursuit of human beings, replacing
it with measuring things in materialistic
science-- because of that, people think that ethics
is an arbitrary choice. People are ethical because
they don't want to be caught. They don't want
to be imprisoned. There's no sort of intrinsic
value of being ethical. There's no reason for it. Previously, in
theistic cultures, God told you so, so
he would punish you if you didn't, so that gave
it a reason to be ethical. Without bringing God back,
this path from ancient India, ancient time, which
spread all over Asia, and this path-- the reason
you want to be ethical and you have an element of
enlightened self interest is that these ethical
acts shape your being in a way that is better
for you, if you follow me. Not only are they nice to the
person whose life you save or who don't abuse sexually or
who you give things to rather than taking things
from them, but you yourself become a bigger being. You become an improved being. You have a higher
quality of life. You become happier. And therefore, there's
a biological reason to be ethical, which in a way,
is what His Holiness is doing in terms of
materialistic science without challenging that
irrational thinking of theirs about how they're not going
to have a future life, because he thinks that's
too much for many of them. And it probably is. And he's also not an American. He's not a stupid
American like me. So he's being polite. But I'm after those
kind of scientists who run around, because I
consider that if you think what you do will have no consequence
to yourself ultimately, however bad it
gets, you just die and you have permanent
anesthesia, permanent sodium Pentothal, permanent sleep. So therefore, in a way,
it doesn't ultimately matter whether you're
good or not good. It doesn't ultimately. Then an elite, a
planetary elite that has the levers of power
and authority and it's all of the societies on the
globe that believes that, acts like that-- apres moi,
le deluge, King Louis XVI said before his head was cut
off, but he didn't know it was going to be cut off. Then you're going to behave
recklessly and destructively, and you're not going
to shift the planet out of global warming, and you're
not going to prevent wars. And you're going to run around
dropping bombs and doing things, because you think worst
case, I'll just stop existing, whereas if worst case, you never
know quite how bad it can get. It can always get worse. You will become mindful
that any little thing that could be a little better
is of total importance. And that's what mindfulness is. Final thing,
Samadhiraja Sutra-- who understands cause and effect,
that person will understand emptiness and relativity,
who understands emptiness and
relativity, will be mindful of the
most minute details of the relativity around them. And they will be
extremely careful to make things better and not worse. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.
