Episode #009 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

If you had to think of the most common symbols of Buddhism or Buddhist thought, one of the first things that has to come to your mind is the lotus flower. And it’s actually not arbitrary at all. I mean, it’s not like Big Lotus Flower Incorporated lobbied congress to become the official flower sponsor of Buddhism so they could make a bunch of money. It’s a powerful metaphor for the path to enlightenment. The plant itself is actually an aquatic perineal. It grows most of its life underwater. And it’s tough to find naturally occurring pools of stagnant water that aren’t swamp lands, especially in India.

It begins growing from the floor of the swamp. Through the muddy, disgusting swamp water, it reaches for the light. And when it finally reaches the surface, it blossoms. And if you’ve never seen a lotus flower in full bloom, it’s one of the most beautiful flowers you’ll ever see. And if you didn’t take a minute to think about it, you might miss the most amazing part of all. This beautiful flower—this thing that looks like something you’d see on a Kleenex box—it’s never known anything but muddy and murky water. It created this beautiful flower with nothing but what it could conjure with this little plot of swamp it exists in.

Much like the lotus, humans are born into muddy, tainted, difficult-to-navigate waters. And most people never blossom. Most people spend their entire life content with the murky water. Through Buddhism, with enough hard work and the right plan of how to get there, you too can achieve enlightenment, and you too can rise above the muddy waters as the Buddha did 2,500 years ago.

See, because before he was known as the Buddha, he was just a normal guy like you and me. His name was Siddhartha Gautama. And it wasn’t always easy for him. Years after he reached nirvana, he compared his journey to the journey of a lotus flower. He said it like this, “Imagine a red lotus that had begun life underwater but grew and rose above the surface until it stood free. So I too have transcended the world, and attained the supreme enlightenment.” Then the person he was talking to when he was saying that was a little confused by what he just said, and he followed up with a question. “Well, who are you then?” And he said, “Remember me as the one who woke up.”

Hello, everyone. It’s me, Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! And today’s show is about Buddhism, but not all of Buddhism. When you have such a successful and effective way of thinking about the world, I think inevitably you’re going to have hundreds of offshoots or individual variants of it. Buddhism has evolved into a massive religion, a religion that over the years has found a foothold of success in countless cultures and dozens of countries. And not all of them are the same. Each culture, each time period made their own adjustments so that it translated to the people of their time that they were trying to sell it too.

Just like Pythagoras or Laozi, someone born this long ago adopts sort of a mythical status, and their life gets embellished and gets superpowers tacked onto it and all sorts of other stuff. All these different interpretations lead to an enormous spectrum of ideas that people attribute to their personal definition of Buddhism, even down to the story of its origins. And each one has their own favorite variant of the teachings, the most interesting of which we’ll touch on in future episodes, but most of which only serve to confuse people about what the Buddha actually taught. To be fair, they’re just as right as anyone else.

A biography of Buddha wasn’t written down until almost 500 years after he had died. I mean, imagine how trusting you’d be of information that had just underwent a game of telephone that lasted 500 years—a line of 13-year-old girls at a slumber party that’s so long the game takes 500 years to end, because I can’t think of anyone else that actually plays that game. The best thing you can do is approach it historically. And the way you find the most credible information—the facts that are most likely to be accurate—is you find the similarities between all the different stories, much like how you find what the teachings of Buddha were by finding the common teachings or practices.

This is not a podcast about religion. It’s a podcast about philosophy. This episode is not about some interesting variant of Buddhism from the 12th century. It’s about the philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama and the precedents it set for future philosophers to use as a springboard.

The story begins in the sixth century BC in the middle of the night in an Indian kingdom. The queen of this kingdom had a dream. In this dream she came upon a white elephant who offered her a lotus flower. When she took the flower, the elephant supposedly dove into the side of her body, seemingly into her womb, and nine months later she gave birth to Siddhartha Gautama. Seven days after that, the queen would die. Gautama never had a mother. But more importantly, he was too young to experience the pain of losing a loved one. That will be important later.

It seems pretty clear that Siddhartha was born into nobility and excess because every account I’ve seen says basically the same thing: the son of a king; he’s the heir to the throne. Every luxury he could imagine was given to him without a moment’s hesitation: huge banquets, throngs of women, constant entertainment at his beck and call. We actually have his own first-person account from later on in his life when he told his followers about his life at the palace as a child.

