The Buddha as a Businessman

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use [Music] only funding for this program was provided by the UCLA office of instructional development [Music] [Music] first of all I have to thank you all for coming secondly I need to thank our Chancellor for the introduction and to say that I hope he will not mind that there will be at least one Sly reference to him in the course of the lecture I also need to thank uh my wife Fleming and my colleague in art history Bob Brown who somehow miraculously transformed a pile of books into something called a PowerPoint presentation I like the Buddha on the screen am am not computer literate and I remain very skeptical about how exactly all of this is going to work at the first sign of trouble I must warn you I will do my best to unplug the damn thing I need also finally to say how very pleased I am that my daughter is here I think she came in part so that she could finally see her father giving a lecture to someone else for a change that said I think we should move on and see if this thing is really going to work uh the man who set this up used tape to point little things to the right button so here we go hang on it is probably fair to say that when we see today an image of the Buddha seated in what appears to be Serene and deep meditation we do not normally consider the possibility that he is pondering on how to avoid paying custom duties and taxes nor is it likely that when we see an equally impressive image of the Buddha engaged in teaching that it would occur to us that he might well be teaching his monk followers how to write a loan contract and not to make unsecured loans or that our Wall Street Bankers would have benefited from being in his audience indeed when we see what must be one of the finest pieces of early Buddhist sculpture from Northwest India we see if we know the story the Buddha as a young prince before he was actually the Buddha seated under a Jambo tree at the moment he first realized the transience and suffering of life we do not see in this image a potential source of considerable revenues in short we are not normally aware that the same Buddha who taught quote all things are impermanent also taught his monks how to use and service a permanent endowment the reason for this cannot be for example that what we call Indian buddh buddist artart preserves only images of an iconic iconic sort in fact Buddhist narrative art from its very Beginnings makes it abundantly clear that the religion of the Buddha was whatever else it was deeply entangled with money and a very great deal of it at that one of the scenes that is repeatedly found in the very earliest Buddhist narrative art at some of the oldest Buddhist sites in India is in fact a business trans transaction a transaction that involves both issues of Law and IL legal case and an enormous sum of money the scene represents the purchase of the land for one of the earliest and most famous Buddhist monasteries in early India the representation of this transaction um uh of this transactions all date to a period before the beginning of the common air and are found even at bodaya the very site of the Buddha's Enlightenment the textual or narrative fact that the land for this venerable Monastery was bought from a young prince or boy for the amount of gold coins required to cover its entire surface that's what you see in the relief sends some startling messages first since the Young Prince was in fact a miner whose father was still alive this would have made the sale entirely illegal from the point of view of classical Indian property law that the case narratively ended up in court and that the court had to be divinely stacked in the Buddhist favor only confirms this as does the historical fact that textual accounts of the sale were repeatedly revised or Rewritten to obscure or to olude its illegality clearly Buddhist authors were aware of the problem and at least one message embedded in this narrative would appear to be that Buddhists in India had some serious problems establishing title to or ownership of real property a second message sent by these the old reliefs is almost certainly a more intended one but sits no less awkwardly with what is commonly thought to be an aesthetic otherworldly religious tradition The Narrative fact that the site was bought legally or not for a fabulous sum of money must at the very least mean that the institution that sat on it was worth even more and that and that value was not expressed in abstract terms or devotional language the inscriptional label written below the re relief that can clearly be seen this works too it's amazing um says anapenda that's the original purchaser gives the jetavana after having bought it by covering it with 10 million coins value here is expressed purely if you will in dollar terms the fact that we do not normally think of the Buddha as a businessman or the Buddhist Community as a business organization cannot then be the result of any reluctance on the part of the tradition to reveal its involvement with money and it becomes even more Curious when it is noted that what we call the Buddhist monastic Community was not modeled to judge by its language um and its organization on a religious institution but on a commercial one the craft or the Mercantile Guild Buddhist sources for example refer to their organization as a sa but sa is a term used to denote a professional Guild in early India professional guilds have a head called the pruka and the Buddha is repeatedly called the pruka of the sa senior members in both are called elders and in both status was as in modern unions determined by seniority induction into the group and training was structured uh in both on a system of Master and apprentice and both use the same terms for each both use seals to mark their goods and correspondence and the goods of both in transit were subject to taxes the Buddha According to some Buddhist sources devised a number of clever strategies to evade them but even he seems to admit that these were not always successful and finally as we will see both gild and sa functioned in some ways like a modern Bank whatever else then it might have been uh it appears that what we call the Buddhist monastic Community or Buddhist monasticism would have been most easily identified in early India itself as a kind of commercial Guild and an economic Enterprise there was moreover no apparent discomfort on the part of the tradition itself about its involvement in business activities in fact local monasteries quite literally advertised it we do not unfortunately have for Buddhist monasteries in early India the kind of documents and records that have survived for monasteries in medieval Europe This loss which has in part all allowed the idealization and misrepresentation of Buddhist monasteries to go on is at least in small part compensated for the by the fact that Buddhist monks like to get their business deals written in stone this is a typical inscription and frequently had copies of some of their legal documents inscribed on the monastery's walls or on their porches if you we'll try it once you can probably just vaguely see the writing up there um these inscriptions like so many inscriptions elsewhere recorded gifts to the monastery but they also publicly advertised the fact that large sums of money had been deposited with the monastery which were intended to generate interest and were therefore presumably available for both personal and Commercial loans given this kind of publicly available information it is not surprising that Buddhism in early India was attractive to the mertile class however much or little it might know about its Doctrine this of course is not I think the sort of thing we would expect again of an aesthetic World denying religious tradition but it is virtually certain that fully developed Buddhist monasticism in India was neither in fact modern research is making ever it ever more clear that monks everywhere were not particularly aesthetic Rus So speaking of early Christian monks in Egypt for example says that archaeology reveals that monks there lived in quarters that were e easily comparable with the best upper class secular dwellings and at the other end of the chronological Spectrum Harvey has shown that Benedictine monks in late medieval England ate far far better than the common people who supported them in early India moreover there is equally little doubt that the domiciles of Buddhist monks were far superior to anything that ordinary people lived in and the only comparable structures were probably Royal they are impressive even in their ruin or in their reconstructions but in Early In classical India the predominant ideology was not in spite of representations in bad movies particularly aesthetic and certainly not adverse to the accumulation of wealth indeed regardless of our Fascination both scholarly and popular with radical Aesthetics or wandering religious holy men or sadus in India it has always been clear that they were never more than a tiny minority and were often perceived as The Idiot Fringe respected in a way but more often feared and grouped in Indian secular literature with criminals charlatans lunatics spies and probably University professors and Buddhist author went to Great Lengths to distance themselves from this type Buddhist monastic values are in fact if one can speak in such broad terms and use again one of our own profoundly middle class and its monastic literature is from the beginning marked with what almost amounts to an obsession with avoiding any offense to the sensibilities of the people who surrounded and supported them but here too there seemed to be misrepresentations in spite of modern guide books or advertising slogans classical India was almost certainly no more focused on religion than any other great civilization it was equally occupied with Science and Mathematics it excelled in linguistics and especially grammar and to it it seems we owe the very concept of zero it was early on occupied with mechanical and architectural engineering medicine and astronomy It produced a highly refined secular literature and systematic works on erotics and it develops sophis sophisticated systems of Law and numerous essentially modern financial instruments the Buddhists of course participated in all of this the Buddhists were for example the first to confront and solve the kind of engineering problems encountered in constructing large freestanding buildings in stone a Buddhist probably a monk wrote a standard Treatise on medicine there are Buddhist authors even in the field of erotics the discipline which has given us the Kamasutra and as a consequence sent any number of westerners to emergency rooms after they tried to assume one or the another of its stipulated positions even and I have to remember to get this one off quick uh even in early Buddhist monastic literature finally and as we will see there are significant contributions to Indian law and economics um in fact the Buddha that emerges in some Buddhist monastic literature appear appears to be very much an Innovative legal and economic thinker sorry folks the reasons that so little of this is widely known or is not known at all are of course numerous but one of them must be the simple fact that in the west generally there is a lamentable lack of knowledge of classical India as a whole the Kam Sutra whose delerious effects have already been noted might seem to be an exception but really isn't f seem to know that very little of it is actually about sex um or or that one of its most important chapters is a description and set of rules for how a good Indian wife should run her husband's house and keep the books The Good Wife quote calculates the year's income and adjusts the expenditure to it she increases the capital and decreases expenditures as much as possible end of quote not everyone I suspect will find this particularly arousing since the only sheets this lady is between our balance sheets the Kamasutra is not in fact a sex sex manual but a guide for a widely found Indian conception of the good life but again because so little is generally known about classical Indian cultural history and since the chancellor is in in attendance it might be worth noting that there is not a single faculty position on campus specifically devoted to this history this conception of the good