MING: Well, good
afternoon, my friends.
My name is Ming.
I'm the Jolly Good Fellow
of Google for one more
week, because next week
I'm retiring from Google.
And this is the very last
guest I am hosting at Google,
and very fittingly, it
is Professor Bob Thurman.
Bob is a wonderful human being.
Behind his back, we
call him Buddha Bob.
He's sort of like--
I think he should
be more like Bob the Buddha,
sort of like Bob the Builder,
except with better karma.
Bob the Buddha is considered
the leading American expert
on Tibetan Buddhism.
In 1962, Bob became
the first American
to wear the robes of a
Tibetan Buddhist monk
outside of Halloween.
Eventually, he left his job,
and he became a professor
at American University,
and right now, he
is a Jey Tsong Khapa professor
of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
studies at Columbia University.
He's also the president
of the Tibet House, which
he founded with this guy called
Richard Gere, which you may
or may have heard of, and
also Philip Glass, which you
may or may not have heard of.
He's also the president
of the American
Institute of Buddhist Studies.
He was see considered one of
25 most influential Americans
in the 1997.
And in 1998, he didn't
do anything after that.
He has been profiled in "The
New York Times," in "People"
magazine, in "Time," he has
appeared on CNN, "The News
Hour," Larry King, Oprah.
He is close personal
friends with the Dalai Lama.
He knows all the dirt,
so ask him later.
He's also the father
of Uma Thurman,
so he knows the dirt as well.
Ask him too.
His hobbies are carpentry,
landscaping, and saving
the world.
He's here to talk
about his latest book,
"Love Your Enemies."
So now that I have this
book, all I need is enemies.
My friends, please welcome
our dear friend, Bob Thurman.
[APPLAUSE]
ROBERT THURMAN:
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Ming.
So sweet.
That was very sweet.
I really enjoy your introducing
me more than talking.
I'm sure.
And just I'm doing this, or
my wife will be mad at me if I
don't.
So great.
So hi, everybody.
I was asked to
talk about ethics,
and I just made a slide.
I do have a lot of PowerPoint,
but for some reason,
I didn't feel like
doing PowerPoint.
So you probably get
PowerPoints all the time
on engineering problems and
God knows what down here,
so I didn't think I would
do that while I was here.
But then I decided I
would make this one slide.
And my talk takes
off from a book
that His Holiness
the Dalai Lama wrote
called "Beyond Religion--
Ethics for a Whole World."
Have any of you ever seen
that book or read it?
Ming has, I'm sure,
and a few people have.
And what he does there is
because His Holiness has always
been trying to
improve understanding
between different kinds of
groups of people who identify
themselves as different
from each other,
and his main job there, one of
his three main jobs in life,
as he puts it, is to improve
the mutual understanding
of the world religions, because
there's been so much conflict
in history between them.
But one thing that he does
when he has meetings, world
religious meetings,
he always a little bit
flummoxes the other
world religious leaders
by saying that there's
another world religion which
is secularism, which are
nonbelievers, as he puts it.
And he used to say-- I don't
know the statistical basis
of him saying that.
I never did ask him.
He used to say, if there are
4 billion people who believe
in some religion or another,
there are at least 1 billion
or 1 and 1/2 billion who don't.
That was a previous
earlier count, I guess.
Now we're up to seven.
So I don't know how
he does it just now.
And they do have a belief,
and they have a belief
of what lies beyond death.
They have a belief,
and actually I
think I can prove to anyone who
wants to debate it that that is
a faith belief actually, rather
than an evidenced belief, which
we can discuss.
And so in that book,
which he originally
wanted to title "Secular
Ethics," he wanted
to show that there is a reason
and a motive for human beings
to be ethical,
because it fulfills
the aim of human beings,
which finally, of course,
like all animals, the aim of
any animal is to avoid pain
and to achieve happiness.
Avoid suffering and
achieve happiness.
That's sort of the
basic goal of everyone.
Whatever other goals
they may set themselves,
no one wants to suffer.
No one wants pain.
Everyone wants pleasure
and/or happiness,
depending on how
they define them.
And then there's
mental levels of pain
and physical levels of pain.
And so he wrote that
book, and in the book,
basically, he used sort of
anthropological insights,
pretty much, and some
biological, a little bit
of biological thinking
of secularists
or scientific
materialists to prove
that the human being as a
mammal, as a being that when
it's young is helpless for
many years, at least a decade,
at least till the teenage
time, at which point
the human being thinks
they're independent.
But the parents don't.
The parents think they need
help right up until they're
parents themselves pretty much,
and sometimes even after that.
Grandparents get sucked in on
babysitting and what have you.
And I can attest to that.
And so because of
that, human beings
do depend on the kindness of
strangers, not only Mae West,
but everybody.
After all, the mammal
conceives a new life,
the more intelligent half of the
mammals, that is-- the females.
They allow a total
stranger to come
and have a condo in their
belly, which is quite a thing.
I think if guys think about
it, I think you'd be hesitant.
I would.
I don't know about you, but
suddenly, there's something
down there, and it wants
a different kind of food,
and it wants this and that,
and it kicks after awhile.
And then it's a
real pain more than
in the neck to get it
outside of yourself.
And so that's all a bunch
of altruistic activity
of the females, and the
males have to carry along.
They have to end up helping,
so mammals' basic nature
is what he's trying to say.
Buddhists don't like
the idea of anything
having an absolute nature.
They have a wonderful
hermeneutic principle
in Buddhist thought, in
Buddhist science, I should say,
because in Buddhism,
philosophy and science are not
necessarily separated so
dramatically as it has
become in the West nowadays.