“I lived in refinement, utmost refinement, total refinement. My father even had lotus ponds made in our palace: one where red-lotuses bloomed, one where white lotuses bloomed, one where blue lotuses bloomed, all for my sake. I used no sandalwood that was not from Varanasi. My turban was from Varanasi, as were my tunic, my lower garments, and my outer cloak. A white sunshade was held over me day and night to protect me from cold, heat, dust, dirt, and dew.

“I had three palaces: one for the cold season, one for the hot season, one for the rainy season. During the four months of the rainy season I was entertained in the rainy-season palace by minstrels without a single man among them, and I did not once come down from the palace. Whereas the servants, workers, and retainers in other people’s homes are fed meals of lentil soup and broken rice, in my father’s home the servants, workers, and retainers were fed wheat, rice, and meat.”

So, it seems pretty safe to say he was born directly into the lap of luxury. And it’s important to note just for a second how easy it is to grow complacent when this lifestyle is a reality. I mean, how easy would it have been for Siddhartha to just continue his life of abundance and constant celebration, become king, and just never worry about anything? Out of sight, out of mind, right? This is why he holds a special place in my heart. We talked about Thales of Miletus being unique because he pioneered the world of philosophy not by means of necessity but because of a genuine curiosity and an extremely high-level intellect. Siddhartha was similar in this way. I mean, there weren’t any warring states in his neck of the woods. He had everything, or so most people would think. He lived this privileged lifestyle for 29 years. And then it’s clear something happened.

No matter how old you are, most of us can think back to a life-defining moment. I’m talking about some event that took place that changed your trajectory in one direction or another. I think most people have one or two of these in their life. And Siddhartha was about to have his. They’re known as the four sights. Legend has it that his dad, the king of the empire, was told by a sage right before Siddhartha was born that his son was destined to become one of two things. He would either become a king that would unite all the tribes of India and go on to rule the entire world, or he would be a spiritual leader.

Now, at first glance this seems pretty profound. I mean, how did the sage know? How could he possibly have predicted that? Then I started thinking about it. Really, how hard was that to predict? It’s like telling the president of the United States that his kid is either going to go into politics or they’re going to be doing valet parking at a hotel. It was a pretty safe bet he was going to be king. But Siddhartha’s father took it very seriously. Several sources talk about this lavish lifestyle locked away in a palace as not only being a nice perk of being royalty but his father’s way of shielding him from all the suffering in the world so that he wouldn’t become a spiritual leader. I mean, he wanted his son to be a king. He wanted him to unite all the tribes of India. And if you really believed that the only other option he has is to become a spiritual leader, then maybe you would try to keep the blinders on for a while.

The story goes that Siddhartha was just pretty inexplicably riding around in a chariot throughout the kingdom. He wasn’t really going anywhere. He was just looking at everyone, laughing maniacally as he drives around. And he comes across an old man. And apparently this guy is beyond old, like, old, wrinkly, weak. This guy had a single-digit social security number. And Siddhartha, having lived such a privileged life, he looks at the guy and is just confused. He turns to the driver, the guy—the royal charioteer that was assigned to him that came along with him on this ride along. And he goes, “What is that?” Having lived such a privileged life, he had never even seen old age before. And his driver goes, “Well, Siddhartha, that’s aging. That man is just really old. It happens to all of us. Animals, humans, we all get old. That’s standard knowledge.”

So, Siddhartha is a little taken aback by that, but they keep going along. I mean, he’s not going to let that ruin a Sunday, you know. They keep riding around, and he comes across a second person. And this guy is incredibly sick. I mean, he looks terrible. I mean, he obviously has some sort of disease that’s ailing him. And just like the first encounter, Siddhartha is shocked. He has no idea what’s even happening because of this sheltered upbringing where he’s never seen any of this stuff. So, he asks the driver again. “What’s going on with that guy?” And the driver says, “Oh, that’s just sickness. Look, don’t worry about it. It happens to all of us. It doesn’t matter if you’re homeless or a king, eventually everyone gets sick and starts to deteriorate.”

Then Siddhartha gets notably sad. So, he keeps driving along. And now the driver comes across a dead body laying in the middle of the road. Now, at this point, what’s going on here? I mean, how many dead bodies and sick people do we need to drive past before it’s no longer a leisurely stroll? What kind of path is this guy taking me on, you know? This guy is worse than Siri. But nevertheless, he sees the dead body, and again he asks the driver about him. The driver says, as you probably guessed, “It happens to all of us.”

