The Story of the Buddha [Re upload]

I love old wisdom stories.

And the fact that this one has been passed down for more than 2,500 years, that to me is reason for a level of awe.

It's kind of remarkable.

It's easy to find lots of versions of this story, and some of them have very fantastical elements, myth elements in them.

But the bare bones of the story are really useful for framing the Buddhist understanding of what causes suffering and what relieves suffering.

And really, in this very beautiful context of a real person who framed his life in the journey of this question.

So the story of Siddhartha, his name was Siddhartha, of his path to awakening is really a striving of understanding how of striving to understand that our suffering itself is the path to relieving our suffering, understanding it.

So the first thing I want to say is that he really, he was a real person.

I don't think there's, there's really any, any question of that there was a historical person, um, by, by the name of Siddhartha Gautama.

Uh, he was, uh, by tradition born into a small kingdom in northern India or southern Nepal, right in that border region.

And the way I think of him is as the world's first psychologist.

And likely, if you look in other traditions all around the world, there were probably plenty of other psychologists of the mind as well.

But his story has been passed down and is still being shared.

And one of the things that fascinates me is when you really go to the essence of his teachings, there's remarkable similarity and overlap between what he was able to figure out about how our minds work.

by simply turning inward, and what neuroscience has figured out by doing MRIs and all of that.

So there was this remarkable, clear study of the mind that he did and framed his life around.

The first time his teachings and his stories, the stories of him were written down was about 500 years after he died.

So by 500 years later, there are lots of variations, but there is a bare bones story that is across all traditions and shared with these basic elements to the story.