Lesson video

Hi, welcome back.

I'm Miss Pauvaday.

Today we are going to be looking at a lesson on The Historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama.

And some of you who have looked at the previous lesson, you will know that we had a quick look at the dominant philosophical ideas that existed in ancient India, which have continued, because Hinduism is probably the longest lasting kind of structured religion, I suppose, loosely termed.

And it's important we know that because religion and philosophy, they're what we call syncretic.

So religions, religious ideas, philosophical ideas, often they merge into each other, and sometimes they create other religions or they create new ideas within a religion.

So it's important we know that because the Buddha, that's the context that he grew up in.

You know, he grew up as a.

he was a Hindu, his family were Hindus and he grew up in that context.

So today we are going to be looking at the life of Siddhartha Gautama, okay.

Okay, so before we start, let's just make sure that we're nice and ready.

You are going to need for today's lesson, you're going to need a pen, some paper, you need your curious mind, you need to go somewhere nice and quiet.

So if you can find somewhere quiet, turn off anything that is going to distract you.

So if there's music on, turn it off.

If the TV is on, turn it off.

If there's a dog barking, the dog's barking, you know, just try and move away from it so that we can focus nicely on our lesson today.

We're going to start off with this question.

I want you to imagine, how would you feel if you discovered that humans are actually immortal, that they can live forever, and most importantly, that everyone kept this a secret from you? So I want you to think about that for a second.

You've lived your whole life and you suddenly find out this incredible piece of information about the nature of being human and nobody told you, and how would you feel? How would you react? So I want you to have a moment now.

You can pause, please pause, and I want you to really think.

What would you think? How would you react? So give yourself a second now to pause.

So you've had a few minutes to have a good think about how you would react to this kind of mind-blowing news about the nature of reality and what it means to be human actually.

So how might you feel? Perhaps you might feel really shocked and really be questioning, well, what is real, because you have been effectively lied to.

You might be asking yourself, well, what are humans? You might even be thinking that you want to know more about the world.

You want to know more about life itself, what it means to be human.

Because of this groundbreaking news, you might feel, actually, I don't really know very much anymore.

I need to go out and look.

You may feel angry at the people that lied to you.

You might not know who to trust anymore.

That might make you feel quite alienated.

You might feel quite upset, very emotional.

I think I probably would as well.

And yeah, you might feel really hurt and confused.

So it seems like a strange question that I'm asking you, and philosophical questions often are quite strange but there are some very real world applications that you need to keep in mind.

So I just want you to keep in mind this question because it's going to become relevant later on.

So what I'd like you to do now is have a good look at these pictures and decide which of these are Buddhas.

So you can go ahead and pause for a moment and have a good look at the pictures and then have, just have, keep it in mind which of these do you think is a Buddha.

Okay, you've had a moment to have a look.

I have to confess I've been slightly sneaky because they actually are all Buddhas.

We're going to have a quick look at why that is a common mistake.

It's not, very common, lots of people misunderstand this.

So, but you won't, not after this lesson today.

So what you need to understand is Buddha is not really a name.

It's actually a, it's a title effectively.

And what it means is, it means awakened, also translates as enlightened.

So we have this concept of this enlightened being.

Now, those of you from, those who saw the previous lesson, you would know that an enlightened being is not particular to Buddhism.

Again, looking at the Indian Hindu dominant philosophical ideas in India at the time, there had been quite a few people who had actually become these enlightened beings.

So this is where Buddhism, you know, we're talking about this syncretism, how they've come together, they've merged together and you've got similar ideas going on.

So if you look at the Pali, which is an.

Pali and Sanskrit, which are ancient Indian languages, if you look at the idea, the word Bodhati, that is the past participle.

So it's the past of wake, which means woke or awakened.

And that's where it comes from really, effectively.

And as I mentioned before, Eastern philosophy, you've got this concept of awakened beings going back before, before the Buddha.

Something to think about.

So I'm going to talk you through now, just briefly, some of these people, some of these awakened beings.

Now the first one, quite a shocking picture when you look at it, but it is actually The Historical Buddha, this is Siddhartha Gautama.

This is the man that we're going to be looking at today and his story.

He's also the founder of Buddhism.

And this is a, you see these kind of images all over, particularly Southeast Asia.

It's the emaciated state.

So he looks very skinny.

He looks almost like a skeleton, quite scary.

Definitely looks like he hasn't had his five a day for sure, but that was done on purpose.

And we're going to, hopefully when we look at the story, we're going to understand why, why did he do that? And again, this is borrowing from a long, long tradition of kind of spiritual retreats, spiritual searching for ultimately basic.

