The Buddha. HD (English Subtitle)

he lived in india 2500 years ago echoes of his world still remain the buddha the indian sage whose story inspired one of the world's great religions buddhism the fourth largest religion in the world he was the son of a king a pampered prince who abandoned a life of pleasure to seek enlightenment even buddha himself in order to get final enlightenment need hard work it was an arduous spiritual journey he was eating one grain of rice per day he was standing on one foot he was sleeping on nails meditating under the bodhi tree he attained the supreme wisdom there is no knowledge one without sacrifice in order to gain anything you must first lose everything next the buddha 2500 years ago nestled in a fertile valley along the border between india and nepal a child was born who was to become the buddha the stories say that before his birth his mother the queen of a small indian kingdom had a dream a beautiful white elephant offered the queen a lotus flower and then entered the side of her body when sages were asked to interpret the dream they predicted the queen would give birth to a son destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man one day they said he would either conquer the world or become an enlightened being the buddha people like stories it is one of the ways we learn the story of the buddha's life is an archetypal journey but it is a means to an end it is not an end within 10 months as a tree lowered a branch to support her a baby boy was born emerging from her side seven days later the queen died the world is filled with pain and sorrow the buddha would one day teach but i have found a serenity he told his followers that you can find too everybody understands suffering it's something that we all share with everybody else it's once utterly intimate and utterly shared so what it says that's a place to begin that's where we begin no matter what your circumstances you will end up losing everything you love you will end up aging you will end up ill and the problem is that we need to figure out how to make that all be all right what he actually said was that life is blissful there's joy everywhere only we're closed off to it his teachings were actually about opening up the joyful or blissful nature of reality but the bliss and the joy is in the transitoriness do you see this glass i love this glass it holds the water admirably when i tap it it has a lovely ring when the sun shines on it it reflects the light beautifully but when the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground i say of course but when i know that the glass is already broken every minute with it is precious everybody every human being wants happiness and buddha he acts like a teacher you are your own master future everything depend on your own shoulder buddha buddha's responsibility is just to show the path that's all the buddha can shine out from the eyes of anybody inside the buffeting of of an ordinary human life at any moment what the buddha found we can find uh foreign in southern nepal at the foot of the himalayas is one of the world's holiest places where according to the sacred tales the buddha was born today buddhist pilgrims from all over the world make their way here to be in the presence of the sage whose life story is inseparable from centuries of anecdotes and legends there are countless stories of the buddha each tradition each culture each time period has their own stories foreign we have lots of visual narratives and artwork from all over buddhist asia but the first written material actually the first biography say of the buddha really we don't see that before about 500 years after his death for the first few centuries buddhist narrative was oral historically it is based on something certainly that happened there must have been someone who corresponded with gautama buddha but we don't know we don't know how much of it is pure fairy tale and how much of it is historic fact but it doesn't matter it touches something that we all basically know the relevance of it is in the message of the story the promise of the story um like any good story it has a lot to teach so the story of his life then is a beautiful way of telling the teaching he who sees me sees the teaching the buddha said and he who sees the teaching sees me born some 500 years before the birth of jesus the buddha would grow to manhood in a town vanished long ago for nearly three decades you would see nothing of the world beyond the tales say he was the son of a king raised in a palace with every imaginable luxury he was called siddhartha gautama a prince among a clan of warriors when i was a child he said i was delicately brought up most delicately a white sunshade was held over me day and night to protect me from cold heat dust dirt and you my father gave me three lotus ponds one where red lotuses bloomed one where white lotuses bloomed one where blue lotus is bloomed the father wants him to be a king wants him to conquer the world you know to be the emperor of india which at that time was 16 different kingdoms and it was predicted that he would be able to conquer wherever he wanted if he remained as a king so the father was creating this artificial environment to coddle him his father wanted to prevent him from ever noticing that anything might be wrong with the world because he hoped that he would stay in the life they knew and loved and not go office was predicted at his at his birth and and possibly become a spiritual teacher rather than a king shielded from pain and suffering siddhartha indulged in a life of pure pleasure every whim satisfied every desire fulfilled i wore the most costly garments ate the finest foods i was surrounded by beautiful women during the rainy season i stayed in my palace where i was entertained by musicians and dancing girls i never even thought of leaving when he was 16 his father drawing him tighter into palace life married him to his cousin it wasn't long before they fell in love he was totally in love with her there is a story that on their honeymoon which was about 10 years long and one time they rolled off the roof that they were making love on while in in union and they float they fell down but landed in a bed of roses lotuses and lilies and didn't notice they had fallen and so the stories say he indulged himself for 29 years until the shimmering bubble of pleasure burst his father does everything he can to never let him leave never let him see the suffering that life is but one day he goes outside and he's traveling through the kingdom and he has the first of four encounters he sees an old man and he asks his attendant and the attendant says oh that's change one doesn't always stay young and perfect then on the next tour outside he sees a sick man and doesn't quite understand what it is he asked his attendant and the attendant says oh that happens to all of us everybody gets sick and don't think you are a prince you will not get sick your father will get sick your mom will get sick everybody will become sick then he sees that it isn't just the sick person in fact it's universal