I want to start by re-emphasizing the point that what are called the religions of the
 East, the ones we're discussing, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese Taoism, they don't involve
 that you believe in anything specific. And they don't involve any idea of obedience to
 commandments from above. And they don't involve any conformity to a specific ritual, although
 they do have rituals, but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time.
 Their objective is always not ideas, not doctrines, but a method, a method for the transformation
 of consciousness. That is to say, for a transformation of your sensation of who you are. And I emphasize
 the word "sensation" because it's the strongest word we have for feeling directly. When you
 put your hand on the corner of a table, you have a very definite feeling. And when you
 are aware of existing, you also have a definite feeling. But in the view of these methods
 or disciplines, the ordinary person's definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is,
 is a hallucination. To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness
 that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked
 up inside a bag of skin, is seen as a hallucination. That you are not a stranger in the earth that
 comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit
 that comes from somewhere else altogether. But that you, in your fundamental existence,
 you are the total energy that constitutes this universe, playing that it's you, playing
 that it's this particular organism, and even playing that it's this particular person.
 Because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide-and-seek. That is to say
 that the colossal reality, the energy that is everything, that is a unitary energy, that
 is one, plays at being many, at manifesting itself in all these particulars that we call
 you and you and you and you and you and you and you and this and that and all around us.
 And it's fundamentally a game. And you can say that this goes really for all the systems
 that I'm talking about. It's the basis of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and of Taoism, this
 intuition. Now today we're going to talk about Buddhism. Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism.
 You could, in a way, call it a reform of Hinduism, or Hinduism stripped for export. It originates
 in northern India, close to the area that is now Nepal, shortly after 600 BC. There
 was a young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha who became the man we call the
 Buddha. Now the word Buddha is not a proper name, it's a title. And it's based on the
 Sanskrit root budh, B-U-D-H, which means to be awake. And so you could say the Buddha
 is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be, and found
 out who he was, who he is. It's curious that this title was not something new. There was
 already in the whole complex of Hinduism the idea of Buddhas, of awakened people, and curiously
 they are ranked higher than gods. Because in the view of Hinduism, even the gods, or
 the angels, the devas, are still bound on the wheel of the sort of squirrel cage of
 going round and round and round in the pursuit of success. And the idea is that if you pursue
 something that you can call success, pleasure, good, virtue, which originally of course means
 strength, magical power, all these positive things, you are under illusion because the
 positive cannot exist without the negative. To be, you only know what to be is by contrast
 with not to be. So if we say, now there is a coin in the left hand, there is no coin
 in the right, and from this you get the idea of to be and not to be. And you can't have
 the one without the other. So if you try to pursue, to gain the positive, and to deny,
 get rid of the negative, it's as if you were trying to arrange everything in this room
 so that it was all up and nothing was down. You can't do it. You set yourself an absolutely
 insoluble problem. Because the basis of life is spectrum. Consider the spectrum of colours.
 When you think of a spectrum, in what form do you think of it? Most people think of it
 as a ribbon, with red at one end and purple at the other. But the spectrum is actually
 a circle, because purple is the mixture of red and blue. It goes right round. And so
 in this way, all sensation, all feeling, all experience whatsoever, is moving through spectra.
 You don't only have the spectrum of colour, you have a spectrum of sound, you have various
 complex spectra of texture, of smell, of taste, and you're constantly operating through all
 the possible variations of experience. And it implies that you can't know one end of
 the spectrum without also knowing the other. So if you wanted, say your favourite colour
 is red, and you wanted only red, and you had to exclude, therefore, blue and purple, without
 blue and purple you can't have red. Behind, of course, all the various colours in the
 spectrum is the white light. And behind everything that we experience, all our various sensations
 of sound, of colour, of shape, of touch, there's the white light. And I'm using the phrase
 "the white light" rather symbolically. I don't mean it literally. But there is common to
 all sensations what you might call the basic sense. And if you explore back into your sensations
 and reduce them all to the basic sense, you're on your way to reality, to what underlies
 everything, to what is the ground of being the basic energy. And to the extent that you
 realise this and know that you are it, you transcend, you overcome, you surpass the illusion
 that you are simply John Doe, Mary Smith, or what have you. So then, the Buddha, as
 the man who woke up, is regarded as one Buddha among a potentiality of myriads of Buddhas.
 Everybody can be a Buddha. Everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion
 of being simply this separate individual. The Buddha made his doctrine very easy to
 understand because in those days there wasn't very much writing being done, and people committed
 things to memory. And so he put his doctrine or method in various formulae which are very
 easy to remember, and I'm going to explain it in those terms so that you can remember
 it just as well. He, of course, practised the various disciplines that were offered
 in the Hinduism of his time, but he found in a certain way that they had become unsatisfactory.
 Because they had over-emphasised asceticism, had over-emphasised putting up with as much
 pain as you can. There was a feeling, you see, that if the problem of life is pain,
 let us suffer. And this is the root of the ascetics, you see, who lie on beds of nails,
 who hold a hand up forever and ever and ever, who eat only one banana a day, who renounce
 sex, who do all these weird things, because they feel that if they head right into pain
 and don't become afraid of it, but suffer as much pain as possible, they will by this
 method overcome the problem of pain, and they will set themselves free from anxiety. There's
 a certain sense in that, as you can obviously see. Supposing, for example, you have absolutely
 no fear of pain, you have no anxieties, you have no hang-ups. How strong you would be.
 Nobody could stop you. You would have ultimate courage. But the Buddha was very subtle. He
 is really the first historical psychologist, the great psychologist, psychotherapist. He
 is very subtle, because he saw that a person who is fighting pain, who is trying to get
 rid of pain, is still really fundamentally afraid of it. And therefore, the way of asceticism
 is not right. Equally, the way of hedonism, of seeking pleasure, is not right. So the
 Buddha's doctrine is called the Middle Way, which is neither ascetic nor hedonistic. So
 it's summed up in what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first is called dukkha.
 Dukkha means suffering in a very generalized sense. You could call it chronic frustration.
 And it is saying that life as lived by most people is dukkha. It is an attempt, in other
 words, to solve insoluble problems. Try to draw a square circle. You can't, because the
 problem itself is meaningless. Try to arrange the things in this room so that they're all
 up and none of them down. It is meaningless. Such a problem cannot ever be solved. So try
 to have light without dark, or dark without light. It can never be solved. So the attempt
 to solve problems that are basically insoluble, and to work at it through your whole life,
 that is dukkha. Now, he went on to analyze this, that there are what he called three
 signs of being. The first is dukkha itself, frustration. The second is anitya. And this
 means the letter A in Sanskrit at the beginning of a word is often the equivalent of our non-
 noun. So anitya means permanent. Anitya means impermanent. That every manifestation of life
 is impermanent. And therefore, our quest to make things permanent, to straighten everything
 out, to get it fixed, is an impossible and insoluble problem. And therefore, we experience
 dukkha, or this sense of fundamental pain and frustration, as a result of trying to
 make things permanent. And the third sign of being is called anatman. Now, you know
 from my talk on Hinduism that the word atman means self. Anatman means, therefore, non-self.
 That there is in you no real ego. Now, I've explained that already. I've explained in
 talking about Hinduism that the idea of the ego is a social institution. It has no physical
 reality. It is simply, the ego is your symbol of yourself. Just as the word water is a noise
 which symbolizes a certain liquid reality, so the idea of the ego, the role you play,
 who you are, is not the same as your living organism. Your ego has absolutely nothing
 to do with the way you color your eyes, shape your body, circulate your blood. That's the
 real you. But it's certainly not your ego, because you don't even know how it's done,
 from the standpoint of your conscious attention. So the idea of anatman is firstly that the
 ego is unreal. There isn't one. Now then, this then is the first truth. There is this
 situation, that we have dukkha, or frustration, because we are fighting the changingness of
 things and because we don't realize that the ego, the "I" is unreal. The second of the
 four noble truths is then called trishna. Trishna is a Sanskrit word again and is the
 root of our word thirst. And it's usually translated desire, but it is better translated
 clinging, grabbing, or there's an excellent modern American slangy word, hang-up. That
 is exactly what trishna is, a hang-up. Trishna is clutching, as for example what we call
 smother love, when a mother is so afraid that her children may get into trouble, that she
 protects them excessively. And as a result of this, prevents them from growing. Or when
 lovers cling to each other excessively and have to sign documents that they will curse
 and swear to love each other always, they are in a state of trishna. And this is the
 same thing as holding on to yourself so tightly that you strangle yourself. Now, so the second
 truth then about trishna is that the cause of dukkha is trishna. Clinging is what makes
 suffering. If you don't recognize that this whole world is a phantasmagoria, an amazing
 illusion, a weaving of smoke, and you try to hold on to it, you see, then you start
 suffering, seriously suffering. Trishna is in turn based upon avidya, the same negative
 "a". Vidya, from the root vid, means knowledge, as in the Latin "video" and the English
 "vision". Avidya, therefore, is ignorance. Gnosis, gn, means, of course, to know. Knowledge
 is the same thing as gnosis in Greek. To know. So this is not to know, to ignore, to overlook.
 And I explained in the first talk in this series how we ignore all kinds of things,
 because we notice only what we think noteworthy. And therefore our vision of everything is
 highly selective. We pick out certain things and say, "That's what's there," just as we
 select and notice the figure rather than the background. Sometimes I draw this on the blackboard
 and ask the question, "What have I drawn?" What would you say? What have I drawn? A circle.
 Any other suggestions? A hole in the blackboard. Yeah, you're getting the point. I've drawn
 a wall with a hole in it, you see. But ordinarily, you've been reading my books. So, but ordinarily
 people see the ball, the circle, the ring, or whatever, and never think of the background,
 because they ignore the background, just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without
 pain. You want pleasure of the figure and don't realize that pain is the background.
 So avidya is this state of restricted consciousness, restricted attention, that moves through life
 unaware of the fact that to be implies not to be, and vice versa.
 So now the third noble truth is called nirvana. This word means "blow out." Nira is a negative
 word again, like "a." Vana is blowing, so it's a kind of outblowing. Now, in breathing,
 you know that breath is life. The Greek word, you may pronounce it "pneuma" or "pnephma,"
 is the same as spirit. And spirit means breath. In the book of Genesis, when God had made
 the clay figurine that was later to be Adam, he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils,
 and it became alive, because life is breath. But now, if you hold your breath, you lose
 it. He that would save his life will lose it. So breathe in, breathe in, breathe in,
 get as much air as you can, and trishna, cling, and you lose it.
 So nirvana means breathe out. What a relief that was. The sigh of relief. Let it go, because
 it'll come back to you if you let it go. But if you don't let it go, you'll just suffocate.
 So a person in the state of nirvana is what we might call a blown-out person, like blow
 your mind. Let go, don't cling, and then you're in the state of nirvana. And I reemphasize
 the point. This is not... I'm not preaching, see? I'm not saying this is what you ought
 to do. I'm simply pointing out a state of affairs that is so. There's no moralism in
 this whatsoever. It's simply pointing out, like, if you put your hand into the fire,
 you'll get burned. You can get burned if you want to. That's okay. But if so happens that
 you don't want to get burned, then you don't put your hand in the fire. So in the same
 way, if you don't want to be in a state of anxiety all the time, and again I emphasize,
 if you like to be anxious, it's perfectly all right. See, Buddhism never hurries anyone
 on. They say, "You've got all eternity through which to live in various forms, and therefore
 you don't have just one life in which you've got to avoid eternal damnation. You can go
 running around the wheel and the rat race and play that game just as long as you want
 to, so long as you think it's fun. But if there comes a time when you don't think it's
 fun, you don't have to do it." So I wouldn't say to anyone who disagrees with me and who
 says, "Well, I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and put this world
 to right and so on and so forth and arrange everything in this world so that it's all
 up." Try it, please. It's perfectly okay. Go on doing that.
 (laughs)


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