life because of this is all but invisible and here we have another related reason has already been noted though we might here use the words of Tian moden in the popular imagination particularly outside of India the renouncer Looms large this undue and unjustifiable emphasis on the marginal right radical aesthetic also has almost certainly obscured another and far more pervasive Indian view of the goals of Life a view that has every right to be taken as the dominant one here the goals of men are three Kama Arta and Dharma the pursuit not of life liberty and happiness but broadly translated of sex money and proper order religion of course has a role especially under the protein term Dharma but not a predominant one and Al the although the tradition argued about which of the three had precedence when their dictates were in Conflict the fact remains however however discomforting that each of these goals was a perfectly legitimate one for human endeavor obviously this conception of the well-lived life has implications for the cultural value and understanding of business and the accumulation of wealth and here a significant gap between them and US opens up or at least becomes apparent a gap that no one perhaps has expressed better than Jonathan Perry when he said quote in India It Is by no means easy to find Parallels for such biblical Notions as the love of money being the root of all evil Indian thought has elaborated almost every conceivable explanation for suffering and evil yet by comparison with our own cultural heritage the Striking thing is that there is hardly a mention of money and avarice indeed he goes on the whole thrust of the most characteristically Indian solution to the problem of theodicy that is to say the doctrine of karma is that the rich deserve and have earned their Good Fortune far from being an outsider in Society he says as was the Jew in medieval Christendom the finance year tends rather to be a paragon of religious orthopraxy given the depth and the extent to which such views and values were held in India it should not be surprising but still is that in some Buddhist monastic literature the Buddha himself and numerous monks are repeatedly described as rich and famous the mark of this being also repeatedly said that they have and have accumulated large quantities of personal possessions and private Goods these circumstances in this same literature has given rise to or is reflected in the development of a large and complex system of monastic inheritance law what to do with the sometimes enormous Estates left by monks came to be a problem as did it seems the desire to shelter those Estates from the state the important phrase here however is in some monastic literature and it introduces a final reason that may be considered here for why these things are so little known or appreciated most people even many scholars have no idea how enormously huge surviving canonical Buddhist literature is and even now it is very difficult to express it in comparable or comprehendable terms in spite of marketing strategies of modern Publishers there is not and never was anything like a Buddhist Bible what there are is literally hundreds even thousands of texts some no more than a few pages others constituting several thousand preserved in a bewildering uh array of languages some if we are lucky are preserved in an Indian language in Sanskrit or prit or poly others if we are not and they are far more numerous are preserved only in translations into Chinese Tibetan koton tarian wigor sogdian or something even worse and many of you have probably never heard of some of these languages some again are preserved in their original Indian language and in translations into one or more of the other ones but regardless of the language they are in all of them have come down to us in relatively or very late manual manuscripts and are copies of copies of copies made centuries after the text themselves were composed these texts moreover were almost certainly composed over a very long period of time centuries again after the Buddha himself lived and yet all of them claimed to be his actual words the huge number of these texts means of course that no one has read them all even quickly let alone carefully studied them the way in which they have come down to us means that we have for each one of them serious philological problems and philology the study of texts and language in their social contexts has perhaps because it requires a modum of intelligence and a great deal of hard work fallen out of fashion in the academy although a few brave souls Soldier on even at UCLA a final complicating Factor as if we needed more is that it is reasonably clear from what we what little we know that Buddhists in India were from the beginning a very fractu bunch and from the beginning argued incessantly about what the Buddha said early Buddhist history from what little we know is a long story of splits and fragmentation the tradition itself maintains that very shortly after the Buddhist death there were not just one or two monastic orders or schools but 18 and each one of them had we are told a version of what the Buddha said and each of course thought theirs was the only one most of the literature belonging to these traditional 18 groups has in fact completely disappeared clearly then if anything can be said to be clear in such a situation we are in no position to say with any historical certainty what the actual Buddha said and if we do not know that I at least cannot see how we could possibly know what he meant though this has not stopped some of my colleagues indeed a modern cartoonist's representation of the Buddha's reaction when reading a Buddha scripture seems Al together plausible ironically of course the way out of what what looks like a hopeless impass lies in exploiting the very features that create it we need only admit our ignorance and turn it to an advantage accept our limitations but exploit the incredible richness and diversity of our sources if we start with a simple observation that given the nature of surviving sources we may never be able to say what the actual Buddha says those same sources will then allow us to say with some