Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute introduction to Buddhist philosophy, Jampa Kaldan traces the life of the Buddha and extracts six central teachings from his journey. Starting with Siddhartha’s renunciation of palace life in search of a solution to suffering, Kaldan explores the Buddha’s study under two masters, his devastating experiments with extreme asceticism, and his discovery of the middle way—a balance between self-denial and indulgence. He emphasizes key principles: shifting values from outer possessions to inner development, taking personal responsibility, cultivating self-compassion, recognizing human potential for enlightenment, and practicing compassion for others. Kaldan then sketches the evolution of Buddhism from its monastic roots through the Mahāyāna and tantric traditions into Tibet, and finally to the West via Lama Yeshe and the FPMT. The talk concludes with an overview of the eight-week course outline covering mind, death, karma, compassion, and emptiness. Suitable for newcomers to Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2002 01 21 08 Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation 21-1-02.mp3
UUID: 913a7c79-c397-4dd2-b413-d273287ebfa6
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Intro to Buddhist Philosophy (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2002-01-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,326
Spiritual practitioner who obviously represented some utterly different set of values to what he was being raised in. The alternative set of values, the to the outer values about which his his father was trying to build his life. So as a result of these encounters with the cold hard reality of life, Siddhartha who was never really happy with his worldly, palace life, he became increasingly determined to find a solution to the problem of dissatisfaction and unhappiness that he’d seen and that he could see in himself. And so when he was twenty nine years old, just after the birth of his son, his first son, Rahula, he decided to abandon his privileged life. And he snuck away from the palace one night unknown to everyone everyone to take up the life of a wandering beggar, spiritual practitioner, a mendicant monk living in the forest and practicing meditation.
Now this was a way of life. It wasn’t something weird he was doing. This was a way of life that was already very common in India at the time. And there was almost a cultural project on in India. It was almost like a grand cultural design, a cult project going on in a subset of the culture to try and find this thing called liberation or enlightenment.
So Śākyamūni Buddha, Śākyamūni, Shakya the clan. Muni means teacher. So he’s often referred to as Śākyamūni Buddha. Of course, he wasn’t a Buddha at this time. I shouldn’t be saying that.
So Siddhartha was, you know, if you like, participating in what was happening around him in in going out on this search. And that search was widely understood in terms at the time of the belief and the acceptance of a process of rebirth and an endless cycle of births that we’re stuck in. So the pro the cultural project was how to find the way out of that. Where’s the exit from that process? So the Buddha in abandoning a life built around the possession of things, status, and power, these outer values, and in favor of taking up an inner quest of personal development, what he demonstrates by that is is the importance of this shift from outer values to inner values.
So a life built around having things to one centered on inner being, to being skillful, to being compassionate, to being wise, and thereby to to be able to realize his full spiritual potential. So such abandoning or changing in values is is primarily an inner process, and it’s not just about giving up outer things. It requires a shift in what our values are in the things that we build our life around. It doesn’t necessarily imply going off, to the forest. I’d like to acknowledge my indebtedness for some of these thoughts in this particular section that I’ve just been talking about to Stephen Bachelor’s book, Alone With Others, where he develops this idea at some length, very interesting, about the shift in values that’s almost looking at the Buddha’s life as an allegory for what we have to go through in our spiritual path.
He sets that out very nicely in that book. The second point I mentioned about a message from the Buddha’s life is is taking responsibility for one’s own development, one’s own personal development. So he took up the life of this homeless, begging spiritual practitioner, shaved off his hair and threw away his good clothes and began using clothes that he picked up from the scrap heaps or more commonly from the cremation grounds as the practice was. These sort of people were allowed in the culture to to take what they needed from the cremation grounds. So wearing those sort of clothes and living a very simple life.
And he spent a number of years studying and practicing meditation with with two spiritual teachers that were well known in the Ganges Plain at the time. And in both cases, with these two teachers that he went to one after the other, he made outstanding progress as a meditator. The first teacher was Alara Kalama. And when he’d spent some time with with Kalama, he obviously progressed so well in his meditation that Kalama offered him to be joint leader of the group of wanderers that he was leading at the time. But he but but, Siddhartha decided to move on.