Right, Green Tara.

She is what is known as a Bodhisattva, particularly in the Tibetan tradition.

And another enlightened being, she's often seen as a real princess in Tibet.

She's seen as a Tibetan princess who was reborn into this enlightened being because she was seen as so compassionate, so wise, and she is praised for, again, being very compassionate as well.

So female, a female Buddha, of which there are quite a few actually.

Now, Budai or Pu-Tai.

This is probably, when people think about the Buddha, they tend to think of either The Historical Buddha that we we've seen pictures of before, or they will think of this guy, The Laughing Buddha.

And you can walk down most high streets in the UK and find some Chinese takeaway or some Chinese restaurant with The Laughing Buddha, but he wasn't the actual Buddha.

So he is another enlightened being, a Chinese zen monk, and he was known for his kind of benevolence and kind of happy personality.

So that's I think that's probably very popular in China.

You will see his image everywhere because, you know, he's effectively this symbol of luck and prosperity really.

So next time you go to the Chinese restaurant or something like that, you can be extra clever and you can tell everyone actually who he is, and then you can demand all the prawn crackers which I definitely think you should do for being so clever.

I'd definitely do it.

Right, and this is the man that we're actually looking at today.

So this is Siddhartha Gautama, he's The Historical Buddha, he's the founder of Buddhism, and he's in a classic meditation Lotus pose, and the snakes behind him represent Mara, often seen as temptation or the devil, or whichever tradition you want to look at, it's translated in lots of different ways But this is quite a traditional pose.

And as we go through these series of lessons, we'll start to understand the symbolisms of these positions and pictures and what they mean for the Buddhist tradition.

Okay, we're going to have a quick pause point now, just to kind of catch up on what we've been learning so far.

I've thrown quite a lot of information at you.

So let's see what we can remember.

So you can just go ahead and match the terms with the correct meaning.

You can write them down and then add the terms, or you can do it after we do the corrections.

It's completely up to you, but go ahead now and pause, and we will look at them in a moment.

Okay, let's have a look at some of the answers.

So, Buddha, yes that means an awakened being.

Let's see, what's next.

Siddhartha Gautama, he was the founder of Buddhism and another awakened being, of which there were many before him.

Pali is an ancient Indian language which is.

Pali's often associated with Buddhism rather than Sanskrit.

Sanskrit usually belongs to the kind of Hindu canon, but there is some crossover.

And a mortal is a being that will die.

So see how you did, give yourself some ticks, give yourself a pat on the back.

So in order to understand really the wisdom of the Buddha we do need to know his story.

We need to know where he came from and how it relates to his actual teaching.

Really interesting story actually.

So he was born around the sixth century BC in what is now known as Lumbini in Nepal.

His parents were actually royalty.

So at the time in India, it wasn't a unified country.

This doesn't happen until the moguls much later on.

They don't really have a centralised government.

What they do have is lots of different kingdoms and Siddhartha's parents, his father was the king of quite a powerful tribe of people and a very large kingdom.

So, and they were Hindu, they were part of the warrior caste.

So, again, this identifies, it shows again how different religions merge into one another and how these kind of ideas slip into different religions.

Now we do know he was a person, historians are pretty confident about that.

But his story is surrounded by myth and legend.

So some of it is, really interesting, we have to read between the lines in terms of trying to understand what is the central message in terms of his teachings.

But we do know that he existed and we know that his father was, that there were holy men that had kind of prophesied and said that he was going to be a great man.

So his father knew this, his mother knew this as well.

She was having these kind of prophetic dreams. She was having these dreams that he was going to become a great man of peace and wisdom to the world.

Sadly, she didn't survive.

She died shortly after childbirth and Siddhartha was raised in the palace, because he was a prince, by his stepmother.

This is Queen Mahaprajapati, nice image of her right there.

She was completely devoted to him and does actually end up following him in the end as a nun.

She's almost seen as one of the earliest feminists where she argues that women should be able to become a nun.

And she won actually, she was able to make that happen.

So we know that he.

this kind of great birth has been prophesied.

Siddhartha was either going to be a great king or a great spiritual leader.

And his father, King Suddhodana, is, you know, he wants him to follow in his footsteps and become this great king.

And so he orders, really strangely, he orders that the young prince should only be raised in complete luxury, in terms that he should never experience any kind of pain or suffering, anything that is going to make him question the nature of reality, question what's the purpose of life.

He wanted to keep him away from those religious ideas, because he doesn't want him to become a spiritual leader.

He wants him to become another king.

Now as an adult, Siddhartha wants to see his kingdom.

You know, he's very popular, he's well liked, he's athletic, he's got a beautiful wife, he's got a child on the way.

He is very kind.

It's noted in many places that he's very kind, and now he wants to see his kingdom.

And this becomes known as The Four Sights.

Because he goes out, out of the kingdom, he's never been out of the kingdom before.

So out of the palace, he's never been out of the palace before.

And he sees an old man, a sick man, and a corpse.

Now for us that might be pretty normal.

But for Siddhartha, he didn't know these things existed.

He didn't know anything about age.

He didn't know that people got sick and he definitely didn't know that people died, because all of that had been kept from him.

And this completely shocks him to his core.

Finally, he saw a monk who seemed at peace.

So you can see in the image here, you can see all the different Four Sights here, and he asks the charioteer, the person, the guards that are with him, you know, why is that man so peaceful? And the charioteers kind of explain to him what a monk is and how monks have been able to find peace even though the world can be quite painful sometimes.

Now The Four Sights are so impactful.

It had such a groundbreaking effect on Siddhartha that he, that night, he kind of paced around.

He felt like, I don't really understand what reality is.

So he felt the only.

being a man of intelligence and a man of integrity, he thought, okay, I need to go out and I need to see the world for myself.

So he leaves, he leaves the palace in the dark of the night, says goodbye to his wife and his child whilst they're sleeping.

They don't know that he's leaving in order to search for the truth about life.

And he finds some.

he heads for the forest because he thinks that's where I'm going to find some more monks.

He does find some forest monks and he learns how to focus his mind and body in meditation.

So that's what.

those are the kind of lessons that he learns from the monks.

He joins these monks and learns these techniques and how to gain mastery over his mind through meditation.

Now he's had this experience of complete luxury, total luxury, a complete absence of pain and suffering.

And now he's in the complete opposite end where he's training his mind and body to cope with extreme pain and suffering.

And he's kind of wondering, could there be a middle way, because, you know, these are two extremes.

So he starts thinking about that kind of idea.

He doesn't think he's going to get the answers from the forest monks.

So in deep meditation, he's trying to find the middle way.

And he soon realises both ways of being are just too extreme.

And that actually what you need is a moderation, you need a balance.

You know, the difference between completely being full and having everything you want, that can lead to pain and suffering.

It can lead, you know, imagine if when you eat, really, really overindulge, you eat way too much chocolate, and you feel unwell.

And then the complete extreme opposite is having nothing, being starving.

Those are two extreme states.

What he thinks is there needs to be middle way, a balance.

And he's trying to kind of uncover how do humans gain that kind of middle way and sustain it and make sure that it continues.

So he sat under a sacred fig tree, which would later become known infamously as the Bodi tree.

That's where he's going to reach enlightenment.

He's sitting there in deep meditation.

And, I mean, I mentioned this idea about myth and legend, how his story is kind of tied up with myth and legend.

This struggle in his mind is sometimes seen in myth as this great battle with Mara.

Mara is known as the great deceiver, that temptation of, I suppose, a little bit like, a little bit like the devil that we have in the Abrahamic traditions of Christianity and Islam, for example.

Slightly like that but, you know, this battle is really in the mind.

That's what's happening.

And Mara is trying to do everything to try and tempt the Buddha away from this quest of deep meditation of trying to find the middle way, and loses.

So because the Buddha remains undisturbed by Mara and eventually Mara kind of subsides and then says, right, you deserve this seat of enlightenment.

And so Siddhartha eventually reaches enlightenment because he sees existence as it actually is.

And he finally realises how you can reach the middle way, how you can reach contentment and be happy.

This puzzle that he's trying to uncover, how do we live peacefully and happily in a world where there is pain and suffering? So these just true or falses.

You can either give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or just do it mentally.

So, Siddhartha, was he destined to be a great king or a great spiritual leader? What do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down, true or false? And that's true.

So Queen Maya, his mother, she actually had a dream just before he was born that he was going to become a great leader.

Unfortunately, she didn't quite make it, not long after he was born she actually died.

So we don't really hear much more about Queen Maya in this story, which is interesting later on, why he wasn't quite aware of his mother.

We still don't really know really.

Okay.

Let's have a look at the next question.

Siddhartha's father, the king, decreed that his son should only have the absolute pleasures and luxuries of life because he wanted to spoil his son.

What do we think? Is that true or false? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Let's have a look.

False, it was false.

False.

Not because of, I mean, Siddhartha's father, he did only want his son to have pleasures and luxuries.

He wanted the best for his son, but it wasn't just because he wanted to spoil his son.

And some of you probably have kind of clocked on to the reason why.

