It's one of the things he's trying to do here is, so far, Buddhism has been described primarily by people with a Western bias or viewpoint. And it's hard to, even using English language and philosophical terms, it's hard to kind of describe Buddhism. And D.T. Suzuki, for instance, most of his description of Buddhism is in psychological terms, in terms of the unconscious and so forth, which don't really apply. So one of the things all of us who are teaching Buddhism are trying to do is trying to sort out and free Buddhism from the description that scholars have given up to date, and from the English language, too. That's one of the main points about Buddhism. Do you have anything to add to that? No, but perhaps we should open up to some questions. I mean, as we went along, there were a number of points that, there were some very interesting

[01:04]

points that you discussed. And Lama Buddhinda had a number of stories that you can tell along with this, that being in Yale, he didn't have time to write down. And he thought, Dr. Thurman had a number of stories that he could supply and extend. Sure. Well, there are innumerable Siddhas stories, and the Siddhas are like the great saints of the East and West. And in fact, there are many people who believe, I am one of them, and I don't think Lama Buddhinda would concur, that this movement of the Siddhas was actually international even in those days, even without airplanes and so forth. In the sense that the early Chan masters are contemporaneous with the Siddhas. That is something only the Tucci even suspects, that Bodhidharma was a Siddha. In the lineage or succession lists of the Chan sects in China, they count the Indian masters, many of them who are the Siddhas, as among their patriarchs. And certainly their style and their nonconformism and their dropping out of the various monastic

[02:10]

establishments fit in with the Siddha pattern. But not only to the East of China that the Siddhas have influenced, but also the rise of Sufism in the Islamic world. Since, for example, the Muslim, when Muhammad was contemporary himself with the Siddhas in the 7th century, 6th, 7th, 8th century was the strongest time. And then as the Muslims became culturally involved, usually by conquest with the Indian and Central Asian nations, this sort of nonconformist style, individualistic style of the Siddhas spread even back into Islam, of course the most conformist of all religious orders, the most militant of that time. And led to people like Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, and the great Sufis, who had the same interest in alchemy and individualistic paths to realization, and particularly in the Islamic world, of course, the notion of fusion with Allah, which was a highly heretical notion from the point

[03:12]

of view of ordinary Islam. In fact, many of them were crucified or killed in other ways for that belief, the idea that the individual could himself become Allah was every bit as heretical in Islam as it was in Christianity. So, if you then connect that, the Siddhas' presence and activity with Sufism, and then you think in terms, say, that Jesus is very eloquently and in great detail described by Ibn al-Ishaq how the Sufi saints, in fact, influenced the medieval Christian saints such as St. Francis and so forth, the Siddha movement spreads again, both East and West, with very powerful subterranean ramifications throughout the entire Eurasian subcontinent. So, it is in India, naturally, that this kind of thing begins, and the reasons for that we can discuss, but it's probably really because India tended to be the most liberal social, have the most liberal social structure of all the different Eurasian empires and kingdoms throughout history. And hence, this kind of shramana type or hippy type of, we can say hippy type of yogi was

[04:16]

more tolerated in India, even today, still more tolerated in India than anywhere else in the world. But, before I just go one by one through these points that I think are worthy of discussion here, perhaps it would be better to see what questions you have growing out of Lama's own paper, so we can stick as much as possible to Lama's presentation. It was so fortunate to appear to him. Do you think that this paper exemplifies really the whole thread of Lama's teaching and his heart's longing to explain what has been lost and what has not been told? I feel something very special in it, of that order. Could you talk more about Lama's basic aim and his writing and his teaching? Would you like me to? Yes, please. Sure. Actually, I was very pleased that Lama mentioned the story of the Golden Bull, because I had

[05:22]

asked Lama, since last year, when we met in the East when he first came, when he first came back from India, about the possible relationships or the institute and the institute's founding ideals in relationship to the Arya Maitreya Mandala, which is his form. Some of you may know, which his own guru, the Pramukeshiva, which he had asked to do this incarnation, sort of authorized him to start. Arya Maitreya Mandala meaning the sort of fellowship of Maitreya, the future Buddha, the Buddha of Love, what Maitreya as his name means, the Loving One. And he read this section from the institute's founding document about how the Western Enlightenment and the Buddhist Enlightenment should find points of contact in giving freely, in the sense that the major thrust of the Buddha Dharma from its historical inception was not

[06:26]

to propagate Buddhism. In other words, Buddha's main interest was not to make Buddhists. His interest was to make Buddhas, to make enlightened beings, in other words, to free people, not to sign them up in some membership, but rather to make them free by understanding what was the truth and what was reality. And so the fact that the Westerners have this idea called liberal arts, liberal in the sense of liberating, although liberal may have been a class-oriented term in its inception. In fact, if you look back into the sort of historical genesis of the Western educational system, nevertheless, liberal does have a connotation of free, of liberating or liberating. And so to fuse these two traditions, to bring the power and the sophistication and the philosophical strengths of Buddhism to bear on keeping alive the liberal, liberating tradition of the West was something that was very dear, I think, to Lama's heart. And hence, Lama touches here, for example, on his idea of the siddhas, his dearly beloved

[07:27]

siddhas, in the sense that their view was against the orthodoxy of the time, against the sterile monasticism of the time, but not just monasticism also. They were actually against Tantricism as well, something that's very little realized about the siddhas, because we think of them normally as Tantrics. But actually, the siddhas were very downright. If you read in Saraha, he says, what are you doing with your mumbo-jumbo doing your tantras over there in the corner? Those rituals will not get you anywhere. Just stay at home and recognize the spontaneous mind. He has such kind of statements. Very anti-Tantric as well as anti-monastic. And he's even anti-laid-bone sattvas too. He gets after them. So the siddhas, like all the great Buddhist critics, were highly critical of all forms of professionalism, we might say. Making a profession out of being a Tantric, or a profession out of being a monk, or a profession out of being a lay patron or something. They were very much against that. And that, I think, is very much Lama's central thrust.

[08:27]

Now, the Golden Bowl analogy, I was particularly touched by in this paper, because we decided to make a journal of the Institute. And we've slowly been working at that. But it takes time. And apparently, because we're also much involved with other things, it's very hard to get it done. But we're slowly working on it. And we gave the name of the Golden Bowl to that journal. Not to be confused with anything. Well, we never know. We never know where those siddhas sit. Since the siddhas have the mastery of death and reincarnation, we never know about the James Brothers. And not those James Brothers, although that we would know either. Although they didn't seem to have had a Golden Bowl, because they had to keep getting gold from banks. But of course, they didn't do the gardening when they were going in the local gardens. The gardening is a humanitarian form of health. Right. But the special idea of the Golden Bowl, we wanted to name it the Golden Bowl to set a

[09:33]

prevailing tendency amongst many of the Buddhist groups, which is to perpetuate certain types of sectarianism, such as did exist in Asia. And the idea that each one had their dharma. You know, like the Tibetan dharma, which is Tibetan property, and the Japanese property, and the Chinese, and so forth. Telenese, and whatever. And rather to revive the really core spirit of it, Nagarjuna's spirit, which is that, well, the idea is to get people to use the dharma and implement it in their life. Therefore, if they want to steal it, let them have it. Throw them the Golden Bowl, as Nagarjuna did. So this gesture, we feel, is a kind of inspirational gesture of the Institute. The idea of throwing out the bowl for everyone to take as much as they can, by all means. So that he, because after all, to take the truth, and even to steal, some people like to steal the truth. They don't want to be given, they want to steal it. But to get the truth, and it's in its sense truth, not in the sense of dogma, which Lama is very much against, and which is wrong meaning of truth from the Buddhist point of view,

[10:35]

and probably truly from the Christian point of view. Truth, capital T, is not dogma. He would love the throwing out of the bowl. I've heard that. He would never what? He would love the throwing out of the bowl. Oh, yes. He did love it. And that's why he said he wanted so much, he wanted to come and give this particular paper. And unfortunately, he couldn't come today, but he is here anyway in his beautiful, lucid writing. Thanks to you. It was a great influence to all of us. And in my view, and I don't know whether I'm a scholar or what, but I guess I'm something of a scholar nowadays. But I don't say just a scholar. Dr. Zinner was the first white man ordained by the Dalai Lama. But then I also subsequently did become unordained to reintegrate into Western society. He was a dropout, too. Yeah. He was a shramana.

[11:36]

But I am a scholar nowadays, so that I guess I can give some kind of an opinion about the works of scholarship on Buddhism. And I must say that of all books written in the English language about Buddhism, I think Lama really takes the cake. They say that in Europe, you know. Yes. Leon Meller, who was translating a lot of German books, said that Lama is tops in Europe for meditation. And that multidimensional meditation is being talked about all over Europe. But not just meditation, just simple explanation of the basic doctrines of Buddhism. The Lama really does do better than any of the just plain scholars or other type, or he really is the best. He's so lucid and so forth. He has so many talents. Yes. His recent book, his last one, The Creative Meditation and Multidimensional Consciousness, I nearly fainted when I read it. I actually practically expired. And people, I did a review for Parabola on it. And I was really freaked out, because being a scholar and quite critical by then, I'm used

[12:39]

to being more or less critical of books, although, you know, praise their achievement, but then try to find some room for improvement. And this one, I could only praise. And they called me up and said, did you write that? About my review, they said, did you write this review about Lama? But it was such a great book. I'm in awe of it, and I'm not a scholar. I'm just in awe of the feeling that this is so truly universal. It's like a great gate, a gate opening for everybody to walk through. His one word in that book that has stuck with me so indelibly, talking about a koan, which is that the essential difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, or between Buddhism and ordinary mysticism, expresses it by reversing a particular metaphor. And that is the usual metaphor that we have from our American exposure to Vedanta, this sort of thing, that the final goal is to be like the drop that slips into the ocean and merges with all the other drops in the great ocean of Brahmanhood. I think the typical sort of Vedanta I wish to escape from all this individuated mess

[13:44]

and sort of float off in the blob in the ocean, the reverse of which is Buddhism, says Lama, so beautifully. Buddhism is, in fact, the exact opposite of all this. The final goal of Buddhism is for the great ocean to slip into the shining drop, and the individual to become the ocean, themselves, each individual. That's a misconception that needed turning around. And he did it. But that metaphor, I mean, he did it forever, of all time. Which, of course, and he did it, naturally, under the authority of the sense of the Gandabhiva Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, with its theory of the universe and an atom, you know, Mount Subaru and a mustard seed and so on, which is a major siddha doctrine also. So it's, in a way, nothing new. But yet, the way he particularly did it, in the context of our culture, was particularly unique and brilliant. I never can get away from that shining drop. It just gleams there, somewhere in the middle of the culture. The enthusiasm of an artist. I see a picture, too, of one of his statements, that matter is in a crystallized form of interrupted

[14:50]

harmony. And I see the river flowing, in picture form, with a clump of rocks in the center, and the water hitting those rocks and having to travel around them. And he's very inspirational when he makes those statements. You don't forget them. Isn't that a Zen picture? Yeah. Is it? Yeah. I would say there isn't anything that isn't interrupted harmony. Harmony is interrupted harmony. There's a Zen story, a koan, which I think, I think it's pretty hard for people to get an idea of what koans are about. And they're not, if I say this, it'll come across a little bit too intellectual. But part of this koan is about what Robert just said, about the drop in the ocean. Is it a Bishan, or Ling Yu, was asked by his teacher, after he'd been there for a while,

[15:56]

who are you? And obviously, somebody who'd known him for a while doesn't ask, who are you? You know, just... So he said, I'm Ling Yu. And his teacher said, would you see if there's any, and he just went on and said, would you see if there's any coals left in hibachi? Hibachi is ashes, or you have ashes. Our idea of hibachi is something you buy in the supermarket, you know, which is cooked in the backyard of a house. But hibachi is used to warm a house, or your hands, or keep hot water warm. It's a way of heating a room, and you burn charcoal in charcoal ash, so the charcoal ash keeps it going. You keep it going all night, you just sort of bury some hot coals in the bottom, and you keep it going all night, and all year even. So he says, are there any hot coals left in hibachi? And Ling Yu looks over and looks, and can't find any, off in his, can't, it's gone out.

[17:01]

And his teacher comes over and reaches down into the tongs, and comes up with a hot coal and says, isn't this, what is this? And he says, it's a hot coal. And maybe I have to say a little more. Because, let's just give one slice through this story. Bodhidharma, of course, when he was asked who are you, he said, I don't know. And Ling Yu is no dummy, so he could have answered, I don't know. But he answered, I'm Ling Yu, which in this case is the same as answering, I don't know. Because of the various alternatives you have, you can give some big philosophical answer like, I'm something. But you just say, I'm Ling Yu, which you know tentatively means, for this moment, I'm a father, or a teacher, or a listener, or something. He just says, I'm Ling Yu. He could have also just made a reference to, he could have gone and done something. He said, I'm Ling Yu, which in a sense is saying, emptiness.

[18:03]

So, but this also means that everyone's the same. His teacher is also so-and-so, and so-and-so. But that emphasizes the accessibility of everyone. Or the similarity or universality of everyone. And his teacher was pointing out, it all merged in the draw. So he went over and pulled the hot coal out. Where's that hot coal? It's not in Bajie, it's in his teacher. The hot coal is in Ling Yu, and it wasn't in Ling Yu. Ling Yu did not pull out the hot coal. And his teacher did pull out the hot coal. So he's pointing out the view of yours. Thank you. I'm curious, because when you speak of the ocean turning into a drop, from a Christian point of view, that's a very fine description of what incarnation might be. And I wonder, I understand that you're not completely translating,

[19:06]

and I wonder what kinds of, that you must run into, a constant kind of desire to translate things into Western terms that have parallels with, let's say, particularly Christian thought being the most dominant religion in the West. And I'm curious about sort of motifs that you particularly pick up along this sort of interesting point that you pick up in parallel between those two. I was speaking this morning, well, we were speaking last night about the concept of nothingness. And it occurred to me that there is a, if one were trying to explain the concept of nothingness to an Orthodox Christian, there is a moment in the Christian tradition which, where the kind of, there is a tearing apart of everything that's gone before.

[20:07]

And there's a moment where people who sort of go into a dark cave and receive the message that the cave is empty. And it's precisely in the emptiness of that cave that the full power of what emptiness means is kind of revealed. I'm wondering what kinds of themes are sort of interesting that you might be able to talk about that way. Well, my personal view is that Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity are really part of the same stream flowing through different cultures. Now that's a somewhat radical view, certainly from many points of view, both from the Christian and from the Buddhist side. In other words, most Christian thinkers involved in this sort of Buddhist-Christian dialogue tend to, as I say, distort Buddhism and really label Buddhism as nihilistic. And they, for example, or another favorite which was crystallized by the great sociologist Max Weber,

[21:14]

who wrote books on the religions of India and the religions of China, and whose views were very influential amongst Western intellectuals about the nature of Eastern thought and so forth, much more influential than, say, Radhakrishnan or these kinds of people in the mainstream of American Western thinkers. And he made this terrible fundamental mistake about Buddhism and about Eastern thought in general, which was the usual mistake in the 19th century, was that there was no sense of individuation in the East. That there was no individualism. That individualism was invented by Luther and the Reformation, and was somehow inherent in Judaic background, but really was invented by them. And hence that the Buddhists had no morals in our notion of it, because they had no individualism. They were just all part of this whole, you see. And they had no liberty and so forth. Oriental despotism was the rule. And just a whole set of clichés that respect one on top of another, which distorts the Christian side.

[22:15]

So they naturally think, well, all that nirvana is just fine, but we Westerners need this sort of individualistic thrust of God's incarnation as a man, and God's incarnation as flesh, which is unique to the West. That's what my Christian colleagues usually give me. And the Buddhist colleagues, on the other hand, tend to be quite down on Christianity. They say, well, Christianity had a message of love somewhere, but it was overlaid with the authoritarian attributes that stem from dogmatic monotheism. And hence it crystallized into all these repressive institutions in Europe. And free thought was stamped out. And Aristotle was only rediscovered through the Arabs. And there was this Middle Ages, and there was no science and so forth. And the Enlightenment and the West had to throw off Christianity in order to get back to a scientific inquiry and the idea of the mastery or rational understanding of reality, which is what Buddhism provided all along, type of thing. And similarly, in the notion of love and compassion, instead of just having a message of love and compassion,

[23:17]

the Buddhists have methods and techniques and a sophisticated psychology of cultivating love and compassion. And it wasn't until the West revolted from Christianity in the form of Freud, Marx, and Jefferson, and so forth, the political people, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau and so on, that we get really Western culture come back to being able to understand Buddhism. So the Buddhists are pretty bad against Christianity as well. Buddhist thinkers, I'm talking about, not intellectuals. So I don't hold that view. So for that reason, Buddhists translators of Buddhist texts, scholars who translate Buddhist texts, self-consciously avoid any terminology that has the slightest tinge of Christianity. For example, the four Arya Satyas, the four truths, even as simple a thing as that, they're called the noble truths. And the word Arya originates in Sanskrit as a racial and class term,

[24:17]

and subsequently a class term. It's the term the Vedic conquerors give to themselves, Arya, as a racist term. And then once they settle in India and organize things in a caste hierarchy to ensure their dominance, Arya comes to truly mean noble in the sense of a higher class. And a class term. But if anything, the Buddha tired himself out and wore out his vocal cords on. It was in transvaluing and redefining the term Arya. And he said over and over that Arya is not an Arya by birth. An Arya is an Arya by achievement, by selflessness, by kindness, by purity, by understanding. And he even made up a folk etymology of Arya, which came to mean selflessness. Selfless, a person who was unselfish, becomes an Arya. And it becomes a stage like an Arhat, like a saint, to be an Arya. And hence Arya comes into the Mahayana scriptures. They have all Arya Mahayana scripture, or Arya Maitreya Mandala, even in Lama Kabir's organizational name. So to translate it as, to then say holy,

[25:21]

well, we can't say holy, which is the Western word for something superior in a religious sense, because holy must be Christian. So we can't say holy in Buddhism. So we'll say noble is in translation to defeat the Buddha's whole transvaluation and to make it sound like a class concept again. You know, there's something high class about the Four Truths. There's sort of high castes to know the Four Truths, which was totally counter Buddha's intention, who was the radical in India, who opened up literature, learning, literacy, and the highest level of personal development to the lowest caste person. That was his basic contribution in India, was to universalize this level of attainment. So that's just an example of how the original flavor of the Buddhist scriptures is distorted by this conscious bending over backwards of the translator to avoid any terminology in English that has a Christian theme. So now it seems to me the task, therefore, of translating these things

[26:21]

is to precisely look into the connotations of the words such as love, such as holy, such as noble, such as truth, and to find out what are the connotations that grow out of Christian culture. And we must remember that that, of course, only dates to the King James translation of the Bible. In fact, English language was not always dominated by Christian connotations before that there were other connotations. And any language can grow and change its connotations. But to look precisely at what they are, look precisely at what the connotations of the Sanskrit or Chinese or Japanese or Tibetan word is, and then to match them and yet demarcate their differences and indicate those clearly like in glossaries appended to translations or hopefully in eventually a translator's dictionary that will eventually be published, which we're working on. So that we can then have a, you know, clean up, use the language freely and fully in its full range, and hence don't have to resort to loving kindness, don't have to mistakenly use the word noble or aria and so forth

[27:22]

and stimulate everybody's racist paranoia and so forth, instead of, you know, up-level and transvagant at such things, which is what Buddhism always tries to do. And then we will really have, and then that will really be more than merely translation or merely transliteration, a real transmission of the Buddhist teachings into the English universe of discourse. You know, because a language is not just a language, it is a whole mode, pattern of thinking and concepts, what they call a universe of discourse. So I am thrilled, yes, by not only that, but by many of the things that do so uncannily match up in Buddhism and Christianity, basically stemming from the initial insights of both Christ and Nagarjuna, who were contemporaries. And this is the philosopher and religious figure, Nagarjuna, not the Siddha Nagarjuna, according to Lama Upavinda, because he doesn't want to be in a position, acknowledging that within their own tradition they consider that Nagarjuna to have lived 600 years.

[28:22]

And so he doesn't want to be in a position maintaining such primitive-minded, naive things as a man, single man, living 600 years. Which I don't mind. Well, Lama doesn't want to be on that limb, and I don't blame him, but I don't mind it. Myself. And I'm ready to defend the possibility of a 600-year lifespan any time. Lama and I had many enjoyable discussions on the fact of this. But in any case, Nagarjuna... I said, Bob is 170 years old. I said he's a yoker. He can say this with more authority than most people. In relation to his question of the all-encompassing compassion of Buddhism, has it solved this problem a little bit? Has it solved it? The confusion of words in Christianity and love, for instance, versus compassion.

[29:24]

One is a healing word and one is a word with meaning and semantics behind it. The all-encompassing compassion of Buddhism is all-encompassing. It's the big difference that I feel between this and on this subject. Do you feel that the Christian notion of compassion is not all-encompassing? I think love is attached to very many unimportant things. I think that compassion in Buddhism never is. It's taking the mantra, the great mantra of Tibet. But one point there, though, that is important and that is the essence of, I feel, both the Buddhist and the Christian notion of compassion. And I would distinguish them, respectively, from the Brahmin or the... Well, not Hindu, because you can't say Hindu at that time. Hindu really is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Brahmanism much later. So there are all these things in Hinduism really which come from Buddhism, actually. Vegetarianism and so forth. But that's another issue. But, say, Brahmanism and Judaism,

[30:27]

you have to distinguish the Christian transvaluation, Christ's transvaluation from the Judaic background, just as you have to distinguish Buddha's transvaluation from the Brahmanic background. And the special distinction of both of them in relation to compassion, it seems to me, that is very important. It's not just the all, although the all is literally correct. But, you know, the God-trip, either the Hindu or the Judaic God-trip, is over, well, yes, omnicompassionate, all-merciful, you know. Somehow the whole world is the God-body. ... [...]

[31:34]

... ... ... So, just for the good vibes of it, I put it in front of me while I had it typed out so I could read it. And it's pretty boring, you know, sometimes to listen to a talk. I never give, whenever I have to talk, which is quite often, I never, well, I just say whatever happens to appear, because I get bored if I read something. But I think this is, you know, for him, and he felt this was very, what he was saying here was important. He wanted it presented here. He was very sorry it couldn't come. And also, it's not very long, so I think it's worth reading. I'll do it as well as I can. You know, there's two ways to be a Buddhist. Do you have chairs for everybody?

[32:38]

Like sitting in a, wearing a suit and sitting on a zafra. East meets west, right? All right. Also, I have to take off my shoes. It sounds like Lou and I rehearsed these routines. I'm kidding. It's to be a Buddhist, I would say. One is to be true to Buddhism, and the other is to be true to yourself. For example, you could, and there's some, obviously they have to be, they have to come together, but there's some difference. You can say, Buddhists don't eat meat, and then you can eat meat. And so you don't, you're being true to Buddhism, you're saying Buddhism is that. And that separates you from Buddhism, right? It makes Buddhism less real, perhaps.

[33:43]

The other way is to say, I eat meat, so Buddhists eat meat. And that, that way we may distort Buddhism too much, go too much our own way. And it's a problem. Scholars often think they're being true to Buddhism, but actually they're being true to their insights at a particular historical time and taste. And may distort Buddhism more that way. But in between you have somebody like Dogen Zenji, who, true to his own feeling, would say, oh, this must be this way. Couldn't have been. He'll change the translation, and it'll turn out later that what he changed it to was more accurate. That'd be ideal. And when you, of course we're involved in doing both, being true to Buddhism and true

[34:43]

to ourself. And when you take this on, what I am is Buddhism, or this is Buddhism, I'll try to do it. Then the context of miracles and so forth is quite different. Because you have to work with their meaning for you, not just, oh, miracles happen. And one of the things that Lama Govinda is talking about here is the siddhas, what look like miracles and so forth. And he doesn't go into it as much as he does when I talk with him about the subject. But anyway, we'll see. By the way, I'm not a scholar, so I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I've studied this some, but I can't answer questions about it. This is why I have my scholarly friend upstairs with me. He will answer all the questions. Last night, by the way, we got, it took some of us to talk for quite a while, for about

[35:48]

12 or 1 o'clock or something. And we got into what I wanted us to get into last night, which is a kind of suspended belief. And we got to what I think is the frontier of this, the real frontier of this Christian, Buddhist, Western, Eastern dialogue, which is at the level of what you believe and don't believe, and what you can try on. And it's interesting. You have this contrast that I pointed out last night about these two divisions. In jogging, too. You have in jogging something that's accessible to everyone. And then you have this special experience of transcendental states joggers get into that aren't accessible. Anyway. This is not what we want to say. It says, a thousand years after the Buddhist Parinirvana, when the religion had become old and had lost its spontaneity, frozen in monastic rules and regulations, which divided

[36:54]

monks from laymen. In other words, the clergy from the world at large and the scholar from the common man. Then there arose a protest from those who, by this, had been disinherited from the original message of Buddha. Those who would never become monks, never shaved Buddha, never became a monk, never shaved his head and represented the age old tradition. Shravanas. Shravanas. Yeah. Shravanas. I think. Shravanas. I think. Shravanas. Yeah. Shravanas. He's putting it in power. Oh, I see. Shravanas. Shravanas. The peripatetic religious teachers and practitioners who roamed over the Indian subcontinent followed no fixed rules but only their own convictions based on their inner experience and represented the highest ideal of spiritual and physical freedom against a background of organized society and institutionalized religion.

[37:56]

They stood outside the pale of caste and creed, opposed the religion of the Vedas, which under their influence gave birth to a secret doctrine, a revolutionary movement, namely that of the Upanishads. Why were they, as their name said, secret? Because they taught, in contrast to the Vedas, that man was not dependent on the gods but created his own destiny in the form of karma. But how did this teaching, with one blow, abolish the superiority of the gods and therefore the original power and monopoly of the Brahmins? And ultimately, the whole caste system, how could it arise? It arose at the culmination of an underground movement which was always present in India from times immemorial but was suppressed by the conquering Aryans who had invaded India from the north and who had invented the caste system in order to protect themselves from being amalgamated and finally annihilated by the seeming masses of the Indian subcontinent.

[38:57]

What he says in here, from when I studied Indian history and Buddhism at that time, no one knows if this is right or wrong, but this routine is as good as, you know, what the scholars say now is so. There's no more, I mean, this is probably more accurate. I mean, we don't know. It's just, it's what Lama Govinda, from his lifetime of study, has come to. It is now, it is only now that we realize that there was a highly sophisticated culture in India before the advent of the Aryan invaders and therefore before the creation of Vedic culture. The proof came to light only recently in excavations of the Indus culture, particularly in the discovery of Mohenjo-daro and the great scholars of the last century like Dyson, Dyson, Oldenburg, Jacobi, Sylvain, Levi, Levy, Max Muller, and many others who

[40:06]

were convinced that the Vedic culture was the beginning of Indian thought and religion, took it for granted that everything originated with the Vedas, took it for granted that everything originated with the Vedas and that therefore Buddhism was merely a reformed movement of Brahmanism or of a Vedic religion as Protestantism was derived from Catholicism and Christianity was a reformed movement of Judaism. All this was very possible because Buddhism did not abolish some of the Vedic gods like Indra, Brahma, Chakra, etc. But it was not observed that they remained merely as decorative elements, being deprived of their power over human destinies, just as the local ancient deities of Tibet were merely incorporated into the Buddhist doctrines as protectors and upholders of the Dharma or as servants of the Buddha and his representatives, just as early Christianity replaced the local gods by saints and by converting ancient sanctuaries into places of Christian pilgrimage. This was a clever and psychologically wise move. Rather than by opposing the ancient gods or spirit, spiriti lotus, they would have gained

[41:12]

an importance and power, while by giving them a secondary role to play, they would solely recede into the background. It was only by the intolerance of later Christians which tried to destroy the traces of other cultures' religions, thereby digging its own grave, as we see in the present religious revolution, which will either destroy or transform all dogmatic forms of Christianity. I, myself, have some difficulty. There's the church, you know. There's some problem, you know. We can see some problem with doctrines of original sin and so forth, but most of the problem is the institutional form of the church. I think we need some Christian siddhas. He tells… Lama Rinpoche told me one story about…

[42:12]

What? Where this monk is asked, where are the four elements? And he goes and asks one person, and nobody knows the answer. Where are the four elements? There's fire, there's water, heat, air. So he goes to all these people, and nobody knows the answer. So he goes up to the heavens, and he asks the various gods, and all the gods do is praise themselves. He goes to Brahma, and Brahma says… He asks Brahma the question, and Brahma says, I am the great Brahma, and I am the source of all. I didn't ask you about who you were. I just asked you where are the four elements. And Brahma just goes on praising himself. It's the Buddhist story, obviously. And he gets down to… Goes back down to planet Earth, and he goes to ask Buddha, and Buddha says, why don't you come and ask me sooner? So he asks Buddha the same question. Buddha said, all forms of…

[43:15]

All the four elements end in the mind, begin and end in the mind. The Buddha himself made it known that the teaching which he propagated was not his own invention, but a doctrine proclaimed by previous Buddhas of a time immemorial. Scholars apparently did not take this claim seriously, or thought that he was referring to the rishis of the Vedas. But a close examination of the Vedas and Brahmanas reveals not the slightest trace of what the Buddha taught. On the contrary, these scriptures are based on the very principles which the Buddha refuted, namely the institution of caste and of animal sacrifices, which form the main pillars of the Brahmanical system. The ideas we regard as typically Indian, like karma, rebirth, ahimsa, nirvana, samsara, karuna, compassion, the sanctity of sentient life in whatever form we may find it, free access to scriptures and sanctuaries, dignity of man according to his deen, self-responsibility, all this was absent in the Vedas.

[44:19]

Sacrifices, on the other hand, were meant to bribe the gods and to ensure the worldly prosperity of cattle and fields. And finally, the dissolution of the individual into its cosmic constituencies. Therefore, Jnanavalkya, who had declared that the eyes go into the sun, the hair into vegetation, the bones into rock, and the blood and semen, etc., into water, the breath into air, the ears into space, was asked by Aktharvbhaga, but where remains man? Then Jnanavalkya takes him out of the assembly and tells him what was then regarded as a great secret, the doctrine of karuna. How did this anti-Vedic doctrine that made gods and sacrifices and the entire structure of the caste system, its purports, get into the Upanishads? Only by the influence of the ancient traditions of this anti-Vedic religion of Buddhists and Jains, or by the influences of the Sramanas. But who were the Sramanas? It seems to me, no accident, that the Buddha himself was called the great Sramana, and

[45:27]

that he was recognized by his contemporaries as such. His order was originally not founded on monastic rules, but consisted of homeless wanderers, a kind of religious community without any fixed dwellings. Only when dwellings were given to them by rich adherents and the number of his followers grew to unmanageable proportions that it became necessary to create certain rules. But these rules were, as it seems, not imposed by the Buddha, but grew out of the necessities of communal life, so that the Buddha, shortly before his demise, left it up to his followers to abolish or to maintain the rules which this way had been established. Now, since the majority of his circle of followers had, in the meantime, settled monastic communities

[46:30]

and abandoned the life of wandering Sramanas for the greater comfort of established monasteries and vested interests, they voted for the maintenance of those rules which secured their dominance over lay adherents. I should say something about that. It's also quite true that happens. And what he says down here is the revolt of the Siddhats was an attempt to re-establish the Sramana ideal and restore the liberty of the individual against a privileged class of professional monks and an established, consolidated society. The problem isn't monastic life. I think monastic life is an integral part of Buddhism. And it helps more people, I think, than just having people on their own. Both are necessary. But the real illness of institutionalized Buddhism is when it becomes a profession.

[47:34]

And when it does become a profession, I'm not sure it became that early, if you had these guys all voting for dominance over lay adherents and vested interests. I think we too quickly assume self-interest on the part of people like myself. Even Ananda, the only direct disciple and companion of the Buddha, who was emotionally connected to the Buddha, was dismissed from the council that took place after the Parinirvana of the Buddha because he had shown some human feelings for his lifelong friend and was readmitted only after some time. The whole Buddhist tradition was therefore formed according to consensus of monks and only after about 400 years of monkish rules was fixed in writing. Therefore, the Vinaya, or the rules for monastic communities, were the oldest part of the Tripitaka. Thus, the revolt of the Siddhas was an attempt to re-establish the Sramana ideal, as I read, and so to restore the liberty of the individual against the privileged class of professional monks and establish and consolidate society. Buddhism was based on individual experience, neither on faith and theological principles

[48:39]

nor on dogmas or popular hearsay. Therefore, Saraha sang, na mantra na tantra na deyo na dharama No mantras, tantras, neither gods nor Dharamis. Asamala jita Only the pure mind, the spontaneous awareness, can lead to liberation. In the highly symbolic language of the Siddhas, experiences of meditation are transformed into external events, and external events are transformed into experiences of meditation. If, for instance, it is said that a certain Siddha, that they stop the sun and the moon in their course, or that they cross the Ganges by holding up its flow, then this has nothing to do with the heavenly bodies of the sacred river of India, but with the solar and lunar currents of psychic energy, and their unification and sublimation in the body of the yogin. In a similar way, we have to understand the alchemist terminology of the Siddhas in the search for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.

[49:40]

In the center of the stories which deal with the mystic alchemy of the 84 Siddhas stands the guru Nagarjuna, who lived around the middle of the 7th century and should not be confused with the founder of the Madhyamaka philosophy, who wore the same name 500 years earlier, even though Tibetans are convinced that he is the same man. Even Padmasambhava is said to have lived already in the Buddhas in Ashoka's time, while others believe him to be a reincarnation of the Tama Buddha and an emanation of Amitabha. From this standpoint, you might even nowadays find the living Siddhas after more than a thousand years living in Tibet. Amitabha says that one of his teachers in Tibet was a Siddha. But here the spiritual succession is regarded more important than a single lifetime or historical fact. So it was said that Nagarjuna in his Siddha incarnation had changed an iron mountain into copper

[50:45]

and it was thought that he would have transformed it into gold if the Bodhisattva Manjushri had not warned him that gold would only cause greed and quarrel among men. Instead of helping him, this Siddha had attended. The justification of this warning, which from the Buddhist point of view had deprived the material side of alchemy of its raison d'etre, very soon became apparent. In the course of the Guru's experiments, it appeared that even his iron alms bowl turned into gold. One day while he was taking his meal, a thief passed the open door of his hut. Seeing the golden bowl, immediately decided to steal it. But Nagarjuna, reading the mind of the thief, took the bowl, threw it to him out the window. The thief was perplexed and ashamed and he entered the Guru's hut, bowed at his feet and said, Venerable Sir, why did you do this? I came here as a thief to steal your bowl. And now you have thrown away what I desired and made a gift of what I intended to steal. My desire has vanished and seemingly has become senseless and superfluous. The Guru replied, Whatever I possess should be shared with others. Eat and drink whatever you like so that you have never more to steal.

[51:51]

The thief was so deeply impressed by the magnanimity and kindness of the Guru that he asked for his teaching. Nagarjuna knew that though the other's mind was not yet ripe to understand his teaching, his devotion was genuine. He therefore told him, imagine all things you desire as thorns on your head, as unreal and useless. If you meditate in this way, you will see a light shining like an emerald. With these words, he poured a heap of jewels into the corner, put the guy down on the cushion in front of it and said, Meditate. The former thief threw himself assiduously into the practice of meditation. And as his faith was as great as his simplicity, he followed the words of the Guru literally. And soon, literally, thorns began to grow on his head. At first he was elated with success and filled with pride and satisfaction. For the past stitch of time, however, he discovered with horror that the thorns continued to grow and finally became so cumbersome that he could not move without knocking against the walls and things around him.

[52:53]

The more he worried, the worse it became. Thus his former pride and elation turned into dejection. And when the Guru returned after twelve years and asked the pupil how he was faring, he told him, Master, he was really unhappy. Twelve years! Are any of you up to that? Nagarjuna laughed and said, If you have become unhappy through the mere imagination of thorns on your head, in the same way all living beings destroy their happiness by clinging to their false imaginings and thinking them to be real, all forms of life and all objects of desire are like clouds. That's true. But even birth, life and death can have no power over those whose heart is pure and free from delusion. If you look upon all possessions of the world as no less unreal, undesirable and cumbersome than the imagined thorns upon your head, then you will be free from the cycle of birth and death. Now the dust fell from the disciple's eyes, and as he saw the emptiness of all things,

[53:56]

his desires and false imaginings vanished and with them the thorns on his head. He attained siddhi, the perfection of a saint, and later became known as Guru Nagarbhodi, successor of Nagarjuna. Another siddha whose name is associated with Guru Nagarjuna is Vipraman Vyali. Like Nagarjuna, he was an ardent alchemist who tried to find the elixir of life. He spent his entire life, fortune... He spent his entire fortune in unsuccessful experiments with all sorts of expensive chemicals and finally became so disgusted that he threw the point of the book into the Ganges and left the place of his fruitless work as a beggar. But it happened that when he came to another city, farther down the river, a courtesan who was taking a bath in the river, picked up the book and brought it to him. This revived his old passion for the book. And he took up his work again. While the courtesan supplied him with the means of livelihood. But his experiments were unsuccessful.

[54:59]

I stopped him. I stopped the other day. I was coming into a freeway exit and there were two people hitchhiking, two women. And I stopped and I said, where are you going? And he said, we're working. I thought it was great that they assumed that I was really picking up hitchhikers. So I drove home. It looked like work to me. But his experiments were as unsuccessful as before. And so one day the courtesan, while preparing his food, by chance dropped the juice of some spice into the alchemy's mixture and lo, what the learned Brahmin had not been able to achieve 14 years of hard work had been accomplished by the hands of this ignorant, low-class woman. The story then goes on to tell, not without humor, how the Brahmin, who spiritually was apparently not prepared for this unexpected gift of good luck, fled with his treasure away from the courtesan into solitude

[56:02]

because he did not like to share it with anyone or to let others know about the secret. He settled down on the top of a rock which rose up in the midst of a terrible swamp. There he sat with his elixir of life, prisoner of his own selfishness, not unlike a giant of northern mythology who became a dragon in order to guard the treasure for which he had slain his brother. But Nagarjuna, who was filled with the ideals of bodhisattvahood, wanted to acquire the knowledge of this precious elixir for the benefit of all who would write for it. And through the exertion of his magic power, he succeeded in finding the note, persuading him to part with the secret. The details of this story, in which the elements of popular fantasy and humor are mixed with mystic symbolism and reminiscences of historical personalities, are of secondary importance. But it is significant that the Tibetan manuscript in which the story is presented mentions mercury as one of the important substances used in the experiments of Brahman. This proves the connection with the ancient alchemical tradition of Egypt and Greece which held that mercury was closely related to the pre-modern material.

[57:06]

He who has realized the prima prima materia of the human mind has found the philosopher's stone. The metaphysical emptiness of the Plinian void, which is the basis of the universe, is the creative void in which all forms are contained. It is not a substance, but a principle, the precondition of all that exists, just as space is the precondition for all material things. I think it's an interesting and important thing. Freud, who, out of his experience in Europe at that time, came up with psychology, which is pretty young, but pretty good. I don't think it compares to Buddhist psychology, because it's so old. But it's certainly a developed way for us to look at the mind. And then Jung follows Freud, and Jung gets much of his inspiration from alchemy. And you find the poets and artists of the West often maintaining a connection through the centuries

[58:10]

with a kind of underculture, which included alchemy, which has surfaced in our own time, in the 15th and 16th, through Jung and LSD and so forth. And I think it has a lot to do with why we're sitting here and with something we're trying to do. Thank you. This idea is illustrated in the story of Guru Kankanappa, one of the 84 Siddhas. Once there lived a king in the east of India who was very proud of his wealth. One day a yogi asked him, What is the value of your kingship when misery is the real ruler of the world, old age and death revolve like a potter's wheel? Nobody knows what the next turn may bring. It may raise us to the heights of happiness or throw us into the depths of misery. Therefore, let yourself not be blinded by your riches. The king said, In my present position, I cannot serve the Dharma, the Dharma of the ascetic. But if you can give me advice,

[59:11]

which I can follow according to my own nature and capacity without changing my outer life, I will accept it. The yogi knew the king's fondness for jewels, so he chose the king's natural fondness for inclinations as a starting point and subject of meditation, thus in accordance with tantric usage, turning a weakness into a source of strength. By what you fall, by that you rise. Behold the diamonds of your bracelet. Fix your mind upon them, he said, and meditate thus. They are sparkling in all colors of the rainbow, yet these colors which glide in my heart have no nature of their own. In the same way, our imagination is inspired by multifarious forms of appearance which have no nature of their own. The mind alone is the radiant jewel in which all things borrow their temporal reality. And the king, while concentrating upon the bracelet in his left arm, meditated as he was told by the yogi until his mind attained the purity and radiance of the flawless jewel. The people of his court, however, who noticed some strange change coming over him one day peeped through the chink in the door

[60:12]

of the royal private apartment and beheld the king surrounded by innumerable celestial beings. Now they knew that he had become a siddha and asked for his blessings and guidance. The king said, It is not the wealth which makes a king, but what I have acquired spiritually through my own exertion. My inner happiness is my kingdom. Since then, the king was known as Guru Kaira Kaupa. Joshu, one of the most famous Zen teachers, was asked by somebody, What is your style? He said, I don't care about food, wealth, and housing. I have not lived a common life. And somebody else asked him, What is... Without any attachment to words, say it. He had a very kind answer. He said, I am always within.

[61:13]

Lama Govinda sees a continuous and real connection between the siddhas and Zen teachings, and particularly Koans. Many of the siddha stories are very similar to the Koans. The siddhas thus were not sorcerers, as some European scholars pretended, not knowing that siddhi means accomplishment. Otherwise, even the Buddha, whose name was Siddhartha, should have been described as a sorcerer. With the same justification, Christ, who is credited with many miracles, would have been a sorcerer. It is a strange habit to denigrate Buddhist saints to the lowest possible degree and to uphold the same phenomenon in Christianity as a sign of holiness. It is a time to show greater respect also to non-Christian achievements. So, for instance, we should not speak of medicine Buddhas implying something like Buddha or a medicine man of primitive cults, but the Buddhas as the great healers of human ills.

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