and something is stimulated inside of him so he keeps getting the cherry driver to take him out and he sees you know horror after horror and on his third trip outside he he needs a corpse and he recognizes impermanence and suffering and death as the real state of things the world that he had been protected from shielded from kept from seeing and he was shocked you know he was shocked and he realized this is my fate too i will also become old i will also become ill i will also die how do i deal with these things these are universal questions in any human being's life what it's like to be in a body inside of time and our fate and how do we navigate that it really is a tale of the transformation from a certain naive innocent relationship to your own life to wanting to know the full story wanting to know the full truth and then the fourth trip outside he sees a spiritual seeker someone who has decided to live a life completely other than his life in order to escape from impermanence suffering and death so he has this sort of traumatic encounter with uh the pain and suffering of life we try to protect our children we don't want to let our children see all the pain that's in the world but at a very early age at a time before he could remember anything at a time before there was conceptual thought he already suffered the worst kind of of loss that one could suffer suddenly and mysteriously his mother died when he was a week old so something tragic happened you know right at the beginning that might be what it takes to become a buddha is that you have to suffer on such a primitive level 29 years old profoundly troubled siddhartha was determined to comprehend the nature of suffering he resolved to leave the palace his wife had just given birth to a baby boy siddhartha called him rahula feder he names his son fetter he names his son ball and chain this is the fetter that will keep me tethered to this life this is what will keep me imprisoned late one summer evening siddhartha went into his wife's room a lamp of scented oil lit up his wife lay sleeping on a bed strewn with flowers cradling their newborn son in her arms he gazed from the threshold deep in thought if i take my wife's hand from my son's head and pick him up and hold him in my arms it will be painful for me to leave he turned away and climbed down to the palace courtyard his beloved horse kantaka was waiting as he rode toward the city's northern wall he leapt high into the air mara the tempter god of desire was waiting you are destined mara told him to rule a great empire go back and worldly power will be yours he left grief and probably absolute puzzlement and dismay in the hearts of wife in the infant son who was innocent and yet was suddenly fatherless and of course his own father but there is no knowledge one without sacrifice and this is one of the hard truths of human existence in order to gain anything you must first lose everything siddhartha was alone in the world for the first time on the bank of a nearby river he drew his sword although my father and stepmother were grieving with tears on their faces he said i cut off my hair i put on the yellow robes and went forth from home into homelessness i had been wounded by the enjoyment of the world and i had come out longing to obtain peace siddhartha wandered south toward the holy ganges river once a great prince now he became a beggar surviving on the charity of strangers he slept on the cold ground in the dark forests of banyan teak and sal that covered the northeastern plain frightening places where wild animals roamed and dangerous spirits were said to live he's going out to see what there is he's a seeker he doesn't have uh teaching yet he doesn't have an understanding yet he doesn't have a insight yet he doesn't have a solution yet but he recognizes the problem siddhartha could not expect help from the religion of the time the ancient vedic religion steeped in ceremony and ritual some of its rituals still live on in ceremonies conducted by hindu priests who chant vedic formula is more than 2500 years old foreign foreign for centuries the vedic rituals had commanded respect for the gods and inspired conviction but by siddhartha's time the rituals no longer spoke to the spiritual needs of many indians leaving a spiritual vacuum and a sense of foreboding the gods become less important than the rituals themselves it's a period of great unrest it's a period of social upheaval social change cities were growing generating new wealth and spiritual hunger as one ancient voice cried out in despair the oceans have dried up mountains have crumbled the pole star is shaken the earth founders the gods perish i'm like a frog in a dry well a lot of people aren't satisfied with the religion that they grew up in and when prince siddhartha decides to give up his life he's doing something that lots of other people were doing siddhartha joined thousands of searchers like himself renunciants men and even a few women who had renounced the world embracing poverty and celibacy living on the edge just as spiritual seekers still do in india today now at this time in india there are lots of renunciants out there it's a flourishing renunciant tradition there are many different people who have given everything up and practice austerities and meditate in order to escape from the cycle of death and rebirth the notion of reincarnation is something that's part of indian culture part of indian civilization part of indian religion um that was there long before the buddha and it was the the in the sense the problem that the buddha faced suffering didn't begin at birth and finish with death suffering was endless unless it was possible to find a way out become enlightened become a buddha in his time there was a sense of death not being final but of of death leading inexorably to rebirth and of being suffering beings bound to the wheel of death and rebirth it is said that siddhartha had lived many lives before this one as countless animals innumerable human beings and even gods across four incalculable ages the sacred texts say and many eons experiencing life in all its different forms siddhartha's previous lives many ills sometimes as a human being sometimes as an animal but then gradually you see his practice becoming more higher and higher and deeper deeper the idea is from life to life to progress more and more towards the the enlightenment and become wiser and wiser some beings will stubbornly insist on their ignorance and their egotism and they will charge ahead grabbing and eating what they can in front of themselves and being dissatisfied but thinking that the next bite will do it and they will die and be reborn time people born in infinite times it could take them you know billion lifetimes if they're very stubborn and becoming a buddha becoming enlightened is the only way of getting out of the continual cycle of death and rebirth now rebirth here isn't the popular notion that you know i my past life i was cleopatra floating down the isle or or or napoleon um it's as if every life is going through junior high school again over