Lesson video

Hello, I'm Ms. Pauvaday.

Welcome to another lesson on Buddhism.

It's very good to have you with me today.

Today, we're going to be looking at Buddhist scripture.

So, and this is all about how do we know what the Buddha actually said, and where do these teachings come from? So, stick with me.

So, let's make sure that we're nice and ready for our lesson.

You're going to need a pen, you're going to need some paper, you're going to need to go somewhere nice and quiet if you can, so that you're not going to be distracted.

We need to focus, we need our curious minds.

And just go ahead and pause now, make sure that you have all of those things and rejoin me when you're ready.

Today's lesson we're going to be looking at how did the Buddha teach? So we know something about what he actually taught, now, we're going to think about, well, how did he teach? How did these teachings actually survive? And how are they organised so that they're accessible? Because you know, we're talking about a really long time ago, thousands of years ago.

How have these teachings actually survived? In order to understand that I've kind of put together this kind of thought experiment for you, so I want you to think about this.

Imagine, something really incredible has happened and you've made contact with this benevolent, this kind, intelligent alien species.

And, in contact with them, you're able to discuss many things and they're able to explain to you things about the universe that we haven't discovered yet.

They're able to tell you about space travel and how to fix those problems of space travel and how to achieve it.

And they go into so much detail that they show you how you can recreate it.

And then they say their warm goodbyes and they leave, they're gone, that's it.

Now, the only evidence of this discussion, this meeting, is through what they have taught you, what they've told you.

How are you going to ensure what they have told you, this important information they've told you, how are you going to ensure that it gets passed on? Word for word, if possible.

How are you going to ensure that? And another problem, no one, including you, can read or write.

So, that's the problem here.

How are you going to do that? So have a think about it and think, what would you do? So, hopefully you've paused and you've had a good think.

What would you do in that regard? I think most people would say, well, they'd have to find a way of trying to record that information, so they might try to, maybe if they can't read or write, they might be able to draw some images that might help them.

Some people might say, well, I'm going to just try my best to remember.

Some students might respond by saying, well, I'm going to tell as many people as possible and ask them to remember, because between us, hopefully we'll be able to remember as much detail as possible.

And this is quite interesting because this is actually what happened, when we look at our history, human history, the alphabet, long before the alphabet and written language existed, we tend to think the alphabet has been around for forever, but actually, it's only been a couple of thousand years, really that the alphabet has kind of existed, perhaps a bit longer, depending on which country you're in.

So, written language hasn't always existed.

There's been a long history of ideas being passed down through just speech alone.

So the Vedas, which are very, very, very old texts, we're probably talking maybe 5,000, possibly 6,000 years old.

They originally were not written down, they were remembered.

That's what happened, so people remembered them word for word.

And if you look at ancient Greece, you've got the great classics like Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad, they were not written down, they were remembered, people remembered them.

They memorised them word for word and that's how it was kind of passed forward.

And even after the alphabet did appear in Greece, people still had this tradition.

It's incredible these people learnt poems and stories, religious sermons, word for word, and that tradition continues.

So there are people, for example, Muslims who learn the Quran off by heart, the Quran is not, it's quite a big text, holy text, so that's quite amazing to remember that word for word.

And interestingly, linguistic historians, so historians who are interested in how language has developed and how language tells us something about history, they have seen that there's actually more accuracy in the way that oral histories are passed down compared to written transmissions.

Because with written transmission, sometimes you have all sorts of problems like translation issues or, the author kind of writes it down in their own particular way.

Whereas with memory you're memorising word for word.

So that's quite interesting and it starts to tell us how, these holy texts, particularly for our purposes, how Buddhist texts were taken down eventually, were passed along.

So, a quick true or false.

Oral traditions, these are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Is that true or false? So pause, have a think about it, and then rejoin me.

It's true.

So, oral traditions, this is where poems, it could be stories, religious sermons, religious ideas have been passed down word for word through generations and that's how it's maintained, that's how it survived.