But in Buddhist science,
there is a rule, a hermeneutic
or a rule of interpretation.
And that is that there is
only one kind of teaching that
is considered
definitive in meaning,
and that kind is the pure
negation of something of self,
the negation of
substance, the negation
of any sort of a relative
absolute, you could say.
It's almost simplistic
and so simple, actually.
The famous concept
of emptiness--
we've all heard of
it-- selflessness--
these are famous concepts.
And what these mean, they don't
mean that things don't exist.
Emptiness is not nothingness.
Completely different word in
any of the Buddhist languages.
And what emptiness means is
that all relative things are
empty of any
non-relative element
or what they would
call intrinsic reality,
intrinsic identity, any
sort of thing like that,
which is really almost like
it's a definition of the words.
It's almost a tautological.
If something's absolute, you
can't relate, because absolute
is the opposite of relative.
And so if anybody comes up
with some sort of an absolute
and says it relates as some
monotheistic teachings do,
as some versions of
Buddhism do, then they
are simply misusing language,
to use a Wittgensteinian
expression.
And so His Holiness, therefore,
is very like a scientist,
and great Buddhist
philosophers are
like scientists in
that all teachings
about relative
reality are relative.
That is to say more or less
valid within a context.
There is no absolute truth
about relative things,
if you follow me, except that
none of them are absolute.
That's the only one.
That's really a logical thing.
But why is that it?
So it seems so simple like
why is that a big thing?
The reason it's a big thing
is that the human bad habit,
cognitive habit, emotional
habit, instinctual habit that
causes all suffering for
human beings in Buddha's
psychological and
philosophical analysis
is the feeling that
we habitually have
that we are absolute.
The person has a feeling,
the unenlightened person
has a feeling that the one thing
they are sure of-- for example,
Descartes perfectly well
illustrates-- stop vibrating--
perfectly illustrated
that when he decided
that the one thing he
was absolutely sure of
was that he was worrying
about what was absolute.
In other words, he was thinking.
That's the famous thing.
He didn't need
Buddhism for that.
And everyone subconsciously or
subliminally or instinctively
feels something about themself
is absolute, and therefore,
when pressed in a corner
of a life and death
thing, like my life is
the one absolute for me
type of thing people feel
that, which, of course,
from Buddha's point
of view is erroneous.
His teaching of selflessness
means that that's an error.
That doesn't mean
that I don't exist.
It means that I am a relational
being, not an absolute being.
That means that other beings
are equally as real and as
important as I am, and that
little shift of not being
the absolute center
of it all yourself,
of coming to this
viscerally understand
that, first intellectually
and philosophically understand
that, and then viscerally
understand it--
that's the whole campaign
of Buddhist teaching.
Because once you do
really understand--
like I had an old
Mongolian guru who
had a couple of great sayings--
passed away a long time ago,
but one of his
great sayings was,
everyone goes around--
this was three or four
decades before "The Matrix."
He said, everyone goes around
secretly thinking, I'm the one.
Therefore, I nearly fainted
when they started on
that in "The Matrix," going to
see the oracle, who's the one,
you know.
So everybody secretly
thinks, I'm the one.
And then the second
one is, people are not
wrong to say that they are real.
The problem is people
think they're really real.
So all it is.
A lot of people misunderstand
Buddhism and think
that the big insight is
that you don't exist,
and then you're free,
and everything is cool.
And actually, there are
certain modern Buddhists
who think that scientific
materialism ratifies that
by discovering that
you're just a brain
bouncing around
inside a skull box
and running around until
the brain gets tired,
and you have a stroke or
collapse or something,
and then you don't
exist anymore.
So in a way, essentially,
you don't exist.
You're just a robot
that is deluded
into thinking you exist, as
long as your heart is pumping,
and your brain is registering
and convincing you
that you're there, but
you're not really there,
because if you just
squash your brain,
you simply cease to exist.
So that's what Buddha was saying
in selflessness and emptiness,
and even some translators
used to translate emptiness
as nothingness, which
is just completely very
bad, because Buddha is
very clear that emptiness
as a sort of ultimate
cosmological principle
or something like that is
a middle way, a central way
between nihilism,
nothingness, and absolutism,
making some sort of
absolute out of something.
Emptiness is therefore really
what it truly is is relativism,
and Buddha really is the
discovery of relativity.
And therefore, ethics was a
central thing for Buddhism,
because ethics operates on
all levels-- physical, not
just physical, not just
verbal, but also mental.
Well, Jimmy Carter knew that.
Remember, Jimmy-- most
of you are too young.
Somebody remember Jimmy Carter
wrote in "Esquire" magazine
how he sinned in his mind.
He lusted after some
young thing or something.
And I don't know how
Rosalynn took that,
but the Buddhists say you
can do that in your mind.
In other words, you can commit
a negative ethical act just
with your mind, even
if you don't act on it.
And that's one of
the reasons Buddhists
are so much into searching
inside themselves.
I have to say it with the
right emphasis in this room.
So it's a very big deal.
Ethics is a very big deal.
Now the problem-- so then His
Holiness does that in his book
by talking about what human
life is like and the fact
that we do love-- are
happy when we love someone,
not only when we're loved,
but also when we do love,
we become very, very happy.
You know, Gene Kelly dancing
in the rain, what have you.
And he has two pillars, he
said, of his secular ethics.
And one of them is
human nature, the nature
of the human as a
social animal, which
he takes from a certain
side in anthropology,
although he cites many studies.
There are more and more
studies that-- actually,
in the famous argument between
Ashley Montagu and Konrad
Lorenz historically in the
history of anthropology,
there are many more things
supporting Ashley Montagu
that humans are really
basically gentle.
They're basically kind.