And then Siddhartha realizes something. He realizes that the natural state of things is suffering and death. This was the real world that he was seeing right now. And for 29 years he had been shielded from seeing it. The obvious parallel to modern times is in the movie the Matrix where Neo finds out he’s been living in a false, computer-generated reality, and the energy his body produces is used to power a race of machines. And despite Keanu Reeves being the worst actor of all time, you could still tell that it crushed him. And Siddhartha was feeling this in real life. He must have felt something extremely similar to this.

And to top it off, that wasn’t even enough to call it a day. Right now, he has to realize that he too is going to grow old one day. He too is going to get sick and die, and his relatives would get sick and die. His children would get sick and die. And now, all of a sudden, he doesn’t know how to deal with it all. And if you think about it, this is a problem that all humans have to face at some point. And they have a wide variety of ways that they try to answer these tough questions.

The philosophy of Buddhism really is centered around answering this question: is there a way to end this seemingly inevitable suffering? He continues the ride along around his kingdom, and the last thing he comes across is a man that would look strange today but was actually very common at the time. This man is what we would now know as an ascetic. And if you’ve never heard this term before, it’s important you understand a little bit of history surrounding this time period.

Generally speaking, the further back in history you go, the muddier the details get about the things you’re reading about. This even applies to things as important as a complete hostile takeover of an entire area. We’re talking 600 BC. The most popular theory that’s currently around about the time leading up to this point in India is that sometime around 1500 BC a massive army of Aryan people from the West swooped in and conquered everything in India and many things further east. They set up agricultural communities. They integrated their language, Sanskrit, and established Vedism, one of the earliest predecessors to modern Hinduism with gods and rituals and all kinds of other good stuff.

So, after several hundred years of being subjugated people, this area of India was just getting kind of tired of it. It was a period of societal upheaval in 600 BC. They had all these gods they were supposed to pray to: Agni the fire god, Indra the god of war. But despite all the sacrifices and rituals they were doing, nothing was happening. I mean, people were still suffering. People were losing faith in the power of these gods. So, what you saw was a new popular line of thought emerging where people still believed in the Vedic gods, but they thought the gods weren’t all-powerful. Even they were subservient to a larger, all-powerful force of the universe.

Then in addition to this change, it became more and more popular and respected to live a sacrificial life of spiritual exploration. People that renounce the world they were born into, and more importantly Vedism, and looked inward for their own method of ending suffering were called renunciants. Because as they saw it, these supposed gods weren’t doing much about it. Just try to think how you’d feel living during their time period. I mean, they didn’t believe in the modern notion of some glorious afterlife where everything’s perfect. You know, you’re frolicking around in the clouds and talking to people for hundreds of thousands or millions of years—whatever you do in heaven. I mean, they didn’t believe in any of that stuff. Reincarnation was the widely accepted belief of the time. You were reborn based on the merit of your actions in previous lives.

So, the way they saw it, they were destined to a life of suffering, sickness, and despair and destined to repeat this cycle over and over and over again. It’s no wonder they sought a way to end it all. To end this seemingly inevitable cycle was the aim of Siddhartha Gautama and the aim of this class of people known as the renunciants. A more general term than renunciants for people that lived a life of deprivation and spiritual inquiry—you know, you’ve seen people starving themselves, maybe going without sleep, even down to things like breathing as little as possible. These people were called ascetics. Renunciates, ascetics, although they weren’t exactly the same, the two terms are more or less interchangeable in the context of the sixth century BC India. The important part is understanding this lifestyle that was growing in popularity as a response to the decline of the authority of the priests teaching Vedism.

Alright, so now that we understand the history, back to the four encounters that Siddhartha Gautama had. The first sight was an old man. The second sight was a sick man. The third sight was a dead man. And the fourth sight was one of these ascetics deep in meditation. These four encounters completely changed the outcome of his life. Seeing the ascetic shocked him. I mean, for the first time in his life he was made aware of these inevitable problems that all humans face. And for the first time in his life, he was made aware there were people out there trying to find a solution to it all.

The story goes that after seeing the ascetic, he instantly was determined to find the cause of human suffering and, once he found it, how to possibly end it. Nothing mattered to him anymore. He didn’t care about his life of abundance or his future as a ruler of a kingdom. He didn’t even care about his wife and newborn baby. He had to seek answers. One thing he was sure of is that he knew he couldn’t do this work still living in the palace. He had to leave. And when he did, it was kind of a rebirth.