Now, the Buddha, he, after his first sermon, about seven weeks after he was Enlightened, he taught all over India and in Sri Lanka for about 45 years.

And that means that his teachings were not systematic.

It's not like he started with day one of Buddhism, this is what you need to know, day two of Buddhism, this is what you need to know.

Because he was teaching to different audiences all over the place, and these were different, this involved different languages, different cultures, so, you know, there were all sorts of differences.

So, they were not necessarily systematic.

A thing about Indian languages is that there are such differences, but you can actually understand.

For example, if you speak one language, it is possible to capture most of another language.

Because particularly at this time, there was so much similarity between these languages.

So, yeah, after 45 years of teaching, he did find different ways of teaching the same concepts effectively.

So there are some changes in his teaching, but effectively he is teaching the same thing, but it's not systematic.

It's not following a particular system.

So, the Buddha's teachings, they weren't really written down in his lifetime, he taught for 45 years, he died at the age of 80.

He died around between 410, 380 BCE, before the common era, before the Christian era.

And his writings, his teachings were not written down until the first century BCE.

So that's a good, 300 years or so, it's a long time.

A long time for it to be written down in Sri Lanka.

So, one of the questions that historians ask is, particularly when we look at these old texts, how do we work out how accurate they are? How do we know if they're still accurate? The interesting thing about Buddhism is the Buddhist teachings were passed down through this oral tradition through the Sangha.

The Sangha is the order of Buddhist monks and nuns.

So it began with the people that were kind of following him.

They were other seekers who wanted to reach Enlightenment as well.

They became the monks and nuns.

And what happened is they memorised his words and this sounds crazy to us, but this was a very common practise at this time and it is still continuing today.

And, they took this really seriously because they took this idea that they were now in charge of maintaining the Dharma, maintaining the teachings of the Buddha and making sure, ensuring that it got to everyone.

So, if you, in a Sangha ceremony, if you were going to join and be initiated, the ceremony required that you had five monks or nuns who were Arahants, who had reached a certain state of consciousness.

Enlightenment, effectively and, or had been practising for 10 years.

And there was a reason for this.

It was basically to create a lineage back to the Buddha himself, to make sure that you could trace the line from the monk or nun that ordained you, to the person that ordained them, all the way back to the Buddha, so that there was a clear line of translation.

Monks and nuns who had memorised word for word, the Dharma from the Buddha to the monk or nun, to the next person, to the next person, to the next person, to ensure that the teachings remained clean and perfect.

So what's important for us to remember here is the teachings of the Buddha is not from this kind of like vague recollection of what the Buddha might have said, or might not have said.

These texts have come from people who have memorised them, word for word going all the way back to the Buddha, according to the Buddhist tradition.

So, okay, let's have a quick pause here.

What do you think? Give two examples of a text that has been transmitted word of mouth, has been transmitted through oral history.

So go ahead and pause, have a think, whizz back if you need to, earlier on in the lesson, and when you're ready, resume.

Okay, so we can think of lots of different texts that have been passed down through oral transmission, oral history, so definitely some of the Greek classics, so, Homer's Odyssey or the Iliad, even some of Plato's texts perhaps, Socrates as well.

And the Buddhist texts as well, and the Vedas, they all started this way and eventually they were written down.

Shortly after the Buddha died and passed into Nirvana, this mystical state, a group of leading monks, they held a council.

And the reason they did that was because when he died, they were obviously devastated, they were sad, they'd lost their teacher, they knew that it was going to happen, obviously through the teachings of the Buddha, but they were still sad.

And one monk rejoiced and said, look, why are you so sad? We're no longer under this strict teacher who's constantly telling us, you can do that, you can't do that, you can't do that, you can't do that.

So he was really happy.

And one of the lead monks realised, we need to have a council, we need to maintain, we need to preserve the teachings of the Dharma because what's going to happen is people are going to start changing it.

Monks and nuns are going to start changing it or distorting it and we need to make sure it stays pure.