But they can become vicious,
worse than any animal,
because the nature
of the human being
is so completely programmable,
deprogrammable, reprogrammable,
which is why education is
so critically important.
Anyway, basically among animals,
the human is a more gentle one.
We don't have claws.
We don't have fangs.
We don't have armored skin.
We're soft-skinned and so forth.
And the young take
existence inside the bodies
of the female, which
is more of a connection
to the next generation
than if you just
drop an egg somewhere in the
riverbank or by the ocean
and wait for the little
turtle to crawl out.
There's a little less
parenting involved
when you do it with eggs.
So he uses that.
And then the second one is the
relationality of everything
and that everyone
is very interrelated
and that people
are never happier
than when they do something
successfully for someone else,
and they feel really good about
that like seeing that person
smile, seeing that child happy.
They really do,
and then that leads
to his slogan about
compassion that he does,
where he says that if you
want someone else to be happy,
be compassionate to them.
And he says if you
want to be happy, be
compassionate to
someone else, which
is his favorite slogan
coming from the tradition
of Shantideva, a great, great
Indian philosopher and sage
and yogi call Shantideva,
who wrote a great book called
"Way of the Bodhisattva"
that I recommend to everyone.
It's one of the great world
classics of spirituality,
actually, in which he makes the
argument very, very thoroughly
that our nature
is such that when
we do something for
someone else that succeeds,
it is its own reward.
And they may even make the very
clever psychological argument
that when you focus on doing
things for others, then
actually, you temporarily forget
about what you need yourself.
You tend to.
And then that's a
key to happiness,
because the one certain
way to be unhappy
is to think, how happy am I?
That's an immediate killer.
The minute you think,
how good is it?
What am I getting out of here?
What's going on?
It's like, oh, no,
it's not that good.
Whatever marvelous
experience it is
when you turn to evaluate
it, you're never satisfied.
The Rolling Stones have
a song like that, right?
Ain't no satisfaction.
So that's His Holiness's
thing on secularism,
which is a beautiful
book, and it
has trainings in the back,
which is another novel
concept to Western
psychologists, which
is that you can
train yourself to be
more compassionate
and more loving,
that it isn't that a
person is just loving.
Of course, there's a
set point that Buddhists
would agree from
one's upbringing
if one is traumatically
brought up,
it's maybe difficult to
feel it's natural to be nice
and to be loving if you've been
guarding and defending yourself
against abuse as a child.
But basically, whatever
level of lovingness one
is or has as a person can be
much more highly developed.
And the negative side, the
opposite of loving-- hating,
despising, et cetera-- can
be diminished by training.
And that's very important.
Should be a part of
everyone's education.
It actually is the final purpose
of the Search Inside Yourself
strategy, because once
you search in there,
you find the negative
reflexes and mechanisms that
have caused you trouble in
life, or you lost friends
where you annoyed and
offended people, where
this and that happened, where
you were dissatisfied also
yourself, and then
you can deconstruct,
and you can disempower those
negative mental habits,
and you can reinforce and
empower the positive ones
to a huge degree.
And Buddhists would not agree
with those modern psychologists
who keep insisting and
write all best-seller books
about how helpless you are,
that your unconscious is doing
everything, and you really
can't really-- what you
think is a free choice is not.
And Buddhists don't agree.
They do agree that a very
unenlightened person is
pretty much robotic in their
reactivity and their reaction
patterns, but the
whole path of Buddhism
is to become conscious of
your unconscious actually
and to reshape it.
It's like the Hercules myth
of cleaning the Augean stables
is very perfect for the
Buddhist enterprise,
because the human being
in Buddha's analysis,
the reason it is such
a valuable life form,
and that every one
of you has what
they call in Buddhism
the precious jewel
of a life endowed with
liberty and opportunity.
And the liberty has
to do with the fact
that you are free of
many kinds of defects.
You're not born
in a species that
has no language, that has
no culture, that can't share
the mind of others
because of having speech
and so forth,
literature, in our case,
and memory, and a certain
type of self-reflexiveness
is not available to lower animal
forms in the human animal form.
And some humans, of course,
are less than others.
And so they're not all the same.
So the liberties are like
that, and the opportunities
are where you can
educate yourself,
because if a human being, if
a saint, or a near saint--
actually, in Buddha's view,
a complete saint can never
become a murderer,
a perfect saint,
but there are degrees of really
niceness and sainthood that
could become very evil by
different circumstances
and reindoctrination.
And similarly, even the Buddha
had one famous disciple,
Angulimala, who
was a serial killer
and became a saint,
complete saint actually
in his lifetime by
changing his behavior
and so forth, and then went to
some of the families of some
of the people he had killed.
And he actually
was so genuinely--
he offered his life
to them anyway,
if that would have helped.
And they actually
didn't take his life
when they realized he really
had totally changed, actually.
Anyway, that's the Buddha's
analysis of the human being.
So I presume, do all of what
is the fourfold for the four
noble truths?
Everybody know
that in this room?
Anybody doesn't know
that, Buddha's sort
of original teaching?
A few people.
Well, I can quickly summarize.
It's important to do,
because the people always
think, especially new people,
that Buddha's main job was
making a religion.
Now I'm going back from
Dalai Lama to Buddha,
because Buddha did the same
thing as Dalai Lama did
in the sense that he grounded
his version of ethics
in what would be considered
scientific reality of that time
and actually may well still be
considered scientific reality.
But I'm not going to get
into that necessarily,
unless we go into a question
period, and you want me to.
So in other words, what
His Holiness Dalai Lama is
doing is same thing Buddha did.
His Holiness is
doing it in terms
of secular science or
materialist science
today, which is the orthodoxy.