certainty what Buddhist authors in a rich array of places and different times um thought he said or told others that he did and both are almost certainly far more historically significant than anything he might actually have said in a approaching our sources in this way we obviously will not find the historical Buddha nor will we find only one representation of him instead we will recover a startling range of textual representations each one of which will have to be set carefully in its historical context but of equal importance each one will have to be taken seriously and allowed to speak since at a given time or place this may have been the only Buddha that had been heard here I can present only one example and that in summary form of what happens when you do just that we might take as our example one of the Buddhist monastic codes that have come down to us these codes are called in Sanskrit vineard they were written by m for monks and deliver monastic rules and values all of which are presented as the word of the Buddha himself this according to these texts is what the Buddha said our example is called the Mula sastav vinia you don't have to remember that there is good evidence to show that this code was redacted or compiled in the early centuries of the common air in Northwest India and that it continued to be in C circulation over a wide area of North India for a very long time in fact it remains to this day the sole canonical Authority for Tibetan monastic life this code clearly had a very wide reach uh and would presumably have played a significant role in in the formation of a very large number of Buddhist monks and nuns this code is also a large one in fact even by Indian standards an enormous one although significant parts of it are preserved in Sanskrit the Tibetan translation alone preserves it in its entirety and that translation takes up 12 fat volumes that are the rough equivalent of 8,000 of our Pages obviously in a work of this size the Buddha will appear in many roles and guises but however startling to some he repeatedly and consistently appears and reappears as a skilled lawyer and as an astute businessman and these two roles are often as they are in the modern world intertwined here of course I can only give some examples of examples we have already seen that the community founded by the Buddha was called a SA or a guild but the word sa Also may be the closest equivalent one might find for the English word Corporation and that our Buddha did not choose the term in any loose or metaphoric way would seem to be unavoidably evident from two typical and related passages in our code which in their own way directly address issues of what today would be called corporate or business law I will quote both in full because they are short because they will allow you to see at the outset something of the style and tone of these texts and because they will make immediately apparent that the Buddhist monk that these texts knew was very different from The Stereotype of the Buddhist monk that lives in the modern imagination the first passage says in shasty that's a town a monk borrowed some money from a Layman but when his time had come he died after the other monks had sold his bowl and robes I.E his personal possessions or estate at auction they repaid the Layman but the Layman said Noble ones that monk took this stated amount from me but you have not repaid that much you must return more the monks reported to the Buddha what had occurred and the Buddha said you monks must inform the lender saying quote in regard to the deceased bowl and robes or estate there is nothing Beyond this if he does not if the lender does not believe that you must make a clear accounting if even even when a clear account is declared that is not acceptable you must and this is the Buddhist speaking you must not repay him from what belongs to the sa the Comm or the community or another individual monk first of all notice that in this little text which is at least as old as the second century it is taken as a given that Buddhist monks whatever else they did borrowed money died in debt sold Estates of deceased fellow Monks at auction and that the Buddha himself had addressed these uh situations moreover this Buddha articulates in responding to these situations not a doctrinal statement but a reasonably sophisticated principle of corporate law the monastic Community or Corporation is not a according to the Buddha itself liable for the debt left by one of its individual members and corporate funds what belongs to the community cannot be used to repay it the deceased fellow monks are also not individually liable Al those although those to whom his estate Falls and who liquidated are responsible though not liable for discharging such debts up to the amount realized by the liquidation of the estate but no further this Buddha it would appear was at least legally speaking truly enlightened and L there be any any lingering doubt that he was in such matters also a just and farseeing jurist we need only note that 60 Pages later in the same section this Buddha directly addresses the other side of corporate liability this text says the setting was shasty a monk who was the officer in charge of monastic Affairs borrowed some money from a Layman for the sake of the community and then died when that Layman heard that he had died he went to the monastery and asked where is the monk so and so and the monk said he has died but the Layman said he Noble once borrowed some of my money well then the monks responded I would say somewhat chily go and collect it from him but the Layman said since he took out the loan for the sake of the community and not for the sake of his parents or himself you must repay it the monks reported to the blessed on what had occurred and the Buddha said if it is known that the loan was taken out for the sake of the community the community must repay it then he adds a monastic officer alone should take out such a loan and he must ask all the senior monks before doing so as in the first text here too it is taken entirely for granted that individual Buddhist monks would borrow money but here we are told that they might do so for at least two