And the first council was created on how to preserve the teachings of the Buddha.

And there was about 500 attendees, the local king, he really advocated this, so he helped organise this.

And it was the lead monk who started this, Kassapa, he led, during this meeting, he led the discussion, questions that obviously lots of monks and nuns and other Buddhists had.

The monk Uppali, he answered questions about the Vinaya, which are rules for monks and nuns in the Sangha.

Basically how to avoid different temptations and vices, that kind of thing.

And monk Ananda who had, he'd been there from the beginning, he had heard all of the Buddha's sermons.

He answered any questions about Dharma, the actual teachings of the Buddha.

And later on, from this council, this continued.

The Tripitaka came to be written down.

And this was in Sri Lanka about 83 years BC.

So you can see it's taken a very long time, first they realised, okay, we need to make sure we preserve the teachings because it's going to get twisted.

And so this tradition of learning the sermons word for word continued.

And by 83 BC, they're written down finally.

The first council was arranged so that some new rules could be added to Buddhist teachings, is that true or is it false? It's false, okay? The first council was, and I'm sure you got this correct, was about how do you preserve the teachings of Dharma? How do you make sure it stays exactly the same as the Buddha taught it? Like I said, it was finally written down 83 BCE in Sri Lanka, in Pali.

So it's Pali text, an ancient Indian language.

And, it's known as the Tripitaka, tri means three, so you might remember that from the Trimurti, which is also three.

And it literally means the three baskets, and the reason why it was known as the three baskets was because, as an ancient language, people didn't have paper.

They couldn't just walk to Tescos and buy a packet of paper.

So people wrote on big leaves, so the ola leaves.

You might know this from how ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus leaves as well.

So this was a common thing that happened.

Now, the Tripitaka, they were written down on ola leaves and they literally kept in three separate baskets, for three different ways of categorising the teachings of the Buddha.

And they were categorised in this way.

So the Vinaya Pitaka, pitaka means basket, these are rules for the Sangha.

So these are rules for the monks and nuns.

The Sutta Pitaka is teachings on Dharma.

So this is the sermons, the words of the Buddha, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka is the kind of complex philosophical teachings on the nature of reality.

And that's how they were separated, into three baskets, which is why they're generally known as the Tripitaka.

Now, in the Vinaya Pitaka, there's five books so there's quite a lot there.

And these are complex sets of rules for monks and nuns, so this is not for Buddhists in general, these are for people who are dead serious, you know, I'm going to become, I'm definitely heading for Enlightenment, I'm going, I'm really serious about this.

So these people have decided to really put themselves in conditions so that they can really, really achieve Enlightenment, really cope, really find a way to break this cycle of Samsara.

And so, in the Vinaya Pitaka you'll find rules about conduct, mostly it's about conduct, so, how to behave with one another, avoid temptation, how to conduct themselves whilst they're inside the Sangha, what kind of duties do they perform? Detailed instructions on the Five Precepts, which are kind of like rules that monks and nuns choose to abide by.

I mean, it even had things like what kind of cloth you wear, what do you eat, when do you eat it? And nuns have an extra set of rules that they have to abide by as well.

Now, the Sutta Pitaka, this is five collections.

This is enormous.

It's enormous because the Buddha had 45 years of teaching, that's a lot of sermons, so that's why this is so big.

And these are just teachings on Dharma so, the cause of suffering and the way out.

So this comes back to the Four Noble Truths.

This is the way is, can we come out of it? This is the way is, this is the cause.

Can we come out of it? Yes.

This is what, effectively, everything comes back to the Four Noble Truths, and the Dharma is all about this.

So they're the Buddha's teachings and mostly his sermons.

You've seen that we've kind of looked at the Dhammapada, these are extracts you might've seen in previous lessons.

This is part of the Sutta Pitaka because these are the things that he said, and it includes other Suttas, particularly this one, the Metta Sutta, which is about compassion.

Very, very popular over here in the West, or in the States or Australia, kind of Western countries.

