Buddha, The (2010)

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Gere: he lived in india , 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.

Gere: 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.

Gere: meditating under the bodhi tree,

he attained the supreme wisdom.

There is no knowledge won without sacrifice.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything.

Gere: next, the buddha.

[Birds chirping] [bell gongs]

gere: , 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.

[Peaceful instrumental music] ♪ ♪

brown: 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.

Brown: within ten 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 is something that we all share with everybody else.

It's at once utterly intimate and utterly shared.

So buddha 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."

[Bell gongs]

the buddha can shine out from the eyes of anybody.

Inside the buffeting of an ordinary human life, at any

moment, what the buddha found, we can find.

[Man chanting in native language]

♪ ♪

[Woman chanting in native language]

♪ ♪ gere: in southern nepal,

at the foot of the himalayas, is one of the world's holiest

places, lumbini, where, according to the sacred tales,

the buddha was born.

[All chanting]

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.

[Peaceful instrumental music] ♪ ♪

[woman chanting faintly]

♪ ♪

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 years after his death.

For the first few centuries, buddhist narrative was oral.

[All chanting] ♪ ♪

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.

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.

Gere: "he who sees me sees the teaching," the buddha said,

"and he who sees the teaching sees me."

Born some years before the birth of jesus, the buddha would

grow to manhood in a town vanished long ago.

For nearly three decades, he 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 dew.

My father gave me three lotus ponds:

one where red lotuses bloomed, one where white lotuses

bloomed, one where blue lotuses bloomed."

The father wants him to be a king, wants him to conquer the

world and to be the emperor of india, which at that time was

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 off,

as was predicted at his birth, and possibly become a spiritual

teacher rather than a king.

Gere: 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 , 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 ten

years long, at one time, they rolled off the roof that they

were making love on while in union, and they fell down but

landed in a bed of lotuses and lilies and didn't notice they

had fallen.

Gere: and so, the stories say, he indulged himself for

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 asks 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 this sick person;

in fact, it's universal.

And something is stimulated inside of him.

So he keeps getting the chariot driver to take him out, and he

sees, you know, horror after horror.

And on his third trip outside, he--he meets 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 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 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.

[Bell tolling]

gere: 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, "fetter."

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."

Brown: 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 kanthaka 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."

Siddhartha refused.

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 won without sacrifice.

And this is one of the hard truths of human existence:

in order to gain anything, you must first lose everything.

Gere: 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 is going out to see what there is.

He's a seeker.

He doesn't have a teaching yet.

He doesn't have an understanding yet.

He doesn't have an insight yet.

He doesn't have a solution yet, but he recognizes the problem.

[Man chanting]

gere: 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

formulas more than , years old.

♪ ♪

[Speaking native language]

gere: 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 was a period of social upheaval, social change.

Gere: 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.

Gere: 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 were 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, that was there long before the buddha, and it was

the--in a sense, the problem that the buddha faced.

Gere: 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 death leading inexorably to rebirth and of beings,

suffering beings, bound to the wheel of death and rebirth.

Brown: 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 aeons,

experiencing life in all its different forms.

Siddhartha's previous lives, many aeons, sometimes as

a human being, sometimes as an animal, but then gradually

using his practice, becoming more higher and higher

and deeper, deeper.

The idea is, from life to life, to progress more and more

towards 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 and die and be reborn

infinite times.

It could take them, you know, a billion lifetimes if they are

very stubborn, you know.

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,

in my past life, I was cleopatra floating down the

nile or napoleon.

It's as if every life is going through junior high school

again, over and over and over.

Gere: 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 that 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.

♪ Ohh ♪ [continues to hold note]

[speaking native language]

[chanting]

[chanting continues]

gere: 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.

[Continues chanting]

♪ ♪ 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

of 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 rarified 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.

[Man chanting]

♪ ♪ gere: siddhartha 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 luxuries, so now he

tries extreme deprivation.

Gere: 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 ascetics and soon was

outdoing them in 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, meditate fiercely for all the hours of awakening.

The step of renunciation, of shedding everything, of dying,

the feeling that one is dying to one's life as it was,

is essential to being reborn as someone who sees.

Gere: ascetics can still be seen in india, firm in the

belief that by subduing the flesh, they can gain spiritual

power.

[Speaking native language]

gere: 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--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.

Gere: "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 t*rture the body, the body becomes too much.

The whole attention is given 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.

Brown: years before, when siddhartha 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.

Brown: 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 shadows 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 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."

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 he 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, they

overpower.

They came up.

They were still there.

And he had a feeling of missing.

He had a feeling of seeing his son and a 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.

