I'm continuing this program with talks on some of the fundamental ideas of Oriental
 philosophy. But before going on, I want to refer back to something that I said in the
 last program, in which I was talking about Hinduism, which may possibly have been misunderstood.
 At the end of the program, I was referring to certain trends in modern Hinduism, which
 I described as being of a somewhat Nambi-Pambi nature. Perhaps that wasn't quite the right
 phrase, because that suggests weakness. What I really wanted to suggest was bloodlessness,
 lack of earthiness, or excessive spirituality. And I think this arises in certain schools
 of thought from a wrong interpretation of the great commentator, Shankara. Shankara
 and Ramanuja are probably the two of the greatest medieval Indian commentators on the Upanishads
 and the traditional scriptures. And the way some people interpret this is somewhat as
 follows. That there is but one reality, which is Brahman, which is without form, without
 any quality that the mind can imagine, following the usual method of description by negation.
 And that this being so, it excludes there being any reality whatsoever to the seeming
 multiplicity of the physical world. In other words, the physical world that we perceive
 with our senses is in reality simply not there. And there is even no cause within reality
 for its seeming to be there. And this is rather like the Christian science doctrine of mortal
 mind, producing the error of suffering and physical existence. That it has no reality
 at all, and our seeing of it, its seeming to be real, again has no basis within the
 divine reality, which is the sole thing that exists. Now this is an interpretation of Shankara,
 which I believe to be fundamentally wrong. I don't believe that Shankara can correctly
 be interpreted as saying that the world of sense experience, which this, to my mind,
 wrong interpretation of his school identifies with Maya. I don't believe that this is the
 way he ought to be understood. Maya, I can think of passages in Shankara where Maya is
 given a much more positive sense. Where the world is not to be considered identical with
 Brahman in the sense that it's not really there and Brahman is the only reality which
 exists. But rather, that the world is Maya, or is illusory, only in the sense that we
 do not see it to be one with Brahman, just as it is. The seeing of its oneness with Brahman
 does not involve its disappearance. And if it does, then we've got not a non-dualistic
 doctrine at all, we've got an extremely dualistic doctrine. Because after all, if there is the
 seeing of an illusion, supposing you say what you see as the illusion isn't really there,
 but you can't deny the fact that you see it, and then if that seeing of it has no basis
 in reality, if that in turn is an illusion, and the illusion that one sees an illusion
 is an illusion, then you've got a principle that is fundamentally distinct from the supreme
 reality and in a way stands against it, is not explained by it, is not grounded in it.
 And therefore this is a highly dualistic form of thought, and as a result, all fundamental
 dualisms lead to consequences in feeling and in conduct which are world-hating. And this
 seems to me why there are trends in modern Hinduism to be excessively spiritual, to regard
 all sense knowledge as basically evil, in the sense of being fundamentally, and I mean
 fundamentally unreal. And this, in other words, is what I wanted to indicate about these trends
 in modern Hinduism which I do not feel are representative at all of either Shankara's
 doctrine or the doctrine of the Upanishads, upon which the whole tradition of Hinduism
 is based. Now then, today I want to go on to the subject of Buddhism. Buddhism originates
 in India, somewhere between six and five hundred BC. There is always some conjecture about
 the exact dating of individuals at this time, but it was during this period that there lived
 a man called Gautama. And Gautama was the son of a king or perhaps tribal chieftain,
 who lived very close to modern Nepal in the north of India. And Buddha is a title given
 to this man. It wasn't his proper name, just as Christ is not as it were the surname
 of Jesus, as when we say Jesus Christ, we should correctly say Jesus the Christ, Jesus
 the Anointed One. And in the same way, one should say not Gautama Buddha, but Gautama
 the Buddha, for Buddha means an awakened one. A man who woke up, who, in other words, you
 must understand this term within the whole Hindu tradition, a man who is no longer spellbound
 by maya, by the seeming separateness of all the things in this world. That's one of the
 forms of maya. And so a Buddha is not a unique historical character. There can be, and it
 is supposed that there have been, innumerable Buddhas. But the idea of a Buddha is related
 to the Hindu idea of an avatar, which means an incarnation of the Godhead in human form.