And, also the Jataka Tales, which are the, kind of descriptions of the previous lives that the Buddha had, which is fascinating as well.

Abhidhamma Pitaka is seven books, so it's not as big as the Sutta Pitaka, it's not as big as the collections of books about Dharma.

This is a bit smaller.

But these are teachings for particular, I'd say particularly monks or nuns, but it doesn't necessarily have to be monks or nuns.

They are deep philosophical teachings for people who've reached a certain state of consciousness.

So these are people who've been practising Buddhism quite seriously for a very, very long time, and they really are sharpening this instrument, this tool of their mind to be able to focus, focus, focus.

And they're starting to notice things about the nature of reality and these books are there to guide them.

And there's a really nice story where a monk had said to a king, the king was interested in Buddhism.

And he said to him, he collected some seawater in his hand and he said to the king, can you tell me which of this water comes from the Ganges, which comes from the Yamuna and which water comes from the Gadaki? I am paraphrasing here, so it's not exactly what he said, but I mean, could you do that? Could you pick up some water and work out which rivers it came from? Of course, that would be too hard for most of us.

We'd think that's crazy, you can't do that.

We know that that's where collections of water don't just necessarily exist, often they kind of cross with other bodies of water.

Now the Buddha was able to deconstruct this.

He was able to experience these kind of things and people who are on their way towards extreme awareness, towards Enlightenment, they have the ability to focus deeply, and be able to be aware of this.

And be conscious of the component parts of everything that's in reality, really.

Again, you know, we're talking about the experiences of people who've become Enlightened.

So the Abhidhamma Pitaka are really complex teachings to help guide people who are in this state, where they are really starting to get a grips of the nuts and bolts of reality, they're starting to really see it as they are.

And they need, they obviously need some guidance as well to move to the next stage.

And that's what these books are for.

As a way to help, complex teachings for monks and nuns who are really on their way to really, really super introspection.

Okay, so have a look at these, can you match? Can you match the Pitaka with its content? So, off you go.

Have a pause, have a look and then rejoin me when you're ready.

Okay, let's have a look.

Let's see what you've got.

I'm sure you've nailed this.

Don't be scared of the terms. Keep going, keep going, go back and have another go and that way you can kind of remember the terms. So let's see, the Vinaya is rules for monks and nuns.

So, I always think for Vinaya, one of the ways I remember it is I think of vices, which are kind of, vices are bad things like certain desires, desires for food or alcohol and all those kind of bad things.

So I think of vices and I think of Vinaya and that helps me.

Right, Sutta.

So this is the Buddha's teaching on Dharma now.

You have to be careful because Abhidhamma has actually got the word Dharma in it, so I always think it's not that one, and that helps me remember that it must therefore be Sutta.

And Abhidhamma is the complex teaching on the nature of reality.

So, well done.

Let's move on.

Now, Buddhism didn't actually survive in India, funnily enough.

And that was for lots of reasons.

Partly to do with the history of India, partly to do with the nature of Buddhism.

Buddhism has this ability, sorry Hinduism, I should say.

Hinduism kind of can absorb other religions because they've got this idea of this one energy, for many Hindus, they thought, well, the Buddha is another manifestation of this one energy, Brahma, so, many Hindus see the Buddha as Vishnu, this protector, this great being that is there to protect people.

So, much of his teachings got absorbed by other kind of Hindu traditions, they just saw that it belonged to the same thing.

Very, very greatly respected in India, so it's very common, if you ever go into a temple, you might see statues of the Buddha, so, that's quite common.

But it's important to know that the Buddha didn't really follow either, he did, he renounced all of that, he wasn't interested in that.

So that's one of the reasons it didn't survive in India.

Also, you had the Mughals who invaded shortly afterwards, a couple of hundred years later, they invaded.

And they kind of united India.

And that meant that some Buddhism started to die out.

But what happened was before that, it did spread to Sri Lanka.

So the Buddha visited Sri Lanka about three times.