It's not the dogmatic
orthodoxy among scientists
today, scientific
materialism, and in his day,
Buddha did that as well.
Shakyamuni Buddha
did that as well,
which is the basis
of Buddhist ethics,
and that's what I
want to talk about it.
Anyway, the four noble
truths, his first Noble Truth
was that the unenlightened
person is bound to suffer.
It's not really a
religious thing.
It's a scientific and
psychological analysis
of the human condition, and
and also of animals, actually,
as well, at a worse
level than the human.
But what it means
is that someone
who has a false sense
of what they are,
and this is especially
defined as it exaggerates
their identity, thinking that
that's an absolute thing,
and they are
absolutely themselves,
and the rest of the universe is
absolutely different from them.
That person in that condition,
and that's at a visceral level.
They may not even have
that as a philosophy,
but that's at a visceral level.
That person is doomed to suffer,
because obviously, if it's
you versus the universe, you're
going to lose that struggle.
No one can overdo it.
And then the theisms, the
different forms of theism
tend to console us for that
losing experience of living
life unto death, and with being
sick and growing old and having
all kinds of things
happen to us,
and having the pleasures and
joys that we have not last.
But we're consoled that there
is an absolute being outside
of the universe that somehow
put us in this situation,
and as long as we pay
dues to that being
and believe in it, that
being will save us.
And then we'll have
bliss after death.
But that's just
sort of transferring
the locus of that absolute
thing into something
that is just presumed to
be outside the universe.
The person who
doesn't do that, they
think that there's an essential
soul in themselves that's
a fixed identity that is somehow
disconnected from everything,
and they try to
withdraw and retreat
into that in various ways.
And actually, the
motor materialist
thinks so too, surprisingly.
They may think they
don't, but they actually
do, because since they are
certain that by their brain
ceasing, they will become
unconscious permanently,
and their mind will
cease to exist forever,
including having no memory
of ever having existed,
they are saying that they
carry within them an essence
of nothingness, actually.
That's sort of the
existential thing.
So like Jean Paul
Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou
can light his cigar
and then light
the fuse of some dynamite
sticks wrapped around his head,
and then the screen goes white.
And that's the idea that
they're reducing themselves
to their essence, which is
anesthetic unconsciousness.
And yet, there is no evidence
that you're ever going to have
anaesthetic no
consciousness, and in fact,
if anybody wants to debate the
point with me who considers
themself a secularist, I
will be delighted to do
so, because there is no evidence
that you will not exist at some
point.
There can never be, right?
If it ever happened to anybody,
nobody ever found them,
and they never reported back.
I always tease my materialist
friends, didn't Carl Sagan
show up after his death and
announce, it's cool guys.
I really don't exist.
So don't worry about
those churches.
Don't worry about
that reincarnation,
because I'm not here.
Not only did he not do that,
but he never could do that,
and no one will ever find
a non-existent entity.
No one will ever
discover nothingness.
They'll never get a Nobel Prize
for discovering nothingness.
It can never be proven,
because it isn't there,
and now I think that's
by definition nothing
is not there.
And therefore, it's a blind
faith belief, par excellence.
There might be gods
that might be there.
Maybe it wouldn't be quite
as absolute as people think,
but there very well
might be some sort
of angels and gods and
things, because at least
that's something that you
might find or not find, so that
can be proven or disproven.
But nothing can never be
proven, because it isn't there.
We know ahead of time.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know that's a digression.
So everyone has that feeling,
the unenlightened person,
and then people also
rag on the Buddha,
because they say
he was a pessimist,
and he was a depressoid, and
he was a killjoy, because he
said it's all suffering.
But he never said
it's all suffering.
He said unenlightened
life is suffering,
is going to be frustrating.
And it's not as
depressed as Socrates,
who said the unexamined
life is not worth living.
Buddha never said the
unenlightened life is not
worth living.
He just said it's going
to be frustrating.
And then the second
Noble Truth is
the cause of that, which
I already explained.
It's the distorted
sense of self,
the deepest cause--
then craving and hatred
and these mental things
that arise from you thinking
you're separate from others,
and therefore, you're
against your enemies,
and you're attached
to the ones you
want to incorporate
in your group, et cetera.
And so those are secondary to
the basic sense of absolutizing
the sense of separate identity.
And that's the
second Noble Truth.
The third Noble Truth
is Buddha's good news,
which is the prognosis
of the diagnosis,
and the prognosis is that
if you knew what reality
was, if you realized your
true nature of yourself, which
you can do, and then
you will be blissful.
You will be in complete bliss,
not necessarily after you
die, and not
necessarily by dying,
but even in life, you
can be in perfect bliss.
You can live in a way
like you were living
in a dream in a matrix,
but a lucid dream,
where you live a
lucid life, and you
know exactly what's
going on in that life,
and therefore,
although you might
seem to be suffering
to others, you actually
don't really suffer.
It's an amazing
claim, and he didn't
expect people to believe it
actually when he said that.
The Third Noble
Truth, he said, this
is true for a noble person,
which he defined as someone
who understands that.
And he said it's
only imaginable,
and it's even
difficult to imagine
for an unenlightened person.
So what you have to do
with this third Noble Truth
is try to imagine it.
Try to imagine some
kind of perfect life
of being blissful at all times.
Everyone's been
blissful here and there.
I hope everybody at Google
has had a moment of bliss.
I really do hope so.
I'm not asking for a show of
hands, but I just hope so.
So all they're saying is that
if you attain, if you understand
reality, what Buddha's discovery
is, that when you fully
understand reality, which
again, is a revolutionary claim
that a human being can
completely understand reality
themself and the world
itself fully and completely,
and when they do, they realize
that that reality is bliss
and that everything is made
of the energy of bliss.