He went to a second teacher, Uddaka Ramaputta. And he once again, his meditation practice under instruction from this teacher went so well that he actually offered to hand over the leadership of the group to Siddhartha. You’ve mastered this better than I do it. So would you like to lead this group? And, again, Siddhartha just turned down the offer.
In each case, he decided that although he had clearly mastered the practices that were being taught and these practices that were taught were probably advanced practices of stabilizing meditation. And there is a we’ll talk about this a little bit in a later session. There’s a whole series of it of steps that one can go through in stabilizing meditation. And probably what he was being taught was the most advanced stages in stabilizing meditation where you obtain these very advanced absorptions and so on. But he wasn’t satisfied that he had found in that sort of meditation the solution to the cause of his dissatisfaction and the dissatisfaction you could see in others.
And so he continued to work alone after leaving both of these teachers. And I think that in seeking out, in learning from, and eventually when it was appropriate in moving on from these teachers, he demonstrates this principle of taking our taking responsibility for our lives, for ourselves. A central point in the teachings of the Buddha is that we need to recreate ourselves ourselves to find our own salvation, to put it in a Western expression. Now for us, we can’t go back to ancient India and become a wandering mendicant, but what we can do is work with ourselves in the hearer and now. In the day to day context of our lives.
That’s what we can do, and we can take responsibility for what’s happening there exactly as Siddhartha did. The third point is having compassion for ourselves. He then decided to undertake because he wasn’t having success, he then decided to undertake some very unpleasant and ascetic practices such as starving himself, not washing, living alone in the forest without any friends, eating one piece of bird dung a day, some things like that. And and at that time in India, as it continues right down to now, there were many, many bizarre practices in this search for the way through. So there was people doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things to themselves.
And all the then all the classic things that we know about him about India, they were all they seemed to have all been going at that time. And so he undertook this work. And he his part what he tried was mainly this isolation and and starving himself, trying to trying to force himself, force to force a way through the old habitual patterns that have been sort of that he’s stuck in. And he did this around the area probably of current day for those who’ve been to India, Not far probably from Bodh Gaya and Rajgir and places like that. And he undertook these practices along with a group of five other friends actually.
So it’s certain there were certain times when he went off completely alone into the wilderness. And he actually in one of the sutras a sūtra is one of the recorded accounts of the teaching of the Buddha. In one there’s some sūtra where he talks about the terrifying experience of living alone in the bush in the in the vast forest of the Ganges Plain, with wild animals and so on and how terrifying that was. But at times, he was also working with this group of five friends. And he actually starved himself to the point where he was just like a skeleton figure.
Some of you may have seen the very dramatic statue of the Buddha in the museum here, which depicts the Siddhartha at the point where he’d virtually starved himself to death. And he just and it’s in the museum. If you haven’t seen it, maybe one day you can check it out. He just looks like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. So severe had he been mistreating himself.
But eventually he got to the point of total exhaustion and almost killed himself in with this extreme self hating practice and it hadn’t worked. It was not successful. And he had an insight that there maybe needed to be a middle way between self hatred and denial on the one hand, which is what he’d been trying, and his old life of self indulgence. That there had to be some middle way of practicing that might be more successful. And he in later teachings, he gives the analogy for this of the string on the instrument like a guitar, If it’s too tight, the sound won’t be right.
So if you push too hard and if you force and and undertake practices of self hatred, then it won’t be right. And if you have the string too loose, and just indulge yourself, that also won’t produce a sweet sound. So he actually decided to give up the ascetic practices and to to have a wash for the first time for perhaps some years, to begin to eat food again. And the traditional story goes that a young lass, probably out helping looking after the the buffaloes or something, offered him some milky rice, which he ate, and he got wonderful energy from that. That’s the traditional account.
Her name was Sujatha. And, of course, his friends were utterly disgusted with him and thought that he’d given up the path, and he’d fallen into the old ways and gave him up as a lost cause and a ban and left him behind. We don’t want anything to do with you anymore. You’ve given up the great quest. So what what about the point for us in giving up these self hating type of practice and adopting a middle path?
I think he demonstrates his principle of having self compassion. That is to acknowledge all the aspects of ourselves as a person and in the light of this, to deal with ourself gently and skillfully. And I think we Westerners can be very hard on ourselves. We can be very idealistic about what can should be achieved. And perhaps like Gautama, we have to learn the balanced art of self development, avoiding the extremes of forcing ourselves on one hand or being lazy on the other.
But the extremes, the middle way between self hatred and self indulgence. And we probably all have experienced the pattern that we get in. We jump we we we sort of go from self indulgence to self hate. I think it’s it’s like a cultural stereotype that we Westerners are in. Half the time we hate ourselves, and then we indulge ourselves to make up for it.
And then we go back to thinking how terrible I am and then we go and spoil ourselves with some other indulgence. A middle way, some skillful middle way between those two, I think there’s maybe message for us from the Buddha’s life. And the fourth one, our extraordinary human potential for enlightenment. He experienced a renewed energy from this more skillful approach, and he decided that he needed to return to his old meditations, probably the stabilizing meditation, but to employ it in a new way and to employ it in conjunction somehow with this insight about a middle way. And we’ll come back to the middle way, the concept of middle way on the second last night when we talk about emptiness and the nature of reality.
So he went to the the traditional account is that he went to where Bodh Gaya is today in Bihar in India, and he went and sat under what was probably the local sacred Bodhi tree there where the villagers probably brought out their offerings for to the gods as the Indians then and now tend to do. And he probably chose that spot for practical reasons because it meant there would be food offerings every day. So and he determined he would sit there until he had found a way through. And the traditional account is that he sat there one night with great determination and had an extraordinary series of meditative insights during the course of that night culminating in what is called full and complete enlightenment in Buddhist terminology. Now he could be called the Buddha because he had woken up.
Buddha just means in that language in Sanskrit now. Then it was a little bit different, but it just means awakened, the person who’s woken up to the way things really are. So in attaining, I think, attaining this enlightened state, he demonstrates this principle of our human potential to grow and even to awaken, which far exceeds the way we normally think of ourselves. That’s one of the themes of Buddhism. It it is radically challenging to us to think of ourselves as being much bigger than we ever would have imagined.
And that’s very wonderful and it’s also very scary. So our fundamental capacity is to be pure, wise, and compassionate. But as Lama Yeshe was saying before, that’s obscured by these in grain habits to always want to chase after the things we like on one hand and avoid the things we don’t like on the other hand. And we do both that and that in this general state of confusion and bewilderment all the time. We don’t really know what’s going on half the time or more.
So this possibility of a radical a radically alternative way of being able to relate to oneself in the world or enlightenment or liberation or nirvana is a central pillar around which Buddhist practice is built. The experience or the way of being of that state is a central pillar around the my the way I understand Buddhist practices being built. The fifth one, the importance of compassion for others. Initially, he felt that after this amazing in series of insights that were very difficult to put any words to, that it was so profound and difficult to understand that no one would be able to relate to it. So what was the point?
He might as well just stay sitting under the tree, taking offerings and in a great state of bliss, enjoying what he discovered. The traditional story is, however, that, the Hindu god Brahmin, who was the king of the gods, came to him and pleaded with him that he must teach what he had discovered. This is so rare and amazing amongst all the gods and humans and other beings that you can’t let this go. You have to come and teach people about it because there will be some people who will catch on and understand. Understand.
Perhaps that story is a metaphorical way of talking about an upwelling of the Buddha’s own innate compassion to simply share after period of contemplating about what it was he had experienced to make the decision to begin to share this. So after a period of seven weeks, sitting around and meditating near the near the tree there at Bodh Gaya, He was thirty five years old. And at this point, he then began a teaching career that was to go for forty five years. He devoted himself to sharing this for forty five years. Initially, he wanted to return to tell his two original teachers about what he discovered.