His father really wanted him to follow in his own footsteps.

He didn't want him to become this great spiritual leader.

He wanted him to take over his kingdom.

Of course he would.

So what he did, he set about really just trying to make sure that he had absolutely, Siddhartha would have absolutely everything that he wanted.

So he would never really suffer, never really be in a position where he'd really start questioning life, and again, having those kind of big philosophical questions.

And a classic one is, you know, where does evil come from? It's the absolute classic philosophical question across all the traditions, across most cultures, they have asked this question, why do we suffer? Why do we have evil in the world? So Siddhartha's father, educated man, he was quite aware of this.

So he made sure that Siddhartha didn't suffer in any kind of way.

He had the best of everything.

And then that way he would kind of stay on the path to being leader.

That was his plan anyway.

So, let's see what's next.

Okay, Siddhartha, when he was finally allowed to leave the palace, he saw four things that shocked him.

And those things were called The Four Noble Truths.

Is that true or false? True or false? Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up, thumbs down? What do we think? True or false? It's false, because whilst The Four Noble Truths are an important teaching in Buddhism, for some reason there's lots of numbers in Buddhism.

Not quite sure why, but they have it.

It was not The Four Noble Truths, nope, it was The Four Sights.

So there are a couple of tellings of this story, Siddhartha's story, in which Siddhartha's father finally lets him out of the palace walls because Siddhartha's been kept in there.

He hasn't really been aware.

Siddhartha's not really aware that he's been kept in, but eventually he really wants to leave.

And then eventually his father says, okay, fine.

So they have this big procession, according to some of the versions of the stories.

And Siddhartha's father kind of orders his soldiers to go out and to just get rid of any signs of, you know, any kind of suffering.

So he doesn't want Siddhartha to see poverty.

He doesn't want Siddhartha to see anything really negative.

He really wants to give Siddhartha this view that the world is perfect, that there's no problems in the world, that everything's rosy.

He really wants to give Siddhartha that view.

Again, so he doesn't start veering off into these pesky philosophical questions and start thinking about, you know, what's the nature of life and taking him down the spiritual path.

So, but it doesn't work.

It doesn't work, according to the story.

What he does is, he is at the procession, but, you know, Siddhartha, lots of accounts talk about the kind of man he was, that he was very popular, he was handsome, very kind, given that he, you know, he was a prince.

But he was known to be very kind, very charismatic as well.

Lots of people wanted to come and see him.

So people did actually come to see him.

And one of the first things he saw was an old woman, and that shocked him because he obviously had never seen that before.

Then he saw a sick man.

Again, he knew nothing of sickness, because it had all been kept away from him in the palace.

Then he saw a dead body.

Oh my good.

he'd never seen, he had no idea that that happened.

So this comes back to the first question I asked you, what would you do if you found out that you were immortal? Kind of other way round, but still quite shocking.

And finally he sees a holy man.

He sees all this kind of destitution, death, all these kind of really negative things that really shocked him to his core, and then finally he sees this holy man who seemingly has nothing but is still so peaceful.

And those are The Four Sights.

That's what he sees.

And they're a really important moment in his life.

Right, holy men, or ascetics, another fancy word for you to use, do they purposefully put themselves through pain? True or false? What do we think? True or false? The holy men that the Buddha saw, and he became one in the forest, do they purposefully put themselves through pain? False.

Now this is slightly tricky.

And I've decided that I think it would be interesting for you to know, not many people know, this side of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Well, let's say these traditions in India, and they still are continuing.

And they're really interesting actually.

So I'm getting way ahead of myself.

So it is false because holy men, they don't actually seek this out, really.

It might be a by-product of what they're doing.

Really, what they're trying to do is they are pushing their minds and bodies into extremes.

And the reason they're doing that is they're really trying to understand the kind of mind body connection through experience.

And later again, when we go through the series on Buddhism, you'll start to understand that so much of Buddhism and Hinduism is actually about the mind.

It's about perception.

How do you experience things, and do we have any control? So, and this is a very, very long tradition.

There's a long tradition of this in India.

And really when you can back, you can see beginnings of psychology, this kind of introspection.

And later when you have people like Carl Jung, for example, very famous psychologist, he's fascinated by this because he can see very clearly in the Indian tradition, he sees that for a long time these holy men have been really watching their mind, putting their bodies through quite incredible stress to see, to try and understand a bit more about the mind and the body and what that's all about really.

So yeah, there is some pain, of course there's some pain when you put your body through those kind of things, but that's not really the intention.

So, okay, right, the middle way, is it halfway between pleasure and pain? And it's in a similar time.