There’s a scene that’s commonly portrayed of his life where he’s already decided he’s leaving his life of royalty. He’s already told his parents what he’s going to do, and he’s taking off the royal garments and jewelry and putting on the generic, modest, yellow robe that all the ascetics wear. He’s cutting his hair short. He’s reinventing himself for his new quest. Then he gets on his favorite horse and just rides off into the horizon a new person.

Here's how he described it: “Although my father and stepmother were grieving with tears on their faces, I cut off my hair; I put on the yellow robes and went forth from home into homelessness. I had been wounded by the enjoyment of the world, and I had come out longing to obtain peace.” I can’t imagine how surreal it must have been for him. Just a few weeks earlier he was living with unlimited abundance. His entire life he had never gone hungry or desired anything that he didn’t immediately get. Now things were different, much different. I mean, he went from one-percenter to Occupy Wall Street in a matter of minutes.

And look, by the way, I know what you guys are thinking. What ever happened to his favorite horse, the one he rode off into the sunset on? Uh, no? You mean you guys weren’t thinking that? Neither was I actually, but apparently it’s very important information because all the Buddhist texts that I see go to great measures to make it clear that his horse later died of a broken heart and that he was reincarnated as a god as a repayment for his assistance to Buddha’s enlightenment. So, the universe, at least for a while, was being run by a horse. Just thought you guys would want to know that.

Siddhartha soon realized that the life of an ascetic wasn’t an easy one. At first he really had no idea where to begin. But he had seen the ascetics practicing meditation. So, it seemed like a good place to start. You know, to someone who grew up in Western culture, at first glance all this Buddhist stuff may seem really novel. Like, wow, Buddha really came up with a lot of stuff, not only his great philosophy but a whole system of reincarnation, a whole system of meditation. But really, most of this stuff was common practice around the time Siddhartha set out on his spiritual journey and had been for some time.

Meditation had long been an institution where practitioners looked to curb their ordinary responses to things in their life and to remove the subconscious judgments about the world around us that impede our ability to make spiritual progress. That was the thinking. A common thing Buddhists say about meditation is that it’s the art of taming the mad monkey mind—the animalistic, default state that your brain is in if you don’t work on it. The ascetics believed so much in the idea that what our mind tells us by default is preventing us from spiritual progress that they took it to the absolute extreme with everything: complete celibacy, starvation, sleep deprivation—the list goes on. Desire was the enemy.

And legend has it, for his time as an ascetic, Siddhartha Gautama only ate one grain of rice per day and drank his own urine. He slept on nails. He stood on one foot because heaven forbid he desire the extravagant luxury of a second foot. He described himself during this time period where he was an ascetic like this. “My body slowly became extremely emaciated. My limbs became like the jointed segments of vine, or bamboo stems. My spine stood out like a string of beads. My ribs jutted out like the jutting rafters of an old abandoned building. The gleam of my eyes appeared to be sunk deep in my eye sockets, like the gleam of water deep in a well. My scalp shriveled and withered like a green, bitter gourd. Shriveled and withered in the heat and wind.”

Well, if for some reason it didn’t work out becoming the leader of a movement, he could have easily written better fan fiction than Fifty Shades of Grey. I mean, that’s some pretty good imagery. But through meditation, Siddhartha came to the conclusion that it was this preoccupation with ourselves and our distorted perception of the world that comes with it that causes suffering. In modern terms, this would be known as the ego. But even this was relatively commonly known at the time. The big question among these ascetics—the one that Gautama would later claim to have solved—is how to achieve enlightenment, the complete removal of that ego and all the disturbances of the mind, combined with a god-like level of concentration and control.

It’s not easy to say the least. And when he began his journey, people had already tried a lot of different stuff. And to his credit, he dabbled in basically all of it for a period. The first thing he did—as most ascetics did—is try to find a guru or a teacher that claimed to have a way to end human suffering and try to learn something from him. For six years he lived this lifestyle. He begged for money; he begged for food; he slept in the dirt, sometimes reportedly in forests that were said to be haunted. But all the while looking for a good teacher and using meditation to slowly become more in tune with the workings of his human nature, hoping that learning to pay close attention to himself would help give him a clue on what the true path to enlightenment was.

It’s clear that all the effects weren’t instant. But it’s also clear that he soon realized that nothing ever lasts very long. This whole existence is impermanent, and that would become a crucial base for his philosophy. He also realized that despite starving himself, despite all this deprivation he was doing, he still didn’t understand anything. He listened to what everyone had to say and followed what their idea of the best way is, but was getting nowhere, which explains why all the other ascetics didn’t really get anywhere either.