and over and over with the authority of the priests worn thin and wisdom seekers like siddhartha roaming the countryside holy men emerged teaching their own spiritual disciplines siddhartha apprenticed himself to one of them a celebrated guru who taught the true knowledge could never come from ritual practice alone it was necessary to look within you may stay here with me the guru told him a wise person can soon dwell in his teacher's knowledge and experience it directly for himself siddhartha set himself to learn the rigorous practices the guru prescribed the teachers of the time are already teaching forms of yoga and meditation teaching that the self-reflective capacity of the mind can be put to use to tame the mind to tame the passions that was already established in india and there were probably so many schools of yoga and meditation in those days just as there are now foreign although yoga appears to focus on controlling the body it is in fact an ancient spiritual discipline a form of meditation harnessing the energies of the body to tame the mind some yogis learn to sit without moving for hours breathing more and more slowly until they seem to be barely breathing at all all kinds of trance states are possible through meditation if you hold the mind if you concentrate the mind on a single object you know be it a word or a candle flame or a sound it's possible to transport the mind into all kinds of interesting places the person who was to become the buddha was very good at all those practices he was a super student doing these practices taking them to their limit and no matter what he did in these practices he was still stuck in the pain that he set out with he ascends to these very rarefied states of consciousness but it's not permanent and it does not bring penetrating truth into the nature of reality so these become a temporary escape from the problem of existence but they don't solve the problem apprenticed himself to another popular guru but the results were the same the thought occurred to me he said later this practice does not lead to direct knowledge to deeper awareness disenchanted he left this master too siddhartha continued to drift south still searching for the answer to his questions why do human beings suffer is there any escape he's trying and trying and searching and searching and he already experienced extreme luxury so now he tries extreme deprivation among the renunciants asceticism was a common spiritual practice punishing the body as a way to attain serenity and wisdom siddhartha fell in with five other aesthetics and soon was outdoing them and mortifying the flesh subjecting his body to extremes of hardship and pain the body represents a fundamental problem old age brings a decrepitude to the body sickness brings pain and suffering to the body and death is ultimately the cessation of the functioning of the body so there was a sense that if you could punish the body sufficiently you could escape its influence you could transcend some of the limitations that the body seemed to impose the ascetic pursues the truth by taking the requirements of survival down to the absolute minimum possible barely enough food to stay alive no protection from the elements no heat sit in the cold sit in the rain um meditate fiercely for all the hours of awakening the step of renunciation of of of shedding everything of dying the feeling that one is dying to to to to one's life as it was is essential to to being reborn uh as uh as someone who sees ascetics can still be seen in india firm in the belief that by subduing the flesh they can gain spiritual power is foreign emaciated exhausted siddhartha punished himself for six years trying to put an end to the cravings that beset him he tortures himself trying to destroy anything within himself that he sees as bad the spiritual traditions of that time said you can be liberated if you eliminate everything that's human you know everything that's coarse and vulgar every bit of anger every bit of desire if you uh you know if you wipe that out with force of will then you can go into some kind of transcendental state and the buddha tried all that and he became you know the most anorectic of the anorectic ascetics he was eating one grain of rice per day he was drinking his own urine he was standing on one foot he was sleeping on nails he did it all to the utmost my body slowly became extremely emaciated siddhartha said my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine or bamboo stems my spine stood out like a string of beads my ribs jutted out like the jutting rafters of an old abandoned building the gleam of my eyes appeared to be sunk deep in my eye sockets like the gleam of water deep in a well my scalp shriveled and withered like a green bitter gourd shriveled and withered in the heat and wind what he was trying to do was pushing his body to the most extreme that he could but then he realized that from that he cannot gain what he wants trying to torture the body the body becomes too much the whole attention is giving to the body nothing else he surrendered himself completely to the hard training that he was given and what he discovered having tried this completely for many years was that he had not answered his question it hadn't worked he was on the verge of death dying unawakened when he remembered something he remembered a day when he was young and sat by the river with his father and the perfection of the world as it was simply gave itself to him years before when siddharta was a small boy his father the king had taken him to a spring planting festival while he watched the ceremonial dancing he looked down at the grass he thought about the insects and their eggs destroyed as the field was planted he was overwhelmed with sadness one great taproot of buddhism is compassion which is the deep affection that we feel for everything because we're all in it together be it other human beings other animals the planet as a whole the creatures of this planet the trees and rivers of this planet everything is connected it was a beautiful day his mind drifted as if by instinct he crossed his legs in the yoga pose of meditation and the natural world paid him homage as the sun moved through the sky the shadow shifted but the shadow of the rose apple tree where he sat remained still he felt a sense of pure joy the joy that he found is in the world that is already broken it's in this transitory world that we're all a part of and the fabric of this world despite the fact that it can seem so horrible the underlying fabric of this world actually is that joy that he recovered that was his great insight but he says i can't sustain a feeling of joy like this if i don't take any food so i'd better eat something and then at that moment a village maiden mysteriously appears carrying a bowl of rice porridge and she said to him here eat that moment of generosity and release when he accepted the rice was a decision towards life it was what in the christian tradition might be called grace that you cannot do it completely on your own and in christianity the grace comes from the divine