Sri Lanka is just below India.

India is massive and Sri Lanka is this island underneath, and there used to be a land bridge.

Because they're very, very close, so it is possible to get over.

So the Buddha visited three times.

Buddhism, you know, really successful in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka is still a Buddhist country.

And this is where the Tripitaka was written down.

And eventually Buddhism moved to Southeast Asia, so Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, all those places, and China and Japan.

And what happened was, eventually it came over to the West, it did come here.

There was this big transmission and we will look at that another lesson.

So, but these are different languages.

So what happened was these other canons, these other kind of collections of texts had to be created from the original Pali one and they were basically translated.

And it's interesting because there's actually a lot of accuracy if you look at the kind of Chinese canon or even the Sanskrit canon, they're very, very accurate with the translation over.

So his teachings have gone from being orally memorised and then repeated, and then eventually being written down in Pali and then eventually being translated into Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, all these other different versions as well, and finally into English.

So, what do we think canon means? Do we think canon is a weapon that you can fire cannonballs from? What do you think? And that is false, okay? So it's a different spelling.

So canon is K-A-N-O-N and it refers to, basically a group of texts.

So Pali Canon is the group of texts of the Buddha written in Pali.

The Sanskrit canon is the Buddhist text written in Sanskrit so, that's how we describe it.

Now, the Buddha, in the Sutta Pitaka, it's very complicated.

Complicated's not the right word.

It's more complex, simply because there's so much of it.

And I just want to tell you a little bit about the kind of things that you would find in there.

You would definitely find sermons, so the things that he actually said when he was teaching and the Dhammapada is often the one that people go to, it kind of lays out the teachings.

But also in this Pitaka, you're going to find stories, lots of stories.

So the Jataka Tales are stories that we mentioned before about his accounts of the different lives that he led.

But there will be stories about people that he met, the kind of stories that he told them and a really popular one, which I want to share with you, is one called Kisa and the Mustard Seed.

And it's a nice story because it really, really shows one of the central teachings of Buddhism.

So I'm just going to tell it to you.

You can find it in the Therigatha, which is the verses of the elder nuns.

And this is part of the, Sutta Pitaka, it's part of that basket, basically.

So, Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed, well known story, what happens is it's quite a sad story, so I will warn you now, it's a bit sad.

What happens is Kisa, she's a young woman and the most tragic thing happens.

The most tragic thing happens.

She has a young baby and the baby dies.

Which, at that time, life expectancy was quite low, particularly with babies.

Naturally, obviously she's just distraught.

She just doesn't know how, how to even comprehend something so tragic.

She's completely distraught.

And she hears of this great teacher coming to her village.

So she seeks him out and it's the Buddha.

And she says to the Buddha, can you help me bring my baby back? My baby's innocent, I want my child back.

And the Buddha, seeing her, how distraught she is, realises he can't really tell her that there's no way.

So what he does is he says, okay, I will help you, but I want you to go and collect a mustard seed, some mustard seeds, from any household in your village that has not experienced death.

So any household in your village, bring me back a mustard seed from any household in your village where they have not experienced death at all.

So Kisa says, okay, yes, I'll do that, I'll do that.

I'll do anything you want.

So, she runs to the nearest home and she says, please, I'm after this, do you have any mustard seeds? And they're like, yes, yes, we can help you.

And then she says, but I can only take it if there has been no death in this house.

And then gradually she realises as she goes from home to home to home, no one's able to give her a mustard seed because everyone has experienced death in some form or another.

If it hasn't happened to someone close by in your family then people are aware of it or, you know, so, she's distraught at the end because she realises the lesson that the Buddha has told her.

And, she goes back to him, completely distraught and realises, okay, this is just the nature of being.

And from that, it was such a powerful story about the nature of being that Kisa then decided to become a nun, a Bhikkhuni, and follow the teachings of the Buddha.

Suddenly she realised the extent of pain and suffering and realised she just didn't want this anymore.

And so it's quite a powerful story.