Gere: 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 in order to break through, in order to attain the

kind of realization that he was looking for.

Gere: siddhartha had put his faith in two gurus.

They hadn't helped him.

He had punished his mind and body.

That had almost k*lled him.

Now he knew what he must do.

To find the answer to his questions, he would look within

and trust himself.

[Man chanting faintly]

[rattling drumming]

bodh gaya is a small town in northeastern india.

Throngs of pilgrims have come here from all over the world

for more than centuries.

[Bell ringing]

[all chanting]

for buddhists, there are hundreds of holy places but

none more sacred than this one.

Bodh gaya 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 buddha's

time.

[Man chanting over loudspeaker]

♪ ♪

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.

Brown: it was springtime.

The moon was full.

Before the sun would rise, siddhartha'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."

Brown: "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.

Mara 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.

Brown: 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 he frustrates mara.

Brown: 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 plowed and mined and spat on

and everything else, you know.

It's still the earth, and it's-- it is--it's--

we owe everything to it.

Brown: 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 be--so that 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.

Brown: 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"

or which he calls "awakening."

He said, "at this moment, all beings and I awaken

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 that makes you think

you're this 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 capacity for enlightenment--that your

awake-ness 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 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.

Pay attention.

Pay attention.

Gere: 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 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

the strong negative mental states.

All the people in the world, they are like the fishes

wriggling in the very shallow water.

So buddha, he himself afraid to teach the people.

The myth is that a 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?

'Cause the world needs--the gods need it, and the men need it."

You know, "the people need it."

And then buddha decided to give his teachings...

Because of a 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 being compassionate to your hand.

You just feel the pain, so you're not gonna

put it there.

So if you feel other's 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.

Gere: 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 the 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.

Buddha."

Gere: from bodh gaya, the buddha walked west nearly

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.

[Soft sitar music] ♪ ♪

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, on seeing 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'd all been trying

to starve themselves into enlightenment.

So they--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 tathagata, 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.

Gere: 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

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.

[Single note twangs] [sitar strumming]

[soft sitar music] brown: "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.

♪ ♪

[Note twangs discordantly] but the string too tight

breaks...

[Hollow snap] and the music dies.

The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies.

[Harmonious strum] there is a middle way.

Tune us the sitar neither low nor high,

and we will dance away the hearts of men."

Gere: 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.

It's not really of interest.

It's not an issue.

What's of interest is the problem of human suffering and

the solution to human suffering.

Pretty much everything else, all right, is beside the point.

Gere: 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.

Gere: 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.

But nobody tells you that, and so that was a huge

announcement.

Gere: 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's saying, "be smart about your desires."

Gere: 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 that you can try on your own life and see which one

makes the best soup.

Gere: 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

sarnath.

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.

[Bell clanging]

[men singing]

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 buddha's time.

[Man singing]

gere: many of today's sacred ceremonies on the ganges echo

the ancient practices of the vedic priests, the brahmans.

In the buddha's day, only the brahmans could mediate between

the gods and men.

Only they could conduct the holy rituals that were said to

preserve the universe itself.

The brahman priests stood at the pinnacle of a rigid social

hierarchy: a sacred system of caste.

Beneath them were the warriors, the caste to which the buddha

belonged.

Below them were farmers.

At the bottom were the servants and, still lower,

outcastes.

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 of

society depends upon your continuing to perform the

function associated with that social status.

Gere: caste 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 caste.

What makes you noble is if you understand reality, you know,

if you're a good person.

If you're a wise person, then you're noble.

[Soft instrumental music] ♪ ♪

gere: in time, a devoted gathering of monks formed around

the buddha at sarnath, 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.

Gere: in a ceremony evoking the beginning of the buddha's

own spiritual journey, fledgling monks of all ages

say good-bye to their families and homes and join the sangha.

[Chanting] [children repeating chant]

I go to the refuge of the buddha, I go to the refuge of

the dharma, and I go to the refuge of the sangha.

[Responsive chanting continues]

the sangha is an embodiment of buddha's 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 us to lead a perfect example of his

teaching: an alive 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

buddha's teaching.

[All chanting softly]

gere: 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.

Gere: by ordaining women as nuns, the buddha gave women the

chance to escape the drudgery of daily life.

[Bell gongs]

life was so hard for most women that entering the sangha was

a liberation, as we know from their ecstatic, heartrending

poems.

"So freed! So freed!

So thoroughly freed am i-- from my pestle, 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!'"

[Bell gongs]

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 an ancient poem counsels: "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 experiences unexpected things from one's mind:

the most dangerous skeptical doubts, doubts about one's

self, doubts about the buddha.