 Buddhists don't think of a Buddha as an incarnation of the Godhead, because they, although not
 rejecting the idea of God or gods, relegate all gods to the world of maya, to the world
 of relative reality. And in this sense, a Buddha is felt in some way to be superior
 even to the gods. Let's put it in this way. Perhaps some of you have seen what is a sort
 of fundamental illustration of the principles of Buddhism, a diagram or map-like thing called
 the Wheel of Life. And in Tibetan versions of the Wheel of Life, you will notice that
 the wheel is divided into six realms. And these six realms include human beings, gods,
 or perhaps angels would be a better term for devas, spirits of wrath called asuras, personifications
 of the destructive forces of nature, animals, then what are called naraka, or purgatories,
 preta or tormented, frustrated spirits with tiny mouths and immense bellies, having in
 other words, immense appetite but very little means of satisfying it, and then again humans.
 And the basic idea of Buddhism is that awakening, buddhahood, can be attained only from the
 human state, deliverance from the vicious circle which the wheel represents, life considered
 as a vicious circle. The gods are too powerful and too happy to concern themselves to be
 delivered. At the opposite extreme, the people in the narakas, the tormented souls in purgatory
 as it were, are too miserable. The animals too dumb, the asuras too angry, the pretas
 too frustrated. You can take this wheel as a matter of fact, not as referring to any
 actual worlds other than ours of ghosts or gods and purgatories, but you can take these
 six realms as representing states of the human mind, and the human state as representing
 even-mindedness, what is called in Sanskrit upaksa, equanimity. Now, when it is said then
 that one can become a Buddha only from the human state, it means, you see, that a Buddha
 stands above the gods as being released from the wheel. In very popular Buddhism, of course,
 as in popular Hinduism, the idea of the wheel is taken rather literally. It is in other
 words believed that the individual passes from life to life, and it's rather funny that
 although Buddhism actually denies the existence of an individual soul as an enduring reality,
 nevertheless in Buddhist countries it is popularly believed that some sort of equivalent of the
 soul passes from life to life, and that if your present life is miserable, it is a result
 of foolish actions in the former life, but if in this life you act wisely, your birth
 in the next life is to be more fortunate, and you may get up, of course, to the heaven
 worlds, the world of the gods, but human birth is the thing that is always regarded as most
 fortunate, because you can be tied to the wheel not only by chains of iron, that is
 to say, by acting wrongly, you can also be bound by chains of gold, that is, by acting
 wisely so as to inherit good fruits. Now, of course, very sophisticated Buddhists, not
 only in modern times, but in ancient times, did not take this idea of reincarnation literally.
 They looked upon it in quite a different way, and just as they regarded the six worlds as
 states of the human mind, so they regarded reincarnation as something happening in this
 life. Those of you who've read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets will remember the passage, perhaps,
 where he says that those who have just left the platform of a station on a railway train
 are not those who will arrive at any destination. Those who, in other words, walked in at the
 door of the room and are now sitting down in chairs are not the same people as those
 who stepped in at the door. We are, in other words, constantly changing, just as we know,
 physiologically speaking, that our bodies are, in all their molecular structure, completely
 changed every seven years or so, so that we are, as it were, not enduring entities, but
 rather something like a university, where the faculty and the students and the very
 buildings themselves may change completely within a span of years, and yet somehow the
 university or something by way of a pattern goes on. And so, in this sense, freedom from
 reincarnation would be, by very sophisticated Buddhists, interpreted as freedom from the
 illusion that the person who came in at the door is the same one now sitting in a chair.
 And that, in its turn, signifies freedom from an emotional habit, the habit of grasping
 at one's own life, at seeking for continuity. And, you see, the idea of continuity in Buddhist
 philosophy is that we desire continuity in order to perpetuate our past. In our past,
 in other words, we have accumulated various things, experiences, material goods, knowledge,
 virtues, power, so on. The desire for continuity is the desire for the perpetuation of a past
 self or string of selves with which we identify ourselves. And Buddhist insight involves the
 recognition that the past is perpetually vanishing. There really is no past to continue. And therefore,
 to cling to it, to identify oneself with it, is to perpetuate an illusion resulting in
 incessant frustration, resulting indeed in that very vicious circle which the symbol
 of the wheel represents. Now, Gautama made it very easy to summarize his teaching. He
 was really quite an adept in what we call mnemonics, in putting things in simple forms
 so that they could easily be remembered. He summed up the whole of his doctrine in what
 is called the fourfold noble truths. And although it becomes sometimes awfully boring to read
 fundamental texts on Buddhism, which just go over these things again and again, I think
 it's only boring if one goes over them in a very formal way that these texts adopt.
