Now today, we're going to revisit the India, China.

We're going to move ahead and into a

next historical dimension.
So what I wanted to do last time was set the frame,
really, for the lecture today.
So when we left India, this was the world of the Vedic,
primarily in northern India, but it goes down
into south as well.
We talked about the strict hierarchy of the culture, the
philosophical project that was at stake, the significance of
fire and water.
Well, sometime in the fifth century-I'm not exactly sure-a man appeared on the historical
horizon, Siddartha Gautama.
You've probably never heard of that name, but he took on a
new name later in his life called Buddha.
And it was the origin of the word Buddhism.
This man was born into a Vedic royalty family.
He was a privileged son of a powerful family.
He was going to become a prince or a princeling.
He married and he had a son and he had his chariot.
And he was driving around in his chariot one day, and the
charioteer passed a poor person sitting on the street.
And he says, well, why is this person so poor?
And he began to look at the world.
And over a period of time, he began to see the world very
differently.
And around his mid 30s, he decided that he would absolve
himself or get rid of this identity as a princeling and
think about the world.
And he sat under a famous tree-been variously described in various places.
But that was for several years.
And he thought, how can I figure out who I am?
So today, there are different schools of Buddhism.
The school that's most directly associated with
Buddha himself-because once again, Buddhism went through various
transformations over time-is Theravada Buddhism.
And so this is based on these four what are called Noble

Truths that Buddha came up with and

that were later codified.
The first is that life is suffering and that suffering
has to come from somewhere.
It's not imposed in me.
So it's got to have some sort of cause.
And so what I want to do is I want to find the
cause of that suffering.
And then if I can find it, then of course, I can
eliminate that cause.
And then, of course, I can sort of reach enlightenment as
a consequence.
Now, all of this sounds like, oh, OK, I can understand that.
But we have to understand that this, too, was at that time a
radical form of modernity.
We, today, of course, when I ask who you are and you say,
my name is this or my name is that, or where you come from
or I come from here or I come from there-these are perhaps normal question that we might expect.
But in ancient times, we wouldn't have understood our
individuality as being, in some sense, a prime element in
our own world view.
We would have seen ourselves as embedded in social customs
and belonging to a village.
Many people didn't even have personal names.
They're named after a village, perhaps, or after an area.
Or they were associated with their ancestors.
They were just one of several in a large family of people.
So here you are, sitting under a tree, trying to think about
your life suffering.
So all that means is that this is not the Vedic worldview.
So he has to, in some sense, say, all of this stuff that
I've been taught as a Vedic prince does not apply, does
not help me.
I'm not here to make some fire ritual.
I'm not here to bathe in the Ganges.
I'm not here to deal with sacred water or smoke in the
atmosphere.
He doesn't start with these philosophical abstractions.
He just starts with himself.
And this is shockingly new.
Now, the Vedics are all about rituals.
Everything has to be codified and everything has to be done

in a certain way.
In order to produce these rituals, you need the Brahmins
who will tell you yes, yes, this is how you do it.
And then people who are not the Brahmins have to listen to
what the Brahmins say, because they're the ones who know
everything.
Well, for Buddha-Brahmins, Schmahmins.
I don't need any Brahmin to help me out here.
They can go off and do their stuff.
I'm sitting under the tree.
I don't need anybody to tell me that I have to do this on
Monday and that on Tuesday and this on Thursday and that on
every moon day and that every feast day.
Forget that.
So rituals-no rituals.
So what do you got to do?
Sit under a tree for a couple years-10, 20.
It depends how long it takes you to get enlightenment.
It might take you-it will take you, certainly, quite a while.
So Buddha comes along and this entire Vedic worldview is
basically just crumpled up, thrown in the garbage.
And he starts all over with a whole new paradigm of life.
The tree-this is not the original tree.
The original tree has long since died.
But this is supposed to be a sprig from-I think this is the great, great grand-daddy tree or
something like that.
But there is a tree.
And it's the Mahabodhi tree in the northeast India.
And I'll show it again a little bit later-- ostensibly,
the tree under which he sat.
So this contrasts with both Zoroastrianism and Vedic world
is huge, absolutely huge.
So we have no organized economic activity.
There's no organization.
You're sitting under the tree by yourself.

Later, Buddhism would become part of certain types of

cultures and part of certain types of political worlds.
And economic things are certainly tied up to it.
But this was the first religion that basically said,
I don't care who you are.
You're sitting under the tree.
You're just like everybody else.
So it wasn't democracy.
You were just radically egalitarian.
It didn't matter if you were a king sitting under the tree or
a poor person sitting under the tree.
That's not the issue.
And it didn't organize society by means of power or economy,
but rather organized society by your state of
enlightenment.
Now, how do I know how enlightened you are?
Now, Todd can sit under tree for 10 years here, and he can
come back after 10 years and say, I'm enlightened.
And I can say, Todd, I don't think you are.
Go back and sit under that tree another 10 years as far
as I'm concerned.
Now, how do I know?
I have to take his word for it.
But I can see, perhaps, in certain ways he thinks or
talks or moves or whatever it is that indeed, he has certain
indictment.
Plus, I know he's been sitting 10 years under the tree doing
his dissertation.
I know I can say, OK, he's done it.
Now, he's really enlightened.
He may not have his PhD.
But there's no outside proof.
There's no stamp.
There's no document that says, OK, after 10 years, you're now
certified enlightened.
So it goes on the inner principle.
He wouldn't come to me after 10 years and say he's
enlightened if he didn't feel that way.
He would sit until the tree another 10 years, and maybe
then, he would come and say.
So if you're truly enlightened, you will let
people know.
But if you're not, you're going to stay silent and sit

under the tree for a while.

So no particular rituals, sacrifices-no sacrifices.
You can imagine, for thousands of years now, sacrifice is
completely normal.
And still, in many sort of religions, if you will-even modern religions-sacrifices are still part and parcel of how it works right.
Islam has sacrifices.
Catholicism has sacrifices-the blood of Christ.
The wafer that you get is the body.
Judaism, to some degree, has sacrifices in the old story of
the sacrifice of Isaac.
But it's not a literal sacrifice.
But there are certain tropes that have to do with sacrifice
metaphorically.
But here, there's none of that at all-just no sacrifice.
So you can see how radically transformational Buddhism was,
and at the same time, how inspirational it was,
especially to people who were fed up with the violence and
the brutality and just the dogmatism of the political and
religious world that had been instantiated over the previous
thousand years.
It's also interesting to realize that Buddhism,
Socrates, and Confucius were, all of them, living at the
same time, as if maybe, in some sort of contemporary way,
connecting to a type of attempt to recalibrate the
religious political world of their places.
So that would be a little side component one
could perhaps discuss.