This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, since we have been talking about this talk for almost two days now, I'm sorry ahead of time. It can't live up to the billy. It's just a talk on the 6th century BCE India. I found that I often say to people, yeah, you know, the Buddha was quite radical for its time. It changed so much in society. And then I realized those people I've just said that to may not know what 6th century BCE India was like. and saying, I don't appreciate where I'm coming from.

[01:00]

Wow, he turned over so many things. So I thought, for this course, maybe let's start there. Okay, so that's why I'm talking about this, Aryan society and culture in the 6th century BCE. All right. Let me start with an old friend. There's an elder person retired in the early 90s. Elder British gentleman, Cambridge educated, pipe smoking, Indologist from Great Britain, right? India Jewel. of the British Empire. He absolutely loved India, as do many British folk still.

[02:10]

But this man's name, scholar, was A.L. Basham. And A.L. Basham really loved India. And he was a scholar of great renown. He wrote a book called the wonder that was India. You can just hear all the glory of the British Raj. Oh, so marvelous. But it remains, I think it was published in 1951, maybe, and then 57 again. It remains one of the best books If you want to learn about the history of India, about the geography, about the Aryan invasion, about Dravidians, about the class system, about any of India, he's done it in great detail. The book is The Wonder That Was India. His name is A.L.

[03:11]

Basham. B-A-S-H-A-M. So I'm saying that to say If you forget any of this, easy enough. Go to Basham, the wonder that was India, chapter five. Chapter five is brilliant. There are two contiguous societies that have the oldest history in the world. I mean, we hear about Sumeria, and we know about Egypt. But the ones that have continued, one is China, the other is India. Their society has continued for millennia. And some of the codes, the societal codes, have continued since then as well.

[04:18]

India was different. in that it was occupied by other people. You know what? We have a tendency to say someone like Columbus discovered America as though America was empty at the time. You know what I mean? There weren't any people here. No indigenous folk. He discovered it, right? There weren't any Native Americans. Wait till I get up and start walking around. So it's not as though there weren't people in the subcontinent of India when the Aryans arrived. There were. And some of those people survived the secession after succession of Aryan tribes moving into India. They had started over in the steeps of southern Europe.

[05:20]

And they, the Aryans, blonde, blue-eyed, had traveled and traveled in waves over centuries. I always think about the Stevie Wonder song. Iraq, Iran, I've been, you know, come on, I've been everywhere, you know. Okay. That didn't get you fancy. Okay. But the Aryans, they had, they had traveled, right, for centuries, right? And there are different disputes as to why they ever started to move. Something like deforestation, you know, agriculture had just run out. But for whatever reason, these blonde, blue-eyed people decided to move. And when they came to northern India, they stopped. And they stopped around the 15th century to 12th century BCE, And we still have cultures there, Baluchistan, you know.

[06:25]

There are remnants of former cultures. And in those remnants, it looks as though it's hard to find an Aryan grouping of people who came in peacefully. They came in with horses, sort of like conquistadors, right? So there are indications. There are mass graves in places. There are looks as though these were a conquering people. And they were led by a group of people that they call warriors. Kshatriyas. Kshatriyas. Sanskrit has these retroflexes. I have my students repeating what I say. Come on, you can say Kshatriya. Kshatriya. It's a retroflex. But that was just when they moved.

[07:32]

You see, they moved, the warriors led the way. That's another indication that they were warring people. There were just two classes of people when the Aryans decided to settle. There were some people that were commoners and some priests. and warriors who had led them all there. Once they stopped, the smaller group of Brahmins in that commoner group said, now that we've stopped, we don't quite need these soldiers out front, I think we better put ourselves atop this class system. And they did. So we get Two classes divide around the ninth century BCE into four classes. And those four classes I put on the far left of this board. Around the ninth century BCE, India is divided into four classes.

[08:39]

They are called Varnas. Oh, you may know that Sanskrit is Proto-European. It's the earliest. It has eight cases. Latin and Greek have five and six. So we have to memorize a little bit more doing Sanskrit. But the thing is, when you see a Sanskrit term or an English, no, let's start with English or German or Middle German word, you can see the Sanskrit word. You see? Oh, so I'll have reason to come back to that. So these two classes divided into four classes, and the classes were called varnas. It was later Portuguese who called them caste. But they were called varnas, and varnas is cognate with varnish. It means both a covering and a color. And the Aryans, blondes, met in indigenous people who were darker.

[09:45]

Some of those dark-skinned people survived and were pushed towards the south. Modern-day Dravidians, Tamil Nadu, people who fled the Aryan invasion and who survived were then pushed down into southern India. And they have their own culture and their own languages, you know, India has 15 national languages. But Tamil Nadu, you speak Tamil Nadu, So once I got off the plane, it was freaking at me, and I said, how are you doing? And then I realized, oh, no. That's like really being a Yankee in the South. You know, you just don't do that, you know? You speak Sanskrit, you're up there. You speak Hindi, you're up there. But when you're in the South, it's Tamil, or some of the other languages that are derived from Tamil. Okay, two classical languages, Sanskrit and the North, Tamil and the South. Vedic Sanskrit is Sanskrit, but Kamal and Kamal Nata develop other languages.

[10:51]

Oh, okay. So don't make the mistake of speaking Hindi and Hyderabad. So they act like I do. Not good. At any rate, Davidians, typically darker skin in the South. They got no problem. You know, we are the original folk here. We're the original folk and we're private. But in the North, people were divided on color lines. Now, it seems like being a black from the Jim Crow South, I may be reading more into this. But I'm actually not. It's a linguistic thing, language. They were divided according to Varnas. Hmm. So the four Varnas are what? Ah, the Brooklynists who made themselves supreme and superior. Then Kshatriyas. Then everybody else, the commoners, so-called Vaishas. The Vaishas did everything from tilling the soil to keeping the animals to lending money.

[11:58]

They were business folk too. The mercantile class, Vaishas. Then those people who the Aryans conquered and kept close were called Shudras. The fourth class, the shudra. And there were two types of shudras. I guess you're getting the impression that this was a hierarchical society. That's what I hope. There were two types of shudra. There were so-called pure shudra and impure shudra. And the pure shudra Everybody had a task. The shudras were not really part of Aryan society. Their sole purpose was to serve the three higher classes. A shudra was to serve the three higher classes.

[13:00]

They were servants, right? They were dark-skinned. They were called vasas, which is also dark. Okay, but they were also impure shudras. Can you imagine what it might have been to be an influence future? Well, they didn't fit in the class system at all. They could not become, by any means, Aryans. They were sometimes called by the British the unscheduled caste, or the fifth class, or Gandhi had to come and say, Let's not call them that untouchables, right? Because just to be nearer than what's polluting, let's call them Harijins, which means, Hari is the name of Vishnu. So that means call them children of God. Ha! You know how words change things.

[14:05]

So Ganali said call them Harijins. Now today, they're called Dalits. They still exist. And in the 50s, Ambedkar had a movement. Ambedkar, well, I won't be telling you just names all the time. But Ambedkar, you should know. Does somebody know about Ambedkar? You studied engagementism? No? Yes, I thought you said yes. Okay. Ambedkar was on the Supreme Court of India. He helped to write the Constitution. But he was an untouchable. And he rose through the ranks because of his father's military travels. So you could fight. You were untouchable. His father made it big in the military and so arranged with the British Raj for him to get scholarships, go to school in England. So he did it. And he came back and he was a judge. And then he was promoted to Supreme Court.

[15:09]

He formed a liaison with Gandhi. They worked on Los Angeles. India movement. And then Ambedkar said, what can I do for my people? So he went on this campaign to study all of the world's religions. Be the Ambedkar. A-M-B-E-T-K-A-R. When we study engaged Buddhism, we have to think of Ambedkar. So Ambedkar decided that Buddhism was a religion that would free the untouchables. Why? Because it doesn't recognize caste. doesn't recognize these varnas. And so on one day in 56, Ambedkar and 500,000 untouchables took refuge for this refuge. Okay. And now today, there are movements like the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, those people, that group founded in England by Sangharachana, their mission is to

[16:12]

Well, they've changed their name now to Tree Rat. But their mission is to go to India and to teach Dalits Buddhism so that when the formal refuges ceremonies come around, they can become Buddhist. So there's still that movement going on, Ambedkar's movement, to get untouchables out of their low-class status. The other thing I wanted to say earlier was, you know, both these traditions, China and India, especially India as I know it, care so much about numbers because it's oral, right? How do you remember things? You know, Buddhism, you know, people joke with me that I'm perfect for this job because being a Baptist and a Buddhist, I like chapter and verse. And I must admit I did. But India and Buddhism is repeat with numbers, right, so that you can remember things.

[17:17]

There are four noble truths, right? I've taught only two things, what two? I've taught only three things, what three? And so forth. So India before the Buddha, too. So there's four varnas. Society can be, I said, schematically seen this way, and you'll pretty much cover it. There's four varnas. There are four so-called ashramas. Ashramas are stages of life, but we think of them as places we stay or we take refuge in or we practice yoga in. Ashrama is a place where you stay. It's a stage in life. Ashrama. Four ashramas. So you're a child, you're a householder, then you're a hermit, then you wander in the city. We'll come back to these. And that's so-called, because the Brahmins were making all these rules now. Remember, it was the Brahmins writing the text that that set forth all these codes and all these classifications. So I think they must have run into some trouble, the Brahmins.

[18:20]

I mean, people must have said, come on, it's like too rigid. You can't, there's no mobility. These are rigid stratifications. So then the Brahmins at a certain stage wrote a text. They said, well, somebody born in Aryan society can have these three aims in life. Maybe this will take some other rigidity out of it. And so the three aims of life, the three goals for any Arya are these three. Dharma, practicing your religious duties. Artha, making a living economically. And Kama, not karma. Kama, like Kama Sutra. That is, you can have sexual pleasure. Did this appease everybody? Well, sort of, for a while. There was no big rebellions against the Brahmins. So there was agitation from time to time.

[19:22]

Okay. Basham, remember the endologist with the pipe? Had the privilege of meeting him once. I've been to Chicago, and he's about 70 or 80. He's probably 80. I was younger then, so I thought he was older. Yes, pipe. Very British, you know, I don't know. The tweed and the vest, the woolen vest and the tweed jacket and the pipe. And he was pacing across the stage there. And he said, well, these three aims of life, you know, I call them the three peas. And everything shook, you know, and ruddy cheeks. And his cheeks just hung, you know, and when he moved, they shook a little. So I'm close. So that's what I call these the three peas. I call it. Now, I began by saying there are four classics.

[20:34]

That's true. But within each class, There's what's called jat, which is your birth station, which really is a job. It means what job you do. And to make society run smoothly, Brahmins set out that, okay, the Brahmins are the highest, but they're different ones. Some are teachers. There was a one division between the teachers, the scholars, and other kinds of Brahmins. And of these other kinds of Brahmins, there are all these different jobs, like a sacrifice. You have somebody to light the fire, somebody to bring the fire. They have to be brown. If you want the funeral to be successful, right, they have to be brown. So many different kinds of brown. It's a job thing. And for all of these, there are multi-jots within each class. The Portuguese in the 17th century came, Indians and all that. That's what it looks like.

[21:36]

It's just a little cast. And so they said, and passed up. But it's really Varna. Oh, it's Varna and Jats. All right, so there are a lot of divisions in India. And you can tell by a person's last name what they do. For the most part, if you've met a Mishra, he's a musician. Or she is. If you've met, you know, so everything is right out there. Because in our society, everything was right out there. Why? Because it was polluting for someone to mix where they shouldn't mix. That's a rigid kind of society. Are you following? In Benares, as a student in 67, 68, I was at BHU. And Benares is a huge village, right? They had a half million people then.

[22:37]

Many of the people who lived along the Gats had not come up to the main street. They lived on the Gats, and they didn't move much. One day, and so the Gats is where any Orthodox Hindu wants to be buried, because that's where the Ganges river. Their ashes will be taken if they are burned on the steps near the wall of the Ganges, so they'll have a happy rebirth and so forth. But there are people who haven't come up to the main street from the Gats. Well, once I was just walking along, and I knew a little Hindi, and I saw this group of kids. It was really heartbreaking. I saw a group of kids. There were four or five young boys, and they were seemingly laughing and playing together, except one of the young boys said something that was apparently funny, and I watched as only... As those young boys looking at each other, two of them could share in the joke.

[23:44]

Two of them couldn't. They couldn't share in the joke because they were not of proper caste. I mean, the stuff is heavy. That was 67, 68. Children who can't participate because they're not of the right. When I was growing up in the South, it was white and colored over the water fountains. This still is a heavy system that permeates India. It's still there. It's as heavy as that. That felt. So, what's your name? Wilhelmsen, if I'm wrong. You know, to call that caste, right? The American system... the American system. Somebody asked me that same time, is this okay?

[24:51]

A person who had a stall, Nam Keem and Chini, in India, somebody knows you buy little crackers, salty stuff, with sweet stuff. Nam Keem and Chini's sugar and sugary, all right. So this guy had a numb cane stand. So he asked me one day, numb's up, I'm sorry, please allow me, I don't mean any harm. I said, sure. He says, what cast are you? And I found over and over again, especially in the cities, that Indians were so much, and I know there are different kinds of Indians, I don't mean to centralize, but there was so much more knowledgeable about American culture than we were about them. So they could talk to you about Manny Davis movies. They could say lines.

[25:53]

I mean, I had it over and over again. So he said, what cast are you? And I said, cast? Me? OK, I'm trying to let you in. I said, oh, no. I said, I'm American. I said that first. Maybe it was in defense. You know, it was touching. And then he started to explain, oh, I thought they were from Assam. I told my friend, you know, because you have this round face. Not Assamese. And he knew. So he said, oh, finally, he said, oh, American Negro. So sorry. So sorry, he said. 67. So sorry, man. I'm sorry. I said, it's okay. I'll be all right. It's all right. So this class system weighs heavily.

[26:56]

Does anybody notice that I have not mentioned women? Okay. Well, then let me say a bit more about these stages of life. So let's see whether this is any different than us. I don't know. Stage of life's a first... Oh, I stopped writing things. Get started writing English. That happens. The first stage of life is called brachmacharn. When you're sort of a student of the brachma, which means you're just a student. You're having your childhood. You go to school. What does going to school mean in Aryan society? It means memorizing the Veda. Because the Veda is the sacred literature of the Aryans. From the root, vid, to know, Veda, the sacred knowledge. Okay. So, when you're a child, it means going to study with a teacher and to memorize at least one of the Vedas.

[28:07]

And therefore... And nobody ever memorizes a whole veda. For example, the first veda has 1,028 verses, slogas. But people stay with a Brahmin, a Brahmin teacher, for a certain period of years, usually about 12. And when they are 12, they undergo a ceremony called upayana. And upayana means getting the sacred thread. And getting that sacred thread, which is a ritual that goes on for a couple of days, you know, you can put the sacred thread on. Girls can't do that, right? You put the sacred thread on, right? You can't jump in a pool, right? With just the bottom of your dotee on, right? If you're a girl, right? So boys could do this. And getting the sacred thread meant that you joined, officially, our society.

[29:10]

And boys did that from the age of 11 to 16 or so. And it was called a ceremony to become twice born. So first you were born from your mother's womb, and then you were born into Aryan society. Again, this is not for women or girls to die. After childhood, you literally... could enter a stage where you are called a grih hasta. You took a griha, which is a house, in your hands. You grabbed it. So you became a householder. And that's when, after the marriage had been arranged and so forth, you could maybe... No, people told me nobody read the Kama Sutra until they were old men with beards down here. It was just something Westerners liked it. Do you know the common sutra? Do you know the common sutra? No.

[30:11]

They never heard of it. And it was against the law to read it. Unless you were way past householding age. Anyway, you're a householder. There's usually an arranged marriage. And ideally, the texts say the wife should be a third of the husband's age. when they're married. A third. So she's eight when it's arranged. He's 24. All right. This was codified. This was the rule. Didn't mean an eight-year-old went home with a 24-year-old guy because the wife always moved with her husband's family because she increased the workload at the husband's family. But it doesn't mean at eight, but it means it was a rage. It was settled by then. Why? Because girls and women were thought to be libidimus.

[31:16]

Why can I say that? What? Libidimus. It's not a B, it's a B. But anyway, yeah. Anyway, you know what I mean? They got a habit. That's what the thought about girls. So you had to get them married off. Because if you didn't, it would be bad for the Aryan family. So there developed this practice of child marriage. As a consequence, as a consequence, India of 6th century BC, India in centuries, afterwards in centuries before, had a lot of widows. This is important. Because the girls were married so young, their husbands were so old, the husbands always died, typically before the women. But widows were pariahs in Indian society, still are.

[32:24]

Only rare, rare philanthropists set up ashrams, in this case, places where they can literally stay for widows. Widows are the most polluting thing in Indian society. If you see one on the road, and I like to say, if you see the bud on the road, kill it. If you see a widow on the road, turn and run the other way. There is nothing that would take away the pollution of a widow. And so, not only do you have this opportunity to have a lot of widows, but you have this incredibly heart-rending ritual that the British called sati, where a widow, a wife whose husband dies, joins him on his funeral pot, right? India's replete, and Indian novelists use this, I, yeah,

[33:30]

I remember a novel, Far Pavilions, right, in the cover of the leaf inside, had this photo of the handprints, handprints of women on their way to join their husbands on the funeral pyre. The British outlaws who called outlawed this practice, but it was still happening in the 80s and early 90s, in some places in Nepal and some places in India. Now, nobody that I know of has done an interview with the woman on their way. Like, is this your free choice, ma'am? Are you doing this of your own free will? Are you drugged? Has the family, has the husband's family threatened you? All of these I'm sure were true. We know it. There are good studies.

[34:32]

There had been energy. Why? Well, polygamy was practiced. Sometimes a man could have three or four wives, and the first wife was mistreated. I know a family in Nepal where this is the case. So there were suicides by women, and there was this practice of why? Because your wife was worth nothing without your husband. If you had been married, and he died... Your life was over. I'm not making this up. Uh-huh. I hope this isn't too boring. Because I'm going in numbers. Hmm? No? Good. Okay. Let me just read some of the text. What an ideal life should be like. That's not the text. Let me find chapter five of Basham. Uh-huh. Sorry.

[35:49]

This is about a 60-page chapter in the last four. Vasson addressed this under the title. Women. Last four pages of 70. At any rate, and the first sentence in the little section on women says... A woman, according to most authorities, was always a minor at law. She never got older than a child. She was never the equal of a person, an adult. Sorry, I overemphasized the Hindi. You know, . And I go, it's just pause. Okay? So if you hear me going, that's all I'm doing. Okie dokie, right along. Moving right along.

[36:51]

So China and India has this. A girl, a woman, is always subject to what is called in both countries' traditions, the three obediences. A girl. or a woman, it must be obedient to her parents when she's a child, to her husband when she's an adult, and to her son if she's lucky enough to have had one. Otherwise, she might be caholicer. Coriah to everybody. If a son doesn't take her in, she's anathema. She's terrible. All right. So China has this provision in its society, India has it, still today. So, has anybody seen the movie series, The Elements, done by Indian director Mehta? Oh, you should see these.

[37:54]

You've seen it, right? Water, fire, earth. Mehta, N-E-H-T-A, you should see these movies, okay. What does water begin with? Do you remember? The movie Water begins with a little girl in white who is going to an ashram, a special ashram, where women who are widows take her in. And most of the women there, in the movie at least, earn their living by prostitution. They take care of these children who've been widowed at such an early age. Metta is a great filmmaker. The Element Trilogy. Something is a real thing. So I was talking about the handprints. Let me tell you what an ideal wife was supposed to be like.

[38:57]

You see, the scriptures say a husband should honor his wife. Why? Because though she was evil and a seductress on the one side, On the other side, only she could guarantee his having 35 million years in heaven. I don't know if you call it honor, but, you know, he begs something in her because if she is a sati, which really means the British misunderstood it, they call it a ritual sati, but sati is the person, the wife, who is devoted to him. Sati means in accordance with reality. Sat is reality. She's truthful. She accords with reality. She is a sati to him. She is devoted to him. She's pure. Right? But being devoted to him means she does seem like that.

[39:59]

A woman was holding her sleeping husband's head in her lap. as they and their child warmed themselves in winter before a blazing fire, suddenly the child crawled towards the fire. But the woman made no attempt to save it from the flames, since that would have wakened her Lord. This is talking about the ideal wife. So as the baby crawled further into the flames, she prayed to the fire god, Agni, to spare the child from harm. And the god, so impressed by her obedience to the husband, granted her prayer, excuse me, and the child sat smiling and unharmed in the middle of the fire until the man

[41:04]

awoke. Well, you don't think you could do that? Come back here. Jane, come back. Thank you, Johnny. Dang, Johnny's going through the fire, but you dare not disturb your husband. That's an ideal life. For life is half the man, the best of friends, the root of the three ends of life, and all that will help him in the next world. If she's faithful, he can earn up to 35 million years. Don't say what she wants. She doesn't get anything out of it, but he gets it. And therefore, even a man in the grip of rage will not be harsh to a woman. Remembering that on her depends his joys. his love, his happiness in the afterlife.

[42:05]

Okay. So we have in there, even up till the 1990s, sati as a ritual being performed where the wife of a husband who's died joins him and together they burn on the funeral pyre. He's dead, but she's alive. practice was outlawed by the British but it's still practiced in some rural areas okay so when I say when I say that the intentional community founded by the Buddha in the 6th century BC was quite radical I'm talking about this fact these facts he accepted Into the sonda, people from any environment.

[43:10]

He accepted into the sonda, people from any stage of life, young and old. He accepted into the sonda, any gender. Or at least the text don't say, they say two genders, both genders, the text say. Okay, well, there are the genders. Right? So the Buddha tried this system on its head. It was a dangerous picture. So I say, remember, you see, there were only 64, let me say, to remember this time, 64 teachers. And they each, you know, had their own teachings and people followed them. And all these people When we gathered with a teacher in the forest, they were called Vana Prustas. Vana is forest. Prustas was stationed there.

[44:11]

And they followed. There were 64. Two of them we know about. One was Mahalia, who founded Chinese. We say Chinese, but Chinese. And the other was people. Not only did they accept women, but they survived. the other 62 we don't know about there's a small set of ajivakas and I don't know where they are the naked ones the giants were naked too they were clad by the sky and then but so many women wanted to come in that they had to come up with a new way so they were didumbar giants clothed by the sky and shwetumbars clothed in white cloth that was for the women who joined And both, Buddha and Maria, women just flocked. Because they want, like anybody else, to know what freedom is.

[45:13]

They want to know, like anybody else, what? Oh. Oh, one last thing to say. Oh, it's the Tibetan pause. Okay, now I'm in the Tibetan pause. Oh. Nibbana. Nibbana. Oh. All right, I'm glad I'm alive here. I know it's true, but you might call it. Nibbana, that we Western scholars earlier on called extinction, and saw Buddhism as pessimistic and all that. It's blowing out, blowing out a candle. Oh, who? What was we? That's so pessimistic. Oh. In India, Oh, in Minaris, I've witnessed this. People run to their doors, you know. There's this month or two months of just being in an oven.

[46:15]

You can see the heat waves rising. You can see them, right? It's so hot. It's so humid. And one day, everybody's on the balcony. Everybody's at the window. Everybody's in the street and everybody's pointing. They're pointing at the cooling rain. It's coming, right? That's the Hibana, the cooling off. It's not blowing out, it's not, I don't know, all the different things. But so many of the early nuns, so much in the terry goddess, they're singing their songs of freedom and they say, cool at last am I. Cool from the fires of desire. From the fire of hatred and ignorance and cruel now and out. Thank you. I'm cruel. I know cruelness. That's me, bud. It's that kind of cooling off of desire.

[47:17]

It's not like, well, go kill yourself now. So, no, never extinction like that. Just extinction of desire. Take a hat. I don't know if I've said too much or I haven't said enough. What? Were you looking for your phone? No. Am I running out of time here? I want people to have something to say I was just going to read two verses. I want to say that the Buddha was a welcoming. This was a welcoming thing. The Sangha, that was hate. Folk of different ages, different classes, different genders. And with the knowledge that yes, they all can cool off. They all can become free. They all can become liberated. This was revolutionary.

[48:19]

They can do it together. Together where pollution is such a thing. They can all go out of mom's round, all come sit and eat. Horus. Right? They could do it in a Buddhist Sangha. Quite revolutionary. So there's some text, and I want to hand out the text to those people who are part of our workshop. We don't have enough for everybody. So there's some staff people, I'm happy to see you here, but we only have enough for the people who are in the group. You have an assignment, which is to read these eight pages. For tomorrow, we're going to begin with a discussion of them. This is not eight pages. This is a group of eight pages. Okay. So I want to say with this, but I accepted these different folks.

[49:25]

Oh, my. Nope, just a little. Okay, there's a little water on the edges. I think I know where it came from, but it's a cooling off. Yeah, you got it. So sometimes today people have said, I don't know whether the Buddha was so keen to accept women. Here we go. We'll get to our workshops. I know he was because he accepted them. But there's this key text. Maybe he hesitated when he was making that decision. Maybe he wasn't all in. And the thing about it is, it's a canonical text in Nepali. So I want to say this.

[50:27]

As you read the text, and we'll talk about it first thing tomorrow, We know there are nuns in the time of the Buddha. We don't know what he said. This text said he said, we don't know. We don't know that. But we know there are nuns in the time of the Buddha. And many texts tell us, historical texts as well. That five years after my very first admitted woman, the Buddha did too. Okay, so we know there are nuns at the time of the Buddha. So he must have allowed it. That's a tricky argument, because there are nuns, you know, you did. But there are nuns. The Booker said, I won't pass away until the four-fold community is that full story. And that four-fold community that intentionally needed founded was consisted of monks, nuns, laymen, and laymen.

[51:28]

They were nuns at the Booker's time. And we wanted to see them all in relation to his teaching. So who's in the English group? Yes, would you please? Call it in there. Do you want to get copies for some of this? No. No. This should be enough for everyone in that group. So please, raise your hand if you're in the group. All right, go have where the sample is in the middle of it. but I think you can read the pages. And I want to say, those nuns who became, who won ordination with the Buddha, they sang songs of triumph. So we know not only that there were nuns, but we know those nuns gained liberation under the Buddhist teaching. And we have these beautiful examples in the works

[52:31]

of the early nons works like the terry gottas. Works like the terry gottas. You were asking about earlier, Tia. Wine desk. Oh, I said it was a cat, but it's a dog. This is Sama's testimony. These are early times. Sama says, like a dog forever getting ready to sit, all day and all life, I circled him on Christmas. Can you see it? Getting ready to sit, right? These days, body and mind are together, like old friends. Since we aren't getting anywhere, They eventually decided to have a seat and try to relax.

[53:36]

There are many facts, she says. All. These are their songs of trial. These are called Olingas, the declaration of their freedom. So they're also teaching this for us. This is the translation by Maggie Olingas. Another psalmist says, After 25 years on the path, I'd experienced almost everything except peace. When I was young, my mother told me that I would find true happiness only in marriage. Remembering the words all these years later, something in me began to tremble. I gave myself to the trembling and it showed me all the pain this little heart had ever known. And how countless lives of searching, or you see, countless lives of searching have brought me at last to the present moment, which I happily married.

[54:44]

Oh, present moment. Nice, yes. These runs already going on. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[55:11]

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