 Really, it's a very skillful outline of the nature of Buddhism, and it's based on an old
 medical formula. In ancient India, as in almost all ancient cultures, every activity was ceremonialized.
 And when a physician came to pay his call, he gave his diagnosis in a ceremonial way.
 He made four pronouncements. The first pronouncement was the name of the disease. The second, the
 cause of the disease. The third, the curability of the disease. Can it be cured? Yes or no.
 And if it can be cured, the fourth pronouncement is the giving of the prescription. And that's
 exactly the form of Gautama's summary of his doctrine. He said, in other words, the first
 principle is that mankind, and indeed all forms of life, suffer from a disease, which
 is called in Sanskrit dukkha. And the most general translation of that word is suffering.
 Dukkha means suffering in all its forms. Moral, physical, spiritual. But Western interpreters
 of Buddhism have sometimes represented him as saying that life is suffering, period.
 In other words of enunciating a highly pessimistic and world-hating doctrine, that to be alive
 is to suffer. And that in other words, the amount of joy, of positive pleasure in life,
 is after all so negligible, that the game is not worth a candle.
 Now if one studies the method of teaching of sages in ancient India, you have to realize
 that one of their fundamental pedagogical gambits is to arrive at the point of view
 they wish to inculcate by a zigzag method. When we walk, you know, we put down maybe
 first the left foot, then we shift to the right foot, then the left foot, then the right
 foot. And in this way we go along, neither to the left nor to the right, but straight
 ahead. And you find too that in thought, that the human mind tends to go from position to
 position, but it always, when it settles on any fixed position, we can always point out
 that that position is an extreme. For example, in scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages,
 when St. Thomas Aquinas fastened on the idea that God is fundamentally ends or being, a
 Buddhist philosopher would point out that he had settled upon an extreme that has an
 opposite, non-being. And that therefore, his position needs to be corrected by the opposite
 position. Somebody else should get up and say, "No, no, God is not being, God is non-being."
 And from this facing of opposites with each other, we arrive at what Buddhism is sometimes
 called the Middle Way. It doesn't mean the compromise position. The Middle Way is the
 doctrine of relativity, of showing that all positions or experiences which we can formulate
 must always be perceived or known by contrast with their opposites. So in other words, Buddha's
 doctrine that life is fundamentally dukkha, or suffering, is an antithesis directed towards
 those people who believe that the object of life is to attain sukha, or sweetness, pleasure.
 He is saying, in other words, you cannot experience pleasure except in reference to non-pleasure.
 And therefore, the more you pursue pleasure, the more non-pleasure will arise to frustrate
 you. The more you pursue permanence, the more you will feel the impermanence of things.
 And so it is, for after all, when we are bent on enjoying ourselves, we become at that very
 moment curiously aware of how rapidly time is slipping by. When on the other hand, we
 are not enjoying ourselves, we become curiously aware of how time is dragging. So then, dukkha,
 arising from an exaggerated pursuit of sukha, its opposite, becomes the basic characteristic
 of life. And he goes on to say, in his second principle, that the cause of this is trishna,
 or grasping, sometimes translated desire, and indeed I believe the word trishna does
 underlie, etymologically, the English word thirst. But trishna is not quite desire. For
 example, one's appetite. When you haven't eaten for some time and you get hungry, this
 is not trishna. It's a perfectly natural occurrence. Trishna is based in turn on avidya,
 which means unwisdom, which is the way the Tibetan scholar around here, Alex Wayman,
 likes to translate it. It's a good translation, unwisdom, or simply lack of insight, lack
 of consciousness, lack of, well, a special sense of ignorance, not the ordinary sense
 of ignorance of not being informed, but ignorance, action based on ignoring something. And ignorance
 is not realizing the relativity of experiences, not realizing the inseparability of pleasure
 and pain, existence and nonexistence, life and death, up and down, good and bad. So that
 as a result of such ignorance or unwisdom, people try to separate these opposites from
 each other, to corral, to gain the good ones, and to exclude and annihilate the bad ones.