purposes for themselves but also for the sake of their parents and however surprising it might it might appear to some the second of these purposes is in complete Accord with the fact that this monastic code has a very explicit rule requiring its monks not to sever their all relations with their parents but to be financially responsible for their maintenance they must support them according to the provisions of their own code but private monastic loans are mentioned by the lender here only to distinguish them from the type of loan it issue the this loan is one that was taken out by a monastic or corporate officer for the sake of the community or Corporation and the Buddha's ruling confirms in effect this Difference by saying without qualification that loans of this type must be repaid by the community that the community or Corporation is liable for debts contracted by a corporate officer in its name and he proved ly adds that such officers should seek such loans only with the consent of the seniors this it seems is only good business practice and it seems reasonable to deduce that the Buddha saw in his omniscience that defaulting on such loans would almost certainly quickly dry up the sources of credit the monastery might be dependent on it will been observed that our Buddha delivered two principles of corporate law in dealing with issues that arose in regard to the Estates left by De deceased monks and there is a third important instance instance of the same sort in fact monastic inheritance law is a topic repeatedly addressed in our code and early medieval digest of it for example refers to it at least 20 refers at least to 25 separate texts from three different sections of this code which deal with the topic and it is perhaps not difficult to see why it received so much attention both inscriptions and texts indicate that whatever else they might have been many Buddhist monks were wealthy perhaps extremely wealthy men even the very earliest inscriptions from Indian Buddhist sites indicate that a disproportionately large number of monks and nuns acted as donors and funded the construction and embellishment of Buddhist Monastery and monuments and a single monk for example paid a loan for This Magnificent Shrine uh which is cave 26 at aant texts to point to sign ific private wealth the text that concerns us here for example involves an estate of 3,000 in Gold a princely sum in any period the text dealing with this estate is a particularly good example of the fact that actual Buddhist texts especially perhaps monastic texts very often do not correspond to Common expectations and do not say what one might think they would since the monk who left the estate of 300,000 in Gold died as a consequence of his greed this would seem to present a perfect opportunity for a Stern homy on its evils or at least a rule forbidding the accumulation of such wealth by monks but the text provides neither and the Monk behavior is never even explicitly criticized instead his death and the estate are taken by the Buddha as an opportunity to establish a point of Law and to assert limitations on the application of secular law to the Buddha sa our Buddha in effect did not object to or criticize uh this enormous state state but tried to shelter it from the state by invoking a version of what we would call special privileges for religious entities and in larger terms an aspect of the use of the or or the issue of the separation of church and state both of which are still being argued 800 years later in our own courts an established rule of classical Indian secular law dictated that the estate of a man who died sunless went to the king Buddhist monks being celibate at least theoretically obviously should have fallen into the category sunless and their estate should have been subject to this rule it was in accordance with this rule uh then that according to the text when government officials heard of the Monk's death they immediately went to the monastery and sealed the Monk's room room with the king's seal but when our Buddha was informed of this he according to the text refuses to accept the application of secular law to the case and contests the state's claim he sends a monk to the king with with Specific Instructions he is to ask the king a series of questions which were designed to establish whether or not the king considered the monk a lay subject or had any relationship to him quote great king when there were Affairs of government did you consider the monk when you took a wife or gave a daughter did you consider the monk etc etc if the king answers no which of course he does the Monk Is instructed to Saye great king the secular of Affairs of a Layman are one thing the Affairs of those who have entered the religious life quite another this must not be your concern these possessions fall to the deceased co-religionist this would be pretty bold talk and more than a little in Congress coming from a homeless beggar who had renounced all possessions and social engagement but that indeed is the point since the Buddha in these texts texts which were crafted by Buddhists themselves as early as the 2 century is no such thing we only have the Buddhist version of this case in which of course the king immediately concedes that the Buddha is correct and gives up his claim there is however every reason to suspect that it probably wasn't quite so easy the important point however again is regardless of what actually happened the Buddha himself is presented in an early and authoritative text as actively engaged in complex legal issues and is repeatedly so pictured this it seems to me as remarkable equally remarkable too is the fact that the Buddha is represented in these texts not just as a skilled jurist but also as an astute businessman here too I can only present uh a few of many instances where this Buddha appears a particularly striking instance of our Buddhist of our Buddhist business Acumen has already been alluded to the text says that lay donors built elaborate monasteries but saw that even in their lifetime these monasteries fell into disrepair since donors continued to receive religious Merit only so long as their donations continued to be in use and