And this is when Buddha went off the deep end, you guys. He decided to eat. Apparently, all of his ascetic friends rejected him and labeled him as someone who loves extravagance just because he decided to not starve himself to death. You know, they’d say like, you haven’t changed. You’re still just a prince that eats all the time. You love luxury. But he had this crazy idea that maybe, just maybe you didn’t need to starve yourself to find the truth. I think it was at this point that Siddhartha realized something.

He knew that his old life, the life in the palace where each day is filled with him indulging in sensual pleasures—this lifestyle doesn’t truly bring happiness. We aren’t truly satisfied when we do these things. The happiness just leaves us soon after and is impermanent and fleeting. Then on the other hand, this life the ascetics had carved out for themselves—this life of constant abstinence, starving yourself—that life wasn’t yielding any real returns either. So, it was just as flawed as the other lifestyle as far as he saw it. He realized that the true path to enlightenment lied somewhere between these two extremes. And he called this path the middle way.

Whether he was right or wrong about this, he was tired of waiting for an answer. He was determined to find the answer that would end his quest. There’s a town called Bodh Gaya in northeastern India where Siddhartha Gautama sat down next to a fig tree with complete conviction and made a serious and lifechanging proclamation. He swore that no matter what happened, he would not leave the base of that fig tree until he had found the path to enlightenment. He was prepared to die. If he did this in 2013, people would probably pull out their smartphones and start making a YouTube video. But to be fair, in 2013 asceticism isn’t in vogue, and people would probably think he was an eco-Marxist that chained himself to the fig tree trying to save it. Nonetheless, you have to admire how high he was willing to take the stakes.

He put it like this, “Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.” It’s said that under that fig tree he had a transcendent experience. He saw all of his past lives pass before his eyes. He gained new insight regarding karma and reincarnation and gained the ultimate wisdom which helped him iron out what he would later call the Four Noble Truths. He had done it. He had reached nirvana. From this point forward he was known as the Buddha.

The term Buddha means the awakened one. And for me, when I think of this moment in his life, when he sits under that fig tree and he puts his life on the line to find answers and leaves the fig tree a different person—when I think of this moment of transformation, I think of Walter White. For anyone who’s a Breaking Bad fan, there’s a moment where Walter White is looking for stacks of money that he hid in the crawl space of his house, and it’s gone. And he’s freaking out. And his wife tells him she loaned the money to her ex-lover and boss. And Walter just loses it. I mean, he just starts laughing like it’s Def Comedy Jam. Huge fans of the show say that they realized later that that moment in the crawl space was the exact moment when Walter White made the full transformation into Heisenberg. Walter White went into the crawl space. Heisenberg came out. Siddhartha Gautama began meditating at the base of the fig tree and stood up the Buddha.

So, there was good news and bad news to this. The good news is that, hurray, he had finally found the cause of human suffering, a sufficient antidote to it, and the path to enlightenment. The bad news was that he was 35 years old, and his work was really only just beginning. Now he wanted to spread what he had learned. But he knew that no one would believe him. He had to find a way to spread his ideas to the world. He went to the first place he could think of, back to all the ascetics that despised him because he dared to eat that one time. He was hoping he could win a few of them over. Like he predicted, they were skeptical that he suddenly was able to achieve enlightenment. So he told them about the Four Noble Truths.

A lot of things may vary between Buddhist schools over the centuries, but the Four Noble Truths are pretty universal across the board. Buddha needed a way to deliver his new, enlightened perspective on suffering to the world, so he broke it down into four stages. The first noble truth was the nature of suffering; the second was the cause of suffering; the third is how suffering can be eliminated; and the fourth is the path or training regimen to remove suffering altogether. So, let’s do this.

The first noble truth is that suffering is universal. But another way to think of that statement is that dissatisfaction is the default state of the human brain. Buddha thought that even when you try really, really hard to make yourself satisfied or comfortable or happy, it just leaves you as quickly as it came. Now, don’t get him wrong. He knew people feel satisfied occasionally. He knew that people felt happy. He just knew that no matter what it was, it eventually fades. Let me give you an example of what he’s talking about.