That is to say nirvana
of the Four Noble Truths,
only the third is really real.
You know the first,
second, and fourth
are only relatively real, and
therefore, somewhat unreal.
So then the fourth
Noble Truth, which
is where I'm finally
going to get to ethics,
the fourth Noble
Truth is the truth
of the path to the realization
of the nature of reality,
which he said was
nirvana, and I'm still
hoping it is the case.
After 50 years of pursuing
it, I've had hints,
and I think it is more strongly
than I did when I started,
but I don't claim to be
certain, because you have
to be a Buddha to be certain.
So anyway, that path is
an educational path, not
a religious path,
because you realize
that a person who diagnoses
reality in such a way
that salvation or liberation,
whatever you want to call it,
is accomplished not by
faith, but by understanding.
That person is forced
to be an educator.
They can't really
just be a preacher
like, yeah, believe what I say.
Believe this, believe
that, and then
you'll be fine, because it
won't necessarily be fine.
Belief is not
enough to transform
your whole visceral instinctual
structure that it is distorted,
and thereby brings
you into conflict
with what you relate to, and
therefore, sooner or later
inevitably, it therefore
makes you suffer.
So then there's the
educational path.
The educational path has
eight branches, components,
and they have a certain order.
And this is where I'm not
against the meditative craze,
the meditational craze.
I'm for it.
But it's not enough by itself
from the Buddhist point
of view.
In traditional
Buddhist teaching,
the meditation part comes after
one has clarified one's world
view, as they put it, what
they call developing what--
I got from Alan Wallace actually
this way of translating instead
of right view-- he's the one-- I
don't know if he originated it,
but he's the one I
first read somewhere.
He calls it realistic world
view versus unrealistic,
and I really like that.
I've always used it
ever since myself.
He was my student,
but I'm not too
proud to have learned
from him, and we
do learn from our students.
And realistic world
view is really
correct, because it leads to
really what Buddhism really
is is realism, because
it's based on the discovery
by someone that
reality is bliss.
So ignorance can't be bliss.
Well, even ignorance
is bliss on some very
super non-dualistic way, but
ignorance of that reality
causes suffering.
And knowledge of that reality
then is knowledge of bliss,
that bliss is what you are
and what everything is,
and therefore conveys bliss.
But you have to
re-educate yourself.
You have to develop the
critical intelligence
to get rid of all kinds
of half-witted ideas
and get rid of them
and see through them
through critical thinking.
And then that's
rectifying your worldview
and making it more realistic.
And there, again,
it isn't that you
have to believe there is
such a thing as Buddha,
you have to believe in nirvana.
You're not asked to do
that, because Buddha knows
that we don't believe that.
If someone comes up and
says it's all bliss,
we're going to think,
what are they selling?
Snake oil?
What is that?
I'm not in bliss today.
And you know that bliss is
hardly legal in most societies,
in fact.
It's more or less illegal.
So that's not what he wants.
What he wants is to look
at what we do think.
He's challenging us to shift
our sense that where we ascribe
and invent, what we invest
reality in to challenge it,
and that's what the
realistic world view is.
Realistic world view is
acceptance of causation.
That's what Buddha
is truly celebrated
as [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
That's Buddha is
the one who argued
for the existence of
causation, so what
are the causes of
things, and how do you
interfere with the causes
of negative things?
That's what the
Buddha's teaching
was, which is not all religious
teaching if you think about it.
But why is acceptance of
causation the beginning
of the path of realism?
Because that self, that
precious absolute self
somewhere in there that
Descartes imagined was there,
that less philosophical people
have imagined was there,
and we visually imagine
about ourselves, that
is some immune to causation.
It's like that
point of awareness
you have when you remember
what happened 10 years ago, 15
years ago, and the way
you sort of remember
is that you are thinking
to yourself like,
you were the same point of
subjectivity then as now.
There's like one thing
that doesn't change
is our sort of point
of subjectivity, which,
of course, is what Descartes was
looking for, which he actually
failed to find if you remember
if you read Descartes.
Then he just presumed that,
well, because I'm looking,
that's-- I'm sure of that.
But he couldn't actually
find himself, actually.
He was like a Buddhist
Yogi in that sense.
So the point is if you
accept causality, then even
your identity is a construct.
It comes from your education,
from your language,
from your associations,
it changes all the time,
and therefore, you're
a work in progress.
You're a Google program.
You can be improved.
I think I read
something about Google.
You're never satisfied
with the way things are.
There's something of
your 10 points of Google.
It's because if people
think about it in a new way,
they'll find a
way to improve it.
But that's just the same
as yourself is like that.
If you really realize viscerally
that you're a relative self,
you would be very careful
what you associate
with, what you subject yourself
to, your consciousness,
and you would want to turn
it into positive things,
and you would want to
develop it artistically.
You'd become a work of art
in a way, your identity
and your self.
It constantly changes.
It's not actually [INAUDIBLE],
which means sameness,
because it always changes.
But therefore, it can
change for the far better
is the key thing.
So once you realize that you
are this relational thing,
inextricably interwoven with all
other relational things, beings
and things, then you
get realistic motivation
of what to do with your
life, this precious thing
that you have of being such an
intelligent, self-reflective
self-creative or
self-destructive being,
and you don't want to
be self-destructive.
You want to be self-created, and
particularly because you don't
indulge in irrational
things that just
by dying you escape from
every causal consequence,
because you accept causality.
Therefore, there's no first
cause or uncaused cause.
Universe is beginningless.
There's no final
destruction of everything.
There will always be more
for effects and more effects.