 And as a result of that, because these opposites exist mutually, they go around in circles,
 and that mutual existence of these opposites is really, it seems to me, the basic meaning
 of the doctrine of karma, which is involved in Buddhism, the doctrine of conditioned action,
 which Buddha epitomized in the phrase, "This arises, that becomes." In other words, without
 this on the one hand, or this on the one hand always implies that on the other, good on
 the one hand implies bad on the other, and so on and so forth. And so, if a person, a
 person becomes involved in karma, involved in conditioned action, leading to a vicious
 circle if he is ignorant of the interdependence of all states of experience.
 So then the third truth, the cure of this dukkha or suffering is the truth about nirvana.
 Nirvana is most grossly mistranslated word in all foreign languages probably, because
 we are early scholars of Buddhism translated it as annihilation, and nowadays nirvana means
 a state of being doped up to most people. It's popularly used as being in ecstasy or
 in a kind of dreamy bliss. And nirvana doesn't mean that at all. It's a state of being very,
 very wide awake. A state of being completely aware. But the etymology of the word is disputed.
 There are several etymologies that you can offer, and so I just choose the one I like,
 and that is to blow out. As when having tried to hold one's breath, you discover that you
 can't hold it. You lose your breath by holding it. Therefore you expire, you de-spirate,
 and so you heave a sigh of relief. And so nirvana is the sigh of relief, the expiration
 or de-spiration. In other words, the giving up of the attempt to clutch at life, to hold
 it in a fixed form, to resist change, to separate the good side of things from the bad side
 and annihilate the bad side. It is the giving up of that fundamentally contradictory, self-contradictory
 kind of conduct. And so then in the fourth truth, there is set out the noble eightfold
 path, Buddha's prescription for dukkha. And the noble eightfold path is really in three
 divisions, one of which concerns itself with understanding, I'd almost say intellectual
 understanding of the doctrine. The one is concerned with conduct, and the third part
 of it is concerned with state of consciousness or meditation. Now, to summarize them briefly,
 the first stages of the path such as a right view, or I prefer to translate the word samyak,
 not so much as right, but as perfect in the Greek sense of telos, or complete. And thus,
 to have a complete view is a view which does not take sides, which takes the middle path,
 which in other words does not go off to extremes, and so on. The part of the eightfold path
 that is concerned with conduct. Buddhism is often represented as having a very exalted
 ethical system, and this is true in a way it does. But also one must recognize the difference
 between Buddhism and Christianity, as at any rate as Christianity is ordinarily taught,
 is that these ethical ideas are not commandments. They are really forms of expedient conduct.
 The Buddha counseled his followers to take upon themselves certain obligations, say of
 not killing, of not stealing, of not exploiting the senses, of not getting drunk or intoxicated
 with poisons, not lying. Because, not because these were against the will of God or against
 the fundamental laws of the universe, but because they are inexpedient forms of conduct
 for a person who wants to wake up. For if you get thoroughly doped up, you're not liable
 to be very wide awake. And then, finally, the end of the path, the last stages of it
 are concerned with one's state of consciousness, with being, with the process of what is sometimes
 called meditation, or of bringing one's mind to its maximum awareness through clear recollection.
 And then, finally, the attainment of what is called Samadhi, which means integrated
 consciousness. Consciousness no longer under the influence of avidya, no longer bamboozled
 and fooled by the apparent separateness of things which are really inseparably interlinked.
 And thus Samadhi could be called integrated, a unified consciousness in which it is seen
 that the subject, the knower, is inseparable from the object, the known, that man is inseparable
 from the totality of life, and so on and so forth. So that Samadhi at the end of the eightfold
 path might be described as being the entry to, or realization, the making real of the
 state of Nirvana, which constitutes in turn being a Buddha.


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