Have you ever had a dream car or a dream anything? Let’s do dream car. Have you ever saw the car on TV, gone on the website and picked exactly the one you want? You have the paint job you want, the interior, the climate control package, whatever. The car is perfect. So, then you get the car. You’re driving it around. And you’re happy as a little clam. You show it to your friends. They’re all jealous and don’t resent you in the slightest bit. You know, people that are slightly more attractive and from a slightly higher social standing than you start to talk to you because you have this really cool car now. The car is perfect.

But no matter how perfect it is, that car eventually just becomes your car. The paint starts to fade a little. You spill blueberry ice cream in the back seat. That never happened to me. A renegade shopping cart smashes into the side of the car. What I’m trying to say is this, no one would disagree with you if you said that it’s a little weird to have owned a car for six months and walk out of the grocery store, see your car sitting in the parking lot and just go, “Oh my god! It’s my car! Yay! Look at my car! Ah, I’m excited just like the first day I got it. Look at the wheels! They’re so big.” I mean, that would just be crazy. What was once your dream car is now just—yeah, that’s my car.

Buddha says that it’s the default state of the human brain to do this with everything: your job, your girlfriend or boyfriend, your smartphone. No matter how good something is, eventually it just becomes normal. The novelty wears off, and you no longer fully appreciate what you have. Whenever someone asks me what I would do if I won the lottery—aside from answering that I’d start a lottery, because that seems to be where all the money is—I answer that I actually already have won the lottery.

Think about our lives in a global and historical perspective for a second. Humans today are better off in 2013 in virtually every single area than they ever have been at any point in human history, especially in developed countries, which I’m guessing most of you guys are from. Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still problems and that we shouldn’t strive for progress. But on an individual level, how many of us walk around our everyday lives truly appreciating the standard of living we were born into? We are standing on the shoulders of generation after generation of genius men and women that sacrifice their comfort and time to bring us a more comfortable and less time-consuming existence. And how many of us care? Now, I’m not attacking you. This is the sentiment behind the first noble truth. Dissatisfaction is the default state of the human brain.

Now, once you’ve accepted that, you’re ready for the second noble truth. What is the cause of all this dissatisfaction? Well, the simple answer is desire. But this desire is created by the mind in different ways. Buddha thought people tell themselves a lot of stories about why they’re dissatisfied. But despite what people tell themselves, he thought you can distill it down to one of three things: attachment, aversion, or ignorance.

The first one is attachment. Buddha realized that humans attach themselves to things. He realized that humans tend to see something desirable, or something they want, and naïvely assume that having that thing will make them happy. They tend to exalt that thing, point out all the really good traits about it and ignore all the bad things—the dream job, the dream husband. The car example from earlier falls into this category. It would be an attachment. And don’t get all extreme. He’s not saying you should lock yourself away in a shack and become an ascetic. Buddha must have experienced the full spectrum of attachment going from his life in the palace to his life as an ascetic.

The second cause of dissatisfaction is aversion. This is a very common one among a certain type of person. We’ve all known someone like this before, someone who magnifies their problems into much bigger things than they actually are or agonizes over things they really have no control over. For example, someone cuts you in line at the bank. Maybe they say something rude to you. Some people would get really mad. I mean, for some people, that type of situation could ruin their entire day, and they could be telling their friends about it for weeks, fuming. And these people would tell themselves that this anger is to be expected. It’s just a part of life. They’d say that if only they didn’t have to deal with all these idiots cutting them in line at the bank or taking the last box of Fruit Roll-Ups on the shelf, or whatever they’re doing to you—if only they were gone, they’d be much happier.

But what Buddha points out is that, really, someone else that came from a completely different history of experiences could have the same exact things happening to them and not feel slighted in the faintest way. For example, what if you were having the greatest day of your life and you were stopping by the bank to get some cash because you were on your way to the circus? In that context, you wouldn’t be that bothered by that person in line. Or what if you were on some bizarre personal quest to become a more patient and forgiving person? Someone treating you that way at the bank could be a great opportunity to practice patience.

Buddha said that this has to do with expectations. We have an expectation that people will treat us in a certain way. And when they don’t, we feel justified in acting out. But does it really solve anything? And why is them not meeting your personal expectation necessarily a bad thing? We get so upset in the heat of the moment, but that too is impermanent and fleeting. In fact, once a situation is over, we just kind of move on with our lives and wait for the next one.