Therefore, everything you
do now physically, verbally,
and mentally will
have an effect,
and that effect is
potentially infinite.
The consequences are infinite,
which puts tremendous weight
on what you do, because
you a little bit better
and a little bit
worse can magnify over
an infinite canvas to
limitless proportions,
negative or positive.
So then third branch of the
Eightfold Path-- now finally,
we reach ethics.
Third is realistic speech,
realistic evolutionary action,
as I translate karma, and
realistic livelihood--
those next three.
They are ethics.
Now in their ethics one,
here I have my slide.
There is this marvelous
thing, which is called
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
The tenfold skillful
and unskillful
evolutionary action
path, which is karma.
And I call it
evolutionary on purpose.
Some of my translating colleague
friends get all nervous.
Oh, no.
That's the Darwin's word.
You can't use that.
But that's just silly.
Darwin is just a British
gentleman in the 19th century,
and he noticed that he had
some monkey-like qualities,
and the Galapagos
turtles-- I don't know what
all-- the Beagle.
The Beagle was the boat, right?
Not the dog.
Whatever.
He did that, and he
noticed this relationship,
which was a big shock to
the other white male bearded
British gentlemen that they
might be related to something,
some fuzzy wuzzies,
some people they
were busy genociding
all over the planet
with their colonialism.
And Buddha recognized
that way back, Buddhists.
Buddhists were like,
not only are we related
to a bunch of chimpanzees and
dogs and cats and whatever,
we've all personally been
chimpanzees and dogs and cats,
so of course we're related.
And if we're not careful,
we'll return to that,
which would not be desirable.
You wouldn't really be able to
do a Google search very well
with a paw and a claw.
We couldn't read.
So what I love is this
word kushala in Sanskrit.
Kushala-- people
always translate it
as virtuous and
non-virtuous, because they
want to get into moralism.
But actually the
word is skillful,
and why is it skillful?
Why is it skillful
to save lives and not
to kill and to take lives?
Why?
Because what did you have
to realize what the goal is?
Buddha's definition-- when
you understand reality,
in order to understand,
reality is infinite, right?
You have to become infinite to
understand an infinite thing.
Now everyone here,
not only have they
had their moment of bliss,
at least one or two,
but they've had
long time of bliss,
and they've been in love.
Everybody in here has
been in love, I'm sure.
Some may still be-- oh,
there they are, 19 years.
They're in love still.
And when you're in love, you
identify with the other person,
and you consider their feeling
as important or more important
if it's really good.
When love really
lasts, each one.
That's why other people get
jealous of people in love,
because they're so
deluded the two of them.
Because each one thinks
the other one is so great,
and nobody else thinks
anybody's great.
And so here are these two
people confirming each other.
Oh, you're the greatest.
Romeo and Juliet, they
kill them off, whatever.
They do their best.
But the point is we know
in a parent and a child,
especially mother,
but father can also
identify completely with
the life of the child
and sort of feel it.
And the good mother knows when
that child needs to be burped,
when it needs food, whatever
it is, it can sense it.
She senses it, because she
empathizes with that child.
So a human being has
this-- but the guys,
they empathize with their
teammate on the football team
or their platoon in
the army, a buddy.
And so we have this
ability to expand
our sense of identification.
Human beings do.
So Buddhahood is simply where
that sense of identification
has infinitely expanded,
where her being is completely
filled with every life is
their life, the same as them.
And they identify
with all of it,
and they have the
bliss energy to be
able to even feel the
sufferings of the others
without being dragged into
them, but be well enough to be
able to interact
with them, to try
to help them suffer less, which
is what the Buddha's job is
like a doctor.
So if that's your goal, if you
imagine there is such a state,
even though it might take a
million lifetimes to achieve,
but since you feel that you are
a continuity of such lifetimes
anyway, so you might as well.
How many of you have
heard of a Bodhisattva?
A lot of you.
OK, good.
So one time His Holiness
asked me to give an evening
talk before a bunch of people,
big 500, 800, 1,000 people
were going to take a
Bodhisattva vow, where
you say I want to
help all beings become
free of suffering.
I want to save all
beings from suffering.
It's like [INAUDIBLE] like that.
So I did the night before, but
then my main point of my talk
was to urge people not to
take that vow too lightly,
because unless you
think that you have
a common sense of
reality that you
are going to have this
infinite continuum of future,
or rather that's your best
bet-- you don't really know,
but everything else in
nature has a continuity.
So there's the law
of thermodynamics.
So why is your consciousness
the one piece of energy
that won't have a continuity?
So the best bet is that
there will be a continuity,
and as long as you don't have
that as a common sense feeling,
then it's silly to say, I'm
going to save all beings from
suffering, because you can't.
There's no time.
Only if you and the
beings are going
to be carrying on forever.
Now imagine the opposite.
Imagine where you had
a common sense feeling
that you're never going to get
out of everybody else's face,
and they're not going
to get out of your face.
Instead of leaving here when
this talk is over and came back
to whatever, I'm going to
be in your face forever.
Next life we'll be
back in a lecture hall.
You'll be giving the
lecture that time.
I'll be listening.
This will go on endlessly.
It's like "Groundhog Day,"
that brilliant Bodhisattva
movie of Bill Murray,
who is one of my gurus.
And until you get it right,
you keep repeating it.
So you might as well
take a Bodhisattva vow.
Why?
If you're going to be tangled
up with all beings forever,
then you better optimize
your tangling up with him.
And what's the optimal way to
be tangled up with someone?
You love them,
and they love you.
You love them.
You can't force
them to love you,
so you try to be
as loving as you
can yourself by becoming
a Buddha, love meaning
wanting them to be happy.