Physical is--we can get from-- [chuckles]

from the food and from the supplement of vitamins and--

yeah, and for the mind, this is the only way we have to...

Only medicine.

[Chuckles]

meditation is not about getting rid of anger or getting

rid of lust or getting rid of jealousy.

Even while becoming a monk, often we experience angers;

[chuckles] it happens.

And it often happens when people start teasing you, like,

"shaven bald-head person."

But it 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 round.

It's not like--we are not living a partial truth, but it's like

the whole of things together.

It takes time to comprehend this.

And then by practicing again and again, the practitioner

becomes very balanced, and one reaches the state of very strong

equanimity, equanimity towards the physical and mental objects.

And this is the base camp for the summit:

enlightenment.

Brown: "after washing my feet," a disciple said,

"I watch the water going down the drain."

[Peaceful instrumental music] ♪ ♪

"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."

Gere: "the mind is as restless as a monkey,"

the buddha taught.

Who you are, what you think of as your "self," 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?

Brown: "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, your self 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 feelings about your feelings on

your self, what naturally arises is simple compassion:

compassion for your own suffering, compassion for

the suffering of others.

Gere: 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.

Brown: "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 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--

on, you know, just an island of happiness within an ocean

of misery?

Of course, that's not possible.

Gere: 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 as 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-- 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.

Gere: 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.

[Up-tempo percussive music] ♪ ♪

brown: "everything is burning.

What is burning?

The eyes are burning.

Everything seen by the eyes is burning.

The ears are burning.

What is burning?

[Sitar strums] everything heard by the ears

is burning.

[Roar-like sound] [flute plays melody]

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, all right?

We're burning with craving.

Everything--everything about us is out of control.

The buddha goes on to talk about the three poisons,

greed and anger and ignorance, and how 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.

Gere: "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.

The 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."

Gere: 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.

Buddha said, "my followers should not accept my teaching

out of devotion but rather your own experiment."

Even buddha himself, in order to get final enlightenment,

need hard work.

So investigate based on reason, through logical investigation.

If something contradict, in buddha's own words, then we

have the right to reject that.

Gere: as the buddha gathered more and more followers,

stories spread of his miracles, which mixed the marvelous with

the mundane.

Brown: one story tells how pieces of firewood split

at the buddha's command.

In another, a mad elephant charged wildly down a 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.

Because miracle is something you cannot understand.

So now I think that 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 skull, a small space, but 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 tiny-- it's a speck.

And the--the universe is what we don't know, and it will

always be that way.

However much we find out, it will still be that way,

because the unknown is vastly-- it's unspeakably greater than

anything we will ever know.

Brown: 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, sh**ting 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 the sheer

wonder of it all.

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--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?

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.

Gere: 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."

w*r was endemic in the buddha's age, ravaging northeast india

again and again.

Although kings and their ministers sought his council,

the buddha offered no grand political vision.

He was powerless to stop the k*lling 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.

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.

Gere: change, the buddha said, must come from within.

The buddha 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.

Gere: 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 , 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 kushinagar, 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's said that he knew

it was bad, but he took it anyway 'cause it was offered

and didn't want the person who offered it to feel bad,

'cause it was his time.

[Man chanting]

♪ ♪

Gere: today kushinagar is revered by pilgrims as the place

where the buddha finally left the world.

It was in kushinagar where he grew weak and asked to be laid

on his side in a quiet grove of sal trees.

As he neared the end, his disciples began to weep,

stricken with grief.

[Emotive instrumental music] ♪ ♪

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 buddha's 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 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.

Gere: the buddha had always been saying good-bye.

Now he prepared to leave the earth forever.

He would never be reborn, never die again.

[Bell gongs] "it may be that after I am

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.

Brown: 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 coralflowers 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 as 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.

Gere: when he was and still prince siddhartha,

the buddha had left his wife, child, and family to try and

understand the nature of suffering.

[Soft instrumental music] ♪ ♪

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...

To 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 route, you are learning the

story of that life.

[Man chanting faintly]

at places of pilgrimage, temples were built,

images were installed, and relics were enshrined.

Gere: although the buddha had predicted that his teachings,

like everything else, would in time disappear,

buddhism flourished in india for , years,

spread into sri lanka, central and southeast asia,

tibet, china, korea, japan, and in the th century,

to europe and the americas, adapting 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 really--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.

I know that there are supposed to be preserved

footprints of the buddha which are kept in one of the sacred

places 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."

Brown: there is a story of a brahman 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 brahman was

reminded of a tusker elephant.

The brahman 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."

[Light instrumental music] ♪ ♪