And both of these come together at the third cause of dissatisfaction, ignorance. Buddha thought both of these mindsets require you to incorrectly conclude that your individual happiness or anger depends on and is controlled by the world around you. They say to themselves, look, if only traffic wasn’t bad or if only that guy didn’t cut me in line at the bank, then I’d be happy. But this is the ignorance, as far as Buddha saw it. There are no good things or bad things. There are just things. There are tons of examples where things that would typically make you upset end up making you happy.

Like, for example, someone steals your smartphone. On the surface that seems terrible. It seems like something you’d be justified in being angry about. But some completely different person might have hated their phone. The new iPhone just came out, and their insurance gives them a free upgrade if your phone is stolen. They’d be walking on sunshine if they got their phone stolen. And there are other versions of this. Like, someone cuts you off on the freeway. You’re angry. But then 100 feet later a tree falls directly where your car was going to be if they didn’t cut you off. Now you’re happy.

This is what Buddha was talking about. Things, people, places, situations—none of these things have inherent characteristics. We just think they do. And here’s another example of this type of thinking. Let’s use the example of Breaking Bad. We were talking about it earlier. I like the show Breaking Bad. Someone else thinks it’s a terrible show. Breaking Bad changes its airtime from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. People that get off of work at 5 think that’s a great idea. People that start work at 6:30 think it’s a terrible idea because they’re going to miss the show. Buddha recognized this way of interpreting the world as a fallacy. And this is why he thought it was an ineffective way of pursuing happiness. It was destined to fail.

The third noble truth is coming to the realization that suffering can be ended by eliminating desire. But where does this desire come from? You got to find the nest of termites if you want to really get rid of them, right? The Buddha thought that this constant struggle to get things that you desire comes from selfishness. And that selfishness comes from the delusion that you exist separately from everyone else. See, he believed in karma and reincarnation. The way that he saw it, we are all part of a giant, eternal structure of existence that’s interconnected, and all the things that happen to you are not actually caused by you at all. It’s the manifestation of previous karmic seeds coming to fruition. So, in other words, all the things that are happening to you are just a result of a previous action.

So, really, there is no self the way that we see it. All things, including humans, are just a small and ever-changing, impermanent part of this eternal process, and suffering is just us not realizing the truth and unknowingly bucking the system. There’s actually a lot of wisdom in that. I mean, thousands of years before Darwinian evolution, here’s a guy that recognizes this ego, this software installed in the human brain devised for self-preservation, that benefits us from a survival standpoint, but actually works to our detriment if we’re just trying to be happy.

It actually goes really well in coalition with Carl Sagan’s famous quote that “We are a way for the universe to understand itself.” Meaning that billions of years ago, stars exploded, and the aftermath of their destruction combined the elements that everyone and everything in the universe is made of. So, in a way, all things are linked together—humans, planets, rocks, trees. But Siddhartha Gautama didn’t think that we should completely reject or deny the existence of our personalities or our sense of self, but just realize that it’s an illusion and be mindful of which thought patterns were productive or not.

Finally, the answer to his question—the way to get rid of suffering is to get rid of your self or ego. So, the natural follow-up question is, well, how do you do that? That is the fourth noble truth, the roadmap to nirvana, which literally translates to “blown out” like someone blows out a birthday candle. It’s referring to the state of being that you achieve when the flames of desire, aversion, and ignorance have finally been blown out. He called this guidebook to achieving nirvana the Eightfold Path: eight things you really need to focus on, and if you perfect them, you would achieve enlightenment.

These eight characteristics are oftentimes broken down into three categories by Buddhists. And the three categories are morality, meditation, and wisdom. Morality consisted of three: right speech, right action, and right livelihood. Meditation consisted of his revised meditation practices, also three, which fell under right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. And wisdom which was made up of two: right understanding and right resolve.

The interpretations of what each of these mean vary way too much to put any sort of definitive stamp on them. But let’s just say it was much easier said than done. But we can gain insight into Buddhist philosophy by touching on one of the most important parts of achieving enlightenment, meditation.

I think a lot of modern Westerners think of Buddhism as being the same thing as Christianity or Islam or Judaism, except from another part of the world. They think Buddhist worship Buddha and that he is their God. The overwhelming majority of the time, this isn’t even close to the truth. When I think of Buddhism, I like to think of it as a form of mental gymnastics. I’ve heard it referred to as the greatest self-help book ever written. If you’re a Buddhist, there is no God that you’re beholden to. Your future is not dependent on the grace of a supernatural God. You won’t be damned to hell because you didn’t believe in him. Your fate is 100% in your own hands. And the only significance the Buddha has is an example of how to reach enlightenment.