since lay doners are represented as seeking to ensure permanent endow uh uh permanent ongoing postmortem sources of such Merit that would continue to acre to them long long after their death they offer the monks permanent endowments for maintenance and building the monks initially refuse them but when the Buddha is informed he declares as a rule quote for the sake of the community a permanent Endowment for building purposes must be accepted the monks did so but not being nearly so smart as the Buddha they simply put put the funds in the monastery's strong room or safe yes Buddhist monasteries had them and left them there our monks in other words hoarded the wealth and did not think to make it grow the donors themselves observed that nothing was being done with the funds and asked why they do not lend them out on interest the monks say that the Buddha has not made a rule allowing this but when the Buddha is informed of the situation he does just that he says quote for the sake of the community a permanent Endowment for building purposes must be lent on interest and then he lists a series of other um uh purposes for which such endowments must be accepted and lent out the monks who again are made to appear a bit dense make a series of bad loans to their own donors who considered the money their own to the rich and Powerful who could as today avoid repayment through their contacts to the poor who simply could not repay at this point the enlightened one himself directly intervenes on his own initiative and without being asked to put in place some sound principles of good business he insists that all such loans be adequately secured again a principle our own Banker seem to have forgotten and he insists that the loan be recorded in writing he says to his monks this is the Buddha speaking taking a pawn of twice the value of the loan and writing out a contract which has a seal and is witnessed the permanent endowment is to be placed in the contract the year the month the day the name of the Elder of the community the Provost of the monastery the borrower the amount and the interest must be recorded unless I'm much mistaken The Voice he heard here is not that of a muddle-headed metaphysician or of a man made oblivious to the material by prolonged meditation this is much more like the voice of a hard-nosed businessman intent on putting his Enterprise on a firm Financial footing notice that there is nothing here to suggest that our Buddha was aiming uh at anything like a charitable lending Institution for people in need loans to the poor are specifically flagged as risky and the requirement that any loan from the monastery be secured by a deposit of twice the loans value would almost certainly have put such loans well beyond the reach of the poor and expose them to even greater indigence indeed are Buddha's instructions to nuns in regard to making loans yes they too were even more unexpectedly authorized and expected to engage in such activities explicitly for bad lending to the poor this was business and business was seen as Strictly Business by some Buddhist monks already in the 2 Century because that was what their Buddha taught a quick final example that shows that our Buddha realized the merits even of a well executed advertising campaign this will bring us full circle I hope yes it did uh back to one of the images that we started with our Buddha had ordered that a festival should be held and that the image of the one sitting in the shade of the Jambo tree that's this image should be carried in procession into town but the monks did so without giving notice to the leoty and the leoty complained saying that had they been given prior notice they would have prepared uh ample offerings our Buddha then gave instructions to the monk saying seven or eight days prior to the event it must be announced in the town and Marketplace on the streets roads and Crossroads quote a great Festival will be held the monks however appearing again to be a little thick simply announced quote there is a festival there is a festival failing as you might have noticed to give a date with what must have been some exasperation even for the Buddha the latter then tells them no no no they must include a date but even when that did even when they did so not everyone heard at this point our Buddha tells the monks quote again the words of the Buddha you must write the notice on a poster hang it on an elephant's trunk and have it announced in the marketplace on the streets roads and Crossroads this clearly is an advertising campaign both reminiscent and worthy of Barnum and Bailey exploiting the latest of then available technology but it was conceived and implemented according to Buddhist to a Buddhist text by the buddham himself this is still I think a little startling what then are we to make of all that we have seen if we are trying to understand how other people in other times s saw things and that I hope after all is a key part of the conversation that we call the hum the humanities then it will not do to Simply invoke the distinct possibility that the Buddha we have seen is a Buddha that was constructed by the Buddhist tradition centuries after the real Buddha lived this will only tell us about how we see things not how the Buddhists who used these texts who did not share our faith in historical criticism or our obsessions with chronology and Origins did the real Buddha for early Buddhists in India could not have been the one that modern historical scholarship has reconstructed but but would have to have been the one or ones they encountered in their texts and at their shrines and we need to recover each one of these figures one of which was the Buddha as a businessman thank you [Music] video cassette copies of this program are available for purchase from the uccla instructional media library call toll-free 18779 58 2200 additional information about the people places and ideas discussed in this program is available at our website www. webcast. ucla.edu [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 37,756

Keywords: buddha, business, economics, law, gregory, schopen, whole, life

Id: 3GeZGFvbDzo

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2009