in the story of the buddha the grace comes from the ordinary kind heart of a girl who sees somebody starving and says eat and there's something beautiful whenever i remember that story it makes me so happy because i see the heart of buddha as the person he was like the siddhartha this dish was the dish used to be fed by his stepmother rice pudding he was missing that so much and then he remembered maybe further and further and he remembered about his wife about his son and the deepest emotions that he had suppressed the overpower they came up they were still there he had a feeling of missing he had a feeling of seeing his son and his feeling of being near his loved ones they were so powerful oh this must have soaked his whole entire being he was actually an utter failure he had been clinging to the path of asceticism and when he took the food what followed was a return of his original question life is painful life involves change this is still a problem the problem didn't disappear it wasn't long before the ascetics who had been siddhartha's companions found him eating and turned away in disgust siddhartha loves luxury they said he has forsaken his spiritual practice he has become extravagant but the man who will become the buddha realizes that extreme deprivation isn't the way to go we can live as normal human beings we can eat and drink and in fact we kind of need to eat and drink and be normal human beings uh in order to break through in order to attain a kind of realization that he was looking for siddhartha had put his faith in two gurus they hadn't helped him he'd punished his mind and body that had almost killed him now he knew what he must do find the answer to his questions he would look within and trust himself ah um um bogaya is a small town in northeastern india throngs of pilgrims have come here from all over the world for more than 16 centuries for buddhists there are hundreds of holy places but none more sacred than this one burgaya is the sacred point from which the buddhist faith radiates some pilgrims travel great distances reciting prayers and prostrating themselves every step of the way it is their mecca and jerusalem their holy of holies is not the imposing temple beside them but a simple fig tree ficus religiosa the bodhi tree the tree it is said is descended from the buddhist time every pilgrim knows the story of how siddhartha after accepting the rice milk from the young girl put aside the rags he was wearing bathed himself in a nearby river and strengthened sat down in the shade of the bodhi tree and began to meditate it was springtime the moon was full before the sun would rise siddharta's long search would be over he sat down under a bodhi tree in the shelter of the natural world in all of its beauty and fullness and he said i will not move from this place until i have solved my problem let my skin and sinews and bones dry up together with all the flesh and blood of my body he said i welcome it but i will not move from this spot until i have attained the supreme and final wisdom all at once mara lord of desire rose to challenge him with an army of demons he attacked siddhartha did not move and their weapons turned into flowers mata is the ruler of this realm of desire this world that we all live in and what he's afraid siddhartha is going to do when he attains enlightenment and becomes the buddha is conquer that world that is he's going to do away with desire he's going to he's going to wreck the whole game mara did not give up he sent his three daughters to seduce him siddhartha remained still when he faces mara he faces himself and his own destructive capacity but he's not the warrior trying to do battle with those qualities he's discovered his own capacity for equanimity he has become like you know the top of the great himalayan mountains you know the weather is passing over him storms are raging around him and he sits like the top of the mountain impassive not in a trance state you know totally aware of everything so if you frustrate tomorrow siddhartha resisted every temptation mara could devise the lord of desire had one final test he demanded to know who would testify that siddhartha was worthy of attaining ultimate wisdom and his demon army rose up to support him siddhartha said nothing he reached down and touched the ground and the earth shuddered mara's demons fled the buddha reaches down and with his finger touches the earth he says the earth is my witness he said mara you are not the earth the earth is right here beneath my finger and the earth is what we're talking about accepting the earth not owning the earth not possessing the earth but the earth just as it is abused and exploited and despised and rejected and uh plowed and mined spat on and everything else you know it's still the earth and it's it is uh it's we owe everything to it siddhartha meditated throughout the night and all his former lives passed before him he remembers all his previous lives infinite numbers of previous lives female and male and every other race and every other being in the vast ocean of life forms and he remembered that all viscerally so that means his awareness expanded to remember to be all so all the moments of the past were completely present to him he gains the power to see the process of birth death and rebirth that all creatures go through he's given this sort of cosmic vision of the workings of the entire universe as the morning star appeared he roared like a lion my mind he said is at peace the heavens shook and the bodhi tree rained down flowers he had become the awakened one the buddha something new opens up for him which he calls nirvana which he calls awakening he said at this moment all beings and i awakened together so it was not just him it was all the universe he touched the earth as earth is my witness seeing this morning star all things and i awaken together it's not like entering a new state it's uncovering or surrendering to the reality that has always been there he realized he'd always been in nirvana that nirvana was always the case your reality itself is nirvana it's the unreality it's your ignorance it makes you think you're this sense self-centered separate being trying to fight off an overwhelming universe and failing you are that universe you're already enlightened he's saying the the capacity for enlightenment that your your awakeness already exists within you nirvana is this moment seen directly there is nowhere else than here the only gate is now the only doorway is your own body and mind there's nowhere to go there's nothing else to be there's no destination it's not something to aim for in the afterlife it's simply the quality of this moment just this just this this room where we are pay attention to that pay attention to who's there pay attention to what's what isn't known there pay attention to what is known there pay attention to what everyone is thinking and feeling what you're doing there and pay attention pay attention for weeks the buddha remained near the bodhi tree peaceful and serene he was tempted to retire into a profound solitude instead of trying