He famously said, whoever sees me, sees the teaching. And whoever sees the teaching, sees me. Buddhism isn’t about praying to Buddha and hoping things will change. It’s about using the Buddha’s life as an example to emulate. And through effective behavior, your lot in life will improve, or at least your perception of it. He didn’t see himself as a spiritually perfect being that shouldn’t be questioned and held in absolute reverence. He encouraged discourse and discussion.

If you see the word “meditation” in the Buddhist context, it usually isn’t that far away from the word “mindfulness.” And the idea of mindfulness is extremely important. I was reading a blog post of the head of a Buddhist congregation. And he was talking about the importance of mindfulness and meditation. And he described the human condition saying that it was like you committed some heinous crime at birth and were sentenced by some sadistic judge, who had a knack for creative justice, to a life sentence of a guy that works for the state following you around everywhere you go, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. And all he does is just get in your face and talk about you nonstop, just constantly yammering on about you. It sounds miserable, right?

He compared this to the conditions humans are actually born into with their nonstop internal chatter about themselves. Just try for a second to focus on one thing. Try to sit in complete silence and think about one thing: pencil. Pencil. Pencil. It’s surprising how quickly you fail. It doesn’t take long at all for you to drift off thinking about something else. Even if you’re trying really hard not to. Buddha said that this internal chatter causes us suffering.

Mindfulness is about being self-aware. It’s about diligently monitoring every thought you have so that you can determine whether each thought is productive or not, so that eventually you can decrease the bad and leave the ones that are beneficial. The mind is an extremely chaotic thing. And the mechanism that Buddhists use to not only be more mindful but to cultivate all kinds of positive states of being is meditation. If the suffering you’re born into can be thought of as a serious injury, meditation would be the physical therapy you’d go to, to recover and become a stronger person than you ever were.

But remember, it is part of the Eightfold Path. It is much easier said than done. Most of us have spent our entire lives in this constant state of chatter. When something is that engrained, it can be difficult to realize whether it’s even going on at all. No one said nirvana was going to be easy or be around after the mid-90s. It’s impossible to touch on everything, but if you’re interested in hearing more about his philosophy and how people have utilized it and shaped it over the years, there are tons of books and communities that would be glad to have you.

Long story short, after Siddhartha told all his old friends that initially rejected him for not starving himself enough about the Four Noble Truths, they were on board. Those people were his first disciples. It wasn’t long before hundreds and hundreds of people heard about Buddha and his enlightenment. But as he expected, it did take a while for him to sufficiently recruit and train enough monks and nuns to build a community called the Sangha, a community that would make achieving enlightenment an easier journey for future people than it was for Siddhartha.

The Buddha traveled his later years through northeastern India teaching his ideas and gathering new disciples. And if you look at it overall, he was actually really successful. And it probably had something to do with the fact that it wasn’t like other philosophical groups that you could join at the time like Pythagoreanism or Confucianism. I mean, you didn’t have to join some ultra-restrictive cult or have ambitions of becoming a political leader down the line to join. It was for everybody.

But all things must end. The man who was once a prince in line for the kingship, who spent the majority of his life searching for truth and teaching what he had found, fell ill and died. In his final days, he is said to have delivered this quote to his monks. “It may be that after I am gone that some of you will think, ‘Now we have no teacher.’ But that is not how you should see it. Let the Dharma and the discipline that I have taught you be your teacher. All individual things pass away. Strive on, untiringly.”

Aside from the massive expansion of Buddhism in India and China for the next 1,500-2,000 years, its wisdom spread into Tibet, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka, and I guess later on into Western culture.

So, it’s that time again—the question of the week. These questions are usually at least semi-related to the show, and the main point is just to get people to think about stuff. But usually there’s some deeper philosophical question at their root. For this week, I want to think about family. When Siddhartha Gautama was 29 years old, he became an ascetic and he left behind not only his life of luxury at the palace but his wife and newborn son. And this got me thinking. People seem to agree that family is important. Many would say things like, “My family comes first. Above anything else, it’s my family. Blood is thicker than water,” things like that.

But why is blood thicker than water? What is it about family that makes the relationships with them more significant than any other relationship that you have? Is there something about sharing DNA with them that instantly makes their relationship valuable? Or are your family members just your best friends in the world, even though you wouldn’t think of them that way, because of the decades of shared experiences and trust that you have with them? Think about it.

And thank you for listening.