This particular weekend seminar is devoted to Buddhism, and it should be said first that there is a sense in which Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. Last week, when I discussed Hinduism, I discussed many things to do with the organization of Hindu society. Because Hinduism is not merely what we call a religion; it’s a whole culture. It’s a legal system, it’s a social system, it’s a system of etiquette, and it includes everything. It includes housing, it includes food, it includes art. Because the Hindus—and many other ancient peoples—do not make, as we do, a division between religion and everything else. Religion is not a department of life, it is something that enters into the whole of it. But, you see, when a religion and a culture are inseparable, it’s very difficult to export a culture because it comes into conflict with the established traditions, manners, and customs of other people.

So the question arises: what are the essentials of Hinduism that could be exported? And when you answer that, approximately, you get Buddhism. As I explained: the essential of Hinduism—the real, deep root—isn’t any kind of doctrine. It isn’t really any special kind of discipline—although, of course, disciplines are involved. The center of Hinduism is an experience called mokṣa—‘liberation’—in which, through the dissipation of the illusion that each man and each woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but a collection of separate things, you discover that you are, on one level, an illusion, but on another level, you are what they call the Self, the one Self, which is all that there is. The universe is the game of the Self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. When it plays ‘hide,’ it plays it so well, hides so cleverly, that it pretends to be all of us, and all things whatsoever. And we don’t know it because it’s playing ‘hide.’ But when it plays ‘seek,’ it enters onto a path of yoga, and—through following this path—it wakes up, and the scales fall from one’s eyes.

Now, in just the same way, the center of Buddhism—the only really important thing about Buddhism—is the experience which they call ‘awakening.’ Buddha is a title and not a proper name. It comes from a Sanskrit root budh, and that sometimes means ‘to know,’ but better, ‘waking.’ And so you get from this root bodhi; that is the state of being awakened. And so buddha, ‘the awakened one,’ ‘the awakened person.’

And so there can, of course—in Buddhist ideas—be very many buddhas. The person called the Buddha is only one of myriads. Because they, like the Hindus, are quite sure that our world is only one among billions, and that buddhas come and go in all the worlds. But sometimes, you see, there comes into the world what you might call a big buddha; a very important one. And such a one is said to have been Gautama, the son of a prince living in northern India, in the part of the world we now call Nepal, living shortly after 600 BC. All dates in Indian history are vague, and so I never try to get you to remember any precise date—like 564, which some people think it was—but just after 600 BC is probably right.

Most of you, I’m sure, know the story of his life. But the point is that when, in India, a man was called a buddha—or the Buddha—this is a title of a very exalted nature. It is, first of all, necessary for a buddha to be human. He can’t be any other kind of being, whether—in the Hindu scale of beings—he’s above the human state or below it. He is superior to all gods, because according to Indian ideas, gods and angels—or, angels would probably a better name for them than gods—all those exalted beings are still in the wheel of becoming, still in the chains of karma; that is, action which requires the need for more action to complete it, and goes on requiring the need for more action. They’re still, according to popular ideas, going ‘round the wheel from life, after life, after life, after life, because they still have the thirst for existence. Or, to put it in a Hindu way: in them, the Self is still playing the game of not being itself.

But the Buddha’s doctrine, based on his own experience of awakening, which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time, all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism; fasting, doing all sorts of exercises, lying on beds of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But Buddha found that all that was futile; that was not the Way. And one day he broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl who was looking after cattle. And suddenly, in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And no amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think and feel that you are a somewhat contained in your bag of skin, and that’s all, there is no way, whatsoever, of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you’re still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehaviors.