Ali Ataie – Buddhism in a Nutshell The Basics of World Religions (Part 8)
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AI: Transcript ©
This is,
our final,
session
of this course. Insha'Allah Ta'ala.
So we will be looking at
our final religion,
which is the religion of,
Buddhism, Insha'Allah.
I'm just, seeing if I can get to
the video here so I can
follow along with the questions and comments.
Doesn't seem to be coming up.
I'll check back again, inshallah.
So
Buddhism,
like Hinduism, is,
an extremely
vast vast and nuanced religion.
We'll just touch on some basics.
It is a,
a sort of Hindu Protestant
reform movement, if you will.
It's like Islam is a Judeo Christian reform
movement. So Islam is kind of like a
legalistic
reformation of Judaism, as well as a theological
reformation of Christianity.
So
Buddha is sometimes referred to as the Martin
Luther
of Hinduism,
you know, the great reformer.
The word Buddhism comes from buddha, which is
a Pali word. Pali is an ancient
Indian language. It's related to Sanskrit.
It's kind of the language of the masses,
the Aymya language, whereas Sanskrit is more language
of the elite, the language of scripture.
It comes from budd,
which means to wake up or to know
something.
Right? So Buddha can be translated as the
enlightened one,
the awakened one. Postmodernists
might say the woke one.
So like Islam, Buddhism is named after the
attribute
it seeks to cultivate.
Right? So with Islam
okay. I'm bringing up the video now.
So there's very few people watching live, but
you're free to ask questions, Insha'Allah Ta'ala.
So Islam hopes to engender a submission to
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And so Buddhism hopes to engender
a type of enlightenment.
Okay.
So Buddhism is not named after the Buddha.
Right? That's a common misconception.
Like Christianity is named after Christ. Judaism is
named after Judah.
Buddhism is named after the enlightened state
that,
or state of mind, state of being that
the Buddha experienced.
So first of all, who is the Buddha?
Well, the Buddha was born prince Sadaratha Gautama
in 564
before the common era.
This was an an a time, the 6th
century before the common era, where you have
this kind of proliferation of prophets all around
the world, really, and sages.
It's really called the Axial Age. I mean,
that's a,
a term that a German philosopher
coined, a in German, the actual age. So
you have, for example, the Buddha here in
India,
the Mahavira also in India,
you have Confucius in China, you have Zoroaster,
in Iran or in Persia,
and then you have a,
a fair amount of profits,
in, ancient Palestine,
during this time.
So he was born in Lumbini, which is
modern day Nepal. It's near the Indian border.
He was a prince. His parents were, royalty.
His father was king,
Pseudodana,
and his mother was queen Maya.
They they were the, royalty of a family
of a small kingdom called Shakya.
They were of the Kshatriya
caste, that's the administrative
and ruling, cast.
You could read about the the biography of
the Buddha,
in, in books.
But according to his biographers
or his, if you will, the sacred history
of the Buddha, The Buddha's mother, queen Maya,
had a dream one night that a white
elephant offered her a lotus
flower,
and then the elephant entered into the side
of her body.
Now Buddhists do not believe
that this was some kind of miraculous
conception like a, virginal
birth of Christ or something like that. They
accept that King Soododhana was the Buddha's biological
father.
The dream simply
made Maya aware of her pregnancy
and certainly of its importance.
So the queen had her dream interpreted by
Brahmin diviners.
These are kind of spiritual,
fortune tellers. They were the intellectual class.
And she was told that her son would
become either
the what's known as the,
which is kind of the universal king of
India,
the one who would unite all 16 kingdoms
of India,
or he would become one of the greatest
of spiritual masters.
So either super king or super sage, but
not both.
So prince Siddhartha Gautama was born, and according
to his biography, he was born with 32
distinct birthmarks
on his body, which was interpreted
by the diviners
to mean that indeed he was sort of
destined or marked, as it were, for some
sort of future greatness.
Buddhist
hegiographers also mentioned that Siddhartha actually began walking
immediately upon birth, and wherever his foot touched,
a lotus flower would spring up.
And he also spoke as an infant according
to his biography.
And he's reported to have said, I am
the chief of the world. I am foremost
in the world. So we have these kind
of highly
realized
I am statements, you know, not unlike what
we saw, for example, in the gospel of
John.
The Brahmin seers told his father
that if
Siddhartha
remained close to the palace,
right, if he remained attached
to palace life,
if he, if he sheltered his son within
the confines
of the palace, then he would indeed become
the universal king.
Right? He'd become the.
And
so they said to him basically,
you need to keep him interested
in the throne, in political power.
So surround him with beautiful, young, and healthy
people. Don't let him see
the true society,
the problems of society.
So had a luxurious
upbringing. He had 3 palaces.
He had access to 40,000
dancing girls.
He was very handsome,
yet he
was profoundly
unhappy.
Okay.
So his father thought, well, we'll get him
married off. Maybe that'll cheer him up. So
he was married at 16 years old
to a girl named Yosaddara.
And so his father concealed from him three
things.
Right?
Because he was advised to by the Brahmin
diviners. So his father concealed from him sickness,
decrepitude,
and death.
And the servants were literal literally instructed,
that when, that that they would do a
quick kind of a clean sweep of the
area whenever Siddhartha would go out,
on his,
daily chariot ride with his charioteer,
Chandaka.
And then we have what's known as the
legend of the passing sites,
the legend of the 4 passing sites.
So on one occasion in his 29th year,
Siddhartha's,
curiosity,
got the better of him, and he ventured
beyond the palace grounds.
And he saw a very old man hunched
over who could barely walk.
So he said, Chandaka, who who is this?
What is this?
And Chandaka, his charioteer said, this is decrepitude.
Right? And then said
to himself,
well, that's going to happen to me.
So it's not like he didn't know that
he that he was gonna get old. Of
course, he knew that. He just never really
thought about it
until now. It's like all of us know
we're going to die,
but go into a hospice, you know, work
in a hospice for a few days, and
you're just surrounded by death. A hospice is
a type of hospital that people go and
and to die. It's end of life care.
And it you know, it's a very sobering
experience. So, like, one of the positive effects
of the pandemic
is that it really forces us to remember
death. And when we do that and it's
not sort of a morbid fixation.
When we remember death, we actually begin to
appreciate
life, the importance of life. Right? So it
really sort of hit Siddhartha like a ton
of bricks. I'm going to get old if
I even get old.
And then he saw a diseased man lying
on the ground with boils all over his
body, and he said, what is that? And
the charioteer said, that is sickness.
And then he saw people carrying a corpse
wrapped in a shroud,
and he said, what is that? And he
said, this is death.
Those are the 3 sights. And then a
4th sight,
he saw a monk with a shaved head
wearing a yellow robe
with a very serene appearance
and a flashing insight. Right? An epiphany
suddenly came to Siddhartha
that finding fulfillment in the physical
and the pleasures of the flesh
is in vain
because all things
in the world are
impermanent.
They perish.
Right? Psychologists say that the apprehension of death
is really the end of childhood.
When a child suddenly comes to this realization
that they're going to get old and die,
that's really the end of their childhood. They
can never go back to that age of
ignorance and bliss
and fantasy.
So,
Sadarafa had a son named Vraghula, which he
named it means fetter or bond, like handcuffs,
like ball and chain, something like that. And
the idea here was that he thought that
children
the idea is basically that children can be
a source of of distraction for people who
are highly intelligent,
people who are very contemplative,
people who are very academic.
And and being a parent is basically a
full time job.
So it's seen as a distraction.
So his hedonistic lifestyle,
kind of just left him dead on the
inside.
And his family responsibilities
prevented him prevented him
from finding contentment.
He felt like he was literally in a
prison,
which is interesting because the hadith that says,
dunya sigil mumim.
The world is a prison of the believer.
Now shortly thereafter, you have what's known as
a great going forth.
Right? So,
there this there's a key element to the
what's known as the monomyth,
The monomyth known as the hero's journey.
What is a monomyth? So a monomyth is
a series of events
in a story
that seem to occur in multiple stories
across multiple cultures.
Right?
So one of the most common monomyths
called the hero's journey,
and the hero's journey really has 3 parts.
The first part
is called separation.
There's some sort of separation. The hero is
separated.
The second part involves trials,
victories,
and some sort of apotheosis.
Apotheosis,
some sort of enlightenment
experience.
And then the third part
is a return.
Right? So we see this in, for example,
in the story of the Buddha. We see
this in the epic of Gilgamesh. We see
this in the story of the biblical Jesus.
We see it in Star Wars with Luke
Skywalker,
the hero's journey.
So Siddhartha, he leaves the palace,
right, in search of meaning in his life.
He was a he went from a sheltered
prince to a wandering ascetic.
He went from being royalty to being a
homeless mendicant, someone who just begs for things.
He left his wife and his child behind.
He learned Raja yoga from Hindu sages.
And eventually,
Hindus claimed him and deified him,
and he actually became the the 9th avatar
of of Vishnu.
Even though Siddhartha
was very critical of Hinduism,
at least the Hinduism of his day, and
he certainly never claimed to be divine, at
least not in any unique way. So remember
in Hinduism, we're all divine. We're all unrealized
avatars. You know, we're all god, but but
we just don't know it. The Buddha did
not claim to be an avatar like Krishna
did.
In fact, he denied
the very existence of the atman.
Right? So this is very strange. This is
this is very un Hindu of the Buddha
to do this,
that he denied the existence of the atman,
the eternal,
divine soul within each of us. We could
talk more about that,
Insha'Allah.
Okay.
So during this period now it's in his
early thirties. He met a small group of
monks who practice an extreme form of self
mortification,
extreme form
of. What is self mortification?
This is when the flesh is is deliberately
punished
or agitated
in order to,
in order for the mind to focus on
the spiritual.
So fasting in every major religion has a
form of self mortification.
There are different degrees of it. Some are
more excessive. It's like fasting is a form
of self mortification.
Abstinence is a form of self mortification.
The shia, they flog themselves. Right? The Sunnis
would say that's an extreme form.
Right? They have something seen as zani where
they strike the chest.
It seems to be okay. And then they
have something called zanjirzani
where they take a chain and they and
they whip themselves called,
and then they even have something called, where
they take these knives and they cut themselves
and they bleed.
That's certainly,
something that is,
condemned in, among the.
But you see that there are different forms
of self mortification
in different religions.
So the Buddha, he met this group
that was into this type of thing, and
he thought that this must be the answer.
So he practiced a highly extreme
form of fasting.
Right? I mean, a lifestyle that was basically
the polar opposite
of his previous lifestyle, 180
degrees.
So he ate, according to his biography, he
ate 6 grains of rice a day. He's
quoted as saying, when I thought that I
would touch my stomach, I took hold of
my spine.
So he's basically completely emaciated, he's wasting away,
and his extreme lifestyle almost killed him. There's
this iconic story that was
on the brink of death about to lose
consciousness
when he perceived this little girl come out
of nowhere with a bowl of rice pudding.
And he and she fed him the rice
pudding, and that revived him.
The experience taught him the futility of extreme
self mortification.
No moksha. Remember this term, Moksha, released from
some sort of enlightenment.
Right? The the superconscious state. No Moksha resulted
from him torturing his body.
However, the experience also taught him the principle
of the middle way.
Very important concept in in Buddhism, the Middle
Way. Between prince and pauper, between indulgence and
asceticism,
between hedonism and self mortification,
between ifrat
ifrat and tafrit. Right? So he's Arabic terms.
Excess and shortcoming.
The middle way is called in
in Pali.
Right? So sensuality
slowed his spiritual progress, while mortification
weakened his intellect.
There's a question,
somebody's asking me about
questions about Christianity on email, will I reply
here? Oh, I'll I'll answer your email.
I've been behind on my emails. I'll answer
them later after class.
Okay. So the middle way. What is the
middle way? Giving the body what it needs
to function well
and keep the intellect sharp.
Right? And more than this is considered
excess.
So 6 years after the great going forth
at age 35,
okay, one night, he entered a city called
Gaia in Northeast India,
and he sat under a fig tree.
It's called the bo tree, which is short
for the bud tree, the tree of knowledge,
the tree of enlightenment.
And he started his yoga as usual, and
suddenly,
amazingly
profound
truths
were revealed to him or, were intuited by
him,
and he sensed
enlightenment. He sensed that the mystical experience
was near. So he vowed not to rise
from that spot until he had achieved it,
and that spot is called the immovable
spot. And Buddhist to this day, they make
pilgrimage to this site. Apparently, the tree, the
actual tree is still there.
Some say that it's, not the the actual
tree, but,
it's it's a fig tree that grew thereafter.
But, they're certain that it is the exact
spot,
at least the Buddhists are.
Now while meditating in that spot,
the god of pleasure and desire named Kama
came to the Buddha and
and paraded these 3 voluptuous women in front
of him
to distract him.
And remained
focused.
Then Mara, the god of death, assaulted him
with a hurricane, falling boulders, torrential rains,
and his minions of demons shot arrows at
Siddhartha,
which Siddhartha converted into flowers,
and they fell harmlessly on the ground. Now
bud now Buddhist scholars mentioned
that Kama and Mara here were really just
aspects of Sadartha
himself.
So these are just modalities of his own
mind
symbolized
as gods of temptation.
So one of the steps of raja yoga,
the 6th step, is to completely control one's
thoughts,
one's. Right?
The great sheikh, Abu Hasan al Nadawi, he
said if you can pray
and some say this is a hadith, that
if you can pray 2 cycles of prayer
without one extraneous thought,
right,
then, without any kawater, then then you've achieved
wilayah, like sainthood.
So with Kama, we might say this was
sort of his Khawater nafsani.
They're being activated
and being mastered. And then with Mara, the,
which are activated and being mastered. So basically,
he's mastering his thoughts and impulses.
Then Mara came a final time just before
enlightenment and asked him, okay. You're almost at
enlightenment, but who is going to witness to
your teaching?
Right? Who's going to follow you? Right? So
like shaytan, he advocates nihilism.
Right? What's the point of this,
you know,
who who cares?
You know, just just do what you wanna
do. Just do you. You know, this type
of thing. It doesn't mean anything.
So then Siddhartha lift lifted his right index
finger, and he struck the earth with
it. And the earth began to rumble and
quake. The meaning
is that the earth will bear witness
to his teaching.
Then Mara fled, and his constriction had passed,
and he experienced the great awakening, the great
budd.
Right? There's a term for this called nirvana
that we'll talk about.
And so he was there for 7 days
in that spot. 7 days of bliss.
And then on the 8th day, he thought,
well, maybe I should leave. So he intended
to rise, and then another wave of enlightened
bliss
washed over him. So 49
days total, he remained raptured,
in that,
in that spot.
So that was his apotheosis.
Right?
That was his apotheosis.
So according to the commentary tradition of the
dhammapada,
the first words uttered by the Buddha after
his awakening
are actually
recorded
in chapter 11 verses
153 and 54. So I'll read those quickly.
It's a very famous,
passage.
Again, like like I said last week,
and, let me just read this here.
Middle way similar to virtue ethics. Yeah. Exactly.
That's a good way.
And I forgot to mention what's happening in
Greece during this axial age. Right? You have
Plato and Aristotle.
And they're all preaching the middle way. Confucius
also, the golden mean.
Aristotle, the golden mean.
Zoroaster, the golden mean.
Right?
Maybe I'll not read.
Excuse me, my question about Thomas.
Oh, yeah. I'll answer your question about,
Thomas,
the the lord of me and the god
of me. How to refute it. Okay. I
I can answer that very quickly. Just kind
of
we'll take a break from the for a
minute. So,
in in my videos and in my writings
and lectures, I say that there's nowhere in
the New Testament, in the 4 gospels, where
Jesus is addressed
as theos,
the God.
He's called theos, but I said that has
a nuanced meaning.
It could mean
a sort of sanctified agent of God, and
that's how it's used in in the in
the, New Testament and outside the canon in
Greek by Philo,
etcetera. But now in in in, in John
20, I believe, verse 28,
when the resurrected Jesus appears to these disciples,
Thomas is there. And,
when Thomas realizes it's Jesus, he says, my
lord and my god.
Right?
He says
something along those lines. So he use a
definite article. The God of me, the Lord
of me.
So this this is obviously,
this is, obviously It's
exclamatory.
It doesn't mean that Thomas is calling Jesus
god.
Thomas is not saying, you are my God.
You are my Lord. What is he saying?
Oh, my God and Lord.
Right?
If your teacher
was killed and you thought he was killed,
and you actually knew he was killed, and
then you saw him walking around 3 days
later,
what would be your reaction?
Right?
Your reaction would be, oh, my god.
So even some Christian commentators, they say that
Thomas' words here are really addressed to the
father,
not to Jesus.
How does being resurrected
qualify Jesus as god? A resurrected body doesn't
equate divinity.
That's a nonsecretary
argument. There are many people resurrected. Jesus himself
resurrected Lazarus.
When Lazarus showed up to his friends later,
did they say to him, oh, my, you
are my
God. Right? So I think it's obvious here.
This reminds me of a scene in a
movie, Superman 2.
An old movie, Christopher Reeve's Superman
or General Zod. Right? He's in the he's
in the, oval office.
And, he says and he says to the
president of the United States, kneel before Zod.
And so the president kneels,
and then the president's kneeling, he says to
himself, he says, oh my god.
And then Zod says, oh, that's that's Zod,
not god.
Right? So the president was not talking to
Zod. He was talking to God. Right? So
Thomas here is not is not calling Jesus
God.
That doesn't make any sense.
Why would he call Jesus God? Because Jesus
was resurrected.
So
I mean, that's that's my answer for that.
So I I think Daniel, Daniel Wallace, I
think he calls it something like
a evocative
of address or something, a nominative vocative?
That doesn't make any sense.
He considers it some sort of vocative.
I have to look up the,
in other words, a vocative is actually, like,
calling on somebody. He's calling on the father
here.
Okay.
Okay. So, sorry. So we said that
the Buddha experienced
enlightenment.
Okay.
And
and after his awakening, he re he, his
words the first words that he said are
recorded in the dhammapada.
So I was going to say that just
as the Bhagavad Gita,
right, has,
is is a very good comprehensive
text,
very short, but very comprehensive
kind of distilling the entire religion of Hinduism
into one text. The Dhammapada is like that
for Buddhism. Buddhist the Buddhist,
canon,
of of scripture is extremely vast. The Dhammapada
is a one stop shop unless you want
to get more deeply into these things. But,
anyway,
he says,
through many births, I've wandered on and on
searching for but never finding the builder of
this house.
So the language here is is
is kind of veiled. It's very symbolic. You
have to kind of decode it.
Through many births, right, I've wandered on and
on. So he's talking about the cycle of
reincarnation, it seems like.
Searching for but never finding. By finding,
the commentators of the
that means mastering.
I'm never mastering the builder of this house.
The builder is desire. The house is the
ego.
I've never mastered
I've never mastered
the the desire of my ego.
To be born again and again is suffering.
And then he says, house builder.
In other words, desire.
You are seen, and seen here means, like,
exposed.
Right? I've I've exposed you.
You will not build a house again. You
will not build a self again.
So now he is selfless.
All the rafters are broken, rafters meaning defilements,
like these vices,
These these diseases of the heart,
these are the rafters. They're broken because the
rafters are holding up the house, which is
called ego.
The ridge pole, that's kind of like this
like the, the main sort of, support
destroyed.
So the ridgepole is ignorance,
right, which holds up the ego. That's destroyed.
The mind gone to the unconstructed,
he says.
Right?
So the mind has experienced
the real,
alhaqq.
Right? The real with a capital r. That
which is not a construct.
Right? The house is a construct. The house
is constructed.
Right? The mind
has left
the self.
Right?
The mind has destroyed the self
and has gone to the unconstructed,
the real.
He has reached the end of craving,
he says.
He has reached the end of craving.
So he has reached the end of house
building, or ego building. No more ego.
So after this experience,
the Buddha walked over a 100 miles to
a place called Banaras and delivered his first
sermon.
What was the title of his sermon? It
was on the Four Noble Truths and the
Middle Way.
So the Four Noble Truths is what he
actually intuited
before reaching enlightenment.
It is really the heart of his teaching.
We'll come back to it in a minute,
Inshallah. But with respect to the middle way,
he this this, his way was between basically
trends and Hinduism.
So at one extreme, you have being overindulgent,
right, too much focus
on the first two of the.
Remember the stages of life in Hinduism? The
first two are comma and artha, so pleasure
and wealth.
So he noticed a trend among the Hindus
that they're really focusing only on these 2
really.
But also the trend of being overly superstitious
and speculative about things. So the Buddha wants
us to experience things. He doesn't like this
kind of empty
speculation
and superstition.
He's not about theorizing, he's about doing. He's
not about, you know, sort of pontificating,
he's about experience.
And the other trend that was developing on
the other extreme, and he had experimented with
this, was this extreme self mortification. And this
was the way of the Mahavira,
the founder of Jainism,
who was about 37 years,
earlier than Siddhartha.
And one of the 2 major sects of
Jainism called
which means skyclad,
only naked male monks
who practice an absolutely
extreme form
of nonviolence,
can achieve Moksha.
Only naked male monks, and they call it
Jina. That's a different term they use.
Who who practice an extreme form of nonviolence,
which is called Ahimsa
Ahimsa. Now all dharmic religions,
By dharmic religion, I mean Buddhism,
Jainism, Hinduism,
right. All these dharmic religions,
they they all stress a level of ahimsa.
They all stress a level of nonviolence.
But with with Jainism, I mean, you can't
cook meals at night because you might kill
an insect. When you walk, you have to
sweep
the streets before you because you might kill
an insect.
When you sleep, you have to be you
have to carry your little broom because If
you roll over, you might kill an insect.
You have to sweep before you roll over.
Somehow, you have to wake up.
Jain monks, they pull their hair out because,
they think it's too luxurious.
Right? This type of thing.
Okay.
The Dhammapada
was it was all all Buddhist scriptures,
were written, well after the death of the
Buddha.
Right? So
the Dhammapada was written,
several decades
several decades after after the death of the
Buddha.
It was compiled by some of his students.
But it is accepted,
generally amongst
all Buddhists.
There there may be different versions of it.
I didn't do much textual
criticism on the
the Dhammapada
to prepare for this class, but inshallah to
Allah, I can expand on that later.
But nothing was really written during the lifetime
of the Buddha.
And if it was, it wasn't compiled until
much, much later.
Okay.
And that's the same with, like,
like,
Plato, you know, didn't write anything.
Or sorry, Socrates.
Socrates didn't write anything.
We know about Socrates through Plato.
Isa alaihis salam apparently did not write anything.
His students,
wrote about him.
Okay.
So
soon after the Great Awakening, Siddhartha formed
actually, at this point, we're going to
yeah, I want to get to
the noble truths. So the heart of the
Buddha's teaching
is called the Four Noble Truths.
Right?
This is the Buddha's path for attaining salvation.
So 4 noble truths. 3 of them are
theoretical, but they're based on experience and observation.
And then one is practical. It's a method.
It's a yoga.
Right?
So this is mentioned in Dhammapada
chapter 14
verses 186
to 192.
Again, this is really sort of the the
central elements
of the faith,
of Buddhism right here
in 14 190.
So I'll begin actually a little bit earlier.
186 to 19 186, it says, not even
with a shower of gold coins would we
find satisfaction in sensual craving.
Knowing that sensual cravings are suffering, they bring
little delight. The sage does not rejoice
even in divine pleasures, meaning like higher or
heavenly pleasures.
One who delights in the end of craving
is a disciple of the fully awakened one,
meaning the Buddha, one who delights in the
end of craving.
People threatened by fear go to many refuges,
to mountains, to forests, to parks, trees, and
shrines.
None of these is a secure refuge. None
is a supreme refuge.
Not by going to such a refuge is
one released
from all suffering.
But when someone going for refuge to the
Buddha
and to the Dharma and the Sangha,
so these are very important. This is called
the 3 jewels of Buddhism. Right? It's called
the sort of the triple refuge of the
Buddhist.
You go to the Buddha,
right, the master. You go to the dharma.
The dharma is pronounced
in Pali, like the
the path to virtue,
the path to
truth,
Right? The buddha, the truth
or the path to truth and the sangha,
the order, the order of monks.
Right?
So one who is going for real refuge
goes to the buddha, the dharma, and the
sangha, sees with right insight the 4 noble
truths,
the 4 noble truths that lead to the
end of suffering.
So what are these 4 noble truths?
Alright. Okay.
So the okay. So first of all, to
use sort of a medical analogy,
wrap our head around this type of thing.
So you go to the doctor, and you
say, I feel sick. I'm suffering.
So the doctor says, what are your symptoms?
What are your symptoms?
And so, yes, inshallah, brother, I'll give you
my, I'll respond to your email, so you'll
have, inshallah,
my contact information.
Can the Vedas have prophecies of the prophet
Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam? Yeah, there's there
there are people who wrote books on this.
You know. And there's different ways of understanding
the Vedas. You're right, the Vedas are are
really sort of the
the
the the most holy of scriptures in Hinduism.
And there have been many studies on them,
and many scholars have extracted prophecies there.
That's certainly true.
Okay.
So going back to this medical analogy. So
what are your symptoms? And so you say,
I have sore throat,
cough, and wheezing.
So he says, ah, you have strep throat.
That's called a diagnosis.
Right? So you have symptoms, you
have diagnosis.
And then you say to doctor, what are
my chances? Like, give it to me straight.
And the doctor says, good. Your chances are
good. That's called the prognosis.
And say, okay. What what can I do?
So he gives you,
antibiotics,
amoxicillin.
So that's a it's called a prescription.
So symptoms,
diagnosis,
prognosis,
and prescription.
Okay. Keep that in mind. So noble truth
number 1. Life or existence,
the world,
is inherently full of evil
and is
suffering.
And the word for suffering
is dukkha,
d u k k h a. That's the
Pali word. Dukkha.
It literally means dislocated.
It's actually used for, like, dislocated joints.
Right? So when your joint is dislocated, it's
hard to move. It's painful. It's frustrating. So
life is like this. It is frustrating physically,
intellectually, and spiritually.
And in fact, this truth
had a profound
the first truth of the Buddha
had a profound effect on Western
philosophers,
especially those who are considered pessimistic,
or nihilistic
philosophers.
For example, the German philosopher,
Arthur Schopenhauer,
who was a great influence on,
on Nietzsche.
Schopenhauer was a nihilist who said that our
lives are just
meaningless tragedies, and we fulfill one desire just
to become a slave to another desire in
this endless cycle until death. Our very existence
is a source of suffering. So death is
a type of sweet relief
for Schopenhauer. He calls it a triumph,
although he did not,
he did not advocate suicide, enigmatically.
So this sounds very similar to to Buddhism.
Schopenhauer said, however, if we you could practice
a bit of compassion
and engage in the arts, like music, and
that gives you a bit of relief from
the suffering,
but it's only temporary. It's just kind of
a Band Aid.
So his prognosis is bad. There's no way
you can get rid of the suffering, And
then you die, and that's when it goes
away. But the Buddha is more optimistic. You
can overcome suffering.
Right? There is a cure for suffering.
Okay.
And these philosophers,
many of them admit
I think,
Schopenhauer's dog's name was Atman.
I think he named his dog Atman or
Jiva. I think it was Atman.
One of those terms. So he's also highly
influenced by Hinduism. There's you can make a
case that Kant is also influenced
by Hinduism because Hinduism talks about this
illusory world. The jagat is Maya. It's not
real. The real world is behind it. And
Kant talks about the the the phenomenal word,
phenomena,
right, that we see. But that's not the
real real world. The real world is called
the noumenal world, which is behind that world,
which you can't have access to. So this
is where Kant differs with with Hinduism. But
but there's a strong,
thesis that can be made that these Western
philosophers
are highly influenced
by Buddhism and Hinduism.
Okay.
So according to the Buddha, there are 6
moments of dukkha in life, 6 moments of
suffering.
These are the symptoms of dukkha.
So trauma of birth
Freud actually denied that.
Sickness, decrepitude.
Right? Like decrepitude fills you with fear and
anxiety.
You know, you can you know, seeing your
body
intellect sort of waste away.
And this relates to the next one, phobia
of death. It's called,
thanatophobia,
fear of death.
He mentions to be tied to what one
hates.
You know, think about the, you know, millions
of people sitting in a cubicle going to
jobs that they hate.
Right? That's that's a big that's a big
symptom of duhkha.
Right? Or think of, like, a woman who
is maybe pressured by her family to marry
some guy,
and then he turns out to be abusive.
So then she becomes very bitter. She becomes
very resentful. So then she starts abusing her
own,
daughter-in-law
because she was abused.
And then finally, separation from what one loves.
Separation from what one loves.
Yeah. And that's interesting. The no self of
Buddhism similar to a bundle theory of Hume.
Yeah. I never thought about that.
That we're just a bundle of ideas.
That's interesting. I'll look into that, Insha'Allah.
But yeah, I mean, the the
the influence And some might say, maybe they
weren't directly influenced, but sort of great minds
just sort of come to similar conclusions.
And I think that's true as well.
Obviously, we disagree with David Hume on many
issues.
Okay. So that's the first noble truth. The
world is in a state of suffering.
The second noble truth, the cause is tanha.
What is tanha? Desire,
selfish craving,
private fulfillment,
egoism, attachment to stuff,
attachment to an identity
even.
Right? So that's that's also causing suffering,
an identity of some sort. Also fake concepts,
fake beliefs,
or false beliefs, false philosophies.
Right?
So when
we're selfless, we're free.
Remove the ego, and you'll remove the suffering.
So what is causing the symptoms? What is
causing duhkha?
It's called tanha.
Tanha is the diagnosis.
Tanha is the disease.
Strep throat is the disease that's causing wheezing
and coughing and and that's suffering.
Right?
In other words, the only reason why you're
suffering is because you have tanha,
desire and attachment.
So it's said that a man came to
the Buddha, and he said, I want happiness.
And the Buddha said, look at that sentence.
I want happiness. Remove the I, I ego
in Latin and Greek. Remove the ego.
What do you have left? He said, well,
want happiness.
Want is tanha, desire.
Remove the desire.
What are you left with?
He said happiness. He said, well, there you
go.
So remove the ego, remove want, and you're
left with happiness.
Now what is the prescription?
Oh, sorry.
Before we get to that, the 3rd noble
truth
is that tanha can be overcome. It's the
prognosis.
What is a prognosis?
Hopeful.
It's hopeful
that there is a cure.
And this is obviously contra
Schopenhauer,
who said there's no cure, but only Band
Aids.
And then the 4th so that's the 3rd
noble truth. You can overcome.
The 4th noble truth is the prescription.
What's the medicine?
The 8 fold path.
The 8 fold path. This is his yoga,
his method for overcoming duhkha by extinguishing tanha.
The Buddha called it the path. The path
is practical.
It's a treatment by training. It's an 8
step program for overcoming selfish self
selfishness.
Or maybe it's better to say overcoming self
identity
and thus eliminating suffering.
So there's one preliminary
step before we get into the eightfold path,
the sort of prerequisite
step, he calls it right association.
In other words, you have to hang out
with the right people or else the path
won't work.
Right?
So there's a famous parable he gives, the
parable of the wild
elephant. He says, how do you tame a
wild elephant?
The best way to do it is to
yoke it. Remember the word yoga is from
yoke. It's to yoke it to a,
a a tamed elephant. How do you tame
a wild elephant? Tie it to a tamed
elephant, and it will learn its comportment by
association.
Right?
But don't punish the tamed one if the
wild one makes a mistake.
Right?
So be with the truth winners.
This is what the Buddha says.
The Quran says, be with the truth winners.
Converse with them, serve them, observe them, learn
by osmosis their compassion.
It's said in a tradition of
that the disciples asked him, how did you
learn your comportment?
Right? And he said, well, I just watched
people with bad character, and I did the
opposite.
Now that's a bit difficult to do. The
best way to learn your comportment is to
be with people of virtue, but he's a
prophet.
Right? So it won't affect him.
Okay. So step 1 of the 8 fold
path.
Okay?
Again, the 4th noble truth of the Buddha
is the 8 fold path,
the prescription, the medicine for overcoming
tanha, the disease.
There's 8 steps. The first step is right
views.
That's what it's called. Right views
means
to exercise reason.
Right? Be reasonable.
Be practical.
Don't put yourself in harm's way.
So
the self mortification
of the Jains is unreasonable, like pulling out
hair,
you know, you know, *,
extreme ahimsa.
That's not reasonable. See, set reasonable goals for
yourself. Have temperance.
So you'll be amazed,
how many perfectly rational people allow emotion
to dominate them.
So here we have to learn to be
dispassionate,
practice apatheia.
This is a famous
this is the most
cherished virtue of the stoic philosophers.
Apatheia. This doesn't mean to be, like, cold
and unemotional.
It means to be emotional,
but within reason
to be in control of your emotions.
Right? Nowadays, the one who is emotionally
incontinent
and screams the loudest
is usually the winner of a debate.
Right? That's how we're swayed. We're swayed by
emotion. The first person who cries, oh, he
must be telling the truth.
Right? The one who shouts the loudest. And
this is this is why children shout,
Right? Because because they want to make an
impression.
Okay. Now part and parcel
to having right views
is to accept the Buddha's rejection
of the extreme
existentialist
positions
of eternalism
and nihilism.
So the Buddha rejected both of these positions,
eternalism
and nihilism. He actually says,
according to the dharmapada,
kill the 2 warrior kings.
And the commentary says what he meant by
warrior kings
was eternalism and nihilism.
So the Buddha rejected
eternalism. What is eternalism?
The proposition that anything in the world is
eternal,
including a soul.
Right?
So this is based upon what he called
a fundamental
mark of existence
along with the duhkha. So duhkha, the world
of suffering, is a fundamental mark of existence.
A a second fundamental mark of existence is
called anika,
a n I c c a,
anika, impermanence.
Everything is changing,
transitory,
and perishing.
Right? Thus, there is no abiding element or
everlasting or eternal thing.
Thus, there is no Atman.
Right? And this is the third fundamental mark
of existence. You have duhkha, anika, and
Anata means no Atman.
Right? We don't have a real self.
We don't have an immortal soul.
Well, if there's no atman,
then does that mean there's no Brahmin? Or
at least this is what can be concluded
by induction,
because Atman is Brahman.
So is that what the Buddha is actually
teaching? Was he an atheist?
Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell.
And there's a debate about that.
So
when the 5
are stripped away from the mine, what are
the 5?
These are the 5 aggregates.
Sorry. Five aggregates.
These are 5 things that make up the
self.
Right? So these are what? For, forms, in
other words, physical bodies,
feelings,
perceptions,
like judgments,
then mental formations,
like your ideologies and your beliefs,
and finally,
consciousness
itself, the fact that you're aware. These are
called the 5 aggregates
or the 5.
When the 5
are stripped away from the mind,
the so called self dies, and suffering ends.
But
when that happens,
what is left
of the individual person?
What is left of the individual person? The
answer is,
not much,
only what's known as residue.
So this is called sopa dicesa
nirvana.
This is what the the Buddha experienced under
the tree,
nirvana.
Nirvana means
extinction.
Means with remainder.
In other words, near
extinction.
Near extinction.
So
or sometimes it's
called Nirvana with residue.
The residue of the what's what they call
the fuel of the 5 hundas.
So something
extremely
minimally
residual
remains of the 5 hundas
when when when one enters into a state
of enlightenment in this world.
So there's fuel, but there's no burning. In
other words, there's no desire.
Right? There's no greed. There's no delusion. There's
no hatred. What's known as the 3 fires
and the.
Right?
So the person still has a body. The
person, you know, still feels pain. The person
still has a name. The person is still
conscious, obviously.
Right? So it's not a total extinction of
the self. There's a there's a residual
effect. There's a residual remainder
of the
that
that are
basically the building blocks of the self.
But when the but but when the aspirant
reaches the state of
nirvana, he becomes a transformed,
selfless,
wise,
compassionate
sage.
A bit detached and aloof at times,
but he's still there.
This is called the arhat, a r
h a t, or arahant, depending on Pali
and Sanskrit.
This is the name of the sage.
Right?
So this happens when you realize that you
are nothing.
So you let go of everything.
Right? So the first nirvana happens in your
life, and that makes you a sage, an.
Then when
the dies,
what happens? He experiences what's known as
nirvana,
also called nirvana,
nirvana without remainder.
And that is the end of it all
his body, his consciousness.
He is absolutely
annihilated.
Total extinction,
the end of all suffering.
So this is why
many western philosophers considered Buddhism to be basically
a form of existential nihilism, because
Buddhism
culminates in which
is entering into a state of nothingness,
emptiness.
It's called sunyata,
nothingness,
emptiness.
Life is transitory. There's nothing to hold onto,
so just let go and be free.
Goodbye permanently.
So again, nirvana means extinction, but it really
means to blow something out. Like blow your
breath out. Right? So it's like a big
exhale,
like a big sigh of relief. It's over.
Everything's done.