So remember the Buddha, he renounces his princely life and all this wealth and pleasure.

He renounces it because he wants to know the truth.

He goes into the forest, becomes a holy man, starts adopting these quite extreme practises.

And at some point he's just, you know, he's barely alive.

We saw the kind of emaciated Buddha.

He's barely alive, very skinny.

And at some point he realises, you know what, I'm going to die if I don't.

I'm not getting anywhere this way, I'm going to die.

I need to take care of myself.

So he has this kind of revelation and he realises that there has to be a middle mark.

And really, it's this very, quite symbolic of his life because he goes from having everything, all the pleasures in life, he's a rich prince, he has all these natural gifts, to being a holy man where he's taken on this life where he really has nothing.

He's barely alive because he's been starving himself to death.

Real two extremes.

So the middle way is really about finding balance.

And he has this revelation when he's meditating, that between these two points is this kind of peace? There's this contentment when you are in the midpoint.

So that is what the middle way actually is.

So that is true.

Right, and that brings us to The Four Noble Truths.

Let's see if I can just move myself, I don't know.

Hey, I can do this.

Just going to move myself over here in the corner with the Buddha.

There he is teaching.

So, okay, The Four Noble Truths.

During his time of meditation he comes across, as I mentioned, this idea of the middle way.

And soon after that he starts to have more important revelations.

And one of them is the Four Noble Truths.

And what these are, we will look at later on.

There will be some lessons on this, so, where we look at them a bit deeper.

But ultimately what these are about, these truths are about suffering, really.

So it sounds quite negative, doesn't it, when you think about all of this? But really the Buddhist tradition is actually quite joyful and very happy.

It's a lot about compassion, I would say.

But The Four Noble Truths really is about human suffering and the kind of mechanics behind all of that.

How does it happen? And interestingly, again, thinking about the psychological aspects of Buddhism, you know, how much is in our control when it comes to suffering? There are obviously some things that we have no control over.

So really The Four Noble Truths is, why do we suffer? And it's kind of like a guide on how to deal with that and how much we can control.

Really important revelation, so, and crucially for Buddhists, it also shows how to be free from suffering and onto this path towards enlightenment And again, something else that we'll look at another time.

So after this revelation, he sits, he meditates.

He meditates for a long time, and then eventually he reaches Nirvana.

He becomes an enlightened being, and probably about seven weeks, around seven weeks, eight weeks after he has reached enlightenment under the very famous Bodi tree, he decides, okay, I'm going to go and I need to teach this.

I need to tell people that there is a way beyond suffering.

So he sets up the first sermon.

He leaves the forest and he sets up the first sermon.

And again, you know, this is a very charismatic.

he's a great speaker, very gentle.

These are the accounts that you can read about him.

And very quickly had lots of followers.

He eventually went home, back to his wife, back to his family, and they very quickly became followers as well.

So, this is the birth of Buddhism, really.

Okay, so I've talked a lot at you.

I hope you have found this interesting.

The last thing I want you to do is I want you to have a look at this written task.

Look at the question.

So the question is, to what extent do you think the events of Buddha's life led him to his final destiny? So, you know, could it have happened to anyone else or, you know, did the thing, the way that his life was, the way that the events in his life, did that really shape the man that he was going to become.

So in this yellow box here you're going to see some things that you can consider.

So you can think about the way that he was lied to.

You could think about the actual destiny, the sage, the holy men were saying, look, this man has a destiny.

Before he was born he was deemed to have a destiny.

You could think about how there have been many Buddhas before him.

So it didn't just really, it didn't really start with him.

And you could think about his wealth.

He started, how he actually started off as a prince, did that have an impact on his final destiny? Or how much of it was his actual own determination, his own personality? So those are some of the things that you can think about.

Have a think.

You can always go back through the video and write down the question and see how you can answer that.

So it's very important for you to have a think about his life and write down what you think.

So I hope you enjoyed today's lesson.

And well done, really, fantastic learning today.

It's not really an easy story to understand.

It's, you know, a lot of this is kind of beyond our.

well, not beyond, but it's quite alien to some of our kind of worldviews or understandings.

You know, we're talking about an ancient culture here that still persists, but culturally it's quite different.

So well done for trying to get your head around it.

Well done.

Before you go, I want you to do two things.

I want you to click next and do the quiz.

See what you remember.

And after the lesson, maybe a day later, I want you to think back and think, right, three things that I remember from that lesson, three things that I'm going to take with me.

And finally, I look forward to seeing you next lesson when we're going to be looking at what does it mean to be human? And other philosophical questions.

So I'll see you then.

Bye-bye.