And then when they really get
happy, they will love you.
So then that's the best way.
Buddhahood, they
have these pure lands
that they describe
where you become Buddha,
and you help all the other
beings to become Buddha.
And I always think of them
as John Belushi's Food Fight
Universe.
Why?
When I have a cookie,
I want my cookie.
Well, maybe I'll share it
with you if you want a cookie.
And that's how we are
in the ordinary world.
But in a Buddha land,
well, if I have cookies,
I want you to have the cookie.
But then you want me
to have your cookie,
so we end up throwing all
the cookies at each other.
And it's a much better
way when you are just
trying to grab cookies for
yourself, as a friend of mine
used to say, it's everybody's
out before himself.
You have to fight over all these
people who want your cookie,
but when everybody
loves everybody else,
then you don't worry
about yourself.
You're willing to
give everything away,
but you get buried in cookies.
So it's a much better way.
So then take a Bodhisattva vow.
Then I want to make
a world like that,
where everybody loves everyone,
because these beings won't
be happy.
I won't make them happy
unless they love each other.
So if that's the goal is
to be that kind of a being,
when you save the life of
another being, in a way
you're identifying
with their life.
They become some tiny
bit one with you.
They have those
things in cultures
where if you save
a life, then you
are responsible for
the person you save.
The person they want to serve
you and help you, et cetera.
They have like these codes
of warrior, things like that,
and those are sort of
superficial forms of that.
But the basic idea is the
same, whereas when you kill,
you're saying, we're not in the
same universe of that being.
Of course, in the Buddhist
view, when you kill,
you haven't
destroyed that being.
You've just taken
away their body,
but you have said that
their interest is not mine.
I don't identify with them.
So you're making
yourself narrower
as a being, whereas
when you save a life,
you're expanding as a
being, because the life you
saved you are connected to.
It's a piece that you have
a relationship with that.
Similarly, when you take others'
property, which is literally
steal, means take what
is not given to you,
then you're disregarding
other beings'
sense of owning something.
And you're their feeling
that they own that.
It's nothing, and
therefore, it's
like a kind of killing
them in your mind,
whereas when you
give them a gift,
and, oh, I'm expanding my
pleasure of this object
by them enjoying it.
And so you're, again,
incorporating them.
And finally, sexuality
is really important,
because that's
when the human form
biologically does sort of
melt into the other, ideally.
I mean not always, obviously,
but ideally, it's supposed to.
And it's a time when
the boundary normally
dissolves even without any
question of enlightenment,
and beings kind
of merge together.
So it's a very sacred
thing, actually.
So when even that time
when the human sort of
drops their identity
and allows themself
to melt, if they keep the
control thing where they're
doing it in some harmful and
abusive way to the object
in treating another
being as an object,
then that which is the deep
visceral lesson of expanding
their sense of identification
through love is being abused,
it becomes another way of
narrowing your existence
rather than expanding it,
whereas loving sexuality is
a way of acknowledging
and experiencing
a merger with another
being and is, therefore,
a very expanding of when
one becomes a larger
being by doing that.
And similarly, when you lie,
you create a false universe
for the other person.
You don't include
them in your universe.
When you speak to slander
people to cause them to dislike
each other, then you are
harming both of them,
whereas when you reconcile
them and make them peaceful,
then you're enjoying their being
harmonious with each other.
When you use speech
violently and harshly
just to injure someone's
feelings, emotions,
whatever, then similarly,
it's like you're verbally
killing them, or
speaking sweetly,
you're inviting them
and embracing them.
And finally, this is
a neat one I like.
It's a little bit the equivalent
in the 10 commandments
of blasphemy, but it's
more specific in the sense
that speech is what gives
us a collective mind.
When you speak and
someone listens,
you share minds all
imperfectly, since everyone
has a little different
meaning of words,
and they don't
necessarily understand,
and even the people who
speak don't necessarily
know exactly what
they're saying.
But if they're trying to speak
in a meaningful way, where
the other person has some
benefit for opening their mind
and listening, then they're
being helpful to that person,
ideally, meaningful, and
meaningful especially
tends to mean
something liberating,
something that expands their
understanding so that they then
can become bigger people and
understand their world better,
whereas meaningless
is the kind of people
who'd blab away not knowing
what they're talking about.
And they're wasting
your mental space
by blabbing at you a bunch
of meaningless drivel,
and there are a few
people who do that
on the media and everywhere.
So speech is the same way.
Then this is really the
mental, and these three
are the like the three poisons--
greed, hatred, and delusion.
They're very similar to that.
Your unrealistic world view,
you get back to that here
in the tenfold thing, and
then this is the anger poison,
and this is the lust and desire
and greed poison attachment
and so forth.
And the opposites are generosity
and lovingness and realism.
But what is powerful about it
is that those mental states are
considered more powerful
even than the physical ones,
because action only becomes
evolutionary in the sense of it
has an impact on you when
it relates to the motivation
that you do the action out of.
So motivation is really
critically important,
and this is then why in those
countries, in countries where
Buddhism has had a long
sway, thousands of years
of experience, centuries of
delivering educational service,
whether or not someone is
Buddhist in those countries,
there is a greater
tendency for people
to search inside themselves,
because they realize
that your life is
good or bad depending
on how you react to
your situations, more
than the situations.
We all know when we've been
very happy in a very good mood
in a difficult circumstance.
We all know when we've been in
supposedly great circumstance,
and yet for some reason, we're
having a tantrum or a fight,
or we're very mentally unhappy,
and we're not enjoying it.
And we've all had that
kind of experience,
because the mind is
the predominant one.
That's why in Indian science,
unlike Greek science,
and unlike your early Chinese
science, in Indian science,
the psychology and
philosophy science
field was considered the king
and queen of the sciences.