It's told to children as well, to help them remember this main idea of pain and suffering, the conditions that we live in.

And that's not the end of it, you know, that is the way we live, but that doesn't mean we can't live without joy and peace.

So later on, I mean, I've told you the beginning of her story, later on she becomes a nun and she embraces the Eightfold Path and finds a way to be joyous and happy and present in the moment and compassionate and all those things, she finds happiness again.

And her story's taken down, as I mentioned in the Sutta Pitaka.

So, true or false, the moral of Kisa's story is that death and suffering is common experience.

Is that true or is that false? True.

So what the Buddha wanted her to know was, death, as awful as it is, as tragic as it is, as heartbreaking as it is, it's a common experience to everyone and we can be bound by that grief, or we can take that grief and we can build beautiful memories of that person and find a way to exist beyond that.

It's not to forget people that we've loved.

It's a way to exist without that sorrow or grief really distorting or changing the way that we live our lives in a negative way, it's trying to live our lives positively after something like death.

Because we know it's going to happen.

Okay, and the last one I want to tell you about is the Jataka Tales, which are really interesting.

Very common with children.

Hopefully you can see the image there, the definition is not great, but in the original image, you've got all the different lives of the Buddha.

He was able to go back in his mind and re-experience it, all the rebirths that he had.

And he lived in various forms as different people, different animals.

And these are stories that he recounts, which have different kind of virtues, different good ways of behaving when dealing with ethical dilemmas.

And that's the Jataka Tales, really popular with children.

And I just wanted to add a little extra piece here because it's just something that I'm quite interested in.

And my students always love it when I talk about this.

So, there is some modern, believe it or not, there is some modern psychological research into the area of rebirth and reincarnation.

And the reason that is, is because there's a growing number of people who can remember specific details about their previous lives, believe it or not.

So there is definitely a psychologist, Stanislav Grof, I think his name is, he is able to put people back into, he does hypnosis and he takes people back into their minds.

Quite common in the world of psychology.

But also he's noticed that people can go back and start talking about trauma, trauma that they've had in previous lives.

So he started to notice this in his practise, he's a psychologist.

And there has been research out of a psychology department in Iceland, a well-known academic, he has been looking into this phenomena of people who can remember details, and I'm talking specific details.

Like, they know the address of where they lived, that kind of thing.

Really crazy, really crazy.

Let's be clear.

This is modern, psychological research.

They are not making any claims about Buddhism or Hinduism being right, they're just saying that this phenomenon exists.

And the reason I'm saying that now is because the Buddha, at the time said that he was able to go back into his mind.

So for us, that might seem quite crazy, but in Indian traditions, it's kind of an accepted thing that you can do that.

And modern psychology is saying, well, maybe, there's something interesting here that we can look at.

Who knows, who knows? Okay, so what I'd like you to do now is have a go to remember these different books.

One of the ways that I do it in my class is I get students to draw a diagram or draw a bookcase and show how the different books are going to be collected differently.

And so what they do is they draw a diagram and then they separate the books and they write down what can be found in each Pitaka.

So start with a Pitaka, show how it's split, look at the Vinaya Pitaka, how many books are in there? What is the Vinaya Pitaka for? What might you find in there? And so on and so forth.

And then see where you can put the Dhammapada and the Jataka Tales, so that you've got a nice diagram to show where they go.

Okay? And, if you can, share it with us.

Make sure that you get permission, but I would love to see them.

So, congratulations, well done for another great lesson.

I'm sure you did brilliantly.

I'm looking forward to seeing any work that you upload.

Make sure that you do two things, do the quiz as soon as you've completed this so that we can consolidate some of the ideas, some tricky terminology today.

But the more that you use it, the more it will kind of stick in your mind.

And if you can upload your work, make sure you get permission, that would be great, I want to see what you've done.

And as always go and tell someone, explain what you've learned today because that's not only going to help you remember, but it's also just, it's interesting.

It's going to make you an interesting person.

So, and I will see you next time.