Now, Buddhists, however, also reject the extreme position
of nihilism. Remember I said at the beginning,
the Buddha said, kill the 2 warrior kings,
eternalism
and nihilism.
But
what I've what I've said subsequently is that
western philosophers will argue that Buddhism
is essentially a form of nihilism.
But Buddha's Buddhists will retort
and say it's not. They'll say that pointing
out they'll point out that the process
reincarnation
of your they don't use jiva, atman. They
don't use these terms. The reincarnation of your
stream of consciousness,
right, along with its karmic
imprints,
indicates that existence does have meaning.
Existence is not meaningless.
That meaning, I mean, it can be uncertain,
but it's certainly there.
They do say, however,
that there are annihilationist
or nihilistic
aspects
of Buddhism,
Like you have to annihilate lust, delusion,
hatred,
attachment,
suffering. But because of karma, you can't say
that Buddhism is
a nihilistic
religion per se.
It's kinda like in Islam. Islam's sort of,
mystical psychology.
There are elements also of annihilationism
you know,
things like that.
However, the rejoinder
from critics
would be, well, at there
is total annihilation.
There is nothingness.
The Buddhist rejoinder
to that is, but the wisdom in teaching
and example of the arhat,
right, the liberated Buddha that reached Parana Nirvana,
is left on earth
for people to benefit from after him.
And then again, the response to that would
be,
why? So other people can
eventually join him in the void of nothingness.
Everything leads
to nothingness.
Right?
Okay. So
I'm actually out of time.
Do you think Buddhism had some influence on
Muslims, e. G. Sufi metaphysics? Yeah. It's possible.
I think Hinduism, Buddhism had some influence on
on Islam, definitely.
I think there was, influence
going both ways.
I don't think the,
the foundations or the,
of Islamic metaphysics was affected by
anything from Buddhism or Hinduism.
Buddhist scriptures were collected 800 years, I think,
by the rumors. Started reading is good, learn,
but how can we identify the real thing
from where Yeah. You really can't.
Like I said, there's many, many opinions about
the Buddha.
So I mean, you have
Theravadin Buddhists who are total atheists. Then you
have Mahayanan Buddhists who
are are kind of,
polytheistic
and everything in the middle.
And again, that's go back that kind of
goes back to
2 tiered model that we talked about, that
this sort of amma, the masses
gravitate or trend towards polytheism.
And it's because they're
they they have this massive corpus of literature
and all these things attributed to the Buddha,
and and there are many things
that were that were,
that were fabricated. Many, many sayings of the
Buddha that were fabricated. It was really difficult
to know what's true and what's not.
The Buddha prophesies a problem.
Yeah. The pro the the Buddha talked about
the the
universal mercy.
And some have identified that. He says that
towards the end of time, a Bodhisattva
will come, who will teach the dharma.
So he's he's certainly prophesizing people to come
in the future. There's an opinion that the
Buddha
is not necessarily a classical opinion, but there's
an opinion from modern scholars
that,
that Khidr in the Quran is the Buddha.
Right?
It's an interesting opinion.
You know, Khidr,
according to
the salaf
was a prince,
who left
a left his kingdom and lived in the
wilderness.
He's called Khidr, which which is comes from
Akhtar, green, because he used to sit on
green foliage.
Right? And of course, green is the middle
color, the spectrum, the middle way.
Right?
You know, Zen Buddhism
can be very bewildering.
Right?
You're not supposed to really ask questions of
your teacher.
You're just kind of supposed to submit to
his guidance and do what he's telling you.
And it's kind of like the Karate Kid
thing where
the master, the Zen master is is teaching
his padawan, if you will.
You know, he he's telling him to do
all this manual labor and the kid doesn't
know what he's doing. He's he's doing it.
He doesn't know the significance of it. He's
not supposed to ask ask questions. So see
that kind of discourse with Khidr and Musa
and Surat Al Kahf.
Ibrahim ibnu Adham, one of the great
Sufis of the early period,
he his biography is similar to Sudartha Gautama,
that he a prince, and then he left
his life of opulence. He went and lived
in
the the forest of Balkh in Afghanistan.
And and according to his,
biography, he he met Khidr,
alayhis salam, on several occasions.
Yeah. So if the the Buddha is if
Khidr is the Buddha,
you know, and
Luqman is Confucius. People always, they criticize the
Quran and say, why is it so
why is it so Middle Eastern centric? What
about the rest of the world? Well,
God, he chooses whomever he wills.
So, that's one answer. The other answer is,
yeah, that's true. But if we look at
the Quran more more broadly, I mean,
probably,
Cyrus or Alexander,
so that's, you know,
the the the Greeks,
you know, Hellenism.
You have,
Khidr, who might be the Buddha. Right? That's,
you know, that entire area
of of,
South Asia. You have the Far East if
if Luqman,
is Confucius.
You know, it's it's, you know, taking wisdom
from all of these different places in the
world.
Anyway,
I have to go now. Nice talking with
you, crypto cat.
So I hope you benefited from this class.
Inshallah.
Please make dua for me. You're in our
prayers as well. And,
if there are, questions,
additional questions,
contact,
MCC, the Muslim Community Center,
in the East Bay.
I'd like to thank the MCC for having
this class. MCC is a fantastic
organization here in the Bay Area. Very active,
very beautiful, righteous people.
And,
they are just doing an incredible service service
to the world,
benefiting with with
their outreach programs,
different types of outreach programs.
So may
Allah bless the organization,
and continue to bless them and, bless all
of us and keep us all safe