to teach others what it had taken him six long years to discover for himself he wants to stay there he's very happy he doesn't want to go out he he says to himself no one is going to understand this you know people are going to think i'm crazy they're going to think i'm nuts buddha saw the nature of the people envy and jealousy and strong negative mental states uh all the people in the world they are like uh the fishes uh um riddling in the very shallow water so buddha he himself afraid to teach the people the myth is that god comes to the buddha brahma comes on his knees and says please we need you why don't you try talking about what you just understood because the world needs the gods need it and the men need it you know people need it and then buddha decided to to give his teachings because of the great compassion it's not an ordinary compassion when you feel the feelings of others you automatically don't want them to feel bad you feel the feeling of your hand you don't put it in the oven i mean you're not you're not being compassionate your hand you just feel the pain so you're not going to put it there so you feel others pain you're going to do your best to help them alleviate it when somebody becomes enlightened something blooms in his heart it's like a flower blooms and it cannot hold the fragrance it has to naturally release so it's like he naturally had to release his radiance he has to share this joy that was in his heart 35 years old the buddha would devote the rest of his life to bringing his teachings the dharma the fundamental laws of all things into the world but as he had feared it would not be easy as he set off to share what he had learned he met a wandering ascetic who is your guru the ascetic asked him the buddha said he had no guru that he had attained enlightenment on his own it may be so the ascetic said and walked away on his first attempt to teach the buddha had failed buddha meets someone who doesn't see anything special about him because he awakened buddha doesn't look any different from anybody else he is ordinary buddhism is not about being special buddhism is about being ordinary and it is not about the continual exudation of bliss it is about walking a normal human life with normal human beings doing normal human things and this reminds you that you yourself might be a buddha at this moment the person you're looking at might be one it's an interesting practice just each person you see as you walk down the street buddha buddha buddha buddha from bogaya the buddha walked west nearly 200 miles and crossed the ganges river he was still searching for a way to explain to others what he feared was unexplainable the path to the enlightenment he himself had experienced in a deer park in sarnath not far from the ganges he would try again his five former companions were still practicing the austerities he himself had abandoned from far off they saw me coming and unseeing me made a pact with one another the buddha recalled friends here comes siddhartha living luxuriously straying from his ascetic practice he doesn't deserve to be bowed down to these are his buddies who were just disappointed and disgusted with him for giving in after they had all been trying to starve themselves into enlightenment um so they uh they're a little distrustful at the beginning they refer to him as an equal and he then tells them no that's not the term you should use when you refer to a tatargata to a being who's gone beyond and so he sets them straight and they then become the first people to hear the content of what he realized under the bodhi tree his first teaching would later be called setting in motion the wheel of the dharma because it brought the buddha's message into the world for the first time he did not propound a dogma instead he spoke from his own experience out of his own heart he had known the abandon of the sensualist and the rigors of the ascetic now he would disavow both of them the buddha said i've discovered a new way and it's not the path of asceticism and it's not the path of sensory indulgence it's the middle way what the buddha was always doing was saying everything's everything needs to be balanced so you know the middle way was always balancing between you know excesses on this side excesses on the other side fair goes the dancing when the sitar is tuned tune us the sitar neither high nor low and we will dance away the hearts of men but the string too tight breaks and the music dies the string two slack has no sound and the music dies there is a middle way tune us the sitar neither low nor high and we will dance away the hearts of men the path to enlightenment lay along the middle way the buddha taught and the ascetics listened now he would answer the question that six years before had provoked his spiritual journey the question of suffering buddhists don't have a creation story there is no creator deity um it's not really an it of interest it's it's not an issue what's of interest is uh the problem of human suffering and the solution to human suffering pretty much everything else right is beside the point the buddha's analysis of suffering came in the form of what have come to be called the four noble truths there is no commandments or anything the first noble truth is that there is suffering in this world generally this suffering has been mistranslated suffering is not entirely accurate to the word that the buddha probably used it means something closer to dissatisfaction that you know we're never quite happy and if we are that's gone in an instant anyhow and he says that this suffering this unsatisfactoriness doesn't arise by itself it has causes our own mind causes it while the second noble truth asserts that suffering has a cause the third noble truth makes an astonishing claim you really can be free of suffering by understanding the cause of suffering nobody tells you that and so that was a huge announcement the problem buddha taught is desire how to live with the confused and entangling desires of our own minds people often misunderstand buddhism as saying in order to wipe out suffering you have to wipe out desire if that was what the buddha was saying then where does the desire for enlightenment fit in you know the buddha is saying be smart about your desires desire must be there without desire how can lead our life without desire how can achieve buddhahood strong desire to become buddha but desire to harmful that bad with the fourth and final noble truth the buddha laid out a series of instructions for his disciples to follow a way of leading the mind to enlightenment called the noble eightfold path the cultivation of moral discipline mindfulness and wisdom they are as i like to think of them a set of possible recipes um that you can try on your own life and see which one makes the best soup the buddha didn't speak for long but when he was finished the five skeptical ascetics had been won over they became his first disciples word quickly spread of the sage teaching in the deer park at sarnat hundreds came to hear him and became disciples too many were wealthy merchants or their