Not physics and not
biology or anything,
but they were not unimportant,
and they had their own physics
and things.
But it was the
mind sciences that
were considered most
important by far,
because that's really what
controls the quality of life.
And I always laugh.
There's a great verse
in Shantideva's book,
and he says-- but he's talking,
of course, about patience.
It's in his chapter on
patience or tolerance,
developing patience as
the antidote to anger.
And he says, you have two
choices when you don't want
to walk-- if you have to walk
barefoot, if you're barefoot,
and you don't want
to walk around
on sharp stones and twigs
and thorns and things
as you walk around the
earth, you have two choices.
Cover the Earth with leather,
or make yourself a parachute.
Because I love that, because
to cover it with leather
is like Western culture.
It's like a big
softball or something.
The planet has turned
into a softball.
Then everyone can walk around
barefoot, and they're happy,
but actually, at
the end of life,
I have no food or
nothing, whereas you
have a pair of sandals,
and then there,
you can allow your
crops to grow, whatever.
Things can be-- it's much
more practical, actually.
And this relates
to my hope, which
I have failed to achieve
in my teaching career,
but I'm hoping someday that the
colonial era will be reviewed,
and the West that conquered
the world will be seen
as inferior for having done so.
And Asia and the
indigenous people
who didn't go out
and conquer the world
will be seen as superior
for not having done so,
just as if you have a bunch
of gentle people on your block
who have lovely parties, who
play Monopoly and Scrabble
and whatever, and
you google lots
of interesting
things and nice time,
and then some mafioso
bully comes on the block
and demands-- starts a
protection racket on your block
and beats a few
of you up, you're
going to be afraid
of that person,
and they might extract
some wealth from you,
but you're not going to think
that's the superior person
on your block.
You're really not
going to think so,
but now our history
is still taught
like empire, sun never set.
It was all so great.
And we're in a way still
stuck in that attitude,
and that's really too bad,
because that is a mistake,
whereas the Asian
people, we wrongly
don't know where-- we want to
reinvent the wheel of the mind
sciences, for example,
instead of realizing
that the search inside
yourself was well developed.
So I'll say it again.
It's [INAUDIBLE] path.
Finally, I'm going
to stop now, almost.
Then there's realistic
creativity or creative effort
after these three ethical
things, and this tenfold path
of skillful and
unskillful-- oh, yeah.
And why is it called
skillful and unskillful?
Quickly, because you know when
you lift weights or you train
or you memorize something,
your memory improves.
Your muscles improve.
When you walk or your bike,
you feel more healthy.
Someone doesn't
come and award you
with improved muscles or
better memory or something
because you did something.
The doing of it shapes
and changes you,
so similarly, an evolutionary
action or karmic action,
if you kill, if you live by the
sword, you die by the sword.
If you become a killer,
you end up living in armor.
You carry around coats of armor.
You become more invulnerable.
You become more walled off and
paranoid about other people.
So the act itself changes you.
It evolves you or devolves
you, one or the other.
And all of these
acts are like that.
Therefore, this
is very key if you
know anything about
modern ethical philosophy.
Because of scientific
materialism
crushing philosophy as a key
and live and important pursuit
of human beings, replacing
it with measuring things
in materialistic
science-- because of that,
people think that ethics
is an arbitrary choice.
People are ethical because
they don't want to be caught.
They don't want
to be imprisoned.
There's no sort of intrinsic
value of being ethical.
There's no reason for it.
Previously, in
theistic cultures,
God told you so, so
he would punish you
if you didn't, so that gave
it a reason to be ethical.
Without bringing God back,
this path from ancient India,
ancient time, which
spread all over Asia,
and this path-- the reason
you want to be ethical
and you have an element of
enlightened self interest
is that these ethical
acts shape your being
in a way that is better
for you, if you follow me.
Not only are they nice to the
person whose life you save
or who don't abuse sexually or
who you give things to rather
than taking things
from them, but you
yourself become a bigger being.
You become an improved being.
You have a higher
quality of life.
You become happier.
And therefore, there's
a biological reason
to be ethical, which in a way,
is what His Holiness is doing
in terms of
materialistic science
without challenging that
irrational thinking of theirs
about how they're not going
to have a future life,
because he thinks that's
too much for many of them.
And it probably is.
And he's also not an American.
He's not a stupid
American like me.
So he's being polite.
But I'm after those
kind of scientists
who run around, because I
consider that if you think what
you do will have no consequence
to yourself ultimately,
however bad it
gets, you just die
and you have permanent
anesthesia, permanent sodium
Pentothal, permanent sleep.
So therefore, in a way,
it doesn't ultimately
matter whether you're
good or not good.
It doesn't ultimately.
Then an elite, a
planetary elite that
has the levers of power
and authority and it's
all of the societies on the
globe that believes that, acts
like that-- apres moi,
le deluge, King Louis XVI
said before his head was cut
off, but he didn't know it
was going to be cut off.
Then you're going to behave
recklessly and destructively,
and you're not going
to shift the planet out
of global warming, and you're
not going to prevent wars.
And you're going to run around
dropping bombs and doing
things, because you think worst
case, I'll just stop existing,
whereas if worst case, you never
know quite how bad it can get.
It can always get worse.
You will become mindful
that any little thing that
could be a little better
is of total importance.
And that's what mindfulness is.
Final thing,
Samadhiraja Sutra-- who
understands cause and effect,
that person will understand
emptiness and relativity,
who understands
emptiness and
relativity, will be
mindful of the
most minute details
of the relativity around them.
And they will be
extremely careful to make
things better and not worse.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