Unfortunately, they had both recently just died, so he wasn’t able to do that. So he decided, well, next I better go back and find my five old friends who abandoned me and tell them about it. And so he he went he found them at present day at Sarnath, the deer park at Sarnath, which some of you may have visited in India near Varanasi. And he that’s where the occasion when he gave the first teaching, his first teaching on the four noble truths, which we’ll do in a couple of weeks time. And the five the five friends were so knocked out by his radiant presence and obviously the transformation that had occurred to him, they on the spot, became his first disciples.
And it was at that point then he gave that first teaching. So I think in choosing to move away from the blissful isolation of his deep insights and the great masters tell us that in these meditative states, is very blissful and you could just stay there a long time, to devoting his life to teaching and contributing to the community of the Genghis plains at that time in history. He demonstrates by this, I think, the principle of compassion. That compassionate devotion to the well-being of others is our highest calling. And and compassion for others, as Buddhism understands it, is a way for us to transcend this dichotomy that we struggle with in our lives between how to look after myself at the same time as care for others.
And we often experience this as a dilemma that pulls us apart in our lives. And the Buddhist understanding of practice, of of compassion, sees a way of overcoming that seeming dichotomy that we struggle with. And we’ll deal with that in some detail when we have the one day Saturday session in several weeks time. So having a spiritual goal, then this sixth point, the business about having a spiritual goal of wholeness rather than of some idealized perfection. So for the next forty five years, the Buddha wandered as a monk throughout the Ganges plains, and he was in he was intimately involved in the nitty gritty of everyday life.
He attracted thousands of disciples, both ordained and lay people, and these included untouchable untouchable class workers and laborers, kings, courtesans, and bandits, just about every possible type of person he had amongst his disciples in many different ways. And there’s some extraordinary stories from his life. And we could do spend a whole session enjoying some of those stories, but we haven’t got time for any of that. But he elaborated this incredibly clear and down to earth approach to spiritual practice. I think when I read the stories of the Buddha’s life and read his sutras, the this thing that comes across so strongly, he must he was just like a genius for teaching in a way that was so magnificently integrated with the day to day life and dreams of the people of his time.
It was just like his hands slipping into the glove of that culture, and it just fitted perfectly. And he built a community of ordained practitioners, monks, and nuns, which survives to this day and is, I think, the world’s longest running institution, the Buddhist Sangha. Correct. If someone else can think of another institution that’s been longer than two and a half thousand years, let me know. He was also quite socially engaged.
He strongly criticized the caste system, which was getting its act together at the time, and he counseled numbers of the kings in of the north of numbers of the kings of the different principalities in the Ganges Plain about avoiding war and building equitable and just and fair states that would be good for all their subjects and for them. And he agreed to the radical move of the ordination of women, which was well ahead of its time, like two and a half thousand years ahead of its time. So he had to face the ongoing difficulties of being a home all during this forty five years of being a homeless wandering beggar. He didn’t have to do that. At any time, he could have gone back to a a much, much better life.
His father wanted him to come back. He had an offer from another king. So but he chose this life. And if you start thinking about the technical details of what that must have been in life, there’s nothing very attractive about it except the wonderful side of being out in the bush all the time. But, you know, when you start thinking about mosquitoes and And he had many problems with undisciplined disciples who went off and wanted to do their own silly things instead of what he was telling them.
And he had jealous assaults on his credibility as a teacher from other teachers who didn’t like him because he was doing so well. And he even had several attempts on his life, one of which by his cousin who was so jealous of him, tried to kill him. So in no sense was Śākyamūni Buddha detached from life or in some airy fairy nirvana state of idealized perfection. At a time when the average life expectancy was probably only somewhere in the early twenties, he lived to the wonderful ripe old age of eighty, and he died from food poisoning in a forest glade near a town called present day Kushinagar surrounded by many of his disciples. So I think in the way that he lived and undertook this work amongst the nitty gritty of life, he demonstrates his principle of wholeness and completeness as distinct from some idealized perfection.