sons living just five miles away in a thriving trading center on the ganges the holy city of benares oh today benares is the most sacred city in all of india as it has been for millennia even before the time of the buddha pilgrims came here to worship their gods and bathe in the holy river of heaven you see people purifying themselves bathing in the ganges you see priests performing rituals you see corpses because that's the best place to end one's life so you see going on there a great range of religious activity and much of it of the type that does go back to the buddhist time many of today's sacred ceremonies on the ganges echo the ancient practices of the vedic priests the brahmanas in the buddhist day only the brahmanas could mediate between the gods and men only they could conduct the holy rituals that were said to preserve the universe itself the brahmin priests stood at the pinnacle of a rigid social hierarchy a sacred system of caste beneath them were the warriors the cast to which the buddha belonged below them were farmers at the bottom were the servants and still lower outcasts those social groups are not merely social conventions but rather they're hardwired into the nature of the universe you're supposed to stay in that group and the survival society depends upon your continuing to perform the function associated with that social status cast was irrelevant to the buddha so were priestly rituals to preserve the universe his teachings focused on the universe within the buddha said you could be from any cast but what makes you noble is if you understand reality you know if you're a good person if you're a wise person uh then you're noble in time a devoted gathering of monks formed around the buddha at sarnat near the ganges broken stones and fallen pillars mark what remains of what grew to be a vibrant monastic community the sangha it took the buddha many many years to find his way but he didn't want it to be so hard for people and so he established a community who could live together and help one another in a ceremony evoking the beginning of the buddha's own spiritual journey fledgling monks of all ages say goodbye to their families and homes and join the sangha gotcha i go to the refuge of the buddha i go to the refuge after dhamma and i go to the refuge of the sangha the sangha is an embodiment of buddhist experience and wisdom what happens if people practice this thing are they truly happy or not are they joyful or not so i think buddha wanted to also leave a perfect example of his teaching and a live teaching a teaching that walks a teaching that can talk a teaching that can laugh so i would say sangha is just like a living example of buddhist teaching the first sangha was a radical institution open to people of every caste and remarkable for the times in which the buddha lived to both men and women the buddha was part of a culture deeply suspicious of women the attitude towards women at the time was very critical and many things were impossible for them so that was a very revolutionary thing to do that in that times of india by ordaining women as nuns the buddha gave women the chance to escape the drudgery of daily life life was so hard for most women that entering the sangha was a liberation as we know from their ecstatic heart-rending poems so freed so freed so thoroughly freed am i from my pencil my shameless husband and his sunshade making my moldy old pot with its water snake smell aversion and passion i cut with a chop having come to the foot of a tree i meditate absorbed in the bliss what bliss bliss nirvana the buddha taught could be found in the fleeting moment through the practice of meditation the buddha showed his followers how to come to terms with their own roiling thoughts and desires by paying attention to them by becoming aware becoming mindful as in ancient poem councils like an archer an arrow the wise man steadies his trembling mind a fickle and restless weapon many times our mind is not peaceful enough so we realize that perhaps we need to understand more about mind itself and how to balance the emotions how to balance our mind and try to cultivate more happiness the difficulties come from within one experience uh unexpected things from one's mind most uh dangerous skeptical doubts doubts about oneself doubts about the buddha physical is we can get from from from the food and from the supplement of vitamins and yeah and for the mind this is the only only way we have to only medicine meditation is not about getting rid of anger getting rid of lust or getting rid of jealousy even while becoming a monk often we experience angers it happens it often happens when people start teasing you like a shaven belthead person that gives a good chance for us to realize that okay let's see this anger arises what is it what most often happens in our ordinary life is that whenever we experience these emotions we get stuck into it it starts twisting us but buddhism is going through inside it and getting out of it peacefully and i think that gives us more joy and that makes human life more full more around it's not like we we are not living in partial threats but it's like holy things together it takes time to comprehend this and then by practicing again and again the practitioner becomes very balanced and one reaches a state of very strong equanimity equanimity towards the physical and mental objects and this is the base camp for the summit enlightenment after washing my feet a disciple said i watched the water going down the drain i am calm i control my mind like a noble thoroughbred horse taking a lamp i enter my cell thinking of sleep i sit on my bed i touch the wick the lamp goes out nirvana my mind is freed the mind is as restless as a monkey the buddha taught who you are what you think of as yourself is constantly changing like a river endlessly flowing one thing today another tomorrow there's water in a river then there's water in a glass and then the water is back in the air and then it's back in the river the water's there but what is it that's a way to think about the self in buddhism one moment you're angry the next moment you're laughing who are you a seed becomes a plant wisps of grass are spun into a rope a trickling stream turns into a river the self comes and the self goes simply notice how from one moment to another yourself is actually not as much the same as we think it is what the buddha realizes is that if we can get rid of this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the self based on egotism we won't cling to things we won't screw up everything we do because we're thinking about it in the wrong way once you stop centering your your feelings about your feelings on yourself that what naturally arises is is simple compassion compassion for your own suffering compassion for the suffering of others even the most abstract of the buddha's teachings had a practical ethical dimension compassion the buddha taught comes from understanding impermanence transience flow how one thing passes into another how everything and everyone is connected when this is that is from the arising of this comes the arising of that when this isn't that isn't from the cessation of this comes the cessation of that this is always connected to that everything is connected to everything else you never live by yourself you live always within a family a society or culture you constantly uh interact with other people all the time so our happiness depends on their happiness as well how can we be happy if we are the only one happy in uh you know just an island of happiness within an ocean of misery of course that's not possible compassion stirred the buddha to send his monks out into the community sworn to chastity and poverty they wandered the roads bringing the buddha's teachings into the world go forth monks for the happiness of the many out of compassion for the world there are beings whose eyes have little dust on them who will perish if they do not hear the teaching but if they hear the teaching they will gain liberation the monks exist by begging we think of begging is kind of a bad thing begging in this tradition is a good thing it's a sign of spiritual purity you're not allowed to beg tomorrow's lunch today only today's lunch then you can't eat from noon until dawn the next day then you have to go out and get another lunch and then in exchange for lunch you give a lecture unless they say we don't want to hear about it then you don't but that's the only thing you but that forces you to interact with the lay community and if you're not serving them if you're not doing something useful for them they won't put anything in your bowl and that will be the end of your community the buddha himself wandered across northeast india teaching and gathering new disciples everywhere he went you didn't have to become a monk or a nun to become a buddhist the buddha's teachings were for everyone everything is burning what is burning the eyes are burning everything seen by the eyes is burning the ears are burning what is burning everything heard by the ears is burning the nose is burning smells are ablaze the tongue is burning tastes are ablaze the body is burning the mind is burning we're on fire we may not know it but we're on fire and we have to put that fire out we're burning with desire right we're burning with craving everything everything um about us is is out of control the buddha goes on to talk about the three poisons greed and anger and ignorance and how the the three poisons are what is making the fire and the way out of doing this is not to deny the three poisons but to recognize that if you turn them around you come to their opposites instead of greed you have generosity instead of anger you have compassion and instead of ignorance you have wisdom i can give my teachings in brief the buddha said i can teach in detail it is those who understand that are hard to find there are stories of people coming to the buddha and saying i am leaving your teaching because you have not told me about whether there is a life after death or whether there is another world and the buddha says did i ever say that i would give you the answer to these things no lord you didn't why do you think that i never said that i would give you the answer to these things because these are not the things that you need to know thing that you need to know is how to deal with suffering because at this very moment what made you ask that question was suffering the buddha was above all a pragmatist he did not expect his followers to agree with everything he said he encouraged them to debate and argue to challenge him buddhists say my follower should not accept my teaching out of devotion but rather your own experiment even buddha himself in order to get the final enlightenment need hard work so investigate based on reason through logical investigation if something contradicts into buddha's own word then we have the right to reject it as the buddha gathered more and more followers stories spread of his miracles which mixed the marvelous with the mundane one story tells how 500 pieces of firewood split at the buddha's command in another a mad elephant charged wildly down the street forcing everyone to flee only the buddha remained quietly waiting the elephant overcome by the buddha's radiant kindness knelt before him and the buddha patted his leathery trunk what is the meaning of miracle miracle is something unexpected i think 100 years ago jumbo jets or some of these computers or these i think in their eye this is something miracle because a miracle is something cannot understand so now i think within this century we may find some new ideas or new facts so far we spent all our energy and time for research on matter not internal world this this skull small space but a lot of mysterious things still there the great field of knowledge is as tiny as the earth is in the universe i mean it's a tight speck and and the the the universe is what we don't know and it will always be that way this however however much we find out it will still be that way because the unknown is vastly it is unspeakably greater than anything we will ever know in one of the most storied miracles the buddha strode on a jeweled walkway suspended in midair while streams of water spouted and flames flashed from his body shooting out to the very edge of the universe and as the buddha sat on a lotus flower giving his teachings he replicated himself filling the sky with multitudes of buddhas for all to see and wonder do we believe that literally does it matter whether we believe it literally what many of those miraculous stories are about is is the sheer wonder the very fact that the whole of unknown time and space has led down to this led to this very moment when we're sitting here talking to when we are sitting here talking to each other is utterly miraculous sitting here in a room having had a cup of coffee having taken it out of a beautiful blue and white porcelain mug what could be more miraculous than that um everyday life around us is already so implausible and so glorious that what need for further miracles and that's the teaching of the buddha that's the miraculous teaching of the buddha violence the buddha taught always leads to more violence to the slayer comes a slayer to the conqueror comes a conqueror he who plunders is plundered in turn war was endemic in the buddha's age ravaging northeast india again and again although kings and their ministers sought his counsel the buddha offered no grand political vision he was powerless to stop the killing and the fighting even the men women and children of his former kingdom were massacred by a marauding king forced into pits and trampled by elephants it was said that the buddha received the news in silence hundreds of them killed so that day buddha human being so he act like a human being so sometimes he also you see they fail he failed to perform miracle the buddha failed but we as the buddha fail constantly and part of our suffering is our is our failure our recognition of our failure buddhism doesn't argue with reality there will always be both the potential for awakening in any moment and the potential for incredible damage at any moment and if we fool ourselves into thinking we're past that we will do incredible damage change the buddha said must come from within buddhist starts always with the mind and talks about the violence in the mind and says that violence in the world is a result of violence in the mind a tree lives on its roots if you change the root you change the tree culture lives in human beings if you change the human heart the culture will follow for decades the buddha shared his teachings all across northeastern india let all beings be happy he taught weak or strong great or small let us cherish all creatures as a mother her only child barefoot in his robes he was still walking the roads when he was 80. but old age was upon him his back hurt his stomach was often in pain i am old worn out he told a trusted disciple like a dilapidated cart held together with thin straps the world is so sweet he said that he could understand wanting to live for at least another century but he was frail and exhausted he became ill near kushinagara a remote village near the border of nepal when he was offered a meal which would prove deadly the food was spoiled he ate what was offered to him and it said that he knew it was bad but he took it anyway because it was offered and didn't want the person who offered it to feel bad because it was his time foreign today is revered by pilgrims as the place where the buddha finally left the world it was in kushinagara where he grew weak and asked to be laid on his side in a quiet grove of salt trees as he neared the end his disciples began to weep stricken with grief but the buddha reassured them all things change he said whatever is born is subject to decay he's saying this is a natural process he tells his disciples use this time use the energy here even this for your own awakening so he used even his own death and their sadness as a time to remind them of what their real task was what he's actually doing is inviting those who are close to him into the experience i don't think the buddhist teaching in any way argues against grief or sadness or loss the teachings if they make any sense have to make sense in ordinary circumstances in ordinary lives and in ordinary lives we grieve when we lose we we grieve we when when it when it hurts we say ouch buddhism is trying to look at things the way they are the way it is just as it is it hurts this is life this is our life and our relation to life involves losing it too you don't get beyond these things you don't get beyond them it's all right to feel what human beings feel and we are not supposed to turn into rocks or trees when we practice buddhism buddhas laugh cry dance feel ecstasy probably even feel despair it is how we know the world it is how we live inside of our hearts and not dissociated from them the buddha had always been saying goodbye now he prepared to leave the earth forever he would never be reborn never die again it may be that after i'm gone the buddha told his disciples that some of you will think now we have no teacher but that is not how you should see it let the dharma and the discipline that i have taught you be your teacher all individual things pass away strive on untiringly these were the buddha's last words the buddha died peacefully his head was pointed to the north his face to the west the stories tell how the earth shook and the trees suddenly burst into bloom their petals falling gently on his still body falling out of reverence divine coral flowers and divine sandalwood powders fell from above on the buddha's body out of reverence his disciples were quite upset what are we going to do without our teacher we will be lost without our teacher but his instruction was so simple and so clear i am not your light i am not your authority you've been with me a long time now be your own light the buddha saw death and life is inseparable these are two sides of the same thing death is always with us death is part of the whole large unknown and if we are unable to smile at the idea of the unknown we're in real trouble that's the realism that the buddha was talking about trying to come to terms with reality when he was 29 and still prince siddhartha the buddha had left his wife child and family to try and understand the nature of suffering he had attained enlightenment shared what he had learned and left a path for others to follow now he was gone but before he died he had asked his followers to remember him by making pilgrimage the place of his death to where he gave his first teachings where he achieved enlightenment and where he was born those four places mark out a sacred biography and in tracing that pilgrimage root you are learning the story of that life at places of pilgrimage temples were built images were installed and relics were enshrined millions of people get immense inspiration buddha spirit always there but real buddha's holy places is within oneself that's important it's a real buddhist sacred place we must build within ourself we must build within our heart allah the buddha had predicted that his teachings like everything else would in time disappear buddhism flourished in india for 1500 years spread into sri lanka central and southeast asia tibet china korea japan and in the 20th century to europe and the americas different forms and shapes wherever it took root attracting many millions of men and women who practice the buddha's teachings both within and outside the monastic community but everywhere and in every age the essence of the story remains the same the buddha said that we've turned this world into a painful place and this world does not have to be a painful place this world can be a world inhabited by buddhas but it's up to each one of us to turn ourselves into a buddha that's real that's the work if the buddha is not you finally the buddha is of no interest to you the buddha is the buddha is of such interest to you because you are the buddha every century being even insect have buddha nature the seed of buddha that's the seed of enlightenment so therefore there is no reason to believe some sentient being cannot become buddha so like that i know that there are supposed to be preserved footprints of the buddha which are which are kept in one of the sacred places in in india or nepal and you know you can stand in them and if you stand in them maybe you realize ah ten toes me too there is a story of a brahmana who one day found the buddha under a tree calmly meditating the buddha's mind was still he radiated such power and strength that the brahmana was reminded of a tusker elephant the brahmana asked him who he was imagine a lotus that had begun life underwater the buddha replied but grew and rose above the surface until it stood free so i too have transcended the world and attained the supreme enlightenment who are you then the brahman wondered remember me the buddha said as the one who woke up you

Channel: 청암(靑巖)

Views: 1,517,667

Rating: 4.8023729 out of 5

Keywords: buddha, Gautama Buddha (Deity), 부처님, 부처

Id: aWvI2WZJjwE

Length: 112min 29sec (6749 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 05 2014