And I think an important theme in our culture is this idea of a state of perfection. I think it’s quite strong. There’s there’s this heritage of the the stereotypical images of a perfect god and a perfect heaven where everything is ideally perfect, and this is like a goal. And I think this attitude is very strong in our Western psychology. I think we carry it with us to a fair degree.
And I think what it can lead to is unrealistic idealism about what we should be and on the other hand, guilt about what we’re not because we don’t come up to this perfect ideal. And I think that the Buddha’s life teaches us that we can be whole and fully self realized within the everyday imperfect world that we are and that we inhabit. So these six points are shifting values, self responsibility, self compassion, our potential as humans, compassion for others, and wholeness rather than perfection. So that brings us to nine o’clock. Haven’t done the history yet or talked about the course.
If someone has to leave, please do, and I I will beg an leave, extra ten or fifteen minutes from those who’d like to stay on to just keep going. We started a bit late. There’s a there’s a hand for those of you who are just going, there’s there’s a handout that I’m going to give in a few minutes. Could you please from whoever’s gonna be giving that out, could you grab that as you go? And you you okay.
Let’s have it. Thanks. So very quickly, I’ll I’ll look at how we get from there to here. So we’ll look at the the early centuries, five points. The early centuries, the emergence of what’s called Mahāyāna Buddhism, the rise of tantric practice, the move of the Buddhist teachings into Tibet, and then how they arrived into how that arrived into the west.
And believe it or not, we’re gonna do that in about three or four minutes. So after the soon after the Buddha’s death, his disciples met at Rajgir, this place where the Buddha used to love to meditate. At Rajgir, He gave many teachings there for the first council to decide what the officially recognized sutras or teachings of the Buddhas were. And for the first couple of hundred years after that, the way of life and style of practice continued very much as it was at the time of the Buddha. Wandering monks mainly and some nuns carrying just their robes, a begging bowl, and a couple of other items, and living in the forests and parks adjacent to the cities and towns where they would go every day to beg for their food from the local laypeople.
And this was also a part of acceptance. This wasn’t some radical departure. This was also what was going on in India at the time. And they would gather together for three months each year during the rainy season in certain locations for what they called the rains retreat because it was almost impossible to move around because of all the rain, the flooding. And these locations eventually turned into more established monasteries.
And then in about the third century BCE, a great king Ashoka established an empire across much of of India, and he actually adopted Buddhism as the state religion, which had a a powerful impact. Synergism with the Buddhism had already been growing, and this tended to disperse it even more. Buddhism in these first few hundred years began to flourish throughout India, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. By the time of Christ, the it had become much more clearly established established in these monasteries where they hadn’t previously done the rains retreat. This approach, this early style of approach to Buddhism, we still seem see as practiced in a very similar way to this in the the what’s called the Theravadan tradition in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma today.
So then the next point was the emergence of what’s called Mahāyāna Buddhism. Mahāyāna is Sanskrit mean meaning great vehicle, literally. And this began to emerge around the time of of of Christ. This whole new approach to Buddhist practice unfolded, and it was characterized by several new emphases. One firstly, that every practitioner of Buddhism should seek to attain full and complete enlightenment or Buddhahood as distinct from the lesser attainment of liberation or the attainment of what’s called an arhat, which which is the goal that’s primarily set in the Theravadin style of practice.
And we’ll talk more about this later. It’s probably a bit confusing at this stage. But there was an emphasis practitioner should aim for the highest possible goal of spiritual path which is full and complete Buddhahood or enlightenment. Another key emphasis of the Mahāyāna practice was a tremendous expansion of the emphasis on compassion. It was always there but it was it was emphasized more strongly.
A more sophisticated analysis of the nature of reality and we’ll come to that later in the course. A much more use of a much great diversity of skillful types of spiritual practice rather than than the rather narrow range of practices employed in the Theravadan style practice as per the early sutras. And large numbers and there was also a change in thinking about the Buddha from being this historical person to seeing him more as this great cosmic being and that there were vast numbers of similar cosmic beings or Buddhas inhabiting special lands called pure lands. And and a great almost exuberance and extravagance of imagining all these different Buddhas and pure lands. That also arose with the Mahāyāna compared to the very simplicity of the approach earlier on.
And there were large numbers of texts written at this time. And interestingly, these new teachings, as they were written, they they were, along with that, developed the idea that these teachings were also given by the Buddha. In fact, our teachers in the Tibetan tradition teach that all these later Mahāyāna sutras were actually many of these were actually teachings given by the Buddha, but in sort of a to a selected group of people who are ready to handle it, and it basically went underground for a few hundred years before it came back again. There seems to be a little historical evidence for that being the case, but this tradition presents it in that way. The this new approach was had a tremendous impact rapidly.
It spread, throughout Central Asia and into China by the first and second century onto Korea and to Japan by the seventh century. It also spread down throughout Southeast Asia much of Southeast Asia and was very powerful in Indonesia as well. So then came the rise of tantra. Around the fifth century in India saw the unfolding of another whole new dimension of Buddhist practice, Tantrism with its radical new approaches to spiritual practice. Some an approach which is summed up as taking the result as the path, and we’ll talk about this in the last session of the course.
The extensive use of visualizations of meditational deities such as some of the pictures you see around the walls here. The powerful powerful yogic techniques that were being developed in India amongst the Hindus and the Buddhists at those at this time for working with one’s psychic energy. So this approach spread also throughout the Buddhist world but it didn’t continue to be widespread with a widespread practice in very many countries. It went to nearly everywhere. There’s remnants of it, but it didn’t remain a central part of the Buddhist practice in most countries except Tibet.
And that brings us to Tibet, the Buddha the Buddhadharma, the Buddha’s teachings coming into Tibet. And that was it was the last really. The last place in Asia almost where Buddhism arrived was in Tibet. It was only the eighth century even after Japan. And there were two great Indian masters, Santarakshita and Padmasambhava, who jointly initially introduced Buddhism into Tibet, a very rough and wild country with its own established religion but not much culture of its own and not even a written language at the time.
And so these teachers brought the full range of all the different types of Buddhist practice. All of the Theravadan style practices, the Mahāyāna stuff, the latest high-tech tantric practices. They just brought all of it to Tibet. And over the next couple of hundred years, nearly all of the material, a huge amount of the Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan in two big waves translation. And so Tibetan Buddhism almost became the repository for everything that had happened in Indian Buddhism for the previous, how long is it now?
Five, twelve hundred years, fifteen hundred years. Then Buddhism, one unpleasant king tried to stamp it out after a couple of hundred years, and then it was reintroduced to Tibet by a great Indian master called AAtisha in the eleventh century, and after that it just went from strength to strength. And more than any other country in Asia, in Tibet, it became utterly and thoroughly integrated with the whole way of life of the country. It became their it became their culture. In many other countries, it’s almost like you have the culture of the country next to Buddhism.
But in Tibet, you take away Buddhism. There’s not there’s virtually nothing left except roasted barley flour and butter tea or something like that. So one of the greatest masters of Tibetan Buddhism was this scholar and yogi called Tsongkhapa in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. And he gathered together all of the different diverse traditions that had already been established in Tibet, and there’s all these different traditions going. And and he sort of integrated it all into one very overall system.
And he reorganized the monasteries, many of which had become quite degenerate, and he formed a new order called the Gelugpa tradition. Prior to that, there had been three main traditions already established in Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingmapas from the original Buddhism, the Sakyas and the Kagyas. And some of you who’ve who’ve perhaps been around Tibetan Buddhism might have come across these these four traditions. The fourth one, the latest one to be founded in the fifteenth century was the Gelug to which the of which the Dalai Lama is the head, of which the monastery that I belong to is a part of, and of which this organization and Buddha House is also closely linked, the Gelug tradition. So how did Buddhism how did that then come here to us in the west?
In nineteen fifty nine, the Dalai Lama left Tibet because of the increasing pressure from the invading Chinese army army into Tibet. And he would one of the many monks who fled with him into North India was someone was a monk called Lama Yeshe. And he came to live at at the refugee camp that had been set up for them in North India at a place called Buxar. And he continued with the traditional studies there as well as they could in those very difficult conditions. But then in the early sixties, he began to have contact.
This this monk, Lama Yeshe, began to have contact with some of the hippies who were coming to Kathmandu to find, lots of cheap drugs and so on. And he eventually started teaching Buddhism to some of these hippies and dropouts. And he it led to him forming an organization called the FPMT or the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna tradition. It’s a long mouthful. That isn’t that much easy to say, FPMT, which now has got over a hundred and twenty centers around the world of which Buddha House is one.
And Buddha House was founded about a hundred and about in nineteen eighty one after a visit here by Lama Yeshe. He became known as Lama Yeshe by his early students. He died in nineteen eighty four, and his main student, a Nepalese monk called Thubten Zopa, who is now known as Lama Zopa Rinpoche, has been the spiritual director of this the organization, the FPMT, ever since nineteen eighty four. And one of the founders of Buddha House in nineteen eighty one was the person who led your meditation session. For those of you who might have gone to learn to meditate before, Doc was one of those first founders of Buddha House in nineteen eighty one.
Thanks to Doc’s kindness, also we’re able to be here tonight. So we arrive here today at the end of this long chain of master disciple relationships that stretches back two and a half thousand years to the Buddha. Relationships that stretches back two and a half thousand years to the Buddha. So perhaps a few technical comments about just about the course. I’m going to let’s organize to give out some handouts to pass around some handouts now, and I’ll just make a couple of comments about those.
There’s a there’s a course outline which which goes through the the details of the course, what what the topic each week is going to be. And I’ll just quick whilst those have been handed out, I’ll just read you the title of each topic and also a a question that I’ve written in conjunction with the title to try and trigger some thinking. And on the sheet, which will be one of the ones that you get, it’s titled course outline. There’s also a paragraph that I’ve written summarizing. But I won’t read that.
There’s not time. I’ll just quickly go through the topics and with each one this question, thought provoking question. By that time, everyone should have a copy of the handout. So tonight, the life of the Buddha. In what way does the life of this ancient spiritual master speak to the modern task of growing up as a person?
The second week, the nature of mind. We all know we have one that is a mind, but how closely have we looked at this process of lived experience which we call the mind? The third week, matters of life and death. Is looking at death a morbid obsession, or is it a spotlight on the precious opportunity that we have as human human beings. The next week after that, our actions and their results is calmer about the dead weight of the past or rather about creating our own destiny by choosing to live more skillfully.
How are they going? Coming around. So what the page I’m looking at what is probably the second or third page and it’s titled course outline. So the first page has anyone not got a set yet? There’s a couple here to go.
One and three two down the back still. So if we run out we might we can copy some more. How Just put your hands right up so I can see how many I need to go and get extra. So I’m down to the middle of the page course outline. And the first page is a simply a title page.
The second page is a table of contents for the little folder of handouts that you’ll be able to produce for yourself during the course. The third page is the course outline, which I’m looking at now. And I I got I’m just going quickly through these topics. The life of the Buddha, the nature of mind, matters of life and death, our actions and their results. Is calmer about the dead weight of the past or rather about creating our own destiny by choosing to live more skillfully.
The four noble truths. Why is life difficult? And what if anything can be done about it? The awakening heart. This is the full Saturday.
Is it possible to be wisely selfish? And what does this have to do with living compassionately? The next Monday, emptiness and the nature of reality. Is our habit of taking the every world everyday world at face value mistaken? And what